Word to the Wyze

television if you so choose to do that. Otherwise, maybe you've discovered me online somewhere. Thanks for tuning in. I decided that I am going to start sharing a little bit more behind the scenes, a little inside baseball about my job on LinkedIn.

maybe they don't, maybe they don't care. Otherwise, what else the thing is LinkedIn I feel like is a place where when I go on there, I'm looking for sort of inspiration, I'm looking for tips, I'm looking for just I don't know, just information. And so I felt like that was a pretty good place for it. I could be totally wrong. I mean, I know TikTok is where everything's at, but I felt like LinkedIn maybe is a better place for professionals to exchange opinions and thoughts on things.

So I don't know. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Maybe I'll continue doing it, maybe I won't. But I've got my first two posts up. I'm gonna try to post every day, just FYI. So I'm gonna try to post every single day and some kind of like little nugget behind the scenes wherever I am whatever.

we love them and hate them. So it's nice that Apple will get me the AirPod so that I can test them. But it's you know a lot of times when companies send stuff, it's there's some sort of caveat with when you can actually.

on it. You know, where everyone else is like, wait, we just found out about this, but you've been using this secretly, so it led to a whole big joke in the comment section of his stuff or any in general.

by the way. When you're packing, that's a big deal. And so I've liked them. But the one thing I don't like about them is that they seal out your ears, and that's good for noise cancelation, but it's sort of bad for everything else if you want to hear people around you.

standard Airpod's third generation are better. They may not be a better deal because they sell for one seventy nine, but the AirPods Pro were on sale for one ninety nine at Target this week, so you know, people might think, oh, for twenty dollars more, I get the Pros. But it depends on how you like these things to feel in your ears. Now.

get a couple of new sensors. So in the stems, which are way smaller, there's a force sensor that you can squeeze to like play pausure music whatever.

audio sounds really good. They've got head tracking, which is really cool if you haven't experienced it, and then they've got the sensor is the first and only on the air pods at this point that it's a sensor that senses your skin, so it knows if they're in your ears or whether they're in your ears or in your pocket, so that can help with with you know, false starts with the music if it starts and stops or something because you're putting them in your pocket and it's just

getting covered up. Battery life is fantastic, but you can also charge them in a couple different ways. You can use MagSafe or you can use standard wireless. I found that I didn't even have to charge these things during my testing because they're just so good.

And so unless you're on a plane all the time, if you're on a train or some sort of noisy situation where you like the noise cancelation, then go with.

and it just worked. But I did get the same email that you got that said, hey, we're shutting down, We're done, So I don't know what to say more about that. Then they're just it's it, They're gone. Yeah, I can't believe it says they've helped more than two hundred and fifty thousand users, So I don't know what to say. So you could get rid of it. I don't know why they're shutting down. I gues two hundred

and fifty thousand users is just not that many. The only alternative I can think of is probably Honey, and that's it. I think their website is get honey dot com. Let me see what their website is, Join honey dot com. So joinhney dot com is their website and I guess that's the best one. That's the one that I use now. I've got that installed on my computer and it seems to work. But to be quite honest, I mainly shop on Amazon. I'm not doing a lot of price comparisons online.

Maybe I'll cross check best Buy, but I think Honeywill will be a decent replacement. But I don't know of one good website that searches deals across various websites. I think it's probably because all the websites want you to shop on Amazon because they get a referral fee. So I don't really know. If you find one, let me know, or if you have one, tweet me. But that's I'm mostly Amazon anyway. I mostly shop Amazon, Target, best Buy. That's it, so I can easily look at the prices

across those three places. But it was nice to know if something was was on sale somewhere else. Speaking of Amazon, Amazon's new fire TV smart TVs are now available. They have two flavors of these, the fire TV Omni series and the four Series. The Omni is the nicer of the bunch. I think they're going to sell a lot of the four series because they're so cheap, but I would probably recommend the Omni series if you're getting serious, and especially if you're buying the bigger size, so the

four series. A forty three inch TV is three sixty nine, which a pretty pretty good deal. A fifty inch is let's see here, a fifty inch is four to sixty nine, and a fifty five inch is five p nineteen, and then you step up to the sixty five inch Omni series, which is better four k those I would say you probably don't want to go less than sixty five inch. That's eight twenty nine, and then a seventy five inch

is one thousand ninety nine. Now I need to upgrade my tea, and I'm trying to figure out if I should go with this, or if I should go with TCL, or if I should go with Visio.

