Zoom goes boom!

It's the Zoom boom.

Apple plays nice with Amazon turning your wisecam into a webcam, and an interview with the folks behind Libby, an app that lets you read books for free. Oh yeah, and your tech questions answered. What's going on? I'm Rich Dmiro and this is Rich on Tech, the podcast where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. Plus I answer the questions that you send me. My name is Rich Demiro. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. I am safe at home

Megan, how's it.

Going pretty good?

You know?

I think we're we're on day two of the Wi Fi working pretty well. I have one hundred and twenty megabytes per second right now on fast dot com. So I think that that's a good sign that we're finally getting our Wi Fi in order.

That is a good sign.

Asked dot com is a good website that you mentioned, That's that's kind of my go to for a quick test of internet speed and a lot of people this week and last week and the week before have been putting a lot of thought into their internet because we realized just how much we rely on it when we're working from home, you know, the occasional going home watching Netflix. You know, usually things are gonna work. I mean, sometimes there's a little buffering at night because a lot of

You know, it's stressed. Just make sure it works for.

Us, right, Yeah, exactly. I mean I just kind of tweeted back from the other day because it like went out again for like the billion time, and then it came back on mysteriously an hour later, So yeah.

It's been again.

And the way that cable I'm actually thinking of switching to a fiber network here, because the way cable works is you're sharing your connection with a lot of different people in your neighborhood, and so when when the network is used a lot, you will notice an issue with your network when your neighbors are using it a lot, versus some of the fiber networks, you know, like the old kind of I don't know, the AT and t's of the world, the FiOS of the world. Those are

No. I had never heard of Zoom before.

It's interesting because I had used it, you know, once in the past. It's always interesting whenever I hear something that becomes popular in the tech world. When I go to download it on my iPhone and like, I already saw that I downloaded it as sometime in the past, I'm like, oh, I've already tried the SAP out Like

Yeah, Well, Zoom.

They're apologizing because we've seen Look, I don't think Zoom is a bad company. I know they've gotten just kind of torn up in the press because there's been so many issues with Zoom, but the reality is this company and they put out a blog post that said, hey, look we didn't anticipate this either.

We were built as a corporate product.

We went from ten million video calls a day to two hundred million participants a day.

That's a lot.

They say that it was built for large companies, which means there is an IT department behind them, which means when Zoom gets installed in your computer, the IT department goes through and kind of figures out all the options that work for your company and the privacy options. So they didn't know that people were going to be having virtual happy here and talking to their friends and doing

And you literally can. It's so easy to get on a Zoom call.

My five year old can do it.

It's amazing, Like it's just so simple.

So they've also had zoom bombers, which these are people crashing Zoom calls. So long story short, Zoom says they are going to try to do better. Are they are rolling with the punches and trying to figure out how they can improve their app. It's not like they, you know, had any heads up on this thing. So they said for the next ninety days, they're shifting everything except working on trust, safety and privacy issues. So that's number one.

Don't post a link to one.

Of your meetings on social media or in a public place.

I made that mistake.

I told you this, Megan, and oh my gosh, within a second, I had, you know, thirty people in there and they were just doing the craziest things I've ever seen.

I was like, it was scary. Can I believe? Yeah?

Manage your screen sharing options. So in Zoom, you want to change your screen sharing to host only, and you want to make sure that you're running the most updated software on Zoom so that you have access to all of the things you need.

So, so, do you need to have a quick question about Zoom? Do you see to have the app on your phone? If someone sends you a link to your phone, does it automatically open or you have to have.

The app on the phone. On the phone, you have to have the app. You can't do it in the web browser on the phone, but on your computer. And this is one of the things I take a little bit of a problem with, Like Zoom basically runs in the web browser one hundred percent, but they try to force you to use the app.

You can literally.

If you go to Zoom dot us and let's say Megan, you start a Zoom on your computer, you just go to join a meeting on the laptop and you type in the meeting I D and next thing you know,

So okay, But that's.

That's also the beauty of the simplicity is that you know, you can, I can, I can text you a link to it of meeting and next thing, no, you're on on your phone.

I mean, it's really amazing how easy.

To make so simple.

All right, First, question.

Yes. Our first question comes from Debbie. It has to do with Zoom. I'm using Zoom to interact with a death population. It keeps freezing or several windows go blank. It is a problem when you are depending on the image to convey the message, asl is a visual language. What can I do to help make Zoom death friendly.

