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Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Seanda Weird, and.
I'm justin leme.
Oh good to see everybody. Uh, how's everybody doing? Like you survived Valentine's Day?
Look at that we did? Yeah we did? I think you did.
I don't know.
Wait wait it was Valentine's Day. Oh my god. Oh no, You're just gonna kill me.
Between work and the flu going to our house, I don't think we even noticed it was Valentine's Day.
To be honest, Yeah, you still you sound like you still have a little bit of that cold too.
Hang out. It's yeah, I can definitely tell I'm still congested a little bit, like I'm a little horse. It's been Caitlyn got sick, I got sick, Max got sick, Kitlen got sick Max. It was just a rotating Yeah, it's it's been going around our community. There are schools that closed because over sixty percent of the class was out sick.
Oh wow.
So it's it's definitely going around this area pretty hard right now.
You know Valentine's Day for me, I just I never believed in Valentine's Day, right, I think it wasn't it? What is?
It?
Wasn't Valentine's Day a manufactured holiday.
It's all Hallmark Holiday.
Yeah, and they you know, Hallmark has like twelve hundred skews plus of different greeting cards for Valentine's Day, you know, l gift bags, gift gift wrap cards, the whole bed. We always like to share when we get like a new piece of technology. Sean, you decided to go ahead and buy some tech.
I decided to buy that printer for myself.
Oh so it's not okay, So it's not a printer. It's a scanner.
Sorry, it's a scanner. It looks like a printer because it's a printer. It scans photos. It's I haven't got it plugged in yet. I did open the box. But I'm excited to get it. But we talked about it. It's the same one than Andy talked about about a month ago. Its steeps and Fast Phototo Fast Photo six hundred or something sixt eighty. Yeah, I'm excited to get it because I've got a ton of the four by sixes that didn't have negatives with them from my family's archive.
Wow.
So I can now just pack in about sixty to seventy photos and let it just go scan scan.
That's awesome.
If you're doing them, it's gonna cycle through. If you do them at three.
Hundred DEPI I mean, it's super fast. If you do them at six hundred, I mean it's a little slower, but it's still better than lifting up the flatbed, you know, and putting them on there and then having to resize them. The software does it all. I even took I don't know why, but my family from Burma, they would do photos, but they were like thumbnails almost. I mean they were like stamps and uh, that's the size of the photos. You put them in an album and I'd had to
take them out of the album. But I got a bunch of those and I scan them with the EPSOM Fast Photo and they handled it without jamming or anything.
It was really cool.
I'm excited to do it. It's just gonna get the project finished because that's all that I've left. Anything that had negatives or positives that I scanned, It all done right now. It's all categorized by at least what I know by year or what information was provided to me by my family, And I've just got to go from the sixties all the way up through the early to the mid two thousands.
So are you gonna do the Maida data because you can put the Maida data in just I will be put like.
I'm going to be sorting it by year and then by event hopefully like this is what I think the event is and some of the people that are in them, right, But with some of the software, you can photo tag that. I'm going to dump them into Google Drive and Google Photos, which will then tag the people that have already tagged in other albums with my family's archive, and it should populate the same use the same data already existing. This is a project that I've been working on since twenty nineteen.
You guys have kind of been following along the whole time. So it's it's it's weird that it's taken five years, but it's just a lot of work.
Yeah, but you're preserving it for the future generations because oh.
Yeah, no, it's are they paying you for this?
They bought me, like they bought me the the Wolverine film scanner. They bought me the epsent flatbed scanner. So they bought all that equipment for me knowing that it was gonna take me time.
Yeah.
Good, Yeah, at least at least you're not just having to like invest for like no return. Besides, you know, obviously you know archiving this stuff.
But yeah, the.
Return, the return for me is seeing my family enjoyed the pictures.
Some years ago, we used to have a place out here called Flickos and they had a super eight millimeter camera projector rig and I took one of my eight millimeter films in and I had a transfer. And it's great because I have it. It's not the best looking thing. And now I understand, like our buddy Mitch, Mitch Goldstone who is at scan my photos. They have an eight millimeter film scanner. But what it doesn't frame by by frame.
So it will take a frame of that eight millimeter film, you know, scan it, then another frame, then another frame and it photo correct, city color correct. It does all this amazing work. I'm I'm wondering now VHS is a little different, you know, bottle of wax. I got a question from GYM this week too, asking, hey, question a good system program to dub VHS to hard drive and is that something that you've done, I mean, and what did you end up using.
I bought a RCA to HDUMI converter, which then will upscale it to either seven twenty or ten a D depending on Whateveryone wasn't the most ideal way to do it because it kind of botched the resolution a little bit. I think on the upscale, what really you need is is some something that will retime it because it tapes are need to be timed, so you need somebody that has a time based corrector in it.
Yeah.
What I would look into and there is getting a VHS DVD combo that can write to hard drives because you can put the tapes in and it'll copy it as you're going into the hard drive. Oh nice, that's a way to do it. Otherwise, I just was playing out of the VH to put the tape in RCA out to this device that was clocking it, and I'd have to look at I don't remember what it's called. I'd have to I bought it off Amazon HDMI to
a black Magic H two six four encoder. Right it was going out analog getting converted to digital and capturing as an H two six four because a lot of people have the ability to bring capture cards in, but they're either going to capture at a much lower resolution or a much higher resolution, because if you just go out and buy, say like a black Magic deck link card or a capture card from Alcado four K or something, you still have to have a program that will record,
either bring it in and record it with OBS that then you can do some H two six four encoding. You're gonna need a processor that supports HG six four encoding, or you're gonna use like the black Magic software, but that's gonna capture like pro reds or ABC you know, or DNxHD like the much higher lossless codecs that are going to take it with no more space.
I was, I told him, because the one I bought ended up buying when I and doing it a little later on was the Diamond VC five hundred SE. It's a kind of a one touch VHS camcorder a digital file converter, so it does that and it's not bad. It has a little screen on it. The problem is finding a good VCR to do it. I had a VCR with some you know, head issues, so you had
a little noise on it. I'd almost recommend buying a brand new VCR if you don't have one, or have one that has just got very low life on it, and trying it that way. And also, don't forget if the tapes have been sitting around a long time, like they can actually have some of that that problem on the tapes themselves, and there's no way to get to really get around that, not really. So I mean, that's that's one thing to look at. And the one from Diamond,
it's not that expensive. I think you can find that on Amazon for I want to say, like around fifty or sixty bucks.
We got to touch on something that I figure is so cool.
So we talked a few weeks back about Zomboid Pro Project Zomboid Project Zomboid. We had a couple of comments from the opus clip that we had put on our social media on TikTok and and Instagram reels and Facebook. People liked it. One guy said it's his most favorite game ever. And then I get this audio file from Justin and I'm listening to this and he goes, oh, by the way, I might be a voice in the game,
And so here. We're gonna play the clip from you for you so you could hear justin in Project Zomboid.
Here you go.
My name is Pastor James Hartnell. I am in what was once a place for radio broadcast. It is now a mausoleum. Hey, walking mausoleum. I have been bitten. I am not long for this world. I came here to this room to pray with you for our souls, our father who art?
Oh, but here they do not worry. I am ready for this. God bless you, get back, get back who art in heaven?
How it be.
Thy name? That is awesome?
All right?
You gotta tell us the story behind this that you may be one of the voices in the game. Kind of recap a little bit about this game.
This is a game. It's on Steam. It's a PC game. It has been around since twenty thirteen, as I think it was when the very first iteration of this game came out. But it is as a zombie survival game, and it looks a lot like the original SIMS.
I think it's generated interest in SIMS again, hasn't it.
I wouldn't really necessarily go that far because I know the SIMS just also re released their twenty fifth anniversary edition of the same Yes, but the game does look a lot like SIMS. And I'll be honest, a lot of times I'll be over at our neighborhood brewery and I'll be playing Project Zomboid and I'm walking. People walk by me and they're like, oh, you're playing the SIMS. I'm like, no, No, I'm not. I'm playing Project Zomboid. Basically,
what it is, it's a survival game. You are a survivor in an apocalyptic event that takes place in Knox County, Kentucky. You will not survive the game because the game actually when you start the game, it actually says this is the story of how you died, and and you will die in the game because the zombies will get you. Yeah, it's just how long can you survive and what can you accomplish during that time before the zombies get to you.
So I've been playing the game a lot, and it recently had a resurgence and popularity because the developers, Indie Stone, they came out with a new update called Build forty two, and they basically revamped everything in the game. They made the combat better, they made the AI of the zombies better, they made a lot more stuff you can do as a character. It's just it's like basically a completely revamped game and people are loving it. And as of the
recording of this show, everybody's talking about it. PC game, PC gamer, all kinds of different websites are all talking about this is the best zombie survival horror game you can get right now on Steam and it's only twenty bucks. So I'm playing it right And there's a lot of mods. You can add a lot of mods because the developer, it's a very small team and they can't fix all the bugs. So there's a huge modding community out there.
And one of the mods I believe was called better TV Radio because there are televisions and radios in the game, like stations, right yeah, yeah, and you can get a radio, you can tune into a station. But the thing is is the radio stations and even the TV they all sound like the old Peanuts.
Characters, like the Woom.
So this particular mod decided, hey, let's get some voice actors, let's let's re let's redo the lines, because the lines, the text is on the screen, it's just.
The voices are just like we.
So they said, let's go ahead and let's let's let's do this. Let's make a professional. So I went to their discord channel and they said, hey, look, we're hiring voice actors. Here are all of the lines that we need to recording, and a lot of them were already taken, including the one that you just heard was taken by
this but it was called Pastor John. And so I saw this and I said, you know what, I have all the equipment, you know, because we do tech talk radio, I have a studio in my house, and I've got a lot of experience. I said, you know, I'm gonna give this a shot. So I went home and I took one take what you just heard right there, took one taken, and I recorded the voice and I sent it in to the discord channel. And the admin of that particular mod that was running the discord, Oh my god,
he goes, where have you been? I needed you like six months ago. That's awesome, he goes, there, there's a lot of the lines that I've already given away. We've already put him into the game. But you I'm giving you this one, even though I already gave it to somebody else. I'm given you this one and I want you for other things. And on top of that, he also mentioned that he is in talks with Indie Stone to make his mod part of the Bass game. Oh very nice, right, So if that happens, then I will
be in the base game. That's because a voice, and it's just a random voice. But they are going to be doing in the future. Their plans are to do not only just more TV more radio voices in the game, but also they're going to introduce NPC characters, right. Those characters are gonna have voices, So I may end up doing a lot more voiceover.
You might be an nc that's awesome, I might be an NBC. How much is this game to play?
Me? Well, for for projects on Boyd it's twenty bucks. Twenty bucks and it provides hours and hours of entertainment.
If you have a PC, can you can you get it?
Yes, it's on PC.
It's on Steam, so if you can, if you got Steam, I think you can even get it on Mac. If you have a Mac and you have Steam Client, I believe they have a version for that now. If you have a PlayStation or an Xbox. Unfortunately, no, this is only a PC game, but I would highly recommend projects on board. It doesn't require a huge amount of graphics power or processing power. It is a very old school looking game, but it is super super good.
All right, speaking of PlayStation, can't do this and not talk about it. I know that justin you do play PlayStation, Sean, do you? Oh you don't anymore? No, okay, because I was wondering if you were affected by this twenty four hour outage, which is apparently gonna cost Sony some money. Oh yeah, yeah, they went down and they're they're gonna be doing payouts.
The funny thing was that they never they never they never said what was the cause. They said, oh, it was a equipment maintenance or something like that. A lot of people are thinking, hey, this was probably a hack. I mean, because you don't have equipment failure like that on that kind of scale for that long unless it
was a hack. Now that that harkens back to what was it twenty eleven, right when they had the famous Sony hack where they were down for like three straight weeks or something like that, where.
They stole the people's data. Why.
I was living in San Diego at the time. I remember that happening, but the twenty four hours and they were basically radio silent, like they were just coming out, Yes, we are aware that some people are having a problem. We are working on it.
And it's like, I'm sorry some people, everybody.
They kind of took like what Microsoft did in this lap, remember that the last Doubt outage that they had that was really bad. They just really didn't say anything for a long time because they.
Were trying to figure it all out.
And yeah, I really think there was a lot more of the story than what they were even leading on. And I really think it was some sort of a breach in their system and they were trying.
To Usually usually when it's radio silence is because they don't know, right, Yeah, Usually it's like, oh, here's why, and it's either some facade or it's half truth.
But nothing Yeah, wow, Yeah, there was something going on.
The twenty eleven outage lasted twenty three days.
Twenty three days, okay, and.
It compromised seventy seven million PlayStation user accounts.
Yeah are people still now?
When you think about this, okay, you go back to think of some of the big hacks where it's been medical systems, you know, hospitals, medical data.
I don't know banks have been ever hit.
You know, schools have, one of our school districts here have when something like this happened. How long can those repercussions affect the customer base that has data, whether it be phone numbers, email?
How long is that stuff going to be floating around decades?
Who knows? Who knows where the data went?
Yeah, I mean it goes to the dark web, goes to the gets.
Sold, and then it gets resold and resold and resolved.
Now, I mean this is this is how you get This is how you get these these these scam emails and the scam text messages and things like that is because your information was exposed onto the dark web to the highest bidder, and a lot of times those highest bidders are from foreign countries like North Korea, China, Russia. You know, those are the top three biggest hacking countries
out there besides the United States. But you even got countries like Czech Republic there's actually a pretty decent size hacking community and the Czech Republic, but the biggest ones are you know the first three that I mentioned. So, yeah, once your data is in the on the dark Web, it's out there forever.
Would you recommend that people take that offer that they'll get usually they'll get an offer for free credit monitoring for a year to be able to keep an eye on that.
Would you recommend they do that?
Or so you have to be really careful with that, because do you remember the experience hack? Yeah, right, the credit model, the credit whatever, the one of the big credits place. Right. So they released almost like immediately this police signe. You know, here's this customer agreement. It'll give you X amount of free stuff from us. But it negated a bunch of the court stuff like liability and like and it went around like wildfire because people were like,
this is the answer. It's gonna protect your data that they're saying, it's gonna be so good for you, But it ended up being well, hey, a class action lawsuit got filed two months later, and people were like, well, I can't be I'm not part of that. I can't be a part of that because I signed this agreement before. All right, you have to be very careful when companies come very forward, very quickly with these ye too good to be true offers, because they're just looking out for their back end.
Oh yeah, totally. Ye never.
I never signed those. I mean, I've been a victim of multiple and they're always like, hey, we're offering you, you know, three free years of credit monitoring, and then you read the fine print. Yeah, exactly what Sean said is you sign this, you take this offer, you lose your right to sue us in the future or even be just become part of a class action lawsuit against us by taking this offer. So I'm always like, nope, somebody would. I'm gonna sit back and see what happens.
Somebody wants to ask me when you sign up for stuff online, whether it's you know, maybe maybe through a vendor of a product that you like and you want to sign up to get information, that you use a social media email account that's not tied to a main account, like say you have an account through your ISP, whether it be Infinity or Cox or you know, any of the cable services Google Fi, that you use one that is separate and just like.
A Gmail or a Yahoo or even AOL.
So there there are a lot of people that do and a lot of people that do this, and this is kind of where I would love to have Matt, you know, if he was here tonight, Simon, because he is the cybersecurity expert. But I do know that a lot of IT professionals, and especially cybersecurity professionals, they have fifteen twenty twenty five email addresses.
Right because I mean you can sign up for them. They're free.
I mean they're all free, yeah, right. And what they do is they assign those email addresses to particular types of things that they do on the internet. For instance, online shopping, they'll use one particular email address. Then for any type of registration of products that they buy, they'll use a different one because then they can track who
is selling the information. Because if they go to register a brand new email address that has never been out there before, and they register a product and all of a sudden, bam bam bam bam bam, they're getting hit with spam emails. They're like, yeah, this company just sold my information even though they said they wouldn't.
Interesting stuff. Are we gonna take a break. We come back. We've got a couple of listener questions. We got some news of some tech as well. We'll be back with more of Tech Talk Radio.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de weird and I'm justin. Let me find us on the web at tech talk radio dot com.
We'll be right back and now back to tech talk radio. All right, So we have a listener question here.
It says I have started a new home based business, and I was looking for ways to get the word out. A buddy of mine told me not to bother with a website. He says most people use social media to get the word out. I wanted to get your thoughts on needing a website. Oh that's a yeah. No, I disagree with what your buddy says. I think everybody needs to have a website.
I agree with you, But the cost of a website has gone up.
Correct.
Well, I think it depends on what you're putting on there, and it depends on how much you want on the website. You know, there are some people put everything they do, you know, the deep have a blog, baby have?
Sure? Yeah?
But like, all right, so you started a website, uh, for your your DJ business?
Right? Yeah?
Yeah, And but that that probably wasn't too much of an investment. What I did was I basically I use Wix like a build your own kind of Yeah, it's like Squarespace.
Wix, you know, stuff like that. They also have an e commerce platform built in, which I you know, obviously I didn't need to use the e commerce, but I what I did was I use the Wix program or process to buy the domain, which obviously you have to buy the domain name, right, and then the hosting of the actual website, which I believe. I think I get five website pages on my platform.
Is it on?
Is it on Wix?
Are they the hosting company or well, they're the hosting company, but it doesn't have a Wix domain. It uses my personal domain. Okay, who's theirs?
Cool?
So, uh yeah, it's my own personal domain, but it is hosted by Wix. And I also get an email address so if I want to, you know, people want to email me, that goes through Wix as well. And I used a little bit of their social media tool which just kind of helps promote my website to search engines. It's called SEO Search engine optimization, right. And then I what I did was I think I bought I bought the three year package because it was a better deal because I knew I was going to have the website
for a while. Yeah, and I think I want to say, I think I paid five hundred dollars for three years all of this, which means hosting domain, name, email, everything, all all of it for like five hundred bucks.
Yeah. I think the idea of just putting it on social media, if you're just on Facebook or Instagram, doesn't it just kind of really it doesn't say too much about the professionalism or you know that you could be a trustworthy I don't, I don't know.
Also, also, content on social media disappears. I mean you're not going to be able to go back and visit that content very easily. I mean, yes, if you follow the person on social media or whatever, you might, but a lot of those social media what he's talking about, this home business, he's probably talking about things like advertising on social media, which means he's going to be paying for advertisements which are going to reach a lot of people.
But most people just skip right by the advertisements.
Right.
So, to have your own website, which is like a home base for your business, you know that that that's that's gonna be where.
You wanted to go.
Yeah, of course with the email address, with your own domain, Uh, you know, you'd be justin at you know, tech talk radio, right, right, you know, that's that's that's that's a more personal way of doing it. Actually, you know what I forgot to mention part of that Wix deal was I actually got five hundred business cards as well. Oh, actual business cards, actual business cards.
That's a great it's a great idea. Actually, yeah, yeah, that is good. I you know, I find having that email address is also a certain benefit because somebody give it has their own bay business.
It's just look so much better, I think.
Yeah.
I mean you've got a business and you're like, oh, yeah, I have a home business.
I do I don't know.
Let's say I do home painting and and and you can reach me at Justin at gmail dot com. Ah, it just doesn't seem professional. Yeah, you know, when you've got a Gmail dot com or an Aol dot com or a Yahoo dot com, it just doesn't seem professional.
Sean, what do you think I agree with Justin?
I mean, I think having a presence where somebody can come and look at your content. It also depends on what you're selling or what you're doing, right, if it's it all depends. But like if you want to you have to use some of those tools, Like you can try and do all your own search engine optimization and
all that stuff. But it's like it's a job on itself, Like it's about what about of work you want to put into it to get out of it, because you can put as much time and effort into it, but if you're not going to get any return in your investment, have somebody else build it for you.
Now, let me take this in a completely different direction. Though Now I don't know what this person's business is. They didn't mention everything in a question. There is a couple different people that I particularly watch on YouTube that I just happen to naturally find within the YouTube algorithm, and they are landscapers, right, and they do these videos where they do a time lapse of them like mowing
a person's lawn and making it look all nice. And I've seen those ing like a storm drain or something and they're doing like a time lapse. Those are like organic social media because you're not really putting a lot of effort into it except for just simply recording the video and then putting it up on YouTube and hoping
somebody finds you. That's one way of doing it. So, like if you're a landscaper, and you want to showcase your work, why not throw up a YouTube channel, But the algorithm is going to have to pick you up, and that's almost impossible nowadays, right, So to have a website where you could, you know, you could take those videos that you've made of you doing your work and put them on your website, which then drives traffic to your YouTube channel, which then gets you more subscribers, which
then in turn makes the algorithm pay more attention to you. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, and now next thing.
You know, you're a millionaire.
Well the other idea, too, would be that if you have the website, still invest in social media by having your presence and that's where you put a lot of content and again drive it back to your website. I mean, yeah, that would make sense. So don't just say both ways, Yeah dude, do do it both ways. Don't just say okay, I got a website, I'm good and not paying attention to it and not do any updates to it.
Do the do both of them.
Social media and that and you know that that's probably a better way.
Or even radio advertising.
Yeah, radio advertising too, and link link link your YouTube channel to your website. So people go to your website, they see your videos that are hosted on YouTube, which then brings them to the YouTube channel, which then gets them to subscribe to you, and then it affects the algorithm. So I mean, there's all. There's it's a it's a big game, man like. It's it's really hard to get noticed on social media anymore, to be honest.
All right, So having having a website is the best thing to do.
Great question there, Sean, do you want to do? You want to handle the next question you.
Want to do? Because I've been reading that question. I've been looking at options because I have several that just came right off the top of my head. All right, the next listener question, And for one, I'm going to comment on this because it says I found a flash drive with a bunch of Windows media video files on it.
I hope it was there, right that that that is I saw? Yeah, you found it outside. I hope it was your street.
Don't plug it at anybody, don't know, like, well, clearly you did because you know it has movie files on it, right right, I'm going to give good faith here and trust that this is your flash drive that you may have just had laying around in your house. There are good options, all right?
What they want? They want to know what?
So the best one is free? All right?
So they wanted to, so they want the question is they wanted to? They want to? Way to convert these right easily?
Oh yeah, sorry, I didn't read the rest of the question. My fault. I found a flash drive with a bunch of Windows Media video files on it. Is there a way to convert them easily? I don't mind spending a few dollars? Or is there a free option? There are several free options for this, all right. Handbreak is the number one video transcoding piece of software. I could recommend it anybody.
I always thought that Handbreak was just for you know, a way for me to get my DVD movies into a file.
Then that is probably the one number one reason I use it for is you can put a DVD in and rip it and it gives you a file. It will take essentially any media platform you can think of within reason. Right, Obviously, your computer has to have the CODEC to be able to do it. Windows Media files Windows wmvs are one of them. You can then convert it to just audio as an MP three. You can convert it to a HT six four. You can do
all sorts of stuff with it. The other one that I recommend, and this is something I recommend to everybody that's install on their Nuke Fresh and stuff, Windows whatever, VLC Player.
VLC player, Oh yeah.
VLC player is probably the most They call it the Swiss Army Knife of media players. It's free, it's open source, it's it looks like a little traffic cone. It's it's it's cool. They can convert with that. Also, it's a little bit more complicated, it's a little bit more you to kind of have a little bit more technical knowledge to understand exactly what you're trying to do with the the software self. But that one's also free. Okay, but it'll play pretty much any media format on the planet,
which is incredible. And then if you are very tech savvy and you want to try to do it yourself with a little bit of Python coding, f fm peg, f f m peg, all right, ffm peg is it's it's this. It's an open source process that runs in the background on your computer, so it doesn't have a web interface. It's built into a lot of other products you can use it. And then run either a Python script to say I want to transcode this file to this file. Except we use it at work all the
time to transcode nd I and base bay. There are certain processes that we use it for that are way more advanced than the general users that we're gonna do.
All right, One question I'm wondering about, Sean. Why would somebody want to move from Windows Media video files to maybe another format?
Uh? What would be the reason for that?
If for space compatibility?
Okay, all right, So.
If I send you a Windows Media file, how are you gonna play it.
On my computer?
Will it work?
I think so?
If you have Windows Media Player installed.
Uh yeah, yeah, yeah.
It might It may or may not be installed. You might have to go to the place or downloaded.
So what the best place to play a file would be? What format? MP four or so?
Yeah, It's like if you think of it from a phone level, right, most phones record in H six four and PIG four because that's the most compatible with existing devices in the world. Right now, if you have it set to most performance, you're gonna get HVC, or you're gonna get a pro res or something or whatever. The Google's shoosing pro res ra or black Magic raw or whatever format there are. So H two six four or H six five here hopefully soon will be the most compatible.
Meaning it, most software and devices are going to be able to read that codec and play it back. If you send somebody at WMV a Windows media file and they're on a Mac or an iPhone or an Android, they're probably not gonna be able to play it straight away.
Got it?
If you send them an MP four that's encoded H two six four, they'll be able to play it because those devices are licensed to play those codecs and can can can play those back video and audio.
And in some cases the compression algorithm may work a little better with a different file format, right, I mean, so you're going to save space.
So Windows media files are less compressed than H six fours, but depending on how big the file is, it could be a worse looking in compression though than H twx four. Got it, H two six four and H six five are more efficient codex They may and they could create can create smaller file sizes, but at greater quality. So you start getting into you know it's w mvs, A v I S and certain other file structures. You get more data less compression, but the file sizes are bigger,
all right. You know, it depends on what flavor of the codec is. It might compress things differently.
But and Adobe, what do you think do they have? They have software that's free.
So there are a couple Adobe products. You can get Adobe Express, which is not one that I've used in a long time. But then they have the Adobe Media Adobe Media Encoder. So if you were part of an enterprise level Adobe Suite, or you have access to the Adobe Suite, if you're paying for like the video package or the photo package, you might have the ability to
get Adobe Media Encoder. Again, it's very simple to open it, say here's my file, and then tell it what you wanted to give you and it'll spin out the file usually usually no time at all.
It's been a while since I've looked at it, but I've used Roxio Easy Creator in the past and Roxio Studio, and they have a They have a conversion program for video on there as well, which works pretty good, but you gotta buy the program. I mean, that's the thing you got versions versus that.
You know, back back in you know, the early two thousands, when ripping DVDs was popular, right, and this is where the term toaster came from, because people would burn, yeah, DVDs and then they would pop out like toast. That's kind of where the key where term toaster came from. So it was kind of a funny thing. But yeah, you had roxyo, Nero, a handful of other ones that
were popular at the time. But then it kind of all fell back in And if you if you look into the kind of the internet side of burning DVDs and blu rays, the two you're gonna find for DVDs is handbrake.
And for hand raise awesome, make make MKV, make mgv's good, very good too, but handbreak is absolutely awesome.
It's a great idea.
All Right, we got to.
Take another quick break. We come back with more of tech talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird.
And I'm justin. Let me send us an X at tech talk Radio. We'll be right back now back to tech talk Radio.
I was asked a question the other day, and it's a good question. We've been talking about tariffs. That subject has come up and it's not you know, the subject politics, but the question has been if you've been wanting to get maybe something that's tech wise that is not made here in the United States, and that it's a variety of products, motherboards, graphics cards, of the Nintendo's switch to
which is going to be you know, be out. Could tariffs affect the costs of some of the technology that we may be wanting to buy because they're going to be going both ways.
It definitely will. I mean, there's no way that a ten tariff increase in China is not going to increase product costs. Yeah, of course it is. How much stuff, how much technology is made.
In China, Yeah, all of it. Yeah, I mean.
It's weird to say, but I would say seventy more than seventy five percent of the world's stuff. Yeah, it's Maine, China.
Well you got you've got other countries like Vietnam and Thailand. And but I mean what technology has made here in the United States. You know, you think about that when it comes to other boards. Uh, there are companies out there. We think of HP, We think, oh HP, right, great American company, Hilda Packard. Most of their products are probably coming from offshore.
Yep, yep.
Maybe if you look at if you look at just how much impact there was just from COVID shutting stuff down for a period of time. Then that didn't increase the cost at all. It just disrupted the supply chain. So if you increase the cost and that offsets the supply chain, that's going to have a domino effect in the same direction. So it's gonna there's going to be a price ke on everyday goods and every day technology and consumer technology. That's people are going to see.
So go ahead, justin looking at to chime in here real quick with this, I mean, what is what what is the what is the end goal here? Because I mean, I know, saving money, Well, we're gonna we're gonna eventually have to dive into a little bit of politics on this, which was out trying to get too deep into politics. But I think the end goal is that Trump wants to have more of these companies bring back these products
into America, to have American companies manufacture these products. I think the problem with that is we don't have the infrastructure.
I don't believe.
I mean, maybe maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe we have these types of factories that Taiwan and China have where they can manufacture the silicon to make the nvidiate chips and the you know, the CPUs and the motherboards and other things like that. I just don't think we have that. But then on top of that, it's all about paying the living wage.
You're going to drink.
Bring jobs back to America. Sure, that's the end goal, right, but at what cost? Because now these companies are getting this stuff made for pennies on the dollar, and this is just the way the world works. You bring these back to America, Now you're gonna have to pay these people that do this stuff at a living wage unless we go completely automated and we just have robots make everything.
Right, which some companies would love. Intel does have a plant in uh Tempe Arizona, a silicon processing plant for you know, the processors and whatnot. So there is there is some manufacturing that goes on here in the United States, and it's probably beyond that. There's other products that we've seen. But it does make you wonder, should that then people start thinking about, Okay, I've been saying we're gonna update my computer, I'm gonna get new motherboard, I'm gonna and they like.
To do it themselves.
Should they be just going ahead and buying them now rather than waiting because the price is gonna go again, you know, yeah.
If you can. And you know, I don't know if I would be spending a lot of my reserve cash right now. Yeah, you don't know what the market's gonna do. Like with these tariffs, it's gonna unsettle so much. There's so much uncertainty that investing in a new a big technology debt, of like buying stuff, it might not be the most wise decision right now.
There are other products too.
We think about Apple as well, a smart watch. Didn't want to buy one like an Apple watch, but you want to monitor your heart justin you went with the ring.
How's that been working out for you? I actually really like it.
You know.
I have the pixel Watch three and I got that recently. When I got the pixel nine fold, I got a free pixel Watch three.
I really, honestly don't even use.
The pixel Watch three for what it is mostly used for. I mean, I get the vibration on my wrist and I'm like, oh, I got something I gotta respond to. But personally me, my eyesight's not the greatest, so I have to wear reading glasses. I can't read my watch.
Oh I can't. I can't look at it.
I mean I can't put it far enough away from my face to be able to read the tiny little print on the watch. And I don't wear my glasses all the time. I only wear them when I need to look up something close. So for me, the pixel Watch just really doesn't do the trick, whereas the Aura ring, I just set it and forget it. And the pixel Watch has to be charged basically every day. The Aura ring is once every eight to ten days.
Oh wow. And it only takes sixty minutes to charge.
Now, and it's a cost wise versus the pixel Watch. Well, the pixel Watch was a good deal. You've got it with the full thing. It's it's, it's, it's it's equivalent.
I would say it's about three fifty to four hundred and fifty dollars, depends on which finish you want, If you want the gold or the silver finish, it's obviously going to be more. But yeah, it's about But here's the cool thing about the r A ring, and it's not applicable to the pixel Watch or the Apple Watch or anything else, is that the r A ring is actually FSA eligible.
Nice.
So if you have an FSA through your health insurance company, they will pay for the ring and they will pay which this is now this is the funniest part about it. They will pay the monthly subscription to the or A ring. They will not pay the yearly subscription, which makes no sense to me because you're actually saving money if you do the yearly subscription. Right, but at least with my particular health insurance company, which is through UMR, They're like, look,
we don't make the rules. We'll pay for the monthly at five ninety nine a month, but we're not gonna pay for the yearly at fifty bucks. I'm like, wait, you're just you're literally you're literally wasting money because like fifty bucks for the year or six bucks a month, right, Like, what the heck with the smart watch, though, you don't pay a monthly do you?
No?
No, no, smart Watch, No you don't.
I mean well, unless you got LTE, if you got this cellular connectivity then obviously yeah, but that's usually tied in with your phone plan or whatever.
You don't really notice it. It's kind of just there.
But with the R ring, you need it. It's like a five or six dollars a month subscription to get the extra benefits. But what I like about the R ring is it's way more accurate. I'll be working out or doing something and then my R ring is like, hey, we detected you're doing a workout. Thirty minutes later, the pixel watch is like, hey, you just did a workout.
I'm like, yeah, like thirty minutes ago. All right.
So Apple is doing something kind of different, which I thought was cool. They're putting out the power Beats Pro too. These are earbuds. Basically, you wear them in your ear. Right, It's not just music though, this is kind of this is different. So you imagine you're working out in the gym, right,
so you put these in, You're listening to music. It's monitoring your heart rate, so it can tell if you're getting a good workout, if you're you know your your heart is accelerating or your heart is running at a good workout pace. So if you're doing a workout.
I thought their Apple Watch was supposed to do that.
Well, say you don't say you don't want to wear an Apple Watch, but you can wear these these power Beats Pro listening to music and it's going to twofold also monitor your heart, which is some people may go if that's kind of cool. Now they're set to retail for about two hundred and forty nine dollars. Although just from what you're saying, justin I think the ring would probably be a better alternative.
I mean, if you're looking for a true health benefit, like a health tracker, I think the Aura ring is right up there with along with like the Garmin or or a couple of the other ones out there. But like when it comes to just overall general like it does everything. Yeah, the Apple Watch is a great watch. The Epixel watches is decent, but I don't know much about these these new earbuds you're talking about.
But yeah, for like a.
True and true, set it and forget it health monitor, the.
Aura ring is great.
Now.
I have the Apple Watch and it monitors sleep apnea, which is this too. Mike Cardiologist wanted to he's, you know, keep an eye on that, and I did and I don't have an issue, which is kind of cool that my Apple Watch was able to see that. So you do the same thing with the ring. You get the sleep appia notification or.
Sleep apnea notification. It also can do other stuff for cardio, like a arrhythmia. Yeah, yeah, it can detect a rhythmia.
It also attracts can track episodes of hyper attack of cardia. Yes, right, right, all right.
I want to ask you guys something Chrome extension plug ins. What do you guys think about this? I mean, some people say, don't do plugins. Don't plug into your Chrome browser or your Edge browser or whatever browser.
Are you using.
Don't use Chrome period. You're you're not a fan of Chrome, not anymore. No, Like what made you kind of say I'm done with Chrome?
Well, I mean, just take a look at your task manager, you know, after you install Chrome and you put a couple of these extensions on. Look at how much resources Chrome is taking up on your computer. I mean, it is absolutely ridiculous how resource intensive Chrome is. And then you might say, oh, well, then that's fine, I'll just go use I'll go use Microsoft Edge. Edge is Chromium based, It's gonna use the same amount of resources.
Firefox.
I've never really been a Firefox fan until about the past two years.
Yeah, a lot of people say Firefox is great.
Well, no, Firefox is great, obviously, I love Firefox, and Firefox doesn't use half of the resources that Chrome does. But the thing is is that you've got all the big tech companies now that are coming after Firefox. Because Mozilla is the company that makes Firefox. They're a nonprofit organization. They don't have a lot of money to advertise, they don't have a lot of money to you know, fend off lawyers and things like that. It's actually way better
I think Firefox. I've used Opera, I've used Brave. Okay, first off, don't ever, ever ever use Brave.
Originally we thought it was good, and then Brave was supposed to be the privacy browser.
It is the exact opposite. If I were to rate my browsers, I'm gonna ask Sean the same question. But if I were to rate my browsers from first to fourth, I would say Firefox first, Edge second, Opera third, and Chrome fourth John Chrome.
For compatibility at work and with devices that are mass produced, Chrome is the most wide probably the most widely used, so it has the most compatibility with software and development and things that we use. I would say for personal use, mose, Firefox, right, Chrome, Safari.
Edge, Oh, forget so far, the Apple one. So I found a plug in, so we've been trying to troubleshoot an internet provided signal lots of dropouts, and they kept saying it was not that bad. I checked at twenty nine disconnects in one day with an extension that a Chrome extension that helped me that I was able to get in the Google Store called Internet Connection Monitor. I checked out the privacy statement developer disclosed that it will
not collect your use your data. They declare your data as not being sold to third parties outside of the approved use cases, not being used for transferred for purposes that are unrelated to the item's core functionality, and not being used or transferred to determined credit worthiness or for lending purposes. Why they had to say that, I had no idea, but Internet Connection Monitor basically will sit in the background if your browser is open or even minim
it will then track your Internet connection. You can click on it and it will tell you how many times you dropped out, how long the dropout was, And I just I found it to be very helpful because this provider, this ISP who is based here in southern Arizona, was saying, well, it's not dropping out that much.
And it was was able.
We were able to actually show them that versus what I was getting with Exfinity where it would stay on for you know, days at a time. So again, I like this. I like this plug in. I you know, I want to say Internet connection monitor. But again, it's a Chrome plug in plug in that you can get from the Google Store. Don't get it anywhere else. Only get it through Google Store if you're going to get it. But that one was pretty good for us to be able to say, no, we've been up this long, et cetera.
Interesting, All right, all.
We extension for Chrome that I use is ad block plus?
Is it ad block plus? They're they're blocking all of those like YouTube and all those things. They're blocking all of those ad blocking extensions on Chrome. However, they're not blocking them on Firefox. Oh really yep, Oh I'm.
Gonna have to look into that, all right.
Keep it's kind of a battle of attrition, right YouTube will block it, ad block will put on a patch, YouTube will block it, ad Blocker put it'll keep fighter. They're fighting back and forth.
On Well, yeah, that that has been the historical case. But now YouTube has come out with a way that basically just shuts down ad block plus permanently. I don't know how they're doing it, but the thing is is if you use Firefox doesn't affect it.
All Right, now the quick break, We'll be back with more of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Seanda Weird.
And I'm Justin Lemme find us on Facebook at facebook dot com for slash tech Talkers.
We'll be right back and now fact to tech talk Radio.
Now.
I don't know about you guys, but there was a certain sporting event that happened last Sunday.
All right, the puppy Moe was called.
The Super Bowl, the Puffy People, Super superb.
Superb Owl, superb Owl?
What did you what Owl? What did you think of it? First off, I hate both teams. I mean, I'm a Denver Broncos fan, so obviously inherently I have to hate the Kansas City Chiefs, all right, But I also hate the Philadelphia Eagles because I think their fans are terrible.
Where where was it in four K? People were saying I was supposed to get it in four K?
Well yeah you have to.
Well, first off, you have to have the ability to get four K. So, uh, I have YouTube TV and I have the four K plan. The four K feed was on Fox Sports, okay, the actual Fox Sports four K channel. If you were trying to watch it on your local Fox affiliate, you were only going to get seven to twenty p as the resolution. Now, some people were saying to b was offering it in four K, which I did not touch it out.
It could be too, B's like, it could.
Be a free like a free service like Pluto and some of the other ones that are out there.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I have a feeling they would charge for that one. But uh yeah, but.
I I did.
I watched it.
I watched it on the four K feed on on my televisions. And I think the NFL finally realized that people were onto them about the referees helping the Kansas City Chiefs over the course of the last few seasons, because it was a huge social media thing. Everybody's talking
about the refs and how they're helping the Chiefs. And then we get to the Super Bowl and Patrick Mahomes, the quarterback of the Chiefs, gets blasted in the face with an obvious face mask, and the Chiefs and the refs are like, I didn't see anything, oh man, And so I think the refs are like, hey, look, we got you here.
Now you're on your own.
And it really honestly showcased how bad the Chiefs really are when you don't have the refs working for you.
You know, upset the Chiefs fans, we're already upset. Yeah, all right, technically though, we're watching the we're watching the halftime performance and then into the game afterwards.
Oh that was good.
There was a.
Scene where Gloria said, is that a drug? Do they actually fly? And Sean, you would know this.
Do they fly drones over the playing field or is these the ones that are on wires that you're not supposed to see?
Yeah, I would have to do some research. It's likely the skycam. They likely rid multiple skycams. Yeah, but I can't imagine they would have gotten permission to fly a drone inside the stadium during.
Well, I think there actually was a it's a I think it's a it's a law or something. Well, obviously it's a law without drones, but I think there was a there's that safety thing. That's why those sky cam they they are drones, but they are attached to a tether so that the drone can't fly off and hit somebody.
There there there there. There are four wires right and certain spaces of the stadium, and then it's all tracked by which reel is pulling in that kind of thing. Like a lot of times they'll use multiple so that certain ones get certain zones. And it's actually interesting because working with in the stadium at nor a name, they use skycam or spider cam depending on who's paying for what.
But they if they're using multiple, they actually have the software that maps out by regional values so that they can't cross over and cross the lines and all this stuff.
All right, best commercial for me before we get out of here, I gotta say it's got to be the Matt Damon commercial, which was just I love that one.
Did you guys have one?
The case of the Mondays the Monday Light, the course light with the sloths, Oh my gosh, yeah yeah yeah, speed Chase and the guy walks in the apartment. He throws the can of course light at his friend who's a slop and the can goes right by him as he's slowly raising his hand. That was my favorite one. Or or the Seal, the Seal doing the Mountain Dew commercial as an action as seal.
That a great one.
You know, I saw a couple in the first half. Yeah. Then, like I said earlier in the show, it's been a rotating week, multiple weeks of sickness in my family. After the halftime show, we were all out. It went right right to bed.
All right.
Well, I will say that in the in the TV community, they're all talking about the score bug, score bug with graphic, with the graphic with the score. Oh yeah, how totally out of left field that came.
That was ridiculous with the.
Everybody thought it was wrong because of the the opacity level behind the numbers and the fonts coming off or like the text was way bigger.
It's just so bush league.
Every tech blog or discord channel that I'm on was discussing, discussed, discussing how awful the score bug looked from a TV person, like, that's all I was focused on.
All right, listen, Uh, we're hoping that everybody feels better, sean in your household, that they get over this bug and that uh, we'll have to next week talk about the spy kits that you both got if you had some fun with that, So we'll save that for next week.
A tech talk radio I'm Andy Taylor.
I'm Seonda Weird, and I'm Justin.
Let me find us on the web one more time at tech talk radio dot com.
Have yourselves a great week. We'll see you
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