Omni series has everything you need. It's got hands free voice control, it's got four K, it's got HDR, it's got Dolby Digital Plus also Dolby Vision on the sixty five and seventy five inch models.

which is really cool. It's got Alexa Voice video calling, so if you plug in a supported webcam you can do that, or you can do Zoom later this year. It's got the fireTV remote that I love, so I don't know, I'm one. This one's seeming pretty good. So it really comes down to the software. Do you like the software from Amazon or Google? Probably Amazon is the bigger platform at this point. But I always tell people to buy the TV and then add a streaming box.

to link. And so I had this feature, you got access to it when you had ten thousand followers or somehow Instagram blessed you with it, but primarily it was if you had ten thousand followers you would get this feature, So that was mostly influences creators, people that amassed a large following. They were able to give that option to swipe up for a link to something, an external link to a website, and I've had that for a while,

I've used it. It's very helpful, but the average person could not use that, And so if the average person wanted to share, for instance, a link to their GoFundMe or a link to find a loss pet or whatever, they just couldn't do it. And they probably a lot of people were probably scratching their heads and being like am I missing something? Like why don't I have this? And so Instagram had reasons for this. The primary reason is that there was never really a good way to

link out of Instagram. But influencers need that to make money and to share links and all that good stuff, so they gave it to them. But they also had to ride this other side of things of safety and security. They don't want just a whole bunch of bought accounts setting up or bought accounts just immediately sharing links, so there had to be some sort of threshold for it, and the ten thousand followers seemed to be a threshold that worked, and so that's what they did for a

long time until now. Now they're giving this functionality to everyone, and they said, you know what, there's a lot of reasons why we like this idea, so let's give it to everyone. And they change it a little bit. Now it's actually a link. It's a sticker that you put on your account, like on your story. And if you've used a sticker before, those are basically if you have ever added like a gift to your account or you know, like a it's Monday or whatever like. So it's a sticker.

It's a sticker on your account. If you've used it, you know what I'm talking about. So now if you go into the stickers when you go into stories, there should be one.

know when we're putting a link to something. And I think that the sticker is better than the swipe up because swipe up was always confusing to people and the tapping on a link sticker is much more understandable. I think to most people. If you don't have access to it, the only reason you wouldn't is because you've been posting

harmful content on Instagram. So if you're a brand new account, or you're posting stuff like hate speech or misinformation all the time, or anything that violates their community guidelines, you will not get access to link sticker. But you're listening to the rich On Tech Show, I don't think that's anyone that's listening here. Let's get to the next question of the show Let's see. Audrey says that I love following your Instagram and listening to your podcast. Keep up

the awesome work, Audrey. I feel like I'm talking directly to your ears right now. Thank you so much for that. Audrey says, I had to download the Clear app on my phone and attend an event for vaccination verification. Now I have concerns about the app, like if they're ever hacked. After having to upload a photo of my driver's license and vaccine card, you also need to take a selfie photo, so now they have my eyescan, is there a way to pull back my info from their database files? And

are my concerns valid? Thanks Audrey, Audrey, No, you are totally out of line.

by giving us your phone number. Well, yeah, that ten percent is nice, but guess what happened your phone number is now percolating into one thousand and one different databases depending on their privacy policy. And you probably didn't read it before you shared your phone number, and so that's why you get all those robo calls from time to time. Well it's just one reason. So yes, you should be concerned about giving out anything when it comes to personal information.