Well, I think she's saying that it kind of flickers in and out. I don't think that that's any problem that she has personally with her computer or her setup.

I think that's just Zoom in general.

Like I said, they've been experiencing such a large amount of people on this platform, and I think for all said and done, they've held up pretty well, like you hadn't been like a major Zoom outage. But with that said, when I am on zoom A, the video quality is not that great. And b I do notice that it does say your internet connection is unstable, when yeah, I'm not really sure it is. I think that's just their way of saying like something's wrong right now. So I

Yeah, aren't the settings on Zoom set to like low? Like can you make the your quality better? Want and like use more battery on your computer?

You can, and you can go into your settings because HD is not enabled by default. But if she's having trouble with it in non HD, then I assume maybe with HD it might even be more trouble. But I'm not sure. I mean, it really comes down to the fact that I think that she It's just one of these things where this is not a perfect system. Zoom is not you know, you're not even paying for it most of the time, so you'll have to understand there

And the cool thing.

About Facebook Messenger versus Zoom for your video calls is twofold. Number one, the calls are unlimited, so you don't have to worry about that forty minute limit on Zoom, which is cool. The second thing, and I actually don't see this as a very big advantage anymore, is that everyone's on Facebook, so that you don't have to sign up for a new account.

You're already on Facebook.

So if you download Messenger, you just log in with your Facebook account and boom, you can find your friends very easily. But the thing about Zoom is it got so popular so fast that now pretty much everyone is on Zoom, and so that's not really an advantage anymore for Facebook. But at the same time, this may be a higher quality video experience. I don't know, it's been a while since I used Facebook Messenger. I did install this on my computer and I like it. But the

They kill me.

Yeah, everyone gets annoyed.

Yeah.

But I use house Party the other day with for a segment that we're doing and it worked really great too, and it's fun, like you can play games and stuff.

So that was fun. How was the video quality, Well, it.

Was kind of blurry, but it still worked, like I could, you know understand everyone, It wasn't like completely laggy.

I think when we get that like crystal clear video and audio through these services, that's going to be pretty amazing, because that's really the missing piece here. I mean, we've seen so many people go remote in this stay at home thing, but the video quality and the audio quality is still just not there. It's it's still it's better than it ever has been, but it's still not like, wow, you're right there in the room with me even now

So is that like what five G hopes to accomplish?

I think so I think better bandwidth.

I also think the problem with most of these services is that they were engineered with imagining that people don't have a very good connection, so they never really had to worry about They were really more worried about making it a consistent connection across a variety of devices and speed, and I think, you know, they had to take into consideration that some people have really slow internet speeds and some have really fast so I think they tweaked that technology first.

I think the.

Next kind of wave will be who can have the highest quality video and audio chat?

Yeah, all right, you're up, all right? This next ques incomes from Lori. Hello, Rich, hope you and your family are well. How do I transfer my Dropox photos to Amazon Photos?

M So she's ditching Dropbox for Amazon, and why not? You get free unlimited photo storage with your Amazon Prime membership, and Dropbox is going to charge you after a certain amount of uploads, so why not?

Now.

The only thing you have to keep in mind, and this is why I haven't really migrated over to Amazon, is that if you ever give up your Prime membership, you better get those pictures out of there pretty quick, otherwise you're looking at I think it's sixty bucks a year for the service, wow, which actually is cheaper than what I pay. I pay ten dollars a month for Google Drive for all my photos. But anyway, so what you need to do if you've got them on Dropbox,

Like let's say you.

Have a whole bunch of stuff on Dropbox, but you only have one file that you actually are one folder that you actually want physically sync to your computer. Sometimes people do that to save space, like they'll keep stuff in the cloud, but they'll say, okay, anything in this folder, actually keep a copy of it on my desktop. So you need to figure out do you have all your pictures on your computer or are they actually only in

So that's number one.

Number two, all you do is go to Amazon the photos website and let me see what that is, Amazon Photos. It's actually kind of funny. It's Amazon dot Com slash Amazon dash Photos and there is a desktop app. So once you download the desktop app, you would point it to the folder where all of your photos are stored in on your hard drive and let it go to town. It's probably gonna take a while for that to upload, depending on how many pictures you have.

Did that all make sense, Megan?

Yeah, I think so. I do feel like I need to start using the Amazon because that's a great way to just you know, stack up your photos.

Yeah, and.

It's full resolution, which is different. Google Photos is unlimited free, but it's not at the full resolution. So if your photos are over a certain megapixel and I believe it's twelve or sixteen, I can't remember, but it will upload at what's called a high quality version. Now, for ninety nine point nine percent of people, that's gonna be just fine, But for me, I just I can't deal with the idea of not having my original pictures, Like, I don't

Full resolution photo storage.

But Amazon knows, they're very smart. They know that the more pictures you have in there, the more you're going to be renewing that Amazon Prime membership every year because you don't want to lose your pictures.

This is fun.

Did you see the story Megan of the guy who turned himself into a potato head by accident on Zoom?

Yeah?

I saw that.

Okay, so I saw that story. It keeps percolating on the news, and I downloaded an app called snap Camera to kind of recreate this.

So that's the story behind it. This guy. I don't know if if he did it or if his kids did it, whoever did.

It, But there's an app called snap Camera, and this comes from Snapchat and it basically turns you into a bunch of funny things, kind of like if I had to give you an example, you know, on Instagram they have those filters where you can look a certain way or you know whatever. That yes, and I think Snapchat started him right, but maybe not right. Well so, so Snapchat has a desktop app that does that same thing.

But here's the magic of it.

You can once you download this desktop app, you can use those same exact filters or lenses as they call them, across any of your video chatting apps. So you can use it in Zoom, you can use it in Google Hangouts, you can use it in Skype. You become your camera on your system, becomes the snap camera. It's like another

So.

I downloaded this app.

I'm actually gonna do a little video on how to use this app for my social media because I think that people are seeing the potato story and I I've looked at all the Potato stories and a lot of them aren't explaining how to do this and how to most importantly turn it off.

So I'm going to do that.

But anyway, if you're interested, just google Snap Camera and you can download it for your computer and use it in Zoom or in any of your other ones. And by the way, if you're using it in Zoom, the way that you turn it off. I will give you

All right, Megan, Okay, this next question comes from Tims. I was looking to see if you had anything posted about recommendations or any success or Is it all scams guarding plug in TV antenna products that claim to give you instant access to local channels.

Yeah.

It's so funny, Megan, because when I get these questions, I get them like a lot of them, all at once.

That's amazing, it's great and it's fantastic.

But the reality is if you you don't want to go on your roof and install an antenna, which would be the best placement.

The second thing is just to see.

If an antenna works in your home. And so I've tried different antennas in my office and some of them work really really well. And so the two that I recommend is from Mohuhu. I like the Leaf, which is a really small antenna that it's almost like a piece of paper you can put on your wall. Some people may have good luck with that. The other one I like is the glide, and the glide is more power, is more powerful, but it will help you get.

Some channels that are more further out.

Here's the thing, and right now, this is a bad example because it's really tough to get stuff on Amazon right now. But in normal times, if you order one of these on Amazon, just try it out, try it in a couple of different places around your home, and if you can get reception perfect, if you can't return the thing, I mean, that's you know, no one really knows what the reception is going to be like at your house until you put up an antenna because there's just too many variables.

I think that's really smart and I feel like right now also people might be thinking, like, you know, I'm going to cancel my cable. Like if people need to save up money or they need extra money, they might be canceling. Like I feel like entertainment's the first to go, and.

So I I know, but I feel like I feel like my entertainment is the first that I want to spend more on because I subscribed. I think I mentioned this, but I subscribe to Hulu and HBO. Of course I got the bills for those I saw. My credit card was charged, and I was like, oh, it's like fifteen bucks for HBO, twelve for Hulu.

I mean that's a lot for you know, just maybe.

Maybe he's choosing I mean, I don't know, someone might choose internet over cable, you know, just like having Wi Fi and just paying for Wi Fi.

And yeah, and the reality is you can get a lot of stuff for free nowadays. And in fact, a lot of these companies that offer paid stuff are offering free areas where you can watch stuff, like I know Roku that's a huge popular feature on them. It's called like I think it's Roku, the Roku channel. And then I know Pluto TV is really popular. Two b t Ubi is really popular, and there's a there's a bunch of them that all have stuff now don't forget their

There's a lot of these.

I think Netflix is the only one that doesn't have any free things to watch, except I do know Netflix did have that one movie that All the Boys or whatever it was called.

