Travel Booking Hacks & Make an Old Laptop New Again

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Apple cancels their plans for an electric car. They never
said they were working on the smart watch with one
hundred hours of battery life, the new Google Map setting
you should turn on right now, plus your tech questions answered.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
What's going on?

Speaker 1 (00:19):
I'm Rich Demiro and this is Rich on Tech broadcasting
live from Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Coast to coast.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
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
that tech should be interesting, useful, and fun. 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

(00:46):
zero one. Give me a call if you have a
question about technology again, that's eight eight eight rich one
oh one. Email is also open. Just go to Richontech
dot tv and hit contact. Your message will make its
way to my screen. We've got some great guests this week.
Kate Kozych, managing editor at Tom's Guide, is going to

(01:09):
talk about her trip to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
Leo Roberts of the Laptop Elf Project will join me
to discuss how to make an old computer new again
with Chrome os Flex and Richard Schneider, president and founder
of Antenna's Direct, is going to talk about the latest
trends in cord cutting.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Great great guests.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Well, the other day I shared a post that said,
it takes me longer to research the hotel I want
to stay in than the actual time I will spend
in that hotel. And that's kind of true because my
wife gives me a hard time. But when I am
booking travel, I am like a clinical doctor. I am

(01:55):
checking all of the stats, the vitals, the signs. I
am cross referred and sing. And this was a question
that Joe asked me when I sent out my first newsletter,
So thank you Joe for the inspiration for the second newsletter,
I decided to go over the ways that I book
my travel now. I am not a super premium Platinum
gold K one k VIP on any particular airline I

(02:19):
have been in the past, and I will tell you
if you make that status two things. Number One, you
are on the road all the time, something that I
used to really enjoy, but now that I have kids,
of course, you know, a trip for work used to
be three to four days. Now it's like, can I
fly up in the morning and fly back at that
same night. Because you know, you've got kids, You've got
things to do. You've got basketball games, football games, well

(02:41):
not football, baseball, I guess I should say football games
to watch. There you go, all right, So where do
I start? I always start at flights dot Google dot com.
This is because Google has a ton of information about flights.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
I don't even put in my dates.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
I actually just put in where I'm going, and I
hit search just to see this calendar of the cheapest
dates to travel.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
They will be highlighted in green.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Now, most of the time I can't travel on those
days because of work obligations or where I'm going, So
I will just use those dates to kind of give
me an idea of the absolute cheapest price. And then
I'll further refine, so I'll put in my preferred airline,
whether I want to carry on bag, so I get
rid of those basic economy fares. Most of the time
I want to go NonStop, and so I'll just use

(03:25):
those filters, and then I'll go back to the calendar
and see what's changed and see if I can find
the flights that I want. From here, I'm gonna settle
on my flights, then I'm going to go to the
actual airline to book directly. Now, they do have a
link on Google's website most of the time to the
direct airline, so you're fine using that and Google gets
a little cut of that obviously a little commission for
helping you find this flight, but you can also go

(03:46):
directly to the website as well. I try to stay
away from third party airline booking websites because if there's
ever an issue with your flight, it can be tricky
to change. Like the other day, I had a Southwest
flight that was booked through a travel agency and you
can can't make the changes you want to make on
the Southwest app. You actually have to go through that
travel agency once again, so it does offer a little

(04:07):
bit of inconvenience if you go through a third party. Now,
for hotels, once again, I always go to Google Hotels.
So in my experience, I do not book on this
site because they index all these random travel websites for
flight or for hotels, and most of the time when
you go to that website, I have never heard of it.
I can't vouch for the price, I don't know if

(04:29):
it's real, so I will just do this as my
kind of research. And so what I like about Google
Hotels is that when you go to the list of
hotels in that city, it will show you some hotel
rooms marked as a deal. And when you see that,
they kind of use all their google Ly data to
tell you when a hotel room is a really good price.

(04:50):
And so if I see like a nice five star
or four star hotel that's marked deal because it's way
cheaper than it typically is, it's abnormally cheap, I will
try to book there. Now I narrow down using my
preferred hotel chain, and of course star level depends. If
I'm looking for a three star, four star, I mean
five star would be amazing, but those are many times
too expensive. But I'll use this as my starting point

(05:13):
for any excellent deals on nice hotels in the city
I want to go to.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Now.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Pro tip, once you have major filters on Google Hotels,
you can bookmark that. So let's say you're a Marriotte
member or you're a Hilton member, you can bookmark those
filters and your star preferences so that next time you
go back to the site, all you have to do
is type in the city you're staying and you can
see what hotels fit that filter. So that's a really
nice tip. Now, my other method is trip Advisor. Trip

(05:40):
Advisors kind of like the Holy Grail because so many
people use it around the world. So I will go
to the city that I want to stay in and
I will look at the listings of all the hotels.
But here's the important part. You have to change the
way they sort the hotels by traveler ranked. They're going
to do their proprietary ranking algorithm, which benefits them the
most because the hotels that pay them the most, or

(06:02):
the ones that get the biggest kickback from or the
ones that advertise the most are going to be at
the top of that list by default. So you want
to go into traveler Ranked. And so once you do that,
it will rank the hotels in a city by what
travelers actually say. And so again I will do that,
and then I will use the filters on the side
to narrow my search by hotel chain, by stars, by neighborhood,

(06:23):
and this will generally show you the top rated hotels
in any given area. Once I settle on my hotel,
once again, I will go directly to the hotel website
book direct I'll use my triple A membership to save
a few bucks. Sometimes it saves a lot, sometimes it
saves a little, but it usually saves a couple of bucks.
And I will never ever ever book a room that
I cannot cancel. I know it's more expensive to do

(06:44):
it that way, but it may save you in the
long run because you're flexible and things change.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
You know.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
We saw that throughout the pandemic, people's plans. I mean,
all the hotels and things I had booked for trips,
I had to cancel them all, and thankfully they were
all refundable. Now, I will tell you that hotels dot
Com used to have a feature I really like. For
some reason, it's really tricky to see a list of
hotels sorted by distance from where you want to go,

(07:10):
but there is in Hotels dot Com used to do this,
but they got rid of it. So now the only
one I know that does this is booking dot Com.
So if you go to Booking dot Com, let's say
you're staying at the convention Center in downtown Detroit. I
don't even know if they have one, but I'm guessing
they do, and you want a hotel that is the
closest to that convention center. You can type in on here.

(07:30):
Let's see if I can actually do this. If I
can type in Detroit d E T R O A
T convention center. So you can type in the convention
center that you're going to, and here it is McGregor
Conference Center, and then you press search and then you
can sort by distance. And that is a key thing
because if you just want to stay at the absolute closest,

(07:52):
so distance from Landmark is what they allow you to do.
So I can see that these this hotel is er
point three miles from the conference center there, So that
is another way to do it if you want just
the closest thing. If you just want to walk you're
in a city for a night or two, that's the
way to do it, all right. For rental cars, I
am I'm kind of I'm kind of picky when it
comes to rental cars. I like the idea that I

(08:14):
can just walk off the plane and walk into my car.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
So I do use one company.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
I've got all my info save with them, and I
just walk off the plane and I skip that long
line at the rental counter. This is more expensive, but
it saves me a lot of time. Otherwise, costco travel
has really good rates. And there's a website called auto
slash that does a really nice search of auto rates
and they will continue to search for a reservation and
see if there's a better deal and a better price

(08:40):
up until the time that you travel.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
So that's really nice.

Speaker 1 (08:44):
When it comes to other websites, point dot me you've
probably heard me talk about this. I really like this
as a search engine for finding travel deals using the
points that you already have. And then there's a website
called going dot com and this is an amazing website
that will deliver cheap flight deals right to your inbox.
They do have a free level of service, but if

(09:06):
you want the best deals, you have to pay. How
about when a hotel was last renovated? Thanks to Wendy
for this tip. You can search up the name of
the hotel on travel Weekly and it will tell you
when that hotel was last renovated. So if it was
in nineteen eighty five, maybe you don't want to stay there,
or maybe you do because it's really cheap, or maybe
everything old is new again and it's cool and you
could do a TikTok video. Speaking of TikTok, I love

(09:28):
to watch YouTube and TikTok and Instagram for videos on
things to do in that city, and it's great. I mean,
people go all over and they show you the coolest
things to do in all these cities. Have gotten some
really great ideas. I use Google Maps to save all
the places that I want to go, so you can
make a list of saved places in a city. I
have ongoing lists for all the cities that I'm visiting

(09:50):
or the cities I visited.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
It's really easy.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
If you look at Google Maps, you'll see a little
saved bookmark icon the next time you search for a place.
That's how you can start your list. Is the best
flight tracking app for the iPhone. Flight Aware is really
good for Android. A ward wallet is where I keep
track of all of my reservations. They do this really
cool list of all of your reservations for everywhere in order,

(10:13):
and they tell you the amount of days until that reservation.
So it's really cool because you can see exactly how
many days until your next trip, which is kind of
fun if you're driving. I Exit is a great app
to tell you what fast food places are up at
the stop ahead, so if you want a certain fast
food place, you can look at this little app and

(10:33):
it organizes it by exit so you can see what's
up ahead. That's really handy. Google Maps. A little pro tip.
You can search for the term scenic spot and this
will help you find cool places to take photos wherever
you go. So if you're into Instagram or you just
want to see a cool view wherever you are, just
search scenic spot and it will show you all the
scenic spots nearby. And if you want to know what

(10:56):
I listened to and I'm taking off on the plane,
tichoy Cho, I've been doing it for years.