In fact, I always recommend give out the least amount of information that they will take to do whatever you're trying to do. And when it comes to signing up at places like Target or you know, Walmart or whatever, Walmart doesn't have a loyalty program, but you know what I mean. You know there's a loyalty program everywhere, and there's always like some little perk that you get in exchange for your phone number, and then they start texting

you incessantly. And so you know, with some of these companies, it's fine because you get something in exchange. But with clear I understand this is a big company. Your information is probably safe with them, but there's always a way to get out of their databases. And so if you look at their privacy policy, it says you may request that we remove your databases remove from our databases any

personal information we maintain about you. You may request removal of your personal information by contacting us in the how to contact Us section of this privacy policy. We will honor your request, except that we may retain limited information so that we can comply with your request not to be contacted in the future. So go ahead and contact them, say I want out, and they should contact you back

and say you got out. And I think, Audrey, that it's a good idea to be like this and from time to time just get rid of your information, you know, unsubscribed to things, you know, close out accounts, old accounts, certainly, don't reuse the same password over and over, and get your information out of as many databases as possible, and that really you don't have to make a concerted effort

to do this, but when the time comes. So, for instance, I talked to a privacy expert a long time ago, Haley Kaplan was her name is her name.

and you throw it out. It's too confusing to understand. But she said every single time you should, you should send it back and say I opt out. And what that means is that your bank, your credit card, your your insurance company can't share anything with third parties. And if your personal information. A lot of times they aggregate this information and share it in databases with other people that they either sell it to or just share it to. And so you have the option to say, nah, I

don't want that. And the more that you do this, the less you're information shows up in those databases. So, for instance, I went through and remove my information from a lot of those like personal information websites step pop up everywhere that say you know who is rich to miro you know, and it has all this disinformation, half of it's fake or half of it's not right you know about you. And so I went through and I did that, And you can do this with yellow pages.

You could do this with white pages. You could do this with well maybe not yellow pages, but you know white pages. You can do this with you know, Google maps. You can blur out your house, you can you can do it with a lot of this stuff. And so any opportunity you have to get your information taken out of one of these databases, do it. If it's as long as you can do it and it's easy and the company's legitimate. If they're legitimate, they'll get rid of it.

If they're not, you're actually just handing over your personal information. So, for instance, if you see a spam email and it's like legitimate spam.

And I feel bad, especially with the smaller businesses. Sometimes I'll sign up for their stuff, you know, if I'm in a store, like if I find myself in a little hallmark town, like a little main street somewhere, and I'm at a gift shop with those little signs that say like, you know, whine is my best friend and my ally or something like that.

you upload a copy of your vaccination card? Instead of having to actually go take a picture of your vaccination card or somehow finding you know, a verification of that card and uploading it to the app, the app will say, hey, can we ping your Apple Wallet and we'll find it in there or Apple Health and we'll just see that your copy is verifiable, and you say sure, and they do it and in seconds you're verified without having to do anything more. So that's what the big difference is here.

And so if you're in California, and I wrote the instructions just for California, and since that's where I primarily appear, it's it's really easy. You just go to the vaccine the Vaccine Record Portal from California. You type in your information, you choose a four digit pin, they send you a QR code, and then you just import that QR code.

not for this show. But I will say if you are being asked for your vaccination card at entry at certain places, this is an easy way to show it. Let me tell you just quickly about some of the places. Now, I did the the easiest way for California with the records, but there is a whole bunch of providers that this works with. So what they're doing is they're using these

smart health card. So that's the smart Health Card is importable into Apple Wallet and Apple Health and if you're a business, you can actually download the Smart Health Card Verifyer app and you can scan people's QR codes. Now that's it's getting pretty intense if you're doing that. But you know, again, we're not getting into the whole debate

over this in this show. But who uses this California, Hawaii, Louisiana, New York, Virginia, a bunch of places in Canada, a bunch of pharmacies Cedar Sinai, Express Scripts, Kaiser, write Aid, United Healthcare, Walgreens, Walmart, and then a whole bunch of providers. And I'm not going to go over the list of those because there's just too many. City of Hope, Cleveland Clinic,

Penn Medicine. So basically, the bottom line is that if you see or can access your Smart Health Card record from your wherever you got your vaccination card, you can now import it into Apple Wallet. It's a really simple process. It's really great, you know, if you're into this sort of thing, and it works really nicely.

MacRumors dot com. It tells me that the iPod Touch has not been updated in eight hundred and eighty four days, which sounds absolutely wild until you look at the history of the updates and the history the average is four hundred days four hundred and four to be to be exact, So four hundred and four days is the average it takes them to come up with a new one. The last time they came up with it was July twenty seventeen, then July twenty fifteen, June twenty fourteen, September twenty thirteen,

May twenty thirteen, and then Octo over twenty twelve. So let's say twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, twenty seventeen, and twenty nineteen. There could be a twenty twenty one in there, but I don't think so. I think we're good with all the product updates from Apple this year, but perhaps next year, I don't know.

Sometimes they're not always available on Amazon in like a straightforward way or just available in a straightforward way in general. But with that said, I've got a couple of wise cams. I love them. I think they do a great job. I think that their software is always being updated. They have a good team, it seems. And so here's what they've got going on. A new Wise solar panel which is twenty dollars, and the Why solar panel will power the wise cam outdoor, so it's it's basically the equivalent

of the Ring solar panel. This is twenty bucks plus shipping, which is pretty good. But shipping starts see this is the thing. It starts shipping in January. So I'm telling you about this in October and you can't get it until January, which I think, as a customer or as a consumer is really frustrating because you're hearing about this and you want it, and now you have to wait

until January to get it. So my advice to Whys would be to not talk about products until they're available, or maybe in a week or two before, because it's that's frustrating, you're talking. I gotta wait at least two months to get my product, and perhaps in January. I'm not even sure it's gonna be available. Then you've got the Why's Lamp Socket and this this enables you to plug your camera into a lamp socket so to power

it that way. That's forty five dollars plus shipping, and that starts shipping in December, so again we got to wait till December. Then they've got a Wyse Switch three pack, and this is a three pack of switches that control wise lights and other wise devices at the touch of a button. That's thirty three dollars for a three pack, which is very competitive.

a very reasonable price. And I think that, you know, you'd be hard pressed to find another family of products as robust as.

from my phone because I don't need them there anymore. Now, when it comes to Google Photos and doing that same thing, if you're using iCloud, that is going to delete pictures off your phone and which will in turn trigger them to.

in a short answer. So the reality is the best way to do this is to just let iCloud optimize the storage on your phone. And what that means is that if your storage is running low on your iPhone, iCloud will go through and it will delete the full resolution picture.

one point one point one point one for families. So I don't know, this kind of gets in a little bit techy, but I guess this whole show is techy, but I try to keep it, you know, on thee for most people that can understand it. But there's something that I always change on my router immediately when I get you know, when I get a router, is uh, I always change the DNS settings. And DNS is what is basically an address book for the web, and so

by default you're using you know, your provider. We've talked about this in the show before, whether it's Spectrum or AT and T or Verizon or FiOS or whoever your internet provider is, well, they use their their information their DNS look up. So if you want to be a bit more private, you can use a third party DNS resolver.

something that works for the family. So can you come out with something that works for the family, and especially something that has maybe a little bit of filtering or maybe a little blocking built in. And so now one dot one dot one dot one for families gives an extra layer of protection to your home network to protect it from malware and adult content.

set it up on your actual devices. So if you if your kid has like an iPhone or a you know, computer or an Android. You can do it there. So on the website Cloudflare, I'll link it up. In the notes, they give instructions for linksys routers, a sous routers, Netgear routers, d link routers, and Ubiquity routers, and so all you have to do kind of is go into the routers and look for the DNS settings. That's that's the bottom line, and you change them to these numbers that I just mentioned.

So it's either one dot one dot one dot two or one zero zero two or the other ones. And it's it's really easy. I do it on my computer all the time.

can do that through this. You can set times of days when categories like social media are blocked, and you can also get reports on your internet your households internet usage, so you can see I don't know what that means, but you know, maybe the websites that they're spending time on or going to. I don't know if it's specific or just you know, category level, but this is a This is a very easy way to just give some basic protection to your family from malware and adult content.

plug into your network, and that's really good. My kids hate it because you can really control. It's like down to the minute. You can say, okay, YouTube you get for a half an hour a day. You can you know, roadblocks is only available on weekends. Whatever you want to do, you can do it with that's very very powerful, all right, s rites in with the subject line iPhone thirteen can a text message be scheduled to be sent? Until recently I had an Android and I can schedule messages to

be sent on a different day or time. I now own an iPhone and I would like to know if this is possible with the iPhone. Thank you S. The short answer here is I don't know, but also I don't think so, and as far as I know, built into so Android and iOS are very different in a lot of ways. But Android, I know, with the stock Google Messages app, I think if you just press and hold the little send button when you're going to you know, after you type in your message, or's like a little

send arrow next to it. I think if you press and hold that, it will give you options to schedule a text and you can schedule it to send in an hour, whatever whatever time you want. On iPhone, not so much. And as far as I know, you can't do this at all on an iPhone because third party apps, as far as I know, do not have access to I Message, So you can't even download a third party app and schedule a message that way. Now, the only way that I think you could do this on an

iPhone is with a third party service. So I'm sure there are plenty of them out there that you could download an app that will send text messages. It will not likely be from your phone number, but you can send a message from that app and schedule it. Now, I don't know of an app that does that. I'm sure there are plenty, especially for businesses. You know, there's lots of text messaging apps, but that would be the

only way to do it. But as a as a casual user of a messaging program, if you just want to casually message your friend but schedule that message to send at a different time, I do not know of an easy way to do that on the iPhone. Let me know if you know of a way to do that. I just don't. All right, So you know, I got a Tesla, so I've been talking about and I'm very

much interested in electric cars. At this point, I will tell you getting the not the supercharger, but I'm getting a charger installed at the house this week, and so I am excited for that, even though I don't really need it. I charge my car at work. That has been fantastic and quite honestly, it's free, and so I am going to take advantage of that as much as possible. And so I used to charge like on Sunday night

or overnight on Saturday to Sunday. Now I just let my car run as far as humanly possible, as long as I can make it to work on Monday.

because I'm gonna need it eventually at some point. And so there are gonna be weekends where I want to take a road trip or I go out of you know, just drive further than I need to charge, and I've got to charge it up before Saturday or Sunday or whatever. And so I'm getting this installed. I tell you all of that because I'm talking about Lucid, and Lucid is a company that they're making an electric car that's very highly anticipated, very expensive. But they are doing their first

deliveries this week. And so the Lucid Air is a five hundred and twenty mile range car and Lucid is out of Silicon Valley, but it is made in Arizona. I email the company to ask if I can come take a tour of the facility and drive the car.

twenty two. Now, the price, don't they don't list the price on their press release about this, but I you know, some other places had pricing. So these cars that they're delivering are like one hundred and seventy grand. Then the next car down is going to be like seventy eight, and then hopefully we'll have a car cheaper than that, and then eventually they want to make a car that's about twenty five grand, which is what Tesla has said as well. But the reality here is that this is

fantastic for the electric car business. It just it's this is a startup, so they're not burdened by the same thing that a major car company that's like a Ford or a GM is burdened with, you know, to try to transform their company into something that's more electric.

as a reporter at k CAL nine. I mean I was able to interview Elon Musk because he would give anyone an interview that would that would put a microphone in his face. And now if I emailed Elon Musk, he probably would not give me that same interview. And Tesla is not the same company. The company just reached a trillion dollar valuation, which just not many companies in America have that, you know, outside of Apple and Microsoft and Google, and you know, maybe a couple others nipping at their heels.

so where, I mean, where does it end. Are you going to go to a parking lot and have your choice of fifteen different proprietary chargers?

best they can be. And you know, something like USBC for a car will have to eventually happen because it will just make things easier for the consumer. And USBC is a pretty good standard as well. It's just not on the iPhone, it's on every other Android, and it's it's worked pretty well for them. But I don't know, we're gonna we'll see what happens. Maybe they'll build it on top of, you know, a USBC style charger. Now when I say USBC, I mean some sort of electric standard, but it'll maybe.

my first software update hit my phone today. I got a message when I woke up, it said Tesla rich on Tesla, your software update is available, and when I clicked through to that, it tells me that there's a bunch of new features available in the car. The most notable, according to Electric website is they are now doing the Century mode Live Camera access. And this is so crazy because this is a feature that I imagined you would have on the Tesla and here it is.

During the update process, you will not be able to drive the vehicle or use the touchscreen in your car. Alarm may be disarmed for a short duration. Do you want to install it now? I'm gonna say no, because I'm gonna do that later on today. This feature requires the ten dollars a month subscription the Premium or I guess the Premium connectivity feature. Oh wait, hold on, I

need to pay. It's being introduced as a new Premium connectivity feature which requires a ten Okay, so you need to have that subscription to get access to this, but apparently it's only available on iOS for now, coming to Android later.

high prices, but their stuff lasts forever. And I'm telling you from experience. My MacBook that my kid is using is my old MacBook. Now give an eye upgrade every couple of years. But I mean he has thrown it down, dropped it, he's on it's it's it's greasy, and the thing still runs amazing. And if you clean it up, you wipe it down, it's still a fantastic computer, at least four years later. And so the fact that you're going on ten years is awesome, and these things.

They don't really need to, and so often you will get maybe an added bonus of they will include something like headphones with it, or they will give you a gift card towards a new computer. So I would say you've waited ten years, So Jody, if you can wait another four weeks, I think wait the four weeks, see

what the deal is on Black Friday. Definitely buy it from the Education store and hopefully you'll get a one to two punch of maybe the fifty dollars off for the education pricing, and maybe another fifty to one hundred dollars gift card that they offer on Black Friday. Hopefully you'll be able to connect those as well. All right, let's get to one more question before the show ends, and this is Steve. He says, good night, Rich, love your show, never miss it. I love the joke because

everyone says good morning. You must listen to the show.

not be far behind. Maybe they were waiting to put this M one pro chip in it, and I think that's probably If I was a betting man, which I am sometimes in Las Vegas. Not in a big way, not in a problematic way, just a small way. If I was a betting man, I would say that Apple will probably probably do that for sure, all right, And with that, that's going to do it for this episode

of the show. If you would like to submit a question for me to answer, go to my Facebook page, Facebook dot com slash Rich on Tech, hit the big blue send email button. Also, I would love it if you would rate and review this podcast. Just go to your favorite podcast app, maybe Apple Podcasts or Spotify wherever you can rate it and review it. Please do that for me and write a line about why you love

this show. That really helps other people discover it. And we're on trend to have our best mone ever in October. Very excited about that, so thank you for listening. No matter where you live in the US, you can download the free KTLA plus app on Apple, TV, Fire TV, and Roku. Then scroll the tech section and you can watch all of my TV segments on the best screen in your house. And you can find me on social media at rich on Tech. My name is rich Demiro.

Thanks so much for listening. I love the fact that I get so many emails now saying that you are listening to the show. It really warms my heart. There are so many ways you can spend an hour of your time. I do appreciate you spending it with me. I'll talk to you real soon.