Remember that movie the Yeah to All the Boys I loved before.

Yeah, I think I think they gave that out for free, whereas anyone can watch that I think that was like one of their things, but I think we're gonna see that a lot more because something like a Disney Plus. It's kind of it's tricky for them because you know you're gonna get a lot of stuff. But imagine how many more people would download the app if they knew they can get a couple of things for free on there, right.

Right, Yeah, that's true. Or they could put ads on it and they get.

Free And I know that, I know that.

What's the other app that does this? Apple TV Plus. They have a lot of stuff for free on their app. You can watch like either like the first or second episode of things for free, and then of course after that, if you get hooked on it, you're gonna have to pay. But a lot of these things are doing that. But a good question about the Antenna's try it out. Speaking of Apple and video, this is a first Apple is now while Amazon is now actually selling videos through their

So hopefully that will change too.

I hope that you can soon buy Kindle books through the Kindle app on iPhone That would be pretty amazing, or on more importantly.

The iPad.

All right, This next question comes from Lisa hi Rich. How safe is Google pay now that some are saying to use Wait sorry, how safe is Google pay now? Some are saying to use it but not to touch card keypads or the use of use of tash. I'm a little leery of using it.

Totally safe.

Google pay, uh is the answer to Apple pay. So do use Apple Pay on your iPhone? I do, and so I've I've recommended all these mobile wallets for a long time, and the reason why I recommend them is because they're actually safer than swiping your card. Now, I said swiping your card, because now most credit cards have a chip in them and debit cards, and so I can't really say that tapping your phone is safer than

Do you remember that when.

Yeah, it was a couple of years ago, it was a big deal and it was like, oh my gosh, anyone who used their credit card or debit card at Target, you you were, you know, at risk because the hackers got millions and millions of card numbers. And that was back before we had chip cards. Now, when you use your chip card at a retailer, and I'm talking when you dip instead of swipe, right, only basically the only place we finally we swipe anymore is the gas station.

Otherwise your chip is it's.

Pretty much how you're paying everywhere else. Now, when you dip that chip card, it is transmitting a one time card number to the to the merchant. So what that means is if a hacker got that number or intercepted it, it would not work. It just it just dissipates after that one time use. And I guess online we still use our credit cards, right, actually typing in the number. So yeah, so that's another place.

Where you are at risk.

And so if you can use Google Pay online, or if you can use one of these third party services. I know they've got like Google, what's the other one? I think Apple pay works online for a certain number of retailers. Anyway, long story short, Yes, this is totally safe. It is a better way to pay in general versus swiping, but it is kind of the same as dipping your chip into or dipping your card into the chip reader.

Anyway, I don't think that's true. Actually, never mind, I think that was I don't scratch that last part. I'm not sure that that's still the case. But anyway, good question.

Interesting. It is interesting because, like I've noticed, because I've been trying to use Apple Pay whenever I'm like, you know, at the pharmacy or whatever, and they always say like I'll be like, oh, do you guys have Apple Pay And they'll say like yeah, but it doesn't really work. And it's just like, come.

I And what does that mean when people say that. They say that all the time, like, well, it doesn't really work.

What I mean, it doesn't work. It either works or it doesn't, you know exactly. Yeah, I was at it.

I was at a tiny diner in Solving, and they had do you remember when I did the story on the square terminal? Were you working with me at that point? It was like, I flew up to San Francisco. It was like a little thing that you would uh anyway, Square. I got to interview the guy who started Twitter.

Oh okay, I don't know. I don't think I was with you, Okay.

Anyway, So I saw this Square terminal, which is like to me, if you're a small business, get the Square terminal. It is the best payment system ever. It looks like a little iPhone display and it just is so beautiful as a method for taking my money. I am so happy to spend my money at your business. And I did the story on this thing, and I never saw one in real life until this was, you know, like a couple of weeks ago, when I was solving before you couldn't leave your house, and this diner had one

I'm like, oh, you know about it? She's like, oh, yeah, just tap and I.

Was like, yes, So don't judge a book by its cover and assume because it's a small, rinky dink kind of business, they don't know what they're talking about.

That was my.

You know, that was my terribleness coming through.

And yeah, so I was. I was nicely surprised. I was shocked.

And so anyway, I don't remember what the topic was, but I love I love when businesses take the tap to pay. It is my absolute favorite thing, that is for sure. Okay, let me get through two quick stories before we get to my interview with Libby. First off, if you can't find a web right now, and I know there's a lot of people that have been searching

You just put the software on it.

It's called flashing the software, and next thing you know, your wisecam becomes a webcam. When this whole COVID thing blows over in three or four years, you can put it back to being a security camera. And by the way, it can't be both at the same time. They tested it with Zoom, Go to Meeting, Blue Jeans, Google Hangouts, Skype, and Cisco. The other thing is, if you have a Samsung Galaxy S ten or Note ten, you are getting

Is called Libby.

Not necessarily a new app, but new to me and I have so far read several books with it for free, all through my local library. But here to describe exactly what it is and give me a better understanding of how the app works is Steve Potash. He is with Overdrive, which makes Libby. Steve Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Rich, and I appreciate your support of our public libraries and benefiting from it.

I imagine you guys are seeing increased demand. But let's just start with what Libby is.

Libby is the free app available to all readers of all ages, and with the library card, the books are free. In the US, you can borrow a ebook, a popular ebook from the public library and then say I want to read with Kindle and it will automatically appear in your Kindle either device or in your Kindle reading app. And I really want to mention the audiobook player in Libby has been gaining so much love for the majority of Americans who've yet to discovered the real pleasure of

All right, so tell me about the process of getting these books. So what I've done is I've sort of started using Libby as my book reading list, so when I hear about a book, I just add it to my list.

Because there are some weights for these books.

I can tell you that the books that the public library makes available for citizens to borrow, they are all paid for, and it is a tremendous source of ongoing revenue and earnings, both for the publishers and more importantly, the authors and agents. If the library has ten copies of a new bestseller, the first ten people that would walk in the branch and borrow it get to borrow it, and others would be on a wait list. That same

That's amazing. Now I've also seen sometimes where I don't know. It's like just a little award or something where it's like, oh, it's your lucky day. You can get this book right now. What's that all about?

So LAPL and San Diego County Libraries are using this Lucky Day feature. So if you're readers in Libby or at LAPL dot overdrive dot com or SDCL dot overdrive dot com, they can check their browser a dozen times a day, so even if they are in a weight list, you may just see it pop into the homepage and you can borrow it immediately.

Oh I like that.

So you can borrow all the ebooks and audiobooks and magazines and never worry about them being late. There's never a fine or late fee because at the end of the lending period, which libraries or the user can set, the books automatically expire and return themselves to the collection.

Now that's one thing I have a question about, because you know, for some of these books I see it's like twenty one days, and what if you're not able to finish that book in those twenty one days.

Well, Libby has a very cool feature called renew and if you are getting to the end of your lending period and you have a chapters ago, you can see if it's available for you to extend the loan. But if there are many people waiting for that book, you may have to get at the back of the line. Again, since you had your turn.

Can you talk about the increase in downloads? Have you seen more interest in Libby ever since We've all been kind of recommended to stay at home, Rich that's.

A mild understatement. It's become mission critical that Overdrive and Libby not only be prepared to onboard millions of first time users over these last two plus weeks. Livvy will see if you don't have a library card, it will prompt you. Would you like to get an instant card using your mobile cell phone number.

Steve Potash from Overdrive, thank you for joining me to talk about Libby. I am just about to finish my book on Uber called super Pumped, which I got through Libby. I've got my wife signed up on the app, so she's going to start using it. Megan, are you using it at all?

I am.

You know it's hard when, like certain things, you have to wait like a couple of weeks. More So, I have been like reading regular books and I do have a book on Libby that I've been trying to finish.

Yeah, my advice is to really set up a list of books that you want to read so that way when one of them comes available, something will come available. But that's my advice is, don't just try to find a book and start reading it that day, because you may be a little disappointed to find that it's not available. So make your book reading list on Libby and then it will notify you when a book is available to read, and then you can download it to your Kindle. Such

Love his podcast TV spots.

I'm such a techy dinosaur, but I can pick up nice tidbits to help me get a bit more up to speed. Well, thank you Sue and came rio U. Producer Megan. Where can folks find you?

I'm on Twitter at producer.

Megan, and you can find me safe at home and on social media at rich On Tech. I am so ready to get back to normal life. I hope that we can very soon. But stay saye, folks, I'm rich tomorrow On behalf of myself, Producer Megan, and everyone that helps get this show to your ears.

Thanks for listening. We will talk to you real soon