Speaker 4 (11:02):
All right.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
There you have it, my tips and tricks for booking travel.
All right, let's hear from you. Triple eight rich one
O one eight eight eight seven four to two four
one zero one.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
You are listening to rich on Tech.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
Rich Demiro here, rich on Tech, Welcome back to the show.
I know I gave you a lot of travel tips
and tricks in the first segment. Hopefully you wrote that
all down because I'm not saying it again. No, I'm
just kidding. Just go to the website rich on Tech
dot TV. Hit the link at the top. It is
highlighted in red, and it will give you a link

(11:38):
to all of those tips and tricks. They were actually
featured in my newsletter sent out this morning, So if
you're not subscribed to the rich on Tech newsletter, you
can do that for free as well. Let's go to
Benjamin in the Pacific Palisades. Benjamin, you're on with Rich.

Speaker 5 (11:52):
Hi, Rich, thanks for taking my call.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Thanks for calling.

Speaker 5 (11:56):
I have Apple equipment all the way through Apple and
one canter iPhone thirteen and for years I've just had
DSL running into the house through the phone set up,
and it's been fine, except when I make calls overseas
through like a signal app or WhatsApp, then I have
to move around the house. Sometimes there's dropouts. Recently, the

(12:21):
company that services my phone line has put fiber optic
right up to my roof and they came by last week.
And I don't know if this is misinformation. He said, oh, yes,
if we put the fiber optic in, it will definitely
prove your download speed, but we can't guarantee that signal
strength and dropouts like that will go away. Is he mistaken?

(12:45):
Everybody else is saying, oh no, I'll get the fiber optic.
It'll be five.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Hundred, you know, oh yeah, I would one hundred percent
go with a fiber optic. I mean, are you actually
on DSL.

Speaker 5 (12:54):
Yes, I have a just a you know, a phone
line directly into the computer and it's been great.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
I don't have to spout you get.

Speaker 6 (13:00):
I have Apple TV.

Speaker 5 (13:01):
I don't have any problem now. I did install four
Google Nest devices.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
Okay, house, and.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
What do you know what kind of speed you're getting
on that DSL?

Speaker 7 (13:09):
Oh?

Speaker 5 (13:10):
I mean when the guy put in the next devices,
he couldn't believe we were getting any signal. It was
very slow.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
Okay, okay, yeah, I would.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
I would one hundred percent go with the with the fiber,
and I one hundred percent think it will fix all
of your latency issues with these with his void services
that you're trying to use. I've had fiber since day
one in my house and it is incredibly fast.

Speaker 4 (13:31):
It is.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
I mean, I can get up to I think it's
five gigabits per second or you know whatever this like.
It started out as a thousand, which I thought was cool.
And by the way, the neat thing about fiber is
that it's up and down the same speed. So with DSL,
your download speed might be you know, at DSL might
be ten, you know, it might be ten, but the

(13:52):
upload might be like one or two. So, and that's
the same thing with cable. Cable advertises these really fast
download speeds, but the upload speed is much much slower.
In fact, it's really tough to find the upload speed
on the cable company's websites for that reason, because they
know that they're not you know, they're they're kind of
playing a game.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
Now.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
I will tell you most people don't need the upload
speeds that I need. I'm working with video all the time,
and so I need to upload large files to my editor,
and so it's that's why I really really like to
have that speed.

Speaker 5 (14:26):
So he's mistaken the installer who said he would not
necessarily eliminate these ropouts throughout the house. The fiber should
eliminate that.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
I mean, Benjamin, here's a deal. You've got four Google nests,
You've got fiber connection. There is nothing else you could
do that would be better except wiring all of those
nests with Ethernet to you know, otherwise you are you're
in the best possible scenario. If Signal or any of
these other apps can't give you a clear connection, there's
something else going on.

Speaker 5 (14:56):
Okay, now, the nest the one complaint I have everyone.
Once in a while, I'll be sitting in my living
room and all of a sudden, a voice comes out
of one of these nests. Is there somewhere you could
recommend I could learn how to control. They didn't give
me any instructions. I don't really like the idea that
that you know, I can say the wrong word.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Yeah, yeah, they have. They have built in the hot
word the Google. They will listen for that hot word.
I don't know if it's all of them or if
it's just a couple of them. You can see some
of them have the little holes on top that do
the listening. You are able to go into the Google
Home app and toggle that off. So you should be
able to go in there and toggle that off. It's

(15:34):
been a bit since I use the Google Homes, but
I do know they have the Google you know, the
Google hot word built in so that you can ask,
you know, weather and things like that. But that's what
I would do, is just download the Google app connected
to the to the little repeaters, and you will have
full control of all the things that they can do there.
I think you'll love fiber Internet. I think it's going

(15:55):
to be great. And so Benjamin, thanks for the call today.
I appreciate it. Triple eight rich On eight eight eight
seven four to two four one zero one. If you
get an email from Netflix that says, hey, you got
to stop paying through Apple, it is legitimate. Apple is
no longer allowing existing customers to pay for their Basic
Plan subscription through Apple. They have not allowed new sign

(16:17):
ups for this in a very long time. But people,
you know, they stick to what they got, especially because
the price was good. But Netflix does not want to
pay a thirty percent commission to Apple anymore. That's what
they're paying every time you pay them. So you pay
them ten bucks a month and they pay Apple three dollars.
They're like, no, we're done with that. So they will
ask you to switch to adding your credit or debit

(16:39):
card directly through their website. So if you've see an
email like that number one, it's not it's not. It
is legitimate. But you have to also be careful because
there could be phishing emails that prey upon this. They
know that Netflix is sending out these emails, so you
may get a bogus email. So when in doubt go
directly to your Netflix dot Com log in on your
web site.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
So go to a.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
Desktop computer, go to Netflix dot Com and go to
change your payment information through there directly. If that's a possibility,
the email should explain everything you need to know. But
that is what's happening with Netflix. In fact, a lot
of companies no longer want to let Apple handle their
payments if possible, because they don't want to pay Apple.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
That that cut all right?

Speaker 1 (17:23):
Coming up, we are going to talk to Kate Kozych,
Managing editor at Tom's Guide. She just got back from
Barcelona at Mobile World Congress. We're going to talk about
all the cool stuff she saw. You are listening to
Rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich
DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology. Phone lines

(17:45):
are open at triple eight Rich one oh one eight
eight eight seven four to two four one zero one.
Joining me now is Kate Kozych, Managing editor at Tom's Guide.
Kate just got back from Mobile World Congress. This is
a big tech show that happens every year in Barcelona, Spain.

Speaker 2 (18:07):
Kate, welcome to the show.

Speaker 8 (18:09):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 4 (18:10):
Rich.

Speaker 8 (18:11):
You know those travel tips you were given before were awesome.
I think a little timely, because you know, I was
just traveling for work.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
I was going to ask you, like, because I wondered
if you heard that, if you you know, because here's
the deal. Everyone has a different way of booking travel.
I'm not saying my way is the only way. There
are so many ways. But I figured i'd share because
you know, I've traveled for a long time and that's
kind of like what I go back to over and over.
So I'm sure i'll get some emails with other people's tips,
which of course I welcome. So tell me about Barcelona.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
How was it.

Speaker 8 (18:41):
It was a great trip. I'm sad to be back
in rainy New York. I will say it was actually
my first time at Mobile World Congress. It was a
trade show, you know, I didn't know what to expect
too much going into it. I've covered CEEUS, the Consumer
Electronics Show for many years now, but this was this
was a bit different.

Speaker 7 (18:58):
I feel like it.

Speaker 8 (18:59):
Had more of a focus on mobile technology, as the
name suggests. What was really cool was to see these
products showcased by companies that don't necessarily sell their products
in the US, but are still such amazing innovators.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
Yeah, anytime I go to a show that's not in
the US, you realize just how this stuff is very
worldwide and there's brands that, like I still haven't heard
of in different countries. It's funny because Mobile World Congress
a I've never been. All these years i've covered technology,
I have never ever been to Mobile World Congress. The
reason is we spend so much money covering CS that

(19:35):
I literally am like, my budget is like busted. So
I'm like, I can't really go to Mobile and I'll
be honest. In previous years it has not been that
exciting a lot of you know, there's been some announcements,
but this year there was a lot. So let's just
start with Samsung the Galaxy Ring. This is their new
fitness wearable. What were your impressions of this? They didn't

(19:56):
let anyone take a picture of.

Speaker 8 (19:57):
It, that is true. The only place that you could
see it and like see it published online, was on
display at their booth. I hustled there in the morning
when the show floor opened and it was crowded. Man,
everyone wanted to see the Galaxy Ring up close. I
had to be a little patient to get up to
these display boxes. That they had, but you know, all
that they were really showing at this time were the

(20:19):
three color options in real life they have black, gold, silver,
and then they also had all the nine sizes around
sizes five through thirteen. I believe, I mean, I think
they looked great, but it was more or less a
tease of what's to be coming. I'm sure that we're
going to hear a lot more very soon, and most
signs are pointing to this Galaxy Ring coming out in

(20:41):
the summertime.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
And only for Samsung phones right as far as I heard,
it's not going to be for like other Androids or
even the iPhone right off the bat.

Speaker 8 (20:50):
I don't believe so well, definitely not the iPhone. I
think you know, they're going to be integrating it with
their Galaxy Health app of it kind of like as
an alternative to the Galaxy Watch, which you can technically
use with other devices. But I think with all of
these manufacturers, and we can talk about it a little
bit more with you know, one plus and the one

(21:11):
plus Watch, but we're seeing more and more that you
want to stay within within these Android ecosystems, even you know,
brand to brand.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
So which is so wild because Android's whole point was
that you didn't have to do that. But they've all
learned from Apple how apply things can be and how
sticky it is to have people stick in the same lane.

Speaker 8 (21:31):
Seriously. But at the same time, I think, I think
seeing this smart ring come out is going to push
some other manufacturers to see if their customers would be
interested in a similar alternative. But of course there's also
brand of gnostic solutions like the RR ring that has
really made this smart ring category mainstream.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
Yeah, and it's great and I wore it for a while.
My wife actually got me one for my birthday. And
I have a rule, don't please don't buy me tech
like ever, because like I, you know, I test so
much of it.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
You got me an or a ring.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
I actually ended up returning it, but I did review
it and I loved wearing it, but it made me
really stressed out because whenever I got a bad score,
my day would be ruined. So if I had like
a you know, bad readiness score or whatever. And also
the chunkiness of the ring, Like I really do wish
that they can get these things like thinner, So we'll see.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
Tell me about the bendable phone.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
This is a Motorola concept phone that what's the point
of this thing?

Speaker 8 (22:25):
So they're actually not even calling it a smartphone. It's
called the Motorola Adaptive Display concept. And I think that's
because in many ways it doesn't have a lot of
the normal smartphone features. It doesn't even have a camera
system built in. I mean, when's the last time we
saw a camera a phone with no camera.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
It's been a while.

Speaker 8 (22:44):
I think they're trying to showcase is that your single
quote unquote smartphone can be every type of device you
needed to be. So they first showed this concept off
at Lenovo Tech World. Lenovo is the Motorola parent company,
and that's what they gave us our first tease, showing
it as like a lifestyle device, think in the same

(23:04):
vein as the Motorol eraser. It's pitching you this, you know,
fashionable tech item, and I feel like that's been kind
of carried on to this adaptive display because what's cool
about it. You can bend it around your wrist and
wear it like a smart watch, and it takes this
you know, almost it is ridiculous look ridiculous looking, I

(23:24):
will say that much, but it eliminates the need almost
to have a smart watch and a smartphone. You can
just bend it around your wrist like a slap bracet
from the from the nineties and have your phone right there.
But they also demonstrated ways where it can bend like
a tent, bend backwards, and then also stand up on
its own. And I think what's cool about this compared

(23:44):
to some of the other smartphone concepts we've seen is
a lot of them are based on folding in, like
the Galaxy Z fold five and the Motorole Eraser as
I mentioned, but this one's all about bending out. I
think we're we're going to see something like this not
too far in the future.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah, and it's nice.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Look, I mean, I'm I don't think it's realistic right now,
but it's nice to see these manufacturers pushing the envelope
and trying new things, because if you look at the
iPhone from two thousand and seven to now, it really
hasn't changed very much. And everyone's waiting for Apple to
do something with the you know, foldable iPhone, which you
know we may see finally, but you know, you look
at these other companies like Samsung and OnePlus and Google,

(24:26):
even with the foldables and you know, the huahwehs of
the world, they're all trying new form factors and so
it's nice to see that we're getting this innovation. It
just has to get to a place where it's realistic.
And this phone that you're talking about, you know, I
saw it on your Instagram. You can find Kate by
the way at Kate kozych ko z u c h

(24:46):
on Instagram if you want to see what this looks like.
But it's it's a little big right now. So again
we'll see this evolve, all right. Tell me about the
transparent laptop. This was from Lenovo, another concept, and this
just looked like every movie the laptop I've ever seen
where it's like, you know, Mission Impossible style, right.

Speaker 8 (25:04):
So it's a laptop that has a seventeen point three
inch micro led transparent display that lets you see right
through it to whatever's on the other side of the screen.
It also has these AI features built in that it
can read what's out beyond the screen and even let
you interact with it on your screen. I was doodling
with it at the show. It was pretty cool. So

(25:24):
I actually posted a video of it on TikTok and
it went viral, but a lot of comments were interesting.
It was about the privacy or like lack thereof with
a see through laptop. Lenovo told me there that hypothetically,
because we have to speak in hypotheticals with concept devices,
that there could be this type of polarizing filter on
the back that limits how much you can see if

(25:44):
you're looking in through the back, or perhaps a film
kind of like we saw on LG's transparent olel ed
TV that rolls up and down for optional privacy. So
I think it was kind of this type of device
came at this time to see it if people would
want that or if that would be a concern, and
I think it turns out it is. So if we

(26:05):
see a next iteration of this laptop, I'm calling it
now it's going to have some type of optional way
that people from the outside can't actually see through it.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
What was the use case scenario?

Speaker 8 (26:16):
So the way that I saw it best use was
it has this little camera on the bottom rear facing
part of the laptop. Most laptops the camera is you know,
selfie camera, so you can do video calls, but this
one was on the bottom facing outward, and we had
it pointed at a pot with flowers in it, and
they opened up this AI software that had a butterfly

(26:40):
flying and overlaid on this display that landed on a
spot on the flower perfectly as though it was like
in real life landing on that. So I think I
think there's you know, a huge design benefit to that,
and also for designers. They didn't confirm this to me necessarily,
but the track pad and keyboard of the laptop is

(27:00):
all a touch screen. It reminds me very much of
a whack home tablet that you use for drawing. You
could have your laptop screen looking out at you know
whatever it may be the flower pot in this example,
and you could start tracing it on your screen. If
you're a graphic designer, how cool is that, Like you
see it right in front of you. It's a built
in tracer. I think that that was probably my favorite

(27:21):
application of using it.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
That is cool, and I just want I'll take a
transparent tablet one of these days. It's just cool.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
It looks cool, and I definitely want like the edges
lit up, you know, so it's like it's like blue
on the edges or something. But it's just I love
all this stuff, Kate Kozych, We're gonna leave it there.
How can folks follow you online? And what do you
typically post about?

Speaker 8 (27:40):
Oh yeah, I'd write all about you know, wearables, conceptual tech,
anything that's really trending online these days. I'm at social
media at Kate Kozych. Except on TikTok, i am Kate
underscore Kozych. Of course, I'm also at tomsguide dot com,
where you can find my stories and some more of
my MWC coverage.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Awesome, Kate Kozych, Managing editor, Tom's Guy, thanks so much
for joining me today to talk about Mobile World Congress. Okay,
all right, Triple eight Rich one O one eight eight
eight seven four to two four one zero one. More
rich on Tech coming your way right after this. Welcome
back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out
with you talking technology at Triple eight Rich one oh

(28:21):
one eight eight eight seven four to two four one
zero one. Let's go to John and Carl's bad. John,
You're on with Rich All Rich.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
Hi.

Speaker 9 (28:33):
I have a number of Google speakers throughout my home,
and whenever I tell it to play music on Pandora,
I get ads on Pandora and I know that there's
a I think there's a Pandora Plus.

Speaker 5 (28:50):
It doesn't have ads, you.

Speaker 9 (28:52):
Know, paid subscription, but I don't know how to get
that onto my Google Home That okay.

Speaker 1 (28:59):
So you would actually go to so are you signed
up with Pandora? Yeah, okay, so you're signed up. So
I would go to the Pandora website and go there,
and you should see a thing for Pandora Plus and
it's five dollars a month for let's see what they
give you. Yeah, ad free, ten dollars a month is

(29:22):
a little bit more for let's see what do you
get for that? Make and share playlists okay? And unlimited skips. Oh,
I guess you get unlimited skips with both. But for
five bucks a month, it's pretty much what you need.
If you just want to get rid of the ads,
you're gonna pay five dollars a month. So just go
to pandora dot com, log in, and then click upgrade.

(29:43):
And once you upgrade, if you're not already linked up
to the count on your Google Home you just open
up the Google Home app and under the Google Home
app there should be some settings and usually under the
settings you can go to services and it says works
with Google, and there's a sorry, let's see music there

(30:03):
it is, and so you go to music and then
you will have your different music services. So it says,
you know, this works with everything, YouTube, Spotify, iHeart Apple Music, Pandora, Deezer,
and you just link up. If your Pandora is already
linked up, it's once you sign up for the Pandora Plus,
it's going to follow over. If you're not linked up,
then you will just link those up. You're gonna log

(30:24):
into your Pandora account and it will be ad free
the next time you do it. So that's the easiest way.
So once again, go to the website, upgrade to Pandora Plus,
put in your card number, all that good stuff, and
then go to the Google Home app and go into
your settings and then go under services it says music,
and that's where you're going to link up your Pandora.

(30:44):
It should already be linked up if you're already listening
to music on Pandora through there, it should just follow
follow through. But if you're not, then that's the way
you'll link it up with the new account. All right, John,
send me an email rich on tech dot tv and
let me know if that worked, Let's go to Jamie
in North Hollywood. Jamie, what's up?

Speaker 6 (31:03):
Hey?

Speaker 4 (31:04):
What's going on?

Speaker 7 (31:05):
Rich?

Speaker 10 (31:05):
How you doing?

Speaker 2 (31:06):
I'm doing excellent.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
It's amazing that Pandora is still a hit, and I
think I know why. It really is still good. That
algorithm just is very very good.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Oh, it is good. It is good.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
Yeah, I want to ask you. I want to ask
you about well. Actually, this morning I was ordering a
breakfast and I didn't couldn't understand why I couldn't delete
a credit card on my Apple wallet. But what that
wasn't really why I called. If you want to tackle
that too, that's cool. But I actually called because I
found this cool shortcut on my iPhone and I can't
put it on It's on my work phone. I can't

(31:37):
put it on a regular phone. But it's inaccessibility and
I double tapped the back of it and it brings
up the camera so I can bring up my camera
as quick as I possibly can.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
That's that's built into the uh is does it have
to be a shortcut? I thought you can just go
into accessibility and do the triple tap on the back.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
Oh okay, I wasn't sure about it.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
Yeah, if you go into let's see, I got to
find where this is. So if you go into accessibility
under settings, and there's usually a let's see, I gotta
I've got to find it. But it's inaccessibility.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
I expect you to tackle it immediately because you know,
I know, you have your your your Google people to
you know, in your data rooms and your you know people,
people who have that knowledge in a blog or something.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
But it's called backtap. That's that's what it's called.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
So if you go to settings and then accessibility, it's
called and then touch, and then there's a thing called backtap.
And if you go into backtap, let's see here it's
right now.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Minds off.

Speaker 1 (32:36):
I don't use this because I feel like I would
just be tapping my phone way too often. But you
can set a double tap or a triple tap. And
so with a double tap you can do really anything
you want. You could do an action button, you can
do app switcher, you can do camera control center, flashlight,
home lock rotation, lock screen notification center.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
I mean, there's so many things you can do. You
can activate Siri.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
So let me do this. I'm gonna actually turn this
on while I'm talking to you. So I'm gonna turn
on camera and you can also set a triple tap
as well. So now I've set camera as my double tap.
So now I've got my phone in my hand. I
double tapped the back of my phone and oh, there
it goes. It launched the camera. It's actually not bad,
so that's kind of cool. So again, if you want

(33:19):
to turn this on, Jamie, go into Settings Accessibility and
then you'll go into touch and then backtap. It's all
the way down to the bottom. You can set a
double tap or a triple tap, and there you have it.
Good question. Thank you Jamie for calling today from North Hollywood.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
Wow. See, I mean I knew that was possible.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
I never actually tried it because I said, oh, I'll
never use this feature, But now that I know it's there,
I know it's like one more way to just activate
something quickly on your phone. So I woke up this
morning to a bunch of emails about a privacy alert
when it comes to the new journal app on the iPhone,
and I guess someone on Instagram, TikTok, whatever social media

(34:02):
posted alert. If you have an iPhone, this is important.
After downloading the latest update, there's a new feature called journaling,
and if you have your settings, the default is you
are discoverable by others. It's toggled on and it lets
anyone near you know your full name and exactly where
you're located. What Apple is letting anyone see exactly where

(34:23):
everyone else is located. Turn this toggle off. This is
messed up big time. Share with your friends if their iPhone.
Very scary stuff. So of course I go into the settings.
I'm like, really, Apple, I don't think they would do that.
So I go into the settings and I educate myself
on what this feature is all about. And I posted
this on my Instagram at richon Tech if you want
to read what I had to say. But the bottom

(34:45):
line is no, Apple is not sharing your full name
and they're not sharing your location with everyone. What they
are doing is they are using signals from the iPhones
around you. So when you are in a group setting
or you are out with friends and it notices that
your contacts are near you, it is using that to
help figure out what it should suggest for you to

(35:07):
journal about. It sounds scary, but it's not. It is
not saving this information, It is not uploading this information
to the cloud. Let me give you the best example.
Let's say you go to lunch every day at a
fast food restaurant by your work. Right when you go
to your journal app on the iPhone. Your iPhone's not
gonna say, hey, do you want to journal about that

(35:28):
whopper you ate for lunch today again for the third time. No,
because it doesn't make any sense. It's not unique. But
if they see that you went to a lunch and
there are a couple of friends around you with their
iPhones and it says, hey, do you want to journal
about that lunch that you had at this special place,
that's when it will put that in there. Yes, you
can turn this feature off. There is no privacy issue

(35:50):
here whatsoever. But if you want to turn it off,
at least you're educated about it. Check it out Instagram
at Richontech. All right, that wraps up our number one.
More of your calls at Triple eight rich one O
one coming up next. Welcome back to rich on Tech.
Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology. The

(36:10):
phone line for the show is triple eight rich one
oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four
one zero one. You can also email the website richon
Tech dot TV. Hit contact up at the top. You
can find me on social media. I am at rich
on tech, on Instagram, X and Facebook. Coming up this hour,

(36:34):
Leo Roberts of the Laptop Elf Project is going to
discuss how to make an old computer feel new again
with Chrome os Flex. This is a free operating system
from Google that pretty much turns your old computer into
a modern Chromebook. But we'll get all the details on
the pros and cons from Leo later in this hour.

(36:56):
And speaking of X, doctor Annie wrote on X Expedia
allows for sort by distance. It is definitely in sort
sort by price, sort by distance. Oh, I guess they
said hotels dot com still does it. Well, maybe the
app doesn't do it anymore, but I used to use
hotels dot Com for that feature. And yeah, Expedia, by

(37:16):
the way, they own a lot of stuff. This was
I believe this was spun off from Microsoft. I don't
think they're still owned by Microsoft, but they were started
by Microsoft back in the day. And here's what Expedia owns.
Expedia dot Com, Hotels dot Com, Vrbo, the airbnb competitor.
I did not realize that Travelocity, remember that one had

(37:38):
a little gnome guy hot Wire. I used to love
hot Wire that was a big competitive price line orbits
again brand from back in the day eBookers.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
I haven't heard of that one. Cheap tickets.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
I've heard of that. Car rentals dot Com have not
heard of that. Trevago too interesting. That's the you see that.
I feel like that's more geared towards the European market.
But I remember seeing ads in the US for that.
But I was trying to remember when you said Expedia.
I remembered another brand from back in the day, and
this is going to be a total blast from the past.

(38:12):
Microsoft in Karda, And if you're of a certain age,
this was a digital encyclopedia published by Microsoft. It came
on a CD ROM or a DVD and you bought
this thing and it had a bunch of articles about stuff,
and I think later it was online. But Microsoft in
Karda nineteen ninety three, according to UH Wikipedia nineteen ninety

(38:35):
three to two thousand and nine. And this was like
the way you got information. It was like after the
World Book encyclopedia that was in your house, you went
to this, and then you went to Wikipedia. And now
you just don't. We don't seek out information anymore. We
just go to TikTok. I'm just kidding. Please do not
send me the angry emails. Yes, kids still can go

(38:56):
for information places you don't have to. You don't have
to send me the email. Just shortcut that. Eighty eight
Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to
two four one zero one. Steve writes in on email, Hey, Rich,
I keep getting a notification to update my Google Chrome
browser from a company called hot Cleaner, and I'm wondering
if this is legit.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
Thank you, Steve. No, Steve, this is totally bogus.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
I believe that this is a malware extension or some
kind of extension that you do not need. So if
you are seeing stuff on your Chrome web browser that
seems a little wonky, you can go through Oh yeah,
I just went to this website. Don't go to these
websites like I do. I go to test, but don't

(39:41):
do it. So what you want to do is you
want to go to your settings, and you want to
go to settings on Chrome, and that's in the upper
right hand corner. It looks like three little dots, and
then you want to go to extensions and then manage extensions,
and then once you're in here, it'll show you all
of your extensions, and I've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen,

(40:05):
I've got sixteen extensions. If you do not recognize something
that is in there, or you're not using something that's
in there, remove it. If you don't want to remove
it completely right away, there is a little toggle switch
you can disable it, and that way it doesn't run.
So an extension on Chrome is kind of like a
little piece of helper software and it could be really useful.

(40:27):
You can add things like You're a read it later,
or a screenshotting tool, or something like honey that can
help you get better prices. But there are also malicious
ones or ones that pretend to be helpers but they're
really not. They hijack your browser and they try to
make it do things that you don't want it to do. Namely,

(40:48):
they will inject advertising on your web pages, or they
will change your default search engine to something that is
more beneficial to them. So again, if you want to
check your extensions on Chrome, go into settings three little
dots upper right hand corner. Extensions. Manage extensions, get rid
of any that you don't know, or don't use or
don't recognize. There is a new smart watch from one plus.

(41:13):
This is the one plus watch too. I am wearing
it as we speak. It is probably the new Android
smart watch to be. One plus made a smart watch
about three years ago. It was great, but it was
not full featured. It only ran their own operating system.
This one now runs a version of ware OS, which

(41:33):
is Google's you know, mobile operating system for watches. So
the cool thing about this is it looks like a
classic time piece. So if you like a nice big
screen that looks like an actual watch, not a square watch,
it looks like a watch. The basics are here. It's
got a nice big screen, like I said, it's got
good water resistance. It's got great fitness, sleep and stress tracking.

(41:57):
The unique aspect is how this battery can last up
to one hundred hours. How does it do that? Well,
it's got a hybrid operating system. It's got two operating
systems in salt. It's got that old one I told
you about. Not old, but it's got an operating system
that does the basics like the time, and then it's
got a more intensive processor and an operating system to

(42:19):
do the apps. So again, you can get up to
twelve days of battery life on this thing if you
put it in power save mode, which gives you just
basic functionality. So if you put it into power Save,
you can just have the time on your watch and
some other basic features and you can go twelve days
without charging it. So the downsides to this watch. I

(42:41):
do think it's very snappy, it's well designed. I've really
liked this thing, but one plus is only guaranteeing software
update for two years on this watch when it's time
to recharge. Really excellent. One plus gets the award for
having the best smart watch charging adapter.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yet. It is a tiny little puck.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
It's square, and the cool thing about it, and the
thing that they did that nobody else has done before,
is that it is detachable, so you can use any
USBC cable to plug this thing in.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
So what does that mean? All you have to do
is throw.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
This tiny, little maybe one by one inch puck into
your travel bag and when you get to where you
need to go, you can plug your standard USBC adapter
into this and charge your watch and it charges really
really fast. One plus has kind of made a name
for itself on fast charging. I averaged about three to
four days of battery life. Now you might be saying, rich,

(43:33):
you just said this thing has one hundred hours or
twelve days, How are you only getting three to four hours. Well,
if you want to use this thing to its maximum,
you're going to get three to four days. Now, that's
still double what any other smart watch on the market does.
Most smart watches are doing about a day, maybe a
day and a half at the most. But if you
want sort of all the use of this thing with

(43:54):
running and fitness and sleep tracking and music offline, all
those things, I'd say about three to four days.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
Now.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
The one thing I don't necessarily like is that OnePlus
has their own app. It's called o Health, and this
is an app that they develop themselves and is their
fitness app. So it's their version of Fitbit. It's kind
of like on the iPhone you have to use you know,
Apple's fitness app to an activity app to h to
use that with the Apple Watch.

Speaker 2 (44:20):
Same thing here.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
The cool thing is is that it does track a
lot of stuff, over one hundred activities with very impressive detail,
and it can get pretty specific.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
There is like there's all.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
There's a reminder right now sorry, I've got to take
out the trash. There is all kinds of things like
they have, like I mean stuff you can't like disc
throwing and whatever. You know, take whatever. You can track
anything you want. The watch faces are amazing. They gave
you so many great watch faces that you can that

(44:52):
you can customize. The main thing to know about the
watch faces if you put third party complications. So let's
say you have a favorite a like all trails, and
you want to have like some sort of complication on
your watch screen. A complication is kind of like a
little widget. You can't necessarily do that unless you really
want to cut down in your battery life. So the
watch faces to get the maximum battery life, you have

(45:14):
to use the ones they have, the complications they have,
and a lot of stuff is covered like weather and
your battery life and your step count.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
They have a lot your heart rate.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
It's just if you want to get really fancy and
you have a specific app like on the Apple Watch,
you can put any complication on there and your battery
life is pretty much going to be the same. The
thing is with this, it's going to be a little
bit different. Downsides again, notifications can be slow to appear
when you raise your wrist. The screen can be dim
and bright light, and I feel like the vibrations on
this thing are really weak compared to other smart watches,

(45:44):
especially the Apple Watch. I hate to keep comparing everything
to the Apple Watch, but it's kind of the gold
standard of wearables. And while I like how Apple is
a little bit more open with their ecosystem with their watch,
you know, everyone's built around the Apple Watch as well,
so it does a lot of stuff and there are
many apps available for it. The other thing I wanted

(46:04):
to mention is that with the watch faces, they have
a bunch of different ones. I think they're all fine.
I just think that, you know, the dim part in
the in the bright light could be a little bit
leaves a little bit to be desired. Like sometimes when
I was on my run, I just wanted to glance
at the watch and I'd have to like lance at
it for a while, wait for it to come to
life so I can actually see what's on there. But

(46:25):
I think overall this has already gotten its first software update.
This is a great watch, the one plus Watch two.
Once again, it's three hundred dollars. It's available on Monday,
March days. I think it's Monday, March fourth. And if
you trade in any watch in any condition, they'll give
you fifty dollars off. There is no cellular version of

(46:47):
this watch available. All right, rich on Tech dot TV.
If you want a link to the one plus watch.
More of your calls coming up. Triple eight Rich one
oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two
four one zero one. This is rich on Tech. Welcome
back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out
with you. If you notice, it's an all eighties weekend

(47:12):
here on the rich On Tech Show.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
Hope you like it.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
If you're listening on the podcast, well just imagine all
the eighties songs you know and love, and there they are.
So we talked about the backtap feature on the iPhone
and it is also available on the Pixel and the Samsung.
So on the Pixel they call it quick Tap, and
you can find it under system and then gestures, so

(47:37):
System settings, System and then gestures and then it says
quick tap to start actions and you can do all
kinds of things. This is the idea where you can
tap the back of your phone on iPhone. It's under
Accessibility Pixel. It's sort of built in as a feature.
It's called quick Tap and then I don't even know
I had it. I have this turned on. It opens
up my notesap and then on Samsung can get the feature,

(48:00):
but you do need to download an app called Goodlock,
which is kind of like their app for all things
customization on the Samsung phone. So if you really want
to customize your Samsung phone, download Goodlock and they have
that is from Samsung, but they just don't bundle it
with the phone because it gives you, like, really a

(48:23):
lot of control over what your phone can do. Triple
eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven four
to two four one zero one. Everything that I mentioned here,
by the way, is on the show notes. You can
always find them by going to the website rich on
tech dot tv and up at the top you can
hit the big red banner that says heard it on

(48:45):
the radio.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Let's see, uh, let's see. Where are we going here?
Andrew and Moore Park, Andrew, you got a question.

Speaker 4 (48:53):
Yeah, Happy Saturday. Do you want your life to be
more complicated?

Speaker 6 (48:57):
Never?

Speaker 4 (48:58):
I don't know. I don't know anybody who does. I
think the same twelve year old who's decided to put
gray text on a light background at Apple is the
same person who might have decided to call things on
watch complications. What's wrong with the word icons like everything else?

Speaker 1 (49:15):
I agree, And I never even heard that term, honestly
until Apple came out with the Apple Watch and they
called it a complication. And I'm like, ah, and of
course I'm trying not to look stupid, so I'm like
not really asking, like wait what, But here's the thing.
So this is a watchmaking term. I think it originates
from the old days of watches, like back in like

(49:37):
it looks like almost like a French term. But anything
that was adding increased complexity to a watch, like the
date a stopwatch or moon phase indicator required additional gears, springs,
and other intricate parts. And so that's why they called
it a complication.

Speaker 4 (49:54):
It makes sense.

Speaker 1 (49:55):
Yeah, but yeah, I agree. For nowadays, we don't really
need that because to me, it was just.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
Can I put my covered wagon?

Speaker 1 (50:03):
Well, you look, Andrew, I'm not. I'm not here to
change the entire watchmaking industry. But until they come up
with a better term, I would call them what would
you call it?

Speaker 4 (50:14):
Kons icon all the other icons on everything.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
Else, But they're sort of interactive, so maybe it's like
a widget. How about widget?

Speaker 4 (50:20):
Well, so, so are the icons on your desktop PC,
Orn Mac?

Speaker 1 (50:25):
Yeah, I guess in this case they're they're displaying real
time information. Thanks for the call, Andrew, appreciate it. I agree.
I mean, look, it's one of these things where at
least we can explain what it is and now you
know so. But yes, we want things more simple, not
not more complicated. Jerry in a New Jersey adjacent Jerry, you're.

Speaker 11 (50:45):
On with Rich Hell really in Pennsylvania, but i'd probly
get your attention being a boy.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
Yeah, well you did, because I'm like, what does New
Jersey adjacent mean?

Speaker 2 (50:54):
But okay, you snuck in here? What's up?

Speaker 11 (50:57):
Anyhow? At my time, I listened to a podcast on
my Android phone using a third party app as opposed
to the radio stations apps because mine is superior. And
I used to listen to ky W and w PHT
here in Philadelphia. But since they're an all of these stations,

(51:23):
they've changed the r L. I used to be able
to go rate click on the web page and do
a little inspect inspect and I used to be able
to get the r L out, but apparently it's not
there anymore, or they've changed it, or they've hidden it.
How can I find this?

Speaker 1 (51:41):
Well, I have a feeling that they're doing this on purpose.
And the reason is because back in the day, you know,
the signal would be streamed and it was pretty simple
and it was just you know, it was just literally
a streaming.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
Signal of the station.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Now I have a feeling everything is much more on
the up and up because of ratings and because of
digital numbers and so, and also the way that they
insert ads into these feeds.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
So that is my feeling.

Speaker 1 (52:12):
And yeah, I was gonna say you might be able
to find a stream by right clicking the website and
seeing what the actual URL is for the streaming link,
But like you said, you already tried that, and so
I think you're you're not gonna be able to get
this link unless you maybe contacted the radio station and
asked an engineer like, hey, a, is there a streaming

(52:35):
link front facing that the public can access? But I
think that's probably the answer. Most of these radio stations
have either gone to apps, or they have gone to
you know, a mega app, or they're on something like
tune in, So that is how they prefer their listeners
tune in if they're doing it digitally, I think for
reasons that I just mentioned, So I don't think that

(52:56):
you're gonna find it unless you find it on a
forum somewhere that someone else was able to figure out.
But I think that these streams are much more dynamic
than they ever were, And it's kind of funny. I
work for a radio organization, so maybe there's someone that
can answer it. But I understand back in the day, yes,
these were all very simple links that you would just
pop into any sort of player that could handle real

(53:19):
time streaming links and it would it would figure those out.
Nowadays it is all through the app. So Jerry, I
don't think I have a good answer for you, as
much as I love you because you're New Jersey adjacent
eight to eight rich one o one eight eight eight
seven four to two four one zero one.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
This is rich on Tech.

Speaker 1 (53:38):
Welcome back to rich On Tech. 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. Joining me now is Leo Roberts of
the Laptop Elf Project. Laptop Elf Project collects Windows and

(53:59):
Mac laptop, all kinds of smart devices, working and non working,
and they will actually refurbish them and then donate them
to teachers and nonprofits who help low income families and individuals.
And they have done all kinds of great stuff over
the years. Leo, thanks so much for joining me.

Speaker 7 (54:20):
Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Rich thanks for
having me.

Speaker 1 (54:23):
So what we're talking about today is one of the
things that you might do to a computer to make
an older computer feel new again, and that is installed
Chrome os flex.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
So can you explain what Chrome os flex is?

Speaker 12 (54:36):
Sure, it's basically a Linux operating system that can be
used on PCs and max.

Speaker 7 (54:45):
It's designed to be fast, secure, and easy to manage.

Speaker 12 (54:49):
In other words, it's turning your old computer into a
Chromebook which will be faster, more secure, and infinite updateable.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
And what kind of devices can you install this on?

Speaker 12 (55:05):
You can install this on both Mac and Windows PCs.

Speaker 1 (55:10):
Okay, and you've done this now because we talked about this.
We've been talking about this for like a year. It's
been out for a while, your year and a half.
How is Yeah, how's it advanced? Like explained to me?
Because when it first came out. You said it was
a little rough around the edges.

Speaker 7 (55:24):
Well, Number one, it's available on more devices, it's much
more universally appliable.

Speaker 12 (55:33):
They have dramatically improved the installation process. It used to
be a little bit techy, and now they've made it very,
very simple to.

Speaker 7 (55:47):
Install and use.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
Can you explain that process a little bit, because if
someone's listening, they're thinking, Hmm, I've got an old laptop.

Speaker 2 (55:55):
I wonder if I should do this. Explain what that
process might look like.

Speaker 10 (55:59):
Sure.

Speaker 12 (56:00):
Assuming you're using either Chrome Browser or Edge or Safari
on the on the Mac, you download as.

Speaker 7 (56:11):
An extension, the Chromebook Recovery Utility.

Speaker 12 (56:17):
That's an extension that you can get from the Google
Play Store or the Apple App Store. And when that
opens up, and you have previously a eight gigabyte or
a greater USB drive, you open up that utility and
it asks you to pick the model, and you pick

(56:37):
Chromos Flex and asks you to pick the version it's
you say Chromos Flex and click start and it will
begin constructing a USB key that you will use to
boot whatever computer you're trying to install it on, and

(56:57):
it guides you through that installation.

Speaker 7 (57:00):
Shouldn't step by step.

Speaker 12 (57:02):
The beauty about this is that once you've booted your
computer to that USB drive, you have a working, functional,
Chrome os Flex computer, so you can test it. You
can test all the features, you can make sure you
like it, and once you determine you've done that, then
you can click install and it will install on your computer.

Speaker 1 (57:24):
So you can effectively run this operating system off the
USB drive to test it out, test, run it, see
if you like it, and then if you do, you
can actually install.

Speaker 7 (57:31):
It now exactly and it makes no changes to your computer.

Speaker 1 (57:35):
But just to be clear, once you do install it,
you will lose all everything that's on your computer before,
so you do have to get that stuff backed up.

Speaker 12 (57:42):
If you have old stuff on your computer that you
want saved, you must do a backup because this will
completely wipe out your hard disk and install chromes Flex.

Speaker 2 (57:54):
What kind of applications can you run on Chromos Flex?

Speaker 12 (57:59):
Oh, there are so many. You have access to the
Chrome web Store. You can do things like photo editing
with the Pixel photo editor. You can also use Adobe
Express Online. You can use Google Docs where you can
do spreadsheets, documents, PowerPoint presentations. You have access to Microsoft

(58:21):
Office Online, where you get word Excel and PowerPoint. There
are hundreds of online games you can play, and if
you're a little bit techy, you can actually install Linux
on your new computer new old computer and install all
the apps that you can install with Linux, and.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
Of course it comes with all of the basic Google
apps like Chrome. Like the Chrome web browser is pretty
much there, so you can do anything you could do
on the web. Check your email, go to YouTube.

Speaker 12 (58:54):
You can do absolutely anything you can do on the web,
and you can even do so work offline.

Speaker 7 (59:01):
For example, if you're working in Google docs and online
and then you have your computer somewhere where you don't
have access, your recent documents will be available to you.
You can work offline, and once you're reconnected to the internet,
those documents will be added or modified.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
Yeah, I mean, you just can't install Windows apps because
it's not a Windows computer.

Speaker 7 (59:25):
So not Windows apps.

Speaker 12 (59:27):
But you will find that the Linux apps are almost
identical to the Windows apps. You can do Firefox, you
can do almost every app that's available.

Speaker 7 (59:37):
For Windows is available for Linux. But that just takes
a little extra work and most likely won't be needed
by by most people.

Speaker 1 (59:47):
So what about like hardware peripherals like let's say have
a scanner that I like to use with my old laptop, Like,
will that still work?

Speaker 7 (59:55):
Almost for sure? However, these are the kind of things
you have to test. There's a list that.

Speaker 12 (01:00:02):
Google publishes of approved models you can check to see
if your model is there. However, I have found dozens
of models that are not there and everything works perfectly.
They do not guarantee that peripherals will work, but I
have found absolutely no problems. The one problem that I

(01:00:24):
have found on Max is occasionally, depending on what Mac
model you're putting this on, sometimes the camera doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
Well, that's kind of a problem.

Speaker 12 (01:00:35):
I mean, I guess, and of course if if you
find it that's the case, then you're not going and
you need the camera.

Speaker 7 (01:00:43):
You're going to have to do something else.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
Okay, what about an external camera? Would that work? Like
if you've plugged in a webcam?

Speaker 7 (01:00:51):
Possibly?

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
Okay, possibly.

Speaker 7 (01:00:54):
These are not guaranteed.

Speaker 12 (01:00:56):
However, I have found that every peripheral I have plugged
in to, most of the ones I've built, have worked
just fine.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
So you've done a lot of these installations. Does it
really make an old computer feel new again?

Speaker 12 (01:01:13):
It's absolutely remarkable. It speeds up the computer. I'm going
to say immeasurably, but of course you can do benchmark
tsks to see it becomes much more snappy, much more responsive,
and you have a contemporary operating system.

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
And one that is free of viruses and malware most
of the time.

Speaker 12 (01:01:37):
Right exactly, it's essentially impossible to get a virus on
one of these chrom os Flix systems. If somehow you
do something that messes up, or you don't like what's
going on, or it seems to have a problem, you
can do what's called a power wash. It wipes out

(01:01:59):
the everything on your computer and reinstalls it as a
new computer, so you're you're protected that way.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
Man, they've really thought of everything with this.

Speaker 7 (01:02:10):
They have, indeed, so.

Speaker 12 (01:02:13):
I'm sorry when it first came out they did not
have the power wash capability, and now they do.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
That's amazing. And so finally, just about thirty seconds here,
who do you recommend does this?

Speaker 5 (01:02:24):
Like?

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
Who do you think this would be good for?

Speaker 12 (01:02:27):
Anybody who can get on the internet and read an
email and click on a website can do this.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
And if you have an old computer kind of laying
around that's not getting much use. I mean, this is
a great.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
You know, gives it new life in a way that's simple, easy,
and you know you'll get some more use out of it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
And if you have a computer that you want to
give a loved one, maybe you want to do this
to it first.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
All right, exactly right, Leo Roberts of the Laptop Elf Project.
You can find out more on their Facebook page. Just
go to facebook dot com slash the Laptop Elf Project
and you can learn how to you know, donate an
old computer to them if you don't need it anymore,
or if you want to make it work your own.

(01:03:12):
It's just a good website to know about, or if
you need a comput.

Speaker 12 (01:03:16):
In addition, we take phones, tablets, monitors, all laptops, so
we really appreciate any donation your listeners have.

Speaker 1 (01:03:25):
Awesome Leo Roberts, thanks so much for joining me today
of the Laptop Elf Project. Coming up more of your
calls at Triple eight rich one O one eight eight
eight seven four to two four one zero one. As
always linked on my website, rich on Tech dot TV.

Speaker 2 (01:03:41):
We'll be right back. Welcome back to rich on Tech.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Rich DeMuro 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 one. Google Maps
has a new feature called Glansible directions. This puts the
directions right on your lock screen. Now they've had some
implementations of this in the past, but this is a

(01:04:10):
more direct implementation. You can see your updated ETA and
your next turn info from the route overview when your
phone is open, but then when your phone is locked,
you'll be able to still see your directions. Now, Apple
Maps has done this for a long time, and the
way Google Maps has gotten around it is they've sent
notifications to your screen, but now it's integrated with the

(01:04:33):
live activities and so this will be much much better
on the iPhone side of things, and on Android it
will just show persistent notification with your directions. So this
works for walking, biking, and public transit. It updates automatically
if you take a different route, and it is rolling
out right now on Android and iOS. So basically this
makes it easier to follow your directions without unlocking your

(01:04:55):
phone every single time. So if you want to turn
this on, you have to turn it on it it's
not on by default for some odd reason. Open up
Google Maps I both iPhone or the Android, tap your
profile picture in the upper right hand corner and it
says Settings. You tap Settings and then under Navigation scroll
and you'll see it says glanceible directions while navigating, and

(01:05:19):
you can turn that on and it will show up.
It has not shown up on my iPhone just yet.
The setting has, but the actual glanceible has not. So
it is rolling out. So if you want to get
prepared for it, and when you next time you do
Google Maps directions, it will show up. You can turn
on that toggle and you'll be pleasantly surprised again. Maps, Settings, Navigation,

(01:05:42):
Glanceible Directions while navigating. Let's go to Robert in Data Point, California. Robert,
you're on with Rich.

Speaker 6 (01:05:50):
Yes, thank you. I'm trying to update to a new
operating system for my Minimac. I'm running a Mahabi right
now and I need to go to Sonoma at least
and it tells me that one, I don't have enough room,

(01:06:12):
and I have an external hard drive Samsung a terrabyte.
But yet when if I try it, I can't seem
to It tells me I can't use that hard drive
for doing that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
It tells you you can't use the hard drive for
doing what to install the.

Speaker 6 (01:06:28):
Outloading what I have on the computer so that I
have enough room to install Sonoma.

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
Okay, you want to move stuff to this hard drive?

Speaker 6 (01:06:38):
Yeah, I have photos on it. It seems to be automatic,
but because that's the majority of my memory, it is photos.
So I'm trying to find out why doesn't it Like,
why can't I just download the whole computer to my
terrabyte and then load it with all the new with

(01:06:58):
a new program.

Speaker 2 (01:06:59):
You should be able to do. You know how this
hard hard drive is formatted?

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
No?

Speaker 6 (01:07:04):
I don't, and I think that's the issue.

Speaker 11 (01:07:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:07:08):
One of the prompts I had that said you will
lose everything on your external hard drive if you try
to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:15):
Yep, and that's what's going to happen.

Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
So first off, on your Mac, you can go you
can go onto your finder and select this hard drive
and you can do a command I to see how
that is formatted. Does it show up on your Mac
at all when.

Speaker 2 (01:07:32):
You plug it in?

Speaker 6 (01:07:34):
Yes, it does show that the external hard drive.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
So it should read you know, most hard drives, but
it may not be able to write to this drive
if it's in a format that it doesn't like. So
there are some formats that were, you know, incompatible in
the past, but nowadays if you use a Mac OS,
if you're only are you only using this hard drive
with a Mac?

Speaker 6 (01:07:54):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
Yeah, So there's a there's a utility on the Mac
called disc utility. Have you used that?

Speaker 7 (01:08:00):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:08:00):
Okay? So do you know how to find that on
your Mac? No? Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
So if you press the uh the search icon in
the upper right hand corner, if you have that, or
you can use command space bar to bring it up,
that'll bring up spotlight.

Speaker 2 (01:08:14):
On the Mac.

Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
You can type in disc utility and if you type
in disc utility, you should see this drive on the
left hand side of your computer screen and you can
select that drive and it will tell you how it is.

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
Format it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:30):
Now, the format that I like, if you're only using
on a Mac OS is mac OS. I believe it's
extended journaled and so you format it like that. Now,
do you have stuff on this drive that you need?

Speaker 11 (01:08:43):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (01:08:44):
Okay, Well therein lies the issue because.

Speaker 6 (01:08:46):
You can't Yeah, it's all photographs.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
Yeah, you can't format that if you if you have that,
you know if you need to save those? Okay?

Speaker 6 (01:08:55):
Is there another external hard drive. I could use it.
I could just plug and play to basically get me
out of the situation.

Speaker 1 (01:09:02):
Yeah, I mean any drive you can go on if
you know, you can go to best Buy or you know,
Staples and buy any hard drive and format it. You
can look for a Mac icon on the drive to
see because not all drives are formatted for Mac out
of the box. Most of them are formatted, you know.
It just depends on the drive. But you can go
get another hard drive and plug it in. If it

(01:09:23):
doesn't work, you can format it with this disc utility
and you would just press Once it's in, you would
just do erase and it would say that you can,
you know, format it in the in the format that
would work on the Mac. So I'm trying. I wish
I had a drive to plug in it. It's like
over my in my bag and I can't run over there.
But I would walk you through it a little bit more.

Speaker 2 (01:09:43):
But that's you.

Speaker 1 (01:09:44):
Basically, another hard drive would solve this pretty simply. Hard
drives are about fifty nine bucks. You said this, you
know you can easily copy stuff over you How are
you going to install the new operating system?

Speaker 2 (01:09:56):
You just need to make room on your drive to.

Speaker 6 (01:09:58):
Do that room, then I could just get to Sonoma
and you know, then you work your way up the
chain to get to the most current. And another issue
I have is, you know, I have that bug that
comes up that says your McAfee is expired, and.

Speaker 2 (01:10:17):
Yeah, get rid of that, you can.

Speaker 6 (01:10:18):
I can't. I've tried to encapsulate it and deny it
and I can't get rid of it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:22):
Well, you might consider what you might consider doing is
just doing a full clean install of this entire operating system.
And if you look up online, there's a especially if
you're having you know, if you're getting all these like
error messages and stuff and like these little fragments of
old files, you might want to do a clean installation.
You could do what's called a internet recovery. So if

(01:10:45):
you look up clean installation of mac OS, you should
get the mac Apple support that will tell you how
to erase and reinstall mac OS.

Speaker 2 (01:10:57):
And there's a couple of ways of doing it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:58):
Basically, your computer as a version of the operating system
on there that you can restore it from, or you
can download it from the internet and do it that way.
Or you can make what's called a bootable USB drive
to do that, and the app I like for that,
by the way, is called disk Drill that can help
you do that. Giving you a lot of suggestions here,
but the bottom line is if you can try to

(01:11:20):
figure out how to get a new hard drive carry
these files over to that hard drive to free up
space on yours, you can do the upgrade that way.
But I would recommend a clean install. That is what
I think would be best for this computer, especially because
it sounds like it's a little bit older. But again
disk Drill, and the other app I mentioned is called
disc Utility. You are listening to rich On Tech. Welcome

(01:11:46):
back to rich On Tech. 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. Coming up this hour, we're gonna talk about
chord cutting. We've got Richard Schneider, president and founder of

(01:12:07):
Antenna's Direct. This is a company that I featured many
many years ago on the Today Show many years ago,
and they've been making some really cool antennas ever since.
And uh yeah, we'll talk to Richard about the latest
trends in chord cutting. So if you're curious about the

(01:12:29):
latest with over the air, or you want to cut
the cord, or you just want to know about antenna's
in general.

Speaker 2 (01:12:36):
We'll get some good info from him.

Speaker 1 (01:12:39):
Phone line for the show Triple eight Rich one one
eighty eight seven four to two four one zero one.
The website rich on tech dot tv. Go to the website.
You can get links to anything I mentioned here. You
can sign up to get the podcast, so if you
want to listen later you missed an episode on the radio,

(01:13:00):
whatever it is. You can watch my TV stories there,
so you know, I do work as a TV tech reporter,
so I've got a whole bunch of video stories there
as well. And you can sign up for my newsletter,
sent out two new issues in the last couple of weeks.
A lot of people liking that. It's a newsletter that
is just an update with some of the stuff. It's

(01:13:22):
kind of like this show. It's just the stuff I
think you should know. If you have a cheap video doorbell,
you might want to reconsider it. Consumer reports found that
these things have some pretty major security flaws. They were
sold at Amazon, Walmart, and other sites under brands like

(01:13:43):
Ekein and Tuck and the problem with these video doorbells
is that they can expose your home IP address and
your Wi Fi name of your home without encryption, which
allows other people to remotely access the video doorbell. I mean,
someone could take over the camera or even monitor your house.
They could see everyone that comes and goes. The devices

(01:14:06):
don't have an fcc ID number, which is legally required
to sell electronics in the US. One of these even
had Amazon's Choice badge on it. These were about thirty dollars.
These doorbells. They come from China, and they're just not
properly licensed. They are not properly secured. So here's what happens. Inevitably,

(01:14:27):
I get someone that comes up to me, Hey, rich
I want a video doorbell. Which one should I get? Oh,
you should get something from Ring. You should get something
from Nest or maybe Whys, even though they've had their
own security issues. And then you go to the website,
you look at the price and you go, oh, I'm
not paying one hundred and thirty bucks for that. Look
at this one for thirty dollars. It looks like the
same looks like the same thing. And yes, you can

(01:14:51):
find something that looks like the same thing, but the
is the service going to be there? Is the support
going to be there. I've had two people come up
to me in the last coup weeks. They both came
to me with the same exact Instagram ad for a camera,
a video camera, like a home security camera that was
really cheap and I had never heard of the brand.

(01:15:12):
And both of them were like, Rich, I really want
to get this because there's no monthly fee and it's
really cheap. And I said, well, you can get it.
But I've been covering technology for years now. I've been
to every CS since twenty ten, and I've never seen
that brand at any event I've ever been at in
my tech life. You can go with that brand, but

(01:15:32):
what are you getting? I don't know because nobody's heard
of this brand. And that's the issue with going with
something that I've never heard of and I've never seen.

Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
You don't know what the security is going to be like.

Speaker 1 (01:15:45):
And the other telltale sign is when you go to
the website and the website's got all kinds of countdown banners,
it's got buy one, get one free, it's you have
to act soon. If you see that stuff on a
website and it's an endless scroll website. You just keep
scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and it keeps trying to
sell you on these products. It's probably not something I

(01:16:08):
want to buy. You can take your chance, but as
consumer reports found out, these things definitely have some issues,
so be careful go with the brands that tech folks
like myself recommend.

Speaker 12 (01:16:23):
HP.

Speaker 1 (01:16:24):
They already sell a subscription ink service which I subscribe to,
by the way, pay like seven bucks a month, where
I can get all the ink I need to print out.
I don't know how many pages it is, but you
get roll over to It's kind of like those old
cell phone plans where you got a couple of minutes
a month and then they would roll over to the
next month.

Speaker 2 (01:16:44):
Remember those days. Well, HP does that with their ink plan.

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
But what I like about the ink plan is that
it's a lot cheaper than buying all the ink for
these printers. If you add up all the four cartridges
that I need for my ink printer, it's like fifty
sixty you know, fifty bucks a peace. It's like two
hundred dollars for ink, and then you got to buy
it and keep it in stock at your house, So
you need an extra one. So this ink subscription plan

(01:17:09):
has worked out pretty well because what they do is
they your computer, your printer has to be connected to
the internet. When your ink gets low, they send you
a new one before you need to replace it. So
in my house right now, I have like a black ink,
I've got a yellow, I've got a magenta. I don't
know about blue. I don't maybe I just whatever the
other color is, I don't. I guess I don't use
it as much.

Speaker 2 (01:17:29):
But they're ready to go.

Speaker 1 (01:17:30):
And the black ink cartridge, by the way, is got
so much ink in it that I've never seen a
cartridge this much like loaded. So they give you a
cartridge that carries more ink than the typical one you
might get at the store, which is also really nice.
So I tell you this because HP has now launched
an all in one printer subscription plan.

Speaker 2 (01:17:53):
And so what does this do.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
It provides you a monthly page allowance and it automatically
ships your replacement in cartridges. The price runs from seven
dollars a month for basic printers and thirty six dollars
a month for multifunction printers and seven hundred pages. So
there are pros and cons to this system, your printer
must stay connected to the internet so HP can monitor

(01:18:17):
your usage and ink levels.

Speaker 2 (01:18:18):
Of course, okay, that's fine.

Speaker 1 (01:18:20):
After thirty days of a trial, you do have to
have a certain amount of months where you keep this
or else you have to pay a cancelation fee, and
if you cancel this, you have to return the printer
all together, which is kind of going to be a
pain to return a printer. On the plus side, the
plan does give you a next business day printer replacement

(01:18:41):
if you have an issue, and you can upgrade to
a new printer after two years. I can't say I
recommend the printer rental plan, but if it works for
you and you do the math and you think that
this is something that just makes your life easier, I
don't know. Maybe it's kind of nice to have. I
guess it's good to have options. There's always going to
be people that want to buy things and have them

(01:19:03):
and you do it on their own.

Speaker 2 (01:19:04):
That's fine.

Speaker 1 (01:19:05):
And yes, is it probably cheaper in the long term
to buy your own printer, use it as long as
humanly possible, and buy your own refurbished ink. Yeah, probably,
But if you just want that convenience and you know,
maybe it's right off, maybe you have a startup, whatever,
it might be easier.

Speaker 2 (01:19:22):
This is interesting Ford.

Speaker 1 (01:19:24):
If you have a Ford electric vehicle, you can now
use the Tesla superchargers. They turned on this functionality this week,
which is very exciting because the Mustang mach E is
my favorite EV that's not the Tesla. I mean there's
other ones that I like, like the Lucid and the Rivian,
but I think the Maki overall, when it comes to

(01:19:45):
price and affordability and accessibility, it is everywhere, and so
I think the Maki really really impressed me. But I've
said this with all electric cars, I am not buying
any electric car that does not work on Tesla's network
because it can be a pain to charge these things
and it's just not for me. You can argue me

(01:20:06):
with that, but if you're on a road trip and
you want fast, easy charging, you gotta go Tesla. