Meta Ray-Bans Review, Managing Photo Duplicates & Choosing Your Perfect Cell Plan

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are you missing your iPhone notes after the iOS update,
I've got the quick fix. If you've got your eye
on a Pixel nine, there is a secret discount available.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
I'll tell you where to find it.

Speaker 1 (00:12):
And while you might be able to stop paying for
antivirus software in twenty twenty four plus, your tech questions answered?
What's going on? I'm Rich Demiro and this is Rich
on Tech. This is the show where I talk about
the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's
also the place where I answer your questions about technology.
I believe the tech should be interesting, useful, and fun.

(00:35):
Let's open up those phone lines at triple eight Rich
one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to
two four one zero one. Once again, that's eight eight
eight seven four to two four one zero one. Give
me a call if you have a question about technology.
Email is also an option. Just go to Rich on

(00:55):
Tech dot tv and hit contact.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
We've got some.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Great guests this week. Two people I know very well,
tech journalist Rob Pagerrero. He maintains Wirecutters cell Phone Plan
cell Phone Plan Guide, and he's going to tell you
how to choose the right carrier and plan for your needs.
It's gonna be a great conversation there and then later
Dan Akerman, we'll talk about making an AI video clone

(01:20):
and talk about the potential for this and also the
implications of this. But first let me fire up my
ray Ban metas here. You can't see this if you're
listening obviously on the radio, but in person. Here I
am wearing the new ray Ban Meta smart glasses. Went
to the opening of the store here in Los Angeles

(01:44):
this week. This is just a pop up store, but
it was really really cool. I had the first version
of these glasses and I was impressed with them, but
not enough to really think that they were incredible or
the next big thing. But now with this second version,
I can conf say that this is an amazing gift
this holiday season because these things make me feel smart.

(02:07):
So what are the ray Band Meta glasses?

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Number One?

Speaker 1 (02:10):
They're basically sunglasses or just regular glasses made by ray Band, obviously,
but Meta is the partner on this, so obviously the
face Facebook parent. And so what do they have. They've
got a camera, they've got a microphone, and they've got
a speaker on board.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
So what does that enable you to do?

Speaker 1 (02:29):
You can take pictures and videos and You also can
listen to music, you can take phone calls, and there
is a little privacy light so when you're recording, you
can see that other people can see that you're recording.
So if I press and hold this button right now,
hopefully on the on the radio on the weekly show
on KTLA, you can see Bobo working the board there

(02:49):
in the background. Hey Bobo, what's up. So you can
get really interesting point of view. So you can get
your point of view, and of course the whole point
of that is for you to share more to social media,
to share more of your life to social media, and
it does work in that aspect because you're getting unique
angles that you wouldn't typically see. So I'm having fun
with that. You can take photos, you can take videos.

(03:11):
But what's really interesting to me is the AI aspect.
And this was not on the first generation, but they've
built meta AI into this, so you can just ask
meta AI for information about anything. So let's say you're
holding something in your hand, or you're looking at a building.
You can just say, hey, Meta, tell me what this is,
and your glasses will snap a picture of that thing,

(03:34):
look it up on the internet or using AI and
tell you all about it, so it's quite incredible, it's
quite fast, and it's really interesting. So these do connect
to your phone, so that's how that works. So all
the pictures kind of download your phone, the videos download
to your phone, but it's also using that phone connection
so that I can use that ask meta AI feature.

(03:55):
I think that is probably the coolest feature about these
classes because it makes you feel super hue. Now, yes,
you can do this with a lot of different things.
You can look up stuff on your phone, you can
use Google lens. There are some earbuds that actually let
you access AI in your ear, but there's something different
about just having it sort of on your face, and
it's something you're wearing anyway, especially here in Los Angeles,

(04:17):
we're wearing sunglasses all day long. And I guess that's
my biggest downside of these meta AI glasses is that
two things. The charging case. It's really weird because it
charges in the case, but I think it's sort of
like magnetic So getting these out of the case without
smudging up the lenses is really tricky.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
I've noticed that.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
And then the second thing is that the transition lenses,
they're supposed to go from dark to light. You know,
outside inside kind of those transition lenses, they don't really
get that dark. So for instance, this morning, I went
on a run and I wanted to wear these, but
I knew that the glasses wouldn't get dark enough to
act as sunglasses. So they get a little bit dim,
but not really enough for my taste. So you could,

(04:58):
of course get a real pair or sunglasses that also
do this functionality. You know, the meta smart glasses come
in like a true sunglass version, or if you wear glasses,
you can get these as your everyday glasses. I can't
tell you much about the battery life because it's only
been a couple of days, so I don't really know
how good that is, but seems like the battery life
is decent.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
But I have to say very impressed.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
So this is the second store in Los Angeles, some
melrose Ave if you're in LA.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
In the next couple of months.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
They're also going to open one in Phoenix that's actually
going to be a permanent installation. So they've got one
store up in Menlo Park where Metas headquartered. This store
in Los Angeles is a pop up, and then you've
got the real store they're going to build in Phoenix.
But apparently people really like this stuff. They start at
three hundred bucks, so not cheap. But I'm telling you,
I think if you've got some techie in your life

(05:45):
during the holiday season, you're trying to figure out like
what to get for them. These are incredible. Even though
my wife said I look funny in them today, I
was like, hey, she goes, you look nerdy.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
I'm like, what what do you mean? I look nerdy?
That's who I am. I am a nerd. Now you
do lock a little extra nerd today?

Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, I'm a little extra nerdy. I'm a little extra animal,
little extra nerdy. That's just who I am.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
Well, his friend on faris Bueller, the Guyler's day off.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
I don't know, that's what you look like. That's what
it looks like. I can't think of his name.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
There you go, so I look like Ferris Bueller's friend.
That that's.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
All right?

Speaker 1 (06:19):
Well, oh Cameron, look at Kim Kim popping in with
the Cameron. I guess that's Kim knows everything. Kim are
call screener Kim she is she really is? Or maybe
she just looked it up.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
You don't know.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
You know, it's tough one thing I've noticed live on
the radio. It is She said, no, she did not
look it up. She knew it off the top of
her head. See yeah, Kim is Our is our pop
culture expert. She knows every reference, all right, So you.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
Know that well.

Speaker 1 (06:47):
I know that you are well aware of the election
news this week. So I'm not going to rehash all
of that, but suffice to say, uh, a new administration
means there will be a new way of doing business. Now,
let me caution you as a journalist, okay, because as
a journalist with many, many years in the business, I
can tell you what I'm seeing right now is a
lot of speculation, a lot of stirring the pot, and

(07:08):
a lot of people saying ooh ooh.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
I want to get in on this. Because people are
clicking headlines.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
So if you see a headline right now that involves
the new president Trump, President elect Trump, along with the
words could should Mike would, you have to take a
step back and understand that that is just someone putting
their opinion out there. So this morning, for instance, I
got an email from someone say, hey, should I get
a laptop today? Because they're going to be twenty percent

(07:34):
more in a couple of weeks. We don't know that
laptops are going to be twenty percent more in a
few weeks. Keep that in mind when you're looking at
these headlines. They're there to sort of stir the pot.
They're there to get you to click, They're there to
get you to get angry. So just remember that while
you're looking through this stuff, what do we know right now?

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Nothing?

Speaker 1 (07:52):
We know zero, And even what I'm about to tell
you is a little bit of speculation. And if you
listen to this show, I always say, I tell you
the tech news that I think you need to know.
It is stuff that's actually happened. I could talk all
day long about the rumors and speculation of what the
next Apple product's going to be, or what Google is
going to do next, or what their next move might

(08:13):
be or could be or should be, or here's what
it means. But I don't I talk about the stuff
that actually matters. So with that said, let me just
give you kind of what I think is going to
happen with big business and with the tech world. When
it comes to a president elect Trump number one friendlier
to mergers and acquisitions, we know that's going to be

(08:33):
a thing. We've seen a lot of major acquisitions fall
apart under the Biden administration because it's just not as
friendly to these large mergers. So Adobe and Figma didn't happen,
Amazon and I Robot didn't happen, Visa and Plaid did
not happen. I think that that's going to change. I
think that we're going to see more of these tech
companies scoop up the smaller tech companies because that's just what's.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
Going to happen under this administration.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
It just makes a lot of senserypto friendly. So President
Elect Trump has said multiple times and he's spoken at
events that he's going to be more crypto friendly. His
administration is going to embrace crypto in a way that
we probably haven't seen. Now, if you're following crypto, you're
following bitcoin, you know this already because bitcoin has shot

(09:18):
up on speculation that this administration is going to be
friendlier to it. Is the US going to switch to
bitcoin as the as their dollar bill. No, that's not
going to happen. But will it be more friendly to
crypto and crypto regulations? Probably AI. When it comes to AI,
we're probably going to see a lighter touch when it

(09:38):
comes to regulations on AI. That's a good and a
bad thing. It's going to allow the US to flourish
when it comes to AI and continue to be a leader.
If you look at just think about AI. It's only
been two years, it's been two short years, and AI
has changed everything. Every single product that I cover in
the tech world since the introduction of chat GBT, he

(10:00):
has some sort of AI component. You look at Apple,
they just transform the entire iPhone into AI. You look
at Samsung, the entire Samsung Galaxy phone is built with AI.
You look at Pixel, it's all about AI. You look
at Google, their entire business was upended because of AI. Now,
not just yet, but that company. They've done a good

(10:21):
job of building their AI into everything, and they've been
working thankfully with machine learning and all that stuff for
a long time. But these companies are standing to benefit
from a lighter touch, probably because they know that they
can push the limits a little bit more with AI. Now, again,
we don't know, we don't know what's going to happen,
but this is what sort of I'm expecting to happen.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
Now.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
Evs are an interesting one because we know from the
last time that Donald Trump was in the White House,
he was not a huge fan of evs. But here
he comes back to the White House and look who
is best friend is Elon Musk, the guy that really
pushed for him to get this job once again.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
So this is a wild card.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
Now, he has not been favorable to electric cars in
the past, but I think we are going to see
a change because Elon Musk is going to have his
ear this time around. And of course Elon Musk with Tesla,
stands to benefit a lot from Trump administration that is
friendlier on electric cars. Now, do we think we're going
to see the same sort of regulations like we have

(11:21):
here in California where they want to make that full
switch to electric cars by a certain time period. I
don't think that's going to be a national thing. We'll see,
but we don't know. Again speculation. I'm just telling you
what I expect to happen. But I think the EV
part is a very tricky part for this new administration
because people like their gas cars. That has been very

(11:42):
clear to me on this show. I live in California
where you go in every third cars electric bobo, I
mean bobo. Can I out you here? With your new
electric car. Bobo just got an electric car, and so
it's one of these things and he loves it.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
You love about it. It's so easy, it's no maintenance.
You just get up and go. The negative, though, is
the wait time for charging? Is the charging?

Speaker 1 (12:08):
Yeah, but that's going to get better, and that's going
to change in other states, you know, you go to
other places.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
You know, I rented a car the other day.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
I specifically did not rent electric car because I knew
charging would be a pain here in.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
La not a pain at all anyway. So there you go.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
That's the talk about the president elect. Now let's get
to your calls. Eighty to eight rich one O one
eight eight eight seven four to two four to one
zero one. My name is rich Dmiro and this is
rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich
DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology at sriple

(12:42):
eight rich one on one. That's eight eight eight seven
four to two four one zero one. Give me a
call if something is bugging you, you need some help
with something, you need to question answered eighty eight rich
one on one eight eight eight seven four to two
four one zero one.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
Coming up.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
I'll tell you about this iPhone notes app bug. If
you logged into your notes app and you found them
all gone, there is a fix.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
I'll tell you about that in a moment.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
But we were talking about those ray Band Meta smart
glasses and Russ in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
You've got a pair of these or why?

Speaker 4 (13:21):
Yes, sir, I've had them about two three months and
I happen to be totally blind. Oh wow, Now, I'm
sure if you go back in the way back the
listeners remember when Radio Check used to make like clocks
that talked. They were pretty gimmicky, but they happened to
work with blind people. Okay, these metaglasses are wonderful for

(13:47):
a couple reasons.

Speaker 5 (13:48):
Rich.

Speaker 4 (13:49):
First of all, if you go down to ray Band,
say in Los Angeles, you pay the same three hundred
dollars that I pay here in Grand Junction. So means
a lot of a lot of technology for blind people
is very because it's of users. Well, anyway, these glasses

(14:12):
are wonderful and you you can't imagine the number of
blind people that use them.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Well, so how are you using them? Tell me?

Speaker 4 (14:18):
Well, I use them for scanning my mail.

Speaker 5 (14:22):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (14:23):
I had a very In fact, I was telling him.

Speaker 6 (14:26):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (14:26):
The other day, I had one of those big Maverick
cups and I lost my straw. It fell down on
the ground, and of course I couldn't find it, so
I said, hey, Meta, help me find my straw. It
told me.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
Exactly where it was.

Speaker 6 (14:45):
Oh.

Speaker 4 (14:46):
No, it was amazing.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
That's amazing. Yeah, I mean I was. I was in yesterday.
I just said, like, what am I doing right now?
And I said, oh, it looks like you are driving.
Maybe I shouldn't be using while I'm driving, but it
looks like it looks like you're driving. And knew the
exact car that I was in.

Speaker 5 (15:01):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
It just it described the whole scene, like the whole everything.
And I was like, this is incredible, and I know
what it's doing. It's taking a picture and then it's
using AI to sort of analyze that picture. But you
can put anything in front of you. Imagine you've done
this as well. You can put anything in front of
you and it will tell you what that is like.
It'll describe it to you right.

Speaker 4 (15:20):
As long as you as long as you use the
uh the responses. You know, you have to say, hey Meta,
look at and then you get the response. It's amazing. Uh,
you know, go into the freezer, grab a box of
say pizza, y hay, Meta, Uh what do you see,

(15:42):
It'll read the directions for you.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
No, way, that is incredible.

Speaker 4 (15:45):
It is amazing.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
So it's interesting you say this because I went to
like an assistive tech conference and they had a lot
of you know, these these glasses are kind of like
the Holy Grail, right for for assistance for visually impaired,
but they are very expensive, like the ones I saw
were like five thousand.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
Bucks season yeah sea suns, yeah exactly. Yeah, well yeah,
I would you like?

Speaker 4 (16:06):
I mean these naturally the glasses there are specialty glasses
for blind people probably have other things. But as these
move along, the people at Meta and ray Ben have
realized that there are lots of users who want to
use the glasses, and they're going to make them more
intelligent for blind people.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
Right.

Speaker 4 (16:27):
My question to you, as a sighted person is why
would you want these? I mean, but I mean, if
you think about it, you know, what do they do
for you? Because you can see the use cases for
somebody who can't see.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yes, But here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
For me, it makes me feel superhuman because the fact
that I can just look at any Let's say I'm
traveling and you know, I might take a picture of
a building and say to Google, like, you know, explain
what this building is all about, or give me the
history on it. But now to be able to just
look at that building in let's say Paris, France or something,
and just give me the history of this building. That's incredible.

(17:03):
And it's just again, we are just the first couple
of years of this stuff. These glasses have only been
out for a couple of years. In the new model,
I think is even better than the first model, and
the AI is brand new. So I think for anyone
that is you know, that just wants to you know,
obviously on the cutting edge right now because he's our
pricey But I think that this that super human idea
of like before it was an address book, we would

(17:25):
put our our phone numbers in an address book and
we wouldn't have to remember them. Now this is like
that time's a million. Imagine having the entire Encyclopedia UH
in your ears at any given time. It's quite incredible.
Russ in Grand Junction, Colorado, thanks so much for giving
me a call today. Appreciate it. Eighty eight Rich one
O one eight eight eight seven four to two four.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
To one zero one. Welcome back to rich on Tech.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology at
Triple eight Rich one O one. That's eight eight eight
seven four to two four one zero zero one.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
Let's see.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
We've got the website rich on Tech dot tv. You
can go there to get the show notes. Sign up
for my newsletter. Be sure to do that. Every week
I send out a newsletter with all kinds of great
information and links and things, all the tech news you
need to know, kind of like a version of this show. Basically,
let's see. Then you can go to contact that'll send
me an email. And if you want notes on anything

(18:24):
I mentioned, you can hit the light bulb icon. And
I've already posted to my Instagram at rich on Tech
little video of me and the ray bandmetas so you
can see what it looks like when I come into
to the studio here. If you're trying to access chat GBT,
you can do it a new way.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
You can go to chat dot com.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Chat dot com will now take you straight to chat GPT.
Apparently this was the previous person who owned this purchased
a domain in twenty twenty three for about fifteen million
dollars and he sold it to open ai for an
undisclosed amount, but he apparently accepted company shares.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
I would do that. I'd accept company shares and open aim.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Sure they're gonna be okay, but anyway, much easier Chat
dot com if you want to access chat gbt. By
the way, don't forget about perplexity AI, because chat gbt
does web search. Now they've they've incorporated the web, the
Internet into their search. It's it's okay, it's it's pretty good,
but it's not like perfect. But because they've done that,

(19:28):
I started going back to perplexity because they they are
the originators of sort of the web. AI search and
perplexity dot ai is really cool because I call a
book report, So if you want like information about a subject,
they're really good at coming up with a nice report
about things. So perplexity dot ai I've been using a
lot more, especially great for like answering questions that you have,

(19:52):
So check it out. If you have an iPhone, Okay,
if you had the iPhone bug where you opened up
your notes app and all the notes were missing, there
is a fix.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
This is quite scary.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
This is like everyone's biggest fear with the cloud, right,
is that you go to open up this app or whatever,
let's say Google Photos or your Google Drive or your
iCloud drive or your iCloud photos, your notes, and they're
all gone and you go what. So Apparently this was
a bug affecting iPhones runningios eighteen, and it was because

(20:24):
a lot of you. I didn't see this. Maybe I did,
but I didn't. Maybe I just clicked through it really quick.
But apparently there was a thing where you had to
accept new iCloud terms and conditions, and if you didn't
accept those, I guess the sink went away for a bit.
I don't know. I didn't see this happen on MyPhone.
I don't use Apple Notes. I use it I always,
you know, I prefer third party platform program so I'm

(20:46):
using Notion right now, which I really really like.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
But Apple Notes.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
If you're using it and all of your stuff went away,
here's how you get it back. Go into settings, tap
your name at the top iCloud and then notes and
make sure sink this iPhone toggle is enabled, and if
it's not, toggle it and reopen the notes app. It
takes about ten minutes for your notes to come back in.
If that doesn't work, then just toggle the sync off,
toggle it back on and reboot your phone. But that's

(21:13):
the main thing is I guess it was related to
this iCloud terms and conditions, but no permanent data loss
has been reported by people. And your notes are on
other devices, so if you have it on your Mac
computer or something like that, but kind of scary. That's
like again, that's the biggest fear of logging in and
your stuff is gone.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
That is not fun.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
Oh my gosh, we have another endorsement for the metaglasses.
Julian and Woodland Hills. We've talked to you on the
show before Welcome back.

Speaker 7 (21:43):
Yes, a little over a year ago, Oh my gosh,
and you would have me on to talk about AI
and how it's going to affect the lives of people
with who are blind, the mole vision, and we had
just started to talk about the be my I service
and that they were offering an AI assistant. Well, speaking

(22:03):
of the Meta glasses, something that was announced recently at
Meta's big conference about their stuff is a partnership with
that organization be My Eyes, where you can use the
Meta Smart glasses to connect with it Be my Eyes Volunteer.
It's currently in beta test right now. I'm one of
the beta testers, and I can tell you that when

(22:24):
this comes out to everybody, it's going to be amazing, because, yes,
we've been able to do this with our phones before,
but when you're blind in the vision and either using
a cane or a guide dog or something like that,
and carrying things, sometimes grabbing a phone is not the
most convenient thing to do, right, And it's because we
wear it. It's just so easy. You talk to it,

(22:45):
you don't have to do anything with your hands. It
just works. I'm in the midst of travel right now
and I use it through the airport to find food,
to find the gate, to find all kinds of things,
and it's just I mean, I think these are definitely game.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
Changer, using the be my Eyes feature to find the gate,
like so, so explain how that works. So let's say
you're wearing these glasses. You say you connect to a volunteer.
Can they see what you're seeing in live time or
is it a snapshot or what?

Speaker 7 (23:14):
No, it seems in real life, so wow, like making
a video call it It's like you know, right, Now
anybody can make a video call through a Facebook, Messenger
or WhatsApp, but it involves launching the app, making the call,
hitting the shutter button two times to enable the video
camera and the glasses. This makes it happen a seamless
where the phone's in my pocket. It never has to
come out. I just tell hey, m be my Eyes

(23:38):
and it says, okay, connecting you to a volunteer from
Be my Eyes. And within a matter of seconds, I'm
connected to a lit volunteer who has a view through
my camera in front of me and now can give
me access to whatever information I need.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
That's wild.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
So people are just standing by, like as they signed
up to be a volunteer for Be my Eyes. They've
got the app on their phone and they're just waiting
for someone to kind of ping them and they say okay, cool.
And then they get that live shot or the live
stream I should say live shot is TV talk. They
get the live stream and they can just see and
be like, okay, so I see Gate one thirty four ahead.
If you look to the left, you can see the

(24:13):
lounges over there. If you look ahead, there's a Starbucks
and they can see all that.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
That's really amazing. Wow, it's just.

Speaker 7 (24:20):
Like having access to an assistant. There's another service that
you've probably heard of as well, called IRA, and they
also provide the same kind of service, but their agents
are trained and paid and under NDA and bonded and
all that stuff. And they've got a beta program going
as well, so pretty soon that'll be available. So both
visual interpreter services are going to be available to blind

(24:41):
the television people all over the world through these glasses.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
Oh that so they're working with the IRA as well
on the metaglasses.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
Wow, okay, that's a I r A. Is that the
one AI r A?

Speaker 5 (24:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (24:53):
AIRA dot io is their website and yeah, they're in
the process of getting that done and it's going to
be wonderful. And plus that to mention the AI and
these things is great. I use it all the time
just for going shopping, browsing the shells. You know, you
pick up something and wonder what is this? Now I
can just ask the thing, you know, what is look
and tell me what I'm holding, or look and read

(25:14):
to me what this is, and I get all kinds
of information.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
It's so wild. Julian.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
Thanks thanks for that, really really great insights, safe travels there.
And this is what's so great about testing this stuff out,
which is what I do for a living, is that
I was aware of these glasses. I was aware of
Meta AI. And sometimes you sort of I'm not gonna
say pooh pooh, but you sort of dismiss stuff.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
You're like, oh, Meta AI, another AI service.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
But when you put these things on and you realize,
like this is one of the few tech products that
I put on and tried, and it's like, immediately, I
realized there's something special here, and we are just at
the beginning. And then when you hear from folks like
Russ and like Julian, you realize that there is something
bigger at play here. And like Julian or like Russ said,

(26:01):
you know these these visually impaired products, you know, the
products for the visually impaired are typically very expensive because
they're they're making them, maybe not at a mass scale,
but something like the ray band metas they're making so
many of them, millions of them for everyone, and so
that's why they're they're able to be three hundred dollars
versus five thousand dollars. There was that phone I saw
at that Assistive Tech content thing Assistant Tech conference. The

(26:26):
blind Shell Phone, which I thought was really incredible and
it does everything you need if you're visually impaired. But
it's expensive, and now it makes sense, it's because it's
a limited audience, so they're not you know, it's not
just a phone that everyone's going to buy, and they
can make them at mass scale, but it does have
all the features you need. That's Blindshell dot com anyway. Incredible.
I guess I really my my inkling on these glasses

(26:49):
was correct. They are really a game changer and I'm
looking forward to more people kind of discovering the magic
of them.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
All right.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
Eighty eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven
four to two four one zero one.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
The website is richon Tech dot tv.

Speaker 1 (27:03):
If you want to sign up to be a volunteer
for b my Eyes, I put the link in the
show notes.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
Just hit the light bulb icon. Coming up.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
Another free ride is over max is the latest to
crack down on password sharing. This is rich on Tech.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here talking
technology at triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight
eight eight seven four two four one zero one. Well,

(27:32):
like I like to say, the free ride is over.
This time it is Max. Remember it used to be
called HBO Max. Now it's just Max. Not to be
confused with anything else out there. So Disney and Netflix
have done this. Now Max is going to do it
starting gradually. So they said on the on the earnings

(27:53):
call that password sharing restrictions will begin in the next
few months with quote messaging to users. What does that mean?
It means when you log in and they kind of
know that you're cheating the system, they're gonna say, are
you sure you don't want to get your own account,
and you're gonna go No, as long as I can
use my friends, why not, I'll keep using theirs. But

(28:15):
next year they're gonna gradually put the uh you know,
squeeze the uh the vice script's a little bit tighter
and uh full implementation will be twenty twenty five, twenty
twenty six. Uh. They believe that this is Bobo's raising
his hand. He has a question, the question from the class. Yes,
mister mister Mitchell de Marrow.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
So let's say I have my account, sure, Okay, I
go to my parents house quite often. Yeah, I watched
my account there. Yeah, how are they gonna regulate that? Well,
that's a good question. So I think that the they're
gonna use an algorithm number one, but number two it's
it's going to be sort of a two factor authentication.

(28:59):
So if if you're logging in at your parents' house,
it may bug you every time, But because you truly
own that account, they're gonna say, hey, we're gonna email
you a code and you're gonna put that in from
your email. It's not gonna be that big of a deal,
got you, But your friend over in you know, somewhere
across the US, that's latching onto your account, it's gonna
be after the third time annoying for you to be like, really,

(29:21):
you got to get this code.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
Again for me.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
Now, some people won't have a problem with that, but
I have noticed that there are you know, from what
I've seen in my personal experience with family members. It
only comes down to whether the company actually wants to
enable these restrictions, like they know, they know if you're
not like and it's very clear if you're logging into
a TV, which is a fixed thing usually like you're

(29:47):
not logging a TV around the nation. So if you're
a traveler and you've got Netflix on your tablet or
you're installing it on a tablet or a phone. They
kind of know that, Okay, people travel, But if they
notice that that phone you've installed on only stays in
a certain place that's not near your household, that's when
they'll start, you know, kind of pushing the password restrictions

(30:08):
a little bit harder on that device. So again, this
is not a perfect thing, but nobody's fooling anyone here.
These companies know exactly when people are sharing. So subscribers
that are sharing and that are part of that kind
of sharing idea, they will be paying more, although there
will be some sort of planet looks like where you
can latch off onto your own or break off onto

(30:30):
your own. Max has one hundred and ten million subscribers.
They added seven million in the last quarter. Trying to
think what that's attributable to, Like, do they have a
good show or something.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
They raised their prices back in June twenty twenty four,
But again I say, the free ride is over all.
These streaming services started so cheap, so so cheap, and
now they are definitely getting a lot more expensive. All right,
let's see, we've got a question here by email.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Pat. Let's see Pat says, hey, does using.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
Your iPhone eight plus as a hotspot for a MacBook
air M two harm your phone in any way? So,
off the top of my head, not really. I mean,
it's really not a harmful thing for your phone. But
there are some things to consider. Number one, your battery life.
So if your phone is using hotspot, it definitely cranks
through that battery a lot faster. Also, because it's using

(31:31):
more on your phone for that modem, it's going to
get hotter. So that's number two. And then of course
your data that's number three. Is really it comes down
to how much data do you have on your plan
and are you going to burn through that? So I
will tell you that it's interesting because if you look
at the Wi Fi at your work, your company reserves

(31:52):
the right to pretty much look at anything you're doing
on your computer. I'm talking to anything, even if it's personal,
even if it's private, they can look at it. And
so there is this idea of people wanting to use
their hotspot at work off their phone because things are
a little bit more private and you can check your email,
you could do things like that. And I'd probably recommend
that if you want to stay more private at work,

(32:13):
it's probably a good idea to do that, you know.
But just understand that if you're on your work's WiFi,
they can see anything that's happening on that computer. Just
imagine that they can see it even if it's private.
Maybe if it's encrypted, it doesn't really matter. Sometimes they
have a certificate, the trust certificate that you accept when
you get onto that Wi Fi that says, hey, you

(32:34):
know what, you give us free rein to anything on
this device. Because it's all in the idea of that
they can monitor the network for anything that might harm
the network. But anyway, all all that to say that
if you have a hot spot, if you've got the
hotspot feature on your cell phone planned schirp, go ahead,
use it. There's nothing really that that's going to be

(32:54):
a problem except for those three things I mentioned. And
by the way, all of the computers nowadays do a
pretty good job of connecting to the device seamlessly. So
for instance, on my computer, I've got a Mac computer
the iPhone. When I am out of range of Wi Fi,
it immediately pops up if my phone's nearby, says Hey,
do you want to connect to your iPhone as a hotspot.
It's very very convenient. Windows does the same thing. You

(33:15):
can set it up with your Android devices as well.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
It used to be.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
When you got a tablet you had to make a
decision like do I want Internet on this tablet?

Speaker 2 (33:24):
Do I want a five G connection?

Speaker 1 (33:26):
And quite honestly, like unless you are you have a
really specific use case for that. Ninety nine percent of
people can just connect to their phone, which is incredible,
much easier than paying for a separate plan and all
that stuff. And even you know, hotspot overseas has gotten easier.
Just the idea of the phone being the everything, kind
of the center of your tech universe has gotten a

(33:47):
lot clearer over the last couple of years. So go ahead,
pat your use the cell phone as your hot spot.
No problem there, just understand those those downsides. Malvin from
chess Shire, Where's that?

Speaker 2 (34:03):
Says?

Speaker 1 (34:03):
I'm kindly looking for step by step information on how
to remove my unwanted information on Google. Great question. The
feature you want is called results about you. So if
you Google results about you, you can see this Google
feature that's called results about you. And what you do
is you put your information. You sign up, you put

(34:25):
your information in here, so you say, here's my name,
here's my address, here's my phone number, here's my email address.
And I know it sounds scary to give Google all
this information, but guess what, they've already got it anyway.
They know exactly this information. You're just giving them that
information so they can scan the internet to find when
this information pops up. And you can give multiple email addresses,

(34:46):
you can give multiple phone numbers, you can give them
I don't know if you can give them variations on
your name, but you can give them all that information.
And so let's see, so I've got I'm looking at
my Yeah, so you can give them full name. Yeah,
you can a interesting It doesn't say I can add
a name online, but.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
You can have Oh, I guess you can have one too.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
I've got three names on here, and so I guess
you can have up to three names that it will
scan for.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
And then you could have an address.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
You can have a couple addresses, you could have a
couple phone numbers, you can have a couple of email addresses.
So Google results about you, just so you understand it.
Only it'll scan the web. It'll look for that information.
If it finds a search result with that information, it
will email you or give you a notification and say, hey,
do you want us to take this down from our

(35:32):
search results? Not off the internet. That is very very
important to understand. The information is still out there on
that website. Google is just taking the link off of
their search results. So when someone searches for your name
plus address, they will not see that search result to
that website that contains your information. Your information will still

(35:53):
be on that website. So if you want to take
this step further and get it off that website, you
would then have to contact that website, do a takedown request,
or use one of these services like in Incogni or
delete me, and they will go and take these down.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
But remember it's a game of whack a mole.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
For every site you take your information off of, five
more sites pop up. But getting it off Google does
disconnect that link. Eighty eight rich one oh one. This
is Rich on Tech. Welcome back to another hour of
Rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you,
talking technology. The phone line for the show triple eight

(36:32):
rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four
to two four one zero one. The website for the
show is rich on Tech dot TV. While you're there,
be sure to sign up for my newsletter, send it
out once a week. You can also click the light
bulb if you want a link to this show anything

(36:53):
I mentioned in the show. This is show number ninety seven.
You can also look at all the things I do
for TEA, watch my TV segments. You can listen to
the podcast. Subscribe to the podcast version of this show
and listen to some of the selected interviews. Plus, you
can contact me. Just hit the contact icon up at

(37:14):
the top, or the link, whatever you want to call it,
and that will send an email right to my inbox.
Coming up this hour, we are going to talk about
finding the best cell phone plan for you. Tech journalist
Rob Pigararo has looked at all the different plans out there.
He has picked his favorites, and we'll explain how to
choose the right carrier and plan for your needs. We've

(37:37):
been talking about the ray Band meta glasses all morning long.
If you want to see my point of view here,
you can actually see Bobo. I just posted it at
richon tech on Instagram. You can see what I see
while I do the show. We have a question from
John and Fallbrook about the the the Meta ray bands.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
What's up?

Speaker 8 (37:55):
Hey, thank you very much, Richer and Joy your show
every week.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
Thank you. I got an iPhone.

Speaker 5 (37:59):
We'll go work for me.

Speaker 8 (38:00):
I'm visually impaired.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
Great question. Yes it does work with the iPhone. That is, uh,
something that I took for granted when I talked about these.
But yes, it does work with iPhone and Android. You
do need a an app from Meta It's called the
Meta View app. You download that and it basically connects
the glasses to your phone so that that way they
can you know, tap into the uh, answering the questions,

(38:25):
sharing the videos, the files, the you know, the photos
that you take on it. It's all synced up and
you could of course change the options for the classes.

Speaker 8 (38:32):
Can I get it? Best buy?

Speaker 2 (38:34):
Great question? Let's see.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Uh, let's see if best Buy sells these best Buy
Meta ray band. Let's see if they have them. It
looks like they do have them there, So yeah, I
mean best Buy.

Speaker 8 (38:47):
How much where they can did you?

Speaker 6 (38:49):
I'll find that out.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, so they started three hundred dollars. It depends, you know,
obviously that's for the base model. So if you want
like the transition lenses, or you want, you know, special
color or special feature.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
It's all going to be.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
You know, there's different, there's various you know, options and
upgrades and things.

Speaker 8 (39:05):
But three hundred bucks, cat you see what color of
traffic light is.

Speaker 5 (39:09):
I don't care what color they are.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
So you did you say you're visually impaired?

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yes, So so you're gonna you're gonna look into the
kind of the AI features of these glasses.

Speaker 6 (39:18):
Huh.

Speaker 7 (39:19):
Oh that's the that's the secret for me.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (39:21):
I can go to a grocery store and look at
the shelf and say pick me out some cereal or something,
and it says, oh, but right there, man, I'd be
My wife would be way happy. Then I could go shopping.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
That's incredible.

Speaker 1 (39:34):
Well, I you know, I think that again from what
I heard with to be my eyes integration, it sounds
like that's just starting up and that's just brand new.
But it's I think that's going to be a huge
use case scenario for these glasses, just based on the uh,
the reaction I've heard today. So John, check them out
and uh, you know, just make sure you check that return.

Speaker 6 (39:54):
Policy comment on your next article.

Speaker 9 (39:57):
Sure, I have the Internet, but I get my WiFi
is cellular. So as you discuss your next plans or
the best plans, remember some people use internet the cellular
internet too.

Speaker 1 (40:12):
Yeah, that's definitely a yeah, absolutely thanks John, appreciate that. Yeah,
the cellular internet is definitely a growing area of interest
because the carriers have come in with their their nice
five G spectrum and they said, oh we could do
you know, we could easily make this home internet. And
so I've tested the one from Verizon. I don't think
I tested the T mobile on AT and T. They

(40:34):
it's very limited apparently where they have it, and it's
I keep asking them to test it and they have
not let me test it. So but it's a great
option if you live in a place where you can
get your Internet over the air. I think it's a
great option for you because it's less expensive. I don't
think there's any contracts. You plug in play as long
as you have a good five G signal at your

(40:56):
house and they offer it to you. So, for instance,
from what I've heard with AT and T, because they
don't want to compete with themselves, they're only sort of
offering their AT and T Internet air in places that
don't have wired internet through AT and T, so again,
they don't want to. They don't want someone that has
fiber at their house for one hundred bucks to say, oh,
I can get internet air for fifty bucks.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
I'll just go with that. I don't need all the
speed of fiber.

Speaker 1 (41:20):
So I think the only downside of the five G
home internet is probably maybe the speed and the bandwidth.
But of course that all depends on what you need.
Ninety nine percent of people are just checking their email,
they're just going on Netflix. They don't really need a
ton of stuff, and so I think that that's probably
a great option for other people. So thanks for the

(41:40):
call there, John in Fallbrook today and what are the
chances of this?

Speaker 2 (41:44):
We got another call from Fallbrook, Curtis. You're on with Rich.

Speaker 10 (41:49):
Hey, Rich, thanks sticking my phone call? Is the fallow
up to the last call you had. I am currently
using the mobile home Internet at my home. I'm also
on twelve book. It works great. It's dirt too, and
they probably do serve your area, John, so you might
want to look into that.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Yeah, no you could.

Speaker 10 (42:10):
I don't know who your sill phone plan who your
sill phone planning is but you know, they have great
prices too.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
How much are you paying for that?

Speaker 10 (42:18):
Uh mine, I'm at thirty five bucks from Long.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
Yeah, that's incredible. And this is the thing they started out.
I think the prices have gone up a little bit,
but they started out very competitive because they were really
trying to you know, take it to the spectrums of
the world and the frontiers of the world. The problem
is Verizon just bought Frontier. So the bigger these companies get,
the less competition or you know, the less they want

(42:42):
to compete because they don't need to. So I love
that T Mobile came in with a very aggressive pricing.
Verizon came in with very aggressive pricing. But again it's
it's it depends on whether it's available where you are
and whether it's a good fit for what you need.
For me, personally, I probably couldn't use it just because
I'm uploading downloading a ton of big files every day
for my TV stuff. So but it's great if you're

(43:05):
you know, for someone like my mom, especially, she's paying
a ton for Internet and I keep saying, maybe it's
time to switch to one of these, you know, wireless providers.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
So anyway, check it out. So what's the question, Curtis.

Speaker 10 (43:16):
Yeah, so my question is I recently went to Vancouver
and I'm on the T Mobile plan. They do offer
a small price to buy like five gigs of data
for about a week. I found out. I went through
that extremely quickly. And my thoughts are to just buy

(43:38):
another plan when I'm out of country, use it for
a period of time, and you know, take advantage of
you know, the prices that they offer and maybe get
more utilization out of it. Then I'm getting too mobile.
I mean, I didn't get the service. Wasn't bad once
I was cooked up to it. But you can go
through five g five each a day really quickly.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
Oh yeah, especially especially recommendations. Okay, great question. What kind
of phone do you have?

Speaker 10 (44:07):
I've got a Pixel nine.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
Okay, well, so here's the great Oh wow, look at
you Pixel nine.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
Great phone. I love that device.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
And the good news about the Pixel is that, Curtis,
you're already set up. You don't need to buy a
different phone. You can do what's called an eSIM and
so it's very seamless. And uh, hate to bring up
my mom again, but she was able to figure this out.
And no shade to my mom. But she's not a
tech person and she was going on an international trip,
and I said, look, you can easily use this eSIM

(44:37):
and all you have to do is toggle it on.
I set it all up in advance remotely, by the way,
and I set it all up on her phone in advance.
I said, when you get to the country, when you land,
just toggle this on and it should work. And sure enough,
she texted me she said it works. And she goes
and all the girlfriends I'm with, none of their phones
work except mine. I said, well, that's why you got
a tech sun that knows what he's doing.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
So with that, said.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
Curtis, what I'd recommend is just an EA, and so
this is what I've used in countries. So here's sort
of my thought. Okay, so you experienced T mobile. Yes,
they include international on a lot of their plans, and
it's great. If you're just casually going to a different country,
maybe for a couple of days, you just need access
to maps, your email or text, that's fine. Absolutely, just

(45:19):
stick with what you got, it's included in your plan.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
It works great.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
And then the next level of ease is a lot
of these plans like the AT and t's of the world,
the verizons of the world. They have where you get
for ten dollars a day quasi unlimited.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
I don't think it's unlimited.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
It's like a certain amount of data that you get
on a daily basis for ten bucks a day. And again,
if you know, if that works for you and you're
in a city for three days and you just want
to pay thirty dollars to have your phone work the
way it works, absolutely do that one hundred percent. That's
what I've done in a lot of countries when I'm
there for just a couple of days on business.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Now, some plans actually.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
Give you an allotment of those I think they call
it like a mobile passport day or some like that,
where you'll get that. Let's say your plan is one
of the expensive premium plans, they may give you a
day or two of those a month. Every month that
you have your plan, they may stockpile some of those
for you. So the last time I went overseas, I
had like ten international days, so I did not need

(46:17):
to buy an eSIM for that trip on my primary phone.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
So that's the second thing.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
Now, the third thing, and what I think is probably
the easiest for a lot of people that just want
a lot of data and don't want to have to
pay a lot of money.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
Is what's called an eSIM.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
And so the company that I like a lot is
called Erlo air Alo. I'll link them up in the
show notes. I've used them around the world. And what
you do is you just download the app, you buy
the eSIM, and then you install it on your phone,
and with a Pixel or an iPhone or a Samsung
any recent phone can handle multiple sims at the same time.

(46:53):
So you don't even have to get rid of your
old calling plan. You just install this in seconds on
your phone without even interrupting your regular plan, and so
you can go when you get to the other country,
you can turn off your regular cell phone plan. There's
a switch in the toggle in the settings, there's a
toggle switch. You turn that off and then your regular
plan will not be drawing any data or usage. And

(47:15):
then you can toggle on the eSIM and now you've
got this eSIM that generally either has a lot of
data or unlimited data depending on the country. They're all
a little bit different, but it's very very easy. Aerolw
is one ola Fly is another h O L a
f l y. There's a ton of them out there.
I've tried a couple of them, but I like the

(47:36):
Aero looks. It's straightforward, it's simple. They were one of
the earliest. But great question, Curtis, and good job on
the Pixel nine. That is a fantastic phone. I got
to tell you about the deal they have on it.
I talked about that yet. No, I'll tell you about
the deal on the Pixel nines. Coming up right here
on rich On Tech eighty to eight rich one oh
one eight eight eight seven four to two four one

(47:56):
zero one.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Welcome back to rich On Tech.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology at
Triple eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven
four to two four one zero one. Our caller told
me he had a Pixel nine from Google, and I said,
that was a great phone. So if you are looking
at a Pixel, if you are toying with the idea

(48:23):
of purchasing one of these devices, I always say, uh,
when you are looking at a Pixel device or a
Samsung phone, wait for some sort of deal or discount,
because these things are priced to get discounted. And we've
seen this over and over with the Pixel and the
Samsung devices. Apple devices are kind of weird because Apple

(48:45):
never discounts their own stuff, but sometimes third parties will,
or you'll get like, you know, they do that free
phone upgrade through AT and T or Verizon or T Mobile,
which we all know is not really free, but if
it works out for you, fine, But the Pixel nine,
there is a great discount thirty percent discount off of
this device. But you have to know where to find it.
So let me show you where to find it. And

(49:06):
it's a I feel like this is probably the best
deal we're going to see on this device throughout the
holidays because thirty percent off is a reasonable amount. So
if you have an Android phone, you have to go
into Google Play. So open up your Google Play and
when you open Google Play, up at the top, there's
like some numbers. Those are your play points, so tap

(49:26):
those and it brings you to an area where it
says earn use or perks, And what you want to
do is tap perks. And once you're inside Perks, you'll
see all the little offers that Google's giving you. And
I'm gonna tell you there's actually one more that popped
up today that was actually pretty good. So if you
look down it says get thirty percent off select pixel devices,

(49:48):
and so you select that and then it'll give you
a promo code. Now, this expires on December second, so
you don't have too much time to kind of make
your decision, but that gives you enough, gives you four weeks.
And I've been checking Amazon because sometimes when these things happen,
anytime there's a discount on one method of shopping, Amazon
will notice that and it will say, ooh, we're gonna

(50:09):
discount it too, so you don't even need to shop there.
And so I've been watching Amazon to see if they
discount the Pixel nine and I noticed they did discount
the standard Pixel nine, which is now on sale for
six hundred and fifty dollars regularly eight hundred. But actually
I think thirty percent off of that is better. Right
eight times three is twenty four, that'd be two hundred
and forty bucks off, So it's still a better deal

(50:30):
to buy it directly from Google. Also, the Pixel Pro,
the Pixel nine pro fold is also discounted on Amazon,
but the Pixel nine Pro is not. So that's where
you find it. And if you want to get that deal,
just say redeem and it will give you that code.
And if it's not for everyone, apparently not everyone has

(50:51):
access to it, but a lot enough do.

Speaker 7 (50:53):
Now.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
The other deal I'm seeing here is a special offer
from YouTube ad free YouTube and YouTube music for four
months for free. So that's another great deal. And I
last time I checked, and maybe you still have this one,
but I found a deal for six months free of
Hulu inside this little perks area. So if you have
an Android phone, don't forget to check this little perks

(51:16):
area because they often have things that are really really
great and they're often sort of personalized just for you.
So again, open up Google Play up at the top,
you'll see the points hit perks and that's where you'll
find all these perks. But Google nine Pixel nine at
that price is really really good. Cannot be combined with
any other offers. Obviously you could do a trade in

(51:37):
with it though, so if you have a phone to
trade in, you can still do that.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
Let's see here. Let's let's go to Craig and des Moines. Craig,
you're on with Rich.

Speaker 10 (51:47):
How you doing it?

Speaker 2 (51:48):
I'm doing excellent. Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 11 (51:51):
Yeah, I'm the blind guy.

Speaker 12 (51:53):
From des Moin DA.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
How's life in des Moines these days.

Speaker 5 (51:57):
Oh, not too bad as cold.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
Oh it's cold.

Speaker 7 (52:01):
I know.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
I always forget how cold it gets everywhere else because
you're in Lalla Land. You know, it's like fantasy land.
Every day you wake up, you're like, oh, sun still shining,
it's still beautiful. Oh it's a little shy sixty degree.

Speaker 5 (52:12):
I lived in la for forty years.

Speaker 11 (52:15):
Oh that came back here for drilled me.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
So you remember, you remember the days of just not
having to look at the weather forecast? Right, So what's
on your mind today?

Speaker 12 (52:25):
Okay?

Speaker 11 (52:26):
They made tell you I have a JB L.

Speaker 5 (52:31):
Head. They covered the complete.

Speaker 11 (52:34):
Hell Okay, Now on the box it said seventy hours. Okay,
they were one hundred and sixty dollars, got them, but
yesterday and I took the old hell bud back but
they wouldn't pay in my heel. But anyway, how much

(52:54):
playtime do I have on them?

Speaker 1 (52:57):
So it says seventy hours? Are these wireless or they
plug in?

Speaker 5 (53:02):
They go see the blue No, they don't clog, so
they're Bluetooth.

Speaker 2 (53:06):
Okay, and it says seventy hours that you get.

Speaker 9 (53:09):
Yeah, it said that on the bout.

Speaker 13 (53:11):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
Okay, Well I'm looking my woke redy to me.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
I'm looking here. Let's see here up to fifty hours
of music, Okay, so yeah, I mean, look, these are
these are over the year headphones, so they're they're probably
gonna give you a decent amount of hours. I'm looking
at their website. Some of them are rated for fifty
summer seventy. But I think you're going to get a
reasonable amount of time. I know with me personally, with

(53:35):
the over the year headphones I have, they last almost forever,
like I barely need to charge them ever.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
So I think you've got a good thing to go.
And Craig, thanks for the call.

Speaker 1 (53:43):
Coming up, we're going to talk about cell phone plans,
which one's the best for you? Right here on rich
On Tech. Welcome back to rich On Tech. Rich Demiro
here hanging out with you, talking technology. If you want
to get in on the phone lines, they're open eighty
to eight rich one one eight eight eight seven four
to two four one zero one. We'll get back to

(54:05):
them in just a moment, but first we've got a
great guest to talk about your cell phone plan and
choosing the right one for you. Rob Pegoraro, rights for
Wirecutter and other uh all kinds of places, PC mag
Fast Company, but just came out with a new guide
on the best cell phone plans for Wirecutter.

Speaker 2 (54:26):
So, Rob, welcome to the show for having me.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
So you've been doing this for a while, You've been
keeping track of these cell phone plans for a while.
What do you think is the biggest thing that you've
seen change over the past couple of years?

Speaker 2 (54:37):
If anything, I've actually.

Speaker 6 (54:39):
Realized this is I've been doing this guide for just
over ten years.

Speaker 4 (54:42):
Now.

Speaker 6 (54:43):
Wow, wait, before the Wirecutter was a New York Times property.
I mean the biggest change obviously is the rise of
Tea Mobile. When I started it, they were, you know,
kind of an upstart, really improving rapidly, but they had
a lot of work to do. It was a four
carryer market. Now it's three. Care you might have four
if boost Mobile continues growing.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
I was gonna say, can you can you explain that
real quick? Like, what is the deal Boost Mobile? Do
they really have their own towers?

Speaker 6 (55:09):
They do? It's this weird sort of bank shot the
government set up when they approved Team Mobile buying sprints.
They said, okay, we want we don't want to see
US be a three carrier market permanently, so we'll sort
of cobble together one you sprint and give some spectrum
to boost you sell off that band to the brand

(55:31):
to Dish network, which already had a bunch of licenses.
And they've got a government deadline they've met to them
so far to build out a five G network from scratch,
which is really hard, and they've done pretty well so far.
But it's one of these things, you know, the ninety
percent of the work is in the last ten percent

(55:51):
of the coverage, so they have more work to do,
but they've been building out rapidly. It seems to work well.
I have not a chance to try it out yet.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
Okay, so big on them.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
But it is available, like like is it like so
if I let's say, and I'm guessing so because I
know they have like their infinite network, which was like
using like the other carriers, So I'm guessing until their
network is fully built out, they're kind of like relying
on falling back so much.

Speaker 7 (56:15):
Now.

Speaker 6 (56:15):
They say that the last deadline they met was to
cover seventy percent of the US population. They meant that
last summer. I think, yeah, last July. They've done that.
They they backfill that with least coverage from AT and
T and T Mobile and they say, with that we cover,
we give people access to more towers we don't own
them than any other service. That said, you have to

(56:36):
look at their what they're selling carefully because they have
very low prices. But you know, you asked me what
the biggest change is, I would say, how many different
ways carriers have learned to spell and pronounce unlimited.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Ah, everyone will unlimited.

Speaker 6 (56:51):
But you got to read the fine print, the asterisks,
the double asterisks. There's so many different wrinkles they'll put
in so they can differentiate, charge some people more if
they need more of an unlimited thing, and compete with
other people to lett over priced by putting limits on
their unlimited service.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
So I guess my first question.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
And by the way, I wanted to nerd out real
quick about the Boost Mobile. It reminds me back in
the day when Sprint PCs was starting up and they
had their own brand new network that was like completely digital,
and I was so hyped to get on that network
because it was brand new and digital instead of the
old analog networks. But I remember it worked in like
literally driving around LA with like work in like three

(57:31):
places for the beginning.

Speaker 6 (57:33):
Sprint spectrum lost in d C. I want to say
that was I don't really date myself. This was like
nineteen ninety four, ninety five, a prior millennium.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
Wow, that's that's a wild okay. So let's h okay.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
So the unlimited thing, So, first off, how do people
figure out their coverage? Like I always tell people, get
a cell phone plan that works where you work and
where you live really well, but how do you figure
out what works there?

Speaker 6 (57:57):
So obviously the carriers have their own cutge maps, and
usually they'll say we have awesome coverage, no problem. That's
not always the case. I've certainly seen gaps between like
you know my I use T Mobile myself, and they'll
say they have service in these places, but really they
don't where it's very thin or patchy, and so you know,
you might be able to post a picture to Instagram,

(58:18):
but your video reel is just not going to happen
in a feasible time. The biggest thing is just first
person testimonials. If friends of yours, people you know, people
at work can say, yeah, this carrier is great in
this place, but in a vacation home. They're awful. That's
a really VALIDATA point. There are third party resources you
can do. It was just poking around. There's an app

(58:39):
called Open Signal from one of the companies that do
their own sort of testing and research of coverage and
network performance, and you can zoom in on an area
and see where people using the Apple's sort of coverage
they've found through the app. And yeah, I've definitely seen
there's a town in rural Virginia where a friend of
mine has a house by the by the Jesse Bay.

(59:00):
And yeah, the Open Signal map seems to be correct
in saying that T mobile is not so great there,
and AT and T and Verriison are a little bit better.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
Interesting because you've been there and it's kind of crowdsourced
and you know from first person that doesn't really work there. Okay,
so how do you know if you should go to
prepaid because now we see all these prepaid plans they
seem just as good as the big carrier plans.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
Like what's the delineation? Like why how do you decide?
Two things?

Speaker 6 (59:26):
I would say to look at Number one, you know,
are you ready to just pay full price for an
unlocked phone, bring that to the carrier or the service
usually prepaid, their offshoots, their third parties. You know, they're
not actual network carriers like AT and T, T Mobile, Verizon.
They'll sell you phones, but it will probably be you know,
second tier stuff, maybe older iPhones. You won't get a

(59:49):
Google Pixel phone number two. You know, see how they
define on limited, they are much more likely to say, yes,
we give you fifty gig as a prairie data instead
of oh, your service is going to get a little slower.
It will be your service will be cut down to
like one point five megabits per second, which back in
nineteen ninety five would have been very very fast. Now

(01:00:11):
it's not or even like five hundred and twelve kilobits
per second, which we're really getting back to the you know,
dial up speeds almost that's much more likely. One of
the things I'd look at if you travel internationally, prepaid
services generally don't offer that. That's where if you buy
the phone unlocked, you can just use an ESUM when
you travel. Otherwise you know you won't have service.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
And I would add my wife, which I switched, not
against her will, but she was like, why do I
have to switch. I'm like, because you don't use any data.
So I switched her one of these cheap carriers. And
when there became a problem, like the sim wouldn't switch
between two phones, everything had to be done over the
app like chat, which was kind of a nightmare. And

(01:00:55):
so the customer service aspect of the idea. If you're
paying you know, ninety huns or bucks a month, you
get the idea of you get that benefit of walking
into a store and saying, here, fix this, whereas if
you're on one of these smaller ones that don't have
a store, you're going to be back and forth on
chat messaging, which is not ideal.

Speaker 6 (01:01:13):
Good point.

Speaker 1 (01:01:14):
What about let's see, okay, you talked to International. How
much data do you think the average smartphone user needs?
You know, you mentioned that slows down, but like, do
people really need an unlimited plan or what?

Speaker 6 (01:01:26):
In many cases they don't. And you know, the better
prepaid service is the ones that offer real saving sort
of recognize that. I would point to mint Mobile, which
used to be an independent company. Tea Lebile owns them
now they have very cheap prices, especially if you just
commit to pay for the year's worth of service. This
is sort of the old contract coming back, but at
least you save money that way. So right now I'm

(01:01:48):
going to pull up my own phone right here, Let's
jump into the end roid settings. See how much I've
used over the last internets. Now you're you're where to
Google hide this feature of the scenario?

Speaker 4 (01:01:59):
Are you on? I on?

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
You're on fifteen?

Speaker 6 (01:02:02):
This is this is a pixel eight a running indur
at fifteen.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Nice.

Speaker 6 (01:02:07):
Also, let's see so far just started billing cycle, so
one point forty nine gigs used this month. Let's go
take a look at last Monthember.

Speaker 2 (01:02:18):
Fourth, so where let's say, use.

Speaker 6 (01:02:20):
Fifteen gigs last month, And like to state the obvious,
I'm not normal. I use my phone a lot more
than many other people. You know, there was a lot
of travel in that month, but fifteen gigs is below
the limited data plans of a lot of prepaid services.
Some of that service the data I used up was tethering,

(01:02:42):
which is something you may not get on some prepaid plans.
And that's another thing you have to watch out for.
How often are you going to want to use your
phone's been with and share it with your tablet or
your laptop via the mobile hotspot function on the phone.
That's that's a given on you know, the heavily advertised
unlimited plans, the Big three, the many smaller services, prepaid brands, resellers.

(01:03:04):
You don't get that, or it's very limited, or there's
a speed limit on it. There's some other way that
the unlimited thing becomes limited.

Speaker 1 (01:03:12):
Right, Okay, we've got about a minute, and I want
to Obviously we're talking to Rob about the Wirecutter article
the best cell phone Plan, So instead of having you
go through what you found to be the best, you
can go to the article to read that. But I'm
curious for your take on these cable companies cellular plans.
I get a question like, hey, Rich, should I go
to a Spectrum Mobile? Do I go to an Infinity Mobile?

(01:03:33):
Are they worth it? And what's the catch?

Speaker 6 (01:03:36):
The catch is you have to be the cable company's
internet customer. There's sort of a customer retention play. But
the thing is, the cable companies seem to be running
these services as well. Lots of people complain about comcasts,
TV and broadband, but in customer satisfaction surveys, they love
Exfinity Mobile.

Speaker 1 (01:03:53):
Okay, well that's good, and I know it's a good deal,
but again it's like you have to stay a customer
and so that.

Speaker 6 (01:04:01):
It's going to keep you from cutting that cable broadband cord,
which if Comcast is the only customer that was given anyways,
then you just need to see how the service works.
And again check the pricing, because Exfinity Mobile is one
of these things where they sell you unlimited, but above
a certain level it gets slowed down a whole lot.
Still usable, but not fast.

Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
All right, and tell us about the article. What else
are we going to learn it. We're going to learn
to your top picks.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
Huh.

Speaker 6 (01:04:26):
Yeah, we have picks for different scenarios. If you need
a lot of data, if you need maximum coverage, if
you're looking to optimize for price, if you travel a
lot internationally. I talk about trends in the industry, how
five views has finally become a reality and is basically
a done deal. We're not letting up new frequencies. How
we're moving on to satellite roaming, whether it's emergency messaging

(01:04:46):
or actual broadband slower broadband coming to your phone from
a satellite.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51):
All right, Rob Pegoraro, he wrote the Wirecutter Cell phone
plan guide. I will link it up on the website
rich on Tech dot TV.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Rob, this was a pleasure. Thanks for joining me tonight.
THANKIKS eighty eight.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
Rich one eight seven four two four one zero one
more rich On Tech coming your way right after this.
Welcome back to rich On Tech. Ed is in Huntington Beach.
Ed wanted to comment on the uh.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
The cell phone plans. Let's bring that up, Ed.

Speaker 7 (01:05:25):
What's up you doing?

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
Rich good?

Speaker 5 (01:05:27):
Hey buddy, Okay, so, yes, you're looking. You're you're discussing
the right payment plan or the right phone for you. Sure,
and I agree.

Speaker 13 (01:05:39):
With you earlier.

Speaker 5 (01:05:40):
There is no such thing as a free phone when
you sign up with anybody, correct, So I I I'm
with Metro PCs. I've been with them for darn near
fourteen years, right, okay, And that was back when it
was taboo to be with Metro PCs.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
Yes, still with now.

Speaker 5 (01:06:03):
I only pay one hundred dollars a month for four
phones and they're all iPhones. They do the same thing
yours does, or anybody else's.

Speaker 4 (01:06:15):
Memory.

Speaker 5 (01:06:16):
All that gadget stuff you guys talk about, But the
only niche in it is you got to buy your
own phone. Each whatever a couple of years when your
phone wears out, right, right, But I mean it was
one hundred dollars when it was just me and my
wife and my kids were babies, and now they're grown,

(01:06:37):
they're in high school, and I bought two phones for them.
It's still one hundred bucks because I have the same
contract I kept. I mean, come on, who has the
same contract before?

Speaker 2 (01:06:49):
Right, Okay, I see what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (01:06:50):
So you're saying because on the big plans like the Verizon,
like for me personally, like I just had to switch
my entire plan because I got an email saying, oh,
we're going to raise your rates this amount, or you
can switch your plan to this because I was on
an older plan.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
And if you get one of those phones, the carrot,
that's the carrot, right exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:07:08):
And then if you get an iPhone for free, quote unquote,
you got to change that. You know, whatever the latest
unlimited plan is, they want you on that. Whereas I
remember when Metro was really being heavily promoted by T
Mobile when they bought them, they were adding they're just
tossing in lines like they were, you know, just free
lines all over the place.

Speaker 5 (01:07:26):
Right, And essentially Metro is T Mobile. Yeah, people, with
all my friends, it's kind of like a taboo question
when you have somebody, hey, how much do you pay
for your cell phone bill each month?

Speaker 1 (01:07:40):
Yes, it's right up there with with who you voted
for two things you don't want to bring up at
a dinner party.

Speaker 5 (01:07:47):
Ask me how much? I hey, three one hundred bucks
a month for four phones?

Speaker 1 (01:07:51):
This is so so ed. You know my mom she
has I moved her onto.

Speaker 5 (01:07:56):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:07:57):
She used to have Cricket. Now she's got Mint Mobile.
And I'm not kidding. She tells all of her friends
how much she pays. She pays one time of year.
I think it's like three hundred bucks for the whole year.
And she has the same service, same stuff, And you know,
Min obviously runs on T Mobile as well. And her
friends like, no, no, I have a ninety dollars plan
from AT and T. It can't there's no way it
could be the same. She's like, it's the same.

Speaker 2 (01:08:17):
I checked my Facebook.

Speaker 5 (01:08:18):
They also say that too, there's no way your phone
can do what mine can do. Yes, yeah, it does everything.
And I guess well, I'm trying to bring up a
point as when when you're talking about the right plan
for you. Of course you want the cheapest plan, but
you don't want it to change. You want you don't
want it to get more expensive. So I knew it

(01:08:39):
a long time ago. As long as I keep this
contract going and you can't miss a payment, there is
no operators or anybody to call who cares. There's Google.
But as long as you keep paying your pay payment
each month, my bill does not change. Even when I
buy new phones and bring them in or buy them

(01:08:59):
from them. I know it's that's an expensive day, but
it happens once in a while. But my I'm still
paying one hundred dollars a month. That's what's that's what's important.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Yeah, you're saving over the long term, and most people
don't want to do that math of the long term
versus the initial And thanks for the call there on
hunting the beach.

Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
Really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):
And by the way, Metro is now for four lines
one hundred and seventy five bucks a month, so one
hundred and eighty for the first month, and that includes
some unlimited things. You're saving like seventy five dollars a
month for those four lines times twelve. That's nine hundred
bucks a year minimum, So that's a free iPhone right there.
Uh eighty eight rich one one eight eight eight seven

(01:09:39):
four to two four one zero one. Talked about this
a little bit earlier in the show. But bitcoin, if
you happen to have some, you might want to take
a look at your account because it is up, up, up,
up up. We talked about bitcoin extensively on a recent show.
Remember I went to that Bitcoin LA conference and uh, now,
bitcoin and there are a lot of people that are

(01:10:02):
very excited about bitcoin because of the election of President
President elect Trump and his pro crypto stance. So the
market is very optimistic. And in the past month, bitcoin
is up twenty seven percent. In the past week, it's
up ten percent. The past day it's down one percent.

(01:10:26):
So you know, but people, I think, what's gonna happen here?
We're seeing this has got to be almost an all
time high. We're at seventy six thousand dollars today. Apparently
it reached seventy seven thousand on Friday before the weekend happened.
But people are buying this in their retirement plans as well.
So you can buy bitcoin. Number one, you don't have

(01:10:46):
to buy a whole coin. Right, you can buy a
portion of a coin. So for instance, if you you know,
there's no way you're gonna put seventy six thousand, maybe
you would, I don't know, but there's you know, you
buy a portion, so you can say I want to
buy ten dollars of bitcoin. It will figure out the
math and give you ten dollars. You want to buy
one hundred dollars a bitcoin, you do the math. So
there's various apps that can let you do this, something

(01:11:08):
like a cash app, a PayPal app. There's a million
coin base. I mean, there's so many ways to buy crypto. Again,
from what I got from that bitcoin conference I went to,
people are really hip on Bitcoin, but not so much
the other coins out there. A couple of years ago,
we saw a lot of coins being promoted and a
lot of digital currency being promoted. Now we're mostly seeing

(01:11:30):
the focus on bitcoin because it is where most of
the emphasis is in the crypto world. So again, a
lot of analysts predicting that this could go up to
one hundred thousand dollars or more by the end of
the year. And I will go back to my original
email from my friend who told me back in many

(01:11:50):
many years ago. This is let me read this real quick,
putting this on your calendar. This is in twenty thirteen.
There's been a lot of big coin news. Price just
went to a new high over three hundred per coin.
Last time I emailed you was one twenty five. It's
growing like crazy, one hundred, twenty.

Speaker 2 (01:12:08):
Five, three hundred.

Speaker 1 (01:12:09):
Now it's at seventy six thousand dollars. What a difference
ten years makes. Do your research before investing. This is
rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich
Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology at triple
A rich one on one. That's eight eight eight seven

(01:12:29):
four to two four one zero one. The website for
the show rich on Tech dot TV. You've got the
latest issue of my newsletter UH in it this week
you can sign up for free. By the way, UH
talk about how to download your information from various services
like Instagram, Google, and Microsoft.

Speaker 2 (01:12:51):
Explain that whole thing.

Speaker 1 (01:12:54):
Then there's this idea of a you've heard of AI,
but what about private AI? There is a private and
uncensored AI chat bot. I mean, that's intriguing, right, So
I had to check that out. I've got that linked
up in the show note or as in the newsletter
as well. And then by way of my brother Justin,

(01:13:14):
who's been on the show, he sent me a link
to a open source image generation one of these AI
image generators. So there's a website hugging face and they've
got all these like AI models and things. But this
one's pretty cool because you use the latest AI stable
diffusion to generate images, so you can put into prompt

(01:13:36):
you don't have to sign in or anything, so it's
pretty good. Anyway, it's all in the newsletter. Rich on
tech dot TV. Just just hit the first thing on
the page and you'll see it, and don't forget to
leave your email address, says these smart glasses changed my POV.
It's all about those metas. Oh oh yes, I want
you to mention this too. Actually I might mention the feedbag,

(01:13:57):
but I talk about the the app that I I
used to email myself and I got an email about
that ironically, and I talk about how I switched. Actually,
one of the viewers or listeners that emailed me about
their app, I think it's better than one I picked,
So I talk about that as well. Eighty eight rich
one on one eight eight eight seven four to two

(01:14:18):
four one zero. On this hour, we've got Dan Ackerman
in front of the show. He's been on before. I
used to work with him at c NEET. He is
going to talk to us about AI video clones and
also he uh he actually heads up sort of the
content creation at Microcenter. Remember we talked about micro Center
a couple couple weeks ago. How they're you know, they've

(01:14:39):
got the physical stores and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
So might pick his brain a little bit about that.

Speaker 1 (01:14:44):
Let's go to Herbert in a Rancho, Santa Fe, California.

Speaker 2 (01:14:49):
Welcome to the show.

Speaker 12 (01:14:51):
Thank you, Rich. Quick question. I have a program that
goes through the computer and finds duplicates. Okay, and it's
called Jimminy two.

Speaker 7 (01:15:02):
I think it's by math Paw.

Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (01:15:05):
And I went through it and I didn't have any
idea I had that many dup with this. But I'm
just picking pictures, and I picked all the ones that
I would like to get rid of, but I'm afraid to.
I don't know enough about the program to commit to
getting rid of a several good advice of memory.

Speaker 1 (01:15:26):
Well, okay, so first off, so Gemini to know it
very well, really like that program I use it have
used it in the past, and it's great. It does
what it says it does. Typically it chooses the file
that is either newer or smaller or something like that.
Is that what you've noticed?

Speaker 12 (01:15:45):
You know, I didn't look into it enough. I glanced
at it. That is a concern that if I have
a picture in two different files, whether it takes it
out of the right one, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:15:56):
Yeah, usually about that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:58):
Typically it uses smarts to kind of figure out, like
it goes, you know, it has like little rules that
are built in, so it's going to say, we know,
you know obviously, like let's say you have two of
the same pictures and it looks at the information on
them and says, okay, this one's smaller, so clearly this
is some sort of thumbnail or screenshot or a copy
that you made of this picture. Also, this one is newer,
so we know that there's an older version of it

(01:16:19):
that's bigger. So it's going to go through and choose
typically the one that it thinks it should keep, and
it typically does that using you know, just it's smarts
that are built into it. So that's that's probably what's
going to happen now. The other thing that I would
say is anytime you are going to make substantial changes

(01:16:39):
to a collection of photos, you want to make sure
that you have a backup before you do that. And
I know that that's tricky. You know that that can
be complicated. But if you just get a hard drive
and use time Machine on your Mac, are these stored
locally on your Mac?

Speaker 12 (01:16:55):
Yeah, I I do that, Okay, back up on an
external hard drive.

Speaker 1 (01:17:02):
Then you're good to go. Then I think you're fine.
As long as you have a double back or any
sort of backup of these pictures, I.

Speaker 2 (01:17:08):
Think it's gonna be fine.

Speaker 1 (01:17:09):
And that's that's the main thing, is that anytime you're
making large, substantial changes to any of the files on
your computer, you just want to be sure that, ay,
you're doing it slowly and methodically. You don't want to
just speed through this, and you're making sure you understand,
you know, the prompts that come up and things like that.
And with Jim and I, I believe that it puts

(01:17:30):
them in like a the trash first and then you
have to empty the trash. So if you you know,
I would probably leave them in the trash for the
next couple of days and then see if you need one.
But I will tell you one time, Herbert, that I
deleted a whole bunch of pictures one time out of
my Google drive and I realized that it was my
kid on like like some of the kid, like my

(01:17:53):
kid when he was born, Like they were all gone,
and I was like, oh no, this is not good.

Speaker 2 (01:17:57):
And so thankfully I had a backup. I went back.

Speaker 1 (01:17:59):
I pulled all those pics sures back. But my point
is it can happen. It's like once they're gone, you're
looking and you're like, oh no, this is not a
good thing. So but Gemini is a great program. They
actually make another one for the iPhone called they used
to make the version of this Gemini for the iPhone.
Now they make one called Clean my Phone, which is
also for the iPhone. It can kind of find the
duplicates and things. But yeah, it's a great program. It

(01:18:22):
does what you need. The other one I like that
does the duplicates is Remo r E m O, and
they've got a version of that, I believe, for it
looks like I know Windows, And they also have one
for Mac as well and the iPhone. So these are
great programs. Gemini Remo, all good programs. But again, before
you make any of those changes, please just make sure

(01:18:44):
you have a backup. If you're on Windows, just use
the built in backup. Just get a hard drive back
up your computer. If you're on you know, the Mac
side of things, just use time Machine. And if you're
doing anything that's like working with your cloud stuff. You know, people,
it took a while for people to realize that when
you delete a picture on your iPhone to save space,
it's also deleting it out of iCloud. So just be

(01:19:06):
aware of that. You know, when you're deleting things, you
have to be very aware of just how much you're
doing and how permanent that deletion is. Thankfully, with most
of these cloud services, things go into a deleted folder
where they stick around for a good thirty days before
they actually get deleted. So on iPhone, if you want
to look into that, you can open up your photos

(01:19:27):
app and if you scroll I mean they just change
the way photos works.

Speaker 2 (01:19:31):
It's such a mess.

Speaker 1 (01:19:32):
But if you scroll down you'll see where it says
utilities and recently deleted. So if you go into that album,
that's where you're going to see the recently deleted. And
I'm just saying, you know, if you're I just I
see the evil uses of all this stuff, like if
you're you know anyway, my point is that'd be the

(01:19:54):
first place I looked on a phone if I had
to like kind of see what's going on with this
person in their phone.

Speaker 2 (01:20:00):
Thankfully Apple got hipped to that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:01):
And now if you notice there's a little lock next
to the recently deleted, that's because let's say you grab
someone's iPhone and you're like, oh, I bet you I
can find some interesting stuff and they're recently deleted. They
now lock that down, so you need to actually use
face ID or passcode to open that up because they
figured out that, yeah, people probably delete some stuff they
don't want other people to see. Now, if you're in

(01:20:24):
Google Photos, which is what I use for my photos,
same thing. If you go into your collections, then you
can go and find your trash in there. So if
you go Google Photos collections and then trash it takes
It says items will be permanently deleted after sixty days
from trash, so that gives you enough time to do
something like clean out your system and go, oh wait,
where's that picture I just deleted. Oh there it is okay,

(01:20:46):
and you can restore those pictures easily. So that's the
way to do it. Great call Herbert. Thanks for the question.

Speaker 5 (01:20:53):
There.

Speaker 2 (01:20:55):
Let's see, do we have time to go to another question?

Speaker 1 (01:20:57):
Not really, we got might have to wait until after
the break eighty eight rich one oh one eight eight
eight seven four to two four to one zero one uh.

Speaker 2 (01:21:07):
Timothy Jacob Hudson.

Speaker 1 (01:21:08):
In this in how to Geek, the website says you
can skip paid antivirus in twenty twenty four. This is
an argument, and I've heard this idea before that what's
built into Windows is probably good enough nowadays.

Speaker 2 (01:21:22):
But let me give you his argument.

Speaker 1 (01:21:24):
He says Windows Defender, which is Microsoft's built in antivirus,
basically gets perfect or near perfect scores in security tests.
So he says, the built in modern security on devices
like Windows, iOS, Android in Mac has pretty much comprehensive
protection without a lot of extra cost, and most common
malware threats are already blocked by email, they blocked dangerous

(01:21:47):
attachments built in firewalls and the default system protections that
you have on Windows, iOS, Android in Mac. But here's
the thing that I would say with the caveat. So yes,
if you want to save money, you can use the
Microsoft built in antivirus Windows Defender.

Speaker 2 (01:22:03):
Just make sure it's up to date. But here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (01:22:06):
This only really works a if your software is up
to date and current. So if you're you know, Mac software,
your Windows software, your iPhone, you're Android or all up
to date, that's number one, you have to have those
latest security patches. Number two, this does not necessarily protect
you against you So I've mentioned this a couple of
weeks ago. Why I think Chrome is a great browser

(01:22:28):
to use because it will scan the links that you
click and it will tell you in real time, hey,
this is a phishing link. But the problem is people
still fall for this stuff on a daily basis, and
that no antivirus software can really protect you from that.
So if you're clicking links, your clicking links that you

(01:22:48):
get in your text messages or in your email, you're
putting in personal information, you're logging into websites when it
says hey there's a problem with your payment, you can
still get caught even if you're using these built in
antivirus or built in protection, So be careful, understand what
phishing is and how they're trying to get you. This
is rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech.

(01:23:11):
Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology. The
website for the show richon Tech dot tv coming up
this hour. We have the feedbag a little bit later
on and Dan Ackerman formerly I've seen it now with Microcenter.
He is going to talk about creating an affordable AI
video clone. I guess he did this himself and has

(01:23:34):
some thoughts on that. Let's see email for the show
richon Tech dot TV got an email here from Michael
from Duarte. Hey, Rich, I'm a seventy one year old
and technology challenge.

Speaker 2 (01:23:47):
I still use my flip phone that serves me very well.

Speaker 1 (01:23:50):
I try to listen to your show whenever I can
while i'm washing the car walking around the house. I
find you're hosting and educational qualities to be very good
and I do learn things from you and your guests.
Just end the reading right there. Thank you, Michael, now,
but I'll keep going. I guess he has a question.
My Dell desktop with Windows ten serves my basic needs
web surfing, eBay, forums and streaming TV. Microsoft keeps encouraging

(01:24:13):
me to upgrade to Windows eleven. But I believe if
it ain't broken, don't fix it, will I eventually be
forced to upgrade. Keep up the great work, Rich, and
thanks for not only educating us, but being entertaining as well. Wow,
entertaining you hear that, Bobo entertaining. We are entertaining people here,
he's being nice. That was auto draft. He just used
that like auto like the Gmail helped me write, Oh,

(01:24:36):
write a nice email to Rich like butter them up.

Speaker 2 (01:24:38):
So answer my question. No, I'm just kidding. Thank you, Michael.

Speaker 1 (01:24:40):
Okay, So here's the deal with Windows, and I totally
understand what you're saying.

Speaker 2 (01:24:45):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:24:45):
I used to be the person I still am where
I like to upgrade the second it's available, right like,
I want the cutting edge. And most of the time
that's just because I'm a nerd. I'm a geek. I
just like to have the latest, greatest, and of course
I want to test it out. But I think when
it comes this is something like Windows eleven. Why do
you need to do that? I don't think you do,
especially with the things you're telling me you do with

(01:25:07):
your computer. So yes, it's in a Windows best interest
to get people to upgrade and to upgrade early, and
if there will be a deadline that you need to
upgrade by, and that's October fourteenth, twenty twenty five, that's
called end of support, end of life. That means that
after that date, Windows will no longer support your system,
and like we just talked about, that means no more

(01:25:28):
security updates, no more bug fixes.

Speaker 2 (01:25:31):
But here's the catch.

Speaker 1 (01:25:33):
They just announced that for an extra thirty bucks, you
can extend that by a year. So Michael, you're looking
at at the very least, if you don't feel like
changing anything on your computer, you can use your current
Windows ten for thirty bucks all the way until well,
you can use it for free until October fourteenth, twenty
twenty five. For thirty dollars you can use it all
the way until October fourteenth, twenty twenty six. So you're

(01:25:57):
looking at two more years from now. No big deal.
I think that for what you need. If your computer's working,
like you said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:05):
You don't need to upgrade.

Speaker 1 (01:26:06):
If you want the Windows eleven stuff, it's a little
bit tricky because clearly your computer supports it, so that's fine.
But the stuff that Windows eleven offers is mostly the
AI stuff, So I mean it's if you want to
play with that stuff, find the copilot stuff built in,
but I don't really know if.

Speaker 2 (01:26:25):
You need it.

Speaker 1 (01:26:27):
It's it's you're not going to get a substantial change
in the things that you're doing, because it sounds like
most of the stuff you're doing is just web browser
brace web browser based. So great question, and just just
ignore that prompt until you have to.

Speaker 2 (01:26:42):
Let's go to.

Speaker 1 (01:26:43):
Mark in Woodland Hills. Mark and Woodland Hills is on
the line. Welcome to the show, afternoon.

Speaker 13 (01:26:49):
You know, I have a question. But I've been listening
to all this about plans and phones. I'd have to
tell you that I was going to go to Visible
for my mobile plan sure, but Mint and get a
unlimited data. But Mint matched the price. So if people
like Mint, you can approach them with that, they probably
will do some. As far as my favorite phone ever,

(01:27:11):
it was a Yoda three. I know all the security
problems with it, but my friend who's a retired Special
Forces officer, showed me his unplugged by Eric Prince. It's
a fantastic phone. It's nine hundred and fifty bucks.

Speaker 5 (01:27:27):
You know it's not cheap, but.

Speaker 13 (01:27:28):
They have vetted everything, and everything on their app store
is vetted. Plus, when you turn your phone off, it's off,
it disconnects.

Speaker 2 (01:27:36):
Yeah, phone has a lot.

Speaker 13 (01:27:38):
Of security elements built into it, and if you know
who Erik Prince is you can figure out why. But
I just thought i'd share that with your listeners.

Speaker 1 (01:27:46):
Yeah, it's interesting the new phones actually, with both iPhone
and Android, if you've got the latest operating system, they
may turn off, but they're still findable with the fine miss.
So if you look at the pixel and you look
at the iPhone, things don't really go off on those.
Do you have you heard of the graphene Graphene os?

(01:28:10):
So this is like you can put this on your phone.
I guess it's like a you know, it's an Android
operating system that is completely secure and private and mobile.
But the problem is, you know, since it doesn't have
a lot of connections to the Google Play Store, it's
going to be a little trickier to run things. So
that's like if you really want, like to turn any
phone into like a private phone. Anyway, I was going

(01:28:30):
to tinker with that to just see what it was
all about. So sounds like that's what that the other
unplugged phone. You're talking about privacy. Look, privacy is going
to become more important, more and more important in this world. Okay,
now now that we've burned up, now.

Speaker 13 (01:28:44):
Nobody is your information with this phone.

Speaker 1 (01:28:46):
Now that we've burned up all your time, did you
actually have a question. We only have a minute before coming.

Speaker 13 (01:28:51):
I have a lot of files and folders, I mean
thousands of files and they're on various external hard drives
and my laptop. Free software out there that would help
me organize all my stuff and boil it down to
one version so that I can both have that and
you know, a copy of course.

Speaker 2 (01:29:08):
Oh that's a great question.

Speaker 1 (01:29:10):
I mean what I would do is probably just dump
everything onto like get one drive and dump everything onto there,
not one drive like Microsoft, but just one drive and
jump dump everything in. That should take care of some
of the duplicates. I'm trying to think if there's a
across the board.

Speaker 2 (01:29:26):
I can't think of one off the top of my head.

Speaker 1 (01:29:28):
But the good news about this show is that someone
else may have a suggestion. But you're saying one app
that can just go through everything and consolidate. I know
Dropbox has dash but that may not be exactly what
you're looking for. That's more for search. We'll think about it.

Speaker 5 (01:29:42):
Mark.

Speaker 1 (01:29:43):
Coming up next, we're going to talk about AI clones.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging
out with you, talking technology at eighty eight rich one
oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four
one zero one. Before the break, we had a Mark
in Woodland Hills wanting to consolidate all of his files

(01:30:03):
and he needed a good app to help him do that.

Speaker 2 (01:30:06):
I was looking online.

Speaker 1 (01:30:07):
I found one for Mac called space Drive, which sounds
like it might actually help him out. It says design
for creators, hoarders, and the painfully disorganized. So I think
that one sounds like it might fit the bill for him,
depending on what side of you know macro windows he's on.

Speaker 2 (01:30:22):
Joining me now.

Speaker 1 (01:30:23):
Oh by the way, if you want to comment on
that or give me a suggestion, you can go to
the website rich on Tech dot tv and hit the
show notes and email me that Joining me now is
Dan Ackerman, editor in chief at Microcenter.

Speaker 2 (01:30:36):
Dan, welcome to the show. Not good to be with you,
Rich So.

Speaker 1 (01:30:40):
Dan and I worked together at cnet many moons ago.
He is now the editor in chief at Microcenter. Explain
what that means, because we wrote a love letter to
micro Center a couple of weeks ago saying how much
we love the idea of an in shopping in store
shopping experience, and what does that mean to your editor
in chief there?

Speaker 14 (01:30:56):
Explain, Oh, that's so great because you know, after like
twenty plus years and traditional tech media working at c net,
being the editor in chief of Gizmoto, I got recruited
by Microcenter, which is a great organization. It's a series
about twenty eight twenty nine stores. We can get all
your computer stuff and TVs and three D printers, but really,
if you're building a computer from scratch and you need

(01:31:18):
all the graphless cards parts, you go there and you
hang outs all community. And they wanted to start doing
a news site because they saw that a lot of
the traditional tech media sites were going out of business,
laying people off, really downsizing, and they said, you know what,
let's just hire some experts and get in on this.
So they hired me, and then I have in turn
hired many many rich of our former c net colleagues

(01:31:39):
as freelancers. Is basically at Mini c net and we
do reviews and five we talk about AI a lot.

Speaker 15 (01:31:44):
We're about to get into the holiday shopping season.

Speaker 14 (01:31:46):
So it's really a tech news site that just happens
to be under the microsport.

Speaker 1 (01:31:50):
So if you go to microcenter dot com, is it
the MC news? Is that what you tap?

Speaker 2 (01:31:55):
It is?

Speaker 15 (01:31:56):
And it's also at microcenter dot news.

Speaker 2 (01:31:58):
Oh, Microcenter dot News. All right, there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:32:00):
So let's talk about some news first off, before we
get to the AI clones that you tested out. PlayStation
five Pro launched this week seven hundred dollars. What do
we need to know about that? The PlayStation five Pro
really interesting.

Speaker 14 (01:32:14):
They did this last generation with the PS four Pro
and the Xbox one X, where before the whole next
generation they had in between with slightly more powerful graphics,
more memory to kind of keep up. Because when you
buy a game console, you're buying something at set in Stone.

Speaker 15 (01:32:30):
The hardware is not going to change.

Speaker 14 (01:32:31):
And three or four or five years later, he ses
gaming PCs are so much more advanced you need kind
of a catch up, and the PS five Pro is
that catch up. Basically, if you play PS five games
a lot of the time, you're going to see.

Speaker 15 (01:32:43):
There's two graphics options.

Speaker 14 (01:32:45):
It's like fidelity, which means a lot of special effects
and radtracing and stuff, but like thirty frames per second,
or Performance, which strips a lot of the special effects
out and gives you sixty frames per second. And the
PS five Pro, because it's got a new GPU and
more RAM and more storage space, it basically gives you
the sixty frames and the higher end graphics, and.

Speaker 15 (01:33:05):
In some games it really makes a difference.

Speaker 1 (01:33:07):
We were just testing out a game on the one
of the consoles and my kid came up against that screen.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
He's like, which one should I choose. I'm like, I
don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:33:15):
Do you want it the better graphics or you want
the faster gameplay? I guess that's the main thing, right.

Speaker 14 (01:33:20):
Yeah, And most people go for the faster gameplay, and frankly,
that's the right choice a lot of the time, because
you want things to feel fluid, but you also don't
want to miss out on, you know, rate tracing and
those all THESS reflections and the cool water effects and
the lighting. So something like the PS five Pro, and
I'm sure there'll be an Xbox version of something similar
not that far in the future, you get to have
the best of both worlds, and even though it's more

(01:33:43):
expensive at you know, seven hundred dollars, it's still less
than buying a big gaming PC, which could cost you
twelve hundred and fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars or more
in order to get that frame rate plus really cool
visuals combination.

Speaker 1 (01:33:57):
So would you recommend someone that has the PlayStation five
to get this and trade in their old one, or
who do you expect to buy it?

Speaker 15 (01:34:03):
Says this thing? The trade in is not a bad idea.

Speaker 14 (01:34:06):
If you have a PS five and you love it,
I don't think you really need to step up to this.
But if you're getting into it now and you're like, oh,
I'm going to go buy a PS five, finally you
should get the pro because it's going to have a
longer lifespan than the regular PS five. Or if you
have one and you're like, oh, I'm going to get
a second one for the den or the bedroom or something,
move the original back there, get the pro for your

(01:34:27):
living room.

Speaker 1 (01:34:27):
Okay, And I'm looking at the trade in price on
the PS five. It's about two hundred and fifty dollars,
so that's not too bad for it's not.

Speaker 14 (01:34:36):
Too bad, but if you're happy with the PS five,
you don't need to upgrade. But if you're getting into
the platform now, or if you want to like add
it to another room, that's a good excuse to this
lurg to get the.

Speaker 1 (01:34:46):
Pro Okay, So in one of your latest articles for Microcenter,
you you experimented with creating an AI clone of yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:34:54):
So you why'd you want to do that? You know,
since we.

Speaker 14 (01:34:57):
Started talking about AI a couple of years ago, one
of the topics that keeps coming up is people doing
deep fakes, people making AI clones of themselves.

Speaker 15 (01:35:06):
You know, Can you trust video? Can you trust audio?
And those tools have become available to just everyday folks
like you and me.

Speaker 14 (01:35:13):
And I spent some time thinking about how it would
create a clone of myself that could do video, that
could have my voice, half my face, even half my
style in terms of writing. It cut me up with content,
but it was never really there. It was too expensive,
too complicated, it didn't work well enough. Finally this spring
it really started to come together, and I signed up
with one app called hey Jen that's a cloud based

(01:35:35):
AI app, and you give it some audio, audio and
video and it makes a phone of you and does
the video Okay, the voice is so su So then
I signed up with another app called eleven Lamps and
they do really good voice cloning, and then I could
api the two of them together. So I give my
script to one app and it does the video and
pulls in my voice from the other app, and then

(01:35:56):
it says, Hey, you've got a video.

Speaker 15 (01:35:58):
It's something that looks like you reading this script.

Speaker 14 (01:36:01):
And you know, if you know me very well, maybe
like you do Rich, you'd be able to tell it
wasn't really me, but the average person on the street.
I could make a pretty convincing case that that's a
real person talking to you.

Speaker 2 (01:36:11):
Wow, and what do you?

Speaker 7 (01:36:12):
So? Do you?

Speaker 2 (01:36:13):
What's your conclusion here?

Speaker 1 (01:36:14):
I mean, is this something that you would use for
content creation or is it more just to show like
this is just the beginning of we're going to see
people that we don't even know if they're real or not.

Speaker 15 (01:36:24):
Yeah. I had two reasons I wanted to do this.

Speaker 14 (01:36:26):
One was to see what you could do and how
inexpensively you could do it. The article I did on
this was called basically how to make an AI clone
yourself for under fifty bucks, Because if you want to
play around with it for a month. Hey jen was
like twenty nine dollars a month, eleven lamps was like
five dollars a month to the basic planner ten dollars
a month for a more advanced plan. I ended up
doing a little Q and A session with my virtual

(01:36:48):
self and I used the custom GPT I made and
chat GPT that was trained on all my writing.

Speaker 15 (01:36:53):
So I would ask you a.

Speaker 14 (01:36:54):
Couple of questions like should I play Star Wars Outlaws
or or a Space Marine two? Or what kind of
power supply do my need for a gaming desktop of
a forty eighty in video card? And it gave me
some good answers, and I had my AI you know
face read them out and.

Speaker 15 (01:37:08):
Do the split screen. So it's showing that you can
do that, but it's more to.

Speaker 14 (01:37:13):
Show people that you should be careful what you watch,
what you'd listen to, you know, be a smart consumer
of media. But then I did find a practically used
for it. I took articles I wrote and I made
TikTok videos out of them by basically running some b
roll in the background, giving the article to my AI
self to read and putt of the little pop up
end of myself in the bottom reading the article.

Speaker 15 (01:37:34):
The lighting is always good, the voice always sounds good.
It's my words. And now you've got a quick TikTok.

Speaker 14 (01:37:39):
Video or a YouTube shorts video based on the articles
that I wrote that I wouldn't have time to do
a breakout video up necessarily.

Speaker 2 (01:37:46):
That is so wild, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:37:47):
If you want to see this, you can go to
the website Microcenter.

Speaker 2 (01:37:52):
Dan has got it linked up. Let me see here.

Speaker 1 (01:37:54):
The article is titled how I turn myself into an
AI video clone for under fifty dollars. And I got
to say the video clone looked pretty good. I was impressed,
so it's pretty good.

Speaker 14 (01:38:05):
The first version I did, I used just the stealthy
camera on my phone and it was okay. The second version,
I used the rear camera on the phone is really
good natural lighting.

Speaker 15 (01:38:12):
That was a lot better.

Speaker 14 (01:38:14):
The third version I went to the Microcenter studio and
they shot me in a studio with.

Speaker 15 (01:38:18):
A professional camera in professional lighting.

Speaker 14 (01:38:21):
And the better material that you give these AI apps,
the better version of yourself that you're going to get back.

Speaker 4 (01:38:26):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:38:27):
And I've also seen you can make headshots. You know,
people use these programs to make headshots of themselves as well,
and it's like you need like a couple of pictures
and it like makes you look like the best possible
you've ever looked in your life.

Speaker 2 (01:38:38):
Like, how did they do that? Oh, it's ai.

Speaker 15 (01:38:41):
It's really funny.

Speaker 1 (01:38:42):
Yeah, very fun Dan, thanks so much for joining me today.
Really appreciate it. The website microcenter dot com and uh
tell me again, it's microcenter dot dot news, dot news
if you want to go.

Speaker 15 (01:38:53):
Directly new stories and reviews.

Speaker 1 (01:38:55):
Yep, and very exciting, very very cool. And I love
that you're doing this this news site there.

Speaker 2 (01:39:01):
It's so cool.

Speaker 1 (01:39:02):
And we love micro Center because I was in New
Jersey and I visited it and I talked about how
much I liked it on the show, and then people
were emailing me. They said, you know, you didn't have
to go as far as New Jersey. We have one
in Tustin, California that we love.

Speaker 15 (01:39:15):
The Tustin show loved the New Jersey store.

Speaker 14 (01:39:17):
New ones in Miami and Charlotte and Santa Clara coming
next year.

Speaker 1 (01:39:21):
And what's the number one thing people buy there when
they go in is it the computers?

Speaker 14 (01:39:25):
Right now, it's like a lot of graphics cards and
CPUs and I bet next year, when we have the
next generation Navidia cards, you're gonna see a huge run
on those.

Speaker 1 (01:39:33):
All right, Dan Ackerman, editor in chief at micro Center,
thanks so much for joining me today.

Speaker 2 (01:39:38):
Appreciate it.

Speaker 15 (01:39:39):
Thanks a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:39:40):
Rich All right, coming up, Oh, we are opening up
the feedback plus. I'm gonna tell you why Verizon is
giving you a little extra time to switch your messaging app.
This is rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich On Tech.
Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology, one

(01:40:02):
of my favorite things to do every week. Also listening
to one of my favorite songs right now. Good job,
I'm playing that at the end, Bobo. So before we
get to the feedback, which is just bursting open this week,
let me tell you about Verizon Message Plus. Remember we
talked about this a couple of weeks ago. Verizon Messages

(01:40:24):
is going away and they want you to switch to
Google Messages. And that was supposed to happen on November seventh,
but guess what, the deadline has been extended to December ninth.
So if you want to keep Verizon Messages for just
a little bit longer, you do have a couple more weeks.
But I think you should probably switch to a different

(01:40:46):
app because this is going away on December ninth, unless
they extend it again. But then you're really rolling the dice.
But the reason why they want you to switch from
Verizon Messages to Google Messages is because you'll get better
cross messaging between iPhone and Android. Basically, you'll get the
upgrade to RCS, which means you can send your Android
friends and your iPhone friends larger quality pictures and videos,

(01:41:08):
and you'll see the read receipts and the typing indicators.
It's just a much better, better solution. All right, Let's
open up the feedbag. These are the emails, the comments,
and the questions you send to me every week on
the website. Rich on tech dot tv hit contact, Leo
writes in, Hey, Rich, just had a chance to listen
to your last podcast, and I have a couple of notes.

(01:41:28):
Rear dash cams work great through the rear windows, but
I haven't found a tape that stays put when the
sun beats down. Even heavy duty heat resistant tape melts off.
I'd suggest mounting it on the package shelf or another
part of the car. Also, you said the email me
app is only available for iOS, but I've used it
a long time on Android and it's free.

Speaker 2 (01:41:47):
Keep up the good work.

Speaker 1 (01:41:48):
So I had to look this up because I use
email me on iOS and then I use email myself
on Android. Email me is available on Android, but it's
not the same app that's on iOS. Yes, so I
did check out the email Me and I gotta say, Leo,
I actually switched over because I like it. It's cleaner,
it's simpler, it's easier. It is free, with the one

(01:42:09):
caveat that if you want to change the subject line
you have to pay. And that's actually a smart thing
by the developer because for me, the way I filter
all of my notes to self is with the subject line.

Speaker 2 (01:42:21):
I put a little hashtag in it. So I will
be paying the.

Speaker 1 (01:42:24):
Whatever it is three dollars to upgrade this, but email
me I'll link it up on the show notes. Thanks
for the suggestion. It's rare that I switch an app
that quickly. Terry writes in, Hey, Rich, love watching you
on TV and also on social media. Your sessions are helpful.
I have total av on my desktop some years ago.
I took advantage of an introductory price. Each year, I
call total AV and explain I'm a senior on a

(01:42:46):
fixed income, before asking if they can help with the price.
Much to my surprise, they are willing to assist. Recently,
we agreed to fifty nine instead of one to fifty
nine for my renewal. A few days later they offered
twenty nine, which I accepted. I verified this low price
was legitimate, calling their official number. Good job, Terry, And yes,
I think that the less you pay for this probably

(01:43:06):
the better they will get you on a high renewal
rate if you don't pay less. And I find that
this is a good thing to do. With anything that
you're paying, always call in, because honestly, even with doctor's offices,
just say, hey, is this the best deal I can get?

Speaker 2 (01:43:21):
Is this the best price you can give me?

Speaker 1 (01:43:23):
I've called doctor's bills and they literally just by asking them,
they'll be like, oh, yeah, here, we'll take fifty bucks
off or whatever. So same thing with all these things.
Just call in if you want to get a better price.
Steven from Orange rites in you might be interested in this.
I always pay cash at brick and mortar merchants. Recently,
at Trader Joe's, I pulled my wallet from my pocket
and the cashier handed me my receipt.

Speaker 2 (01:43:44):
Wait, I hadn't paid yet.

Speaker 1 (01:43:47):
Turns out the reader had detected my credit card through
my thick leather. Wallet management said, this can happen, Stephen.
I'm so glad you wrote me this, because I have
actually experienced this myself, specifically at Trader Joe's. I don't
know what their systems are, but they are the strongest
RFI D NFC whatever you one, it's NFC. It is

(01:44:07):
the strongest NFC antenna I've ever seen in my life.
I pull out my card and immediately it goes oop
and I said, wait, what, I didn't even tap yet.
And it's happened several times. So thankfully, I use a
debit card most of the time, and it still wants that.
It still wants that pin number. But if you use
a credit card, yeah, it's just gonna authorize it instantly.

(01:44:28):
A lot of people like these RFI D blocker wallets,
so a lot of the wallets I've seen have that
built in just for this sort of protection. So there's
a company named Silent Pocket that makes these things and others,
but you can just look for any RFI D blocker technology.
My wallet actually has that now my new wallet does
have that, and so I do. I do like that

(01:44:50):
feature because you just never know. And it's only happened
to me at Trader Joe's for some reason. But I
love that place, so I'm fine with it, and it
is me buying it, So there you go. Alan from Brookline,
Massachusetts listens to the podcast. He says, listening to your
November second podcast about the caller with Google Chrome quote
performance issues. I tried your suggestion to perform a settings reset.

(01:45:14):
I had the same issue on my MacBook Pro. It
took about sixty seconds and it kept my bookmarks. I
just had to reactivate some extensions like bitwarden and re
log into your web into websites. Thank you for your knowledge. Well, Alan,
this is what I love about this show. You listen
to it and you'll learn and you hear things that say, huh,
I didn't think about doing that, and it helps you out.

(01:45:35):
So it sounds like the person who had all the
different random things happened on their Chrome, they did a
settings reset and it took care of it.

Speaker 2 (01:45:41):
Did the same thing for you. Oh, let's see.

Speaker 1 (01:45:44):
Don writes in a computer upgrade story, After my laptop
started showing its age. I tried switching to a Mac
Mini on a friend's recommendation. Despite his help, I struggled
with the different interface, so I donated it to my church. Later,
my tech savvy friend Josh found me a mull Form
Factor PC for just twenty five dollars what after setting
it up, It's working perfectly, a great alternative to big

(01:46:07):
desktop towers.

Speaker 2 (01:46:08):
Two lessons learned.

Speaker 1 (01:46:09):
There are affordable solutions out there, and having a knowledgeable,
helpful friend is invaluable. Keep up the great work, Rich,
it's helping us all.

Speaker 2 (01:46:17):
Oh, thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:46:19):
And finally, Reg from the Bay Area listens on the podcast,
says Rich, just a note of thanks for your segment
on US Mobile for cell service. I've been an AT
and T customer for years, paying almost one hundred bucks
for two lines. After your information, I switched to US Mobile,
where I'm now on Verizon's network with unlimited calls and
texts plus five gigs a month for twenty three dollars
a month, no extra fees. The transfer is easy. I

(01:46:41):
wish I'd done it years ago. Thanks for all your
good work and sound advice. Thank you, Reg. I do
appreciate that, and that's what I aim to do help
you just know about this stuff. At the end of
the day, you have to make the decision on whether
you want to switch or whether it's worth it, whether
you want to do something. But that's why I'm here
to explain this stuff that is going to do it
for this episode of the show. You can find links
to everything I mentioned on the website. Just go to

(01:47:03):
rich on Tech dot TV. You can find me on
social media. I am at rich on Tech. Before we go,
I do want to mention one thing. Robin Bertolucci, program
director at KFI, one of the primary stations we are
on here with this show, is leaving KFI after twenty
four years there as program director and I have to

(01:47:24):
tell you Robin instrumental in getting me here to do
this show. Robin was an amazing mentor. I don't know
how she did it, but she seemed to listen to
every word that came out of my mouth.

Speaker 2 (01:47:39):
Over the years.

Speaker 1 (01:47:40):
Has given me so much, so many opportunities, so much advice,
always there for me, and I'm gonna miss her so
much because even though she didn't directly oversee this show,
she was always there to tell me what I did right,
what I did wrong, what I could do better, And
it's just one of those people that you meet in
your life time that's just quite incredible and has an

(01:48:02):
impact not only on you as a person, you as
an employee and you as just a human. Just what
an amazing person, Robin. I will miss you. Thanks to
everyone else who makes this show possible. Kim on phones,
Bobo on the board. My name is rich Demiro. I
will talk to you real soon.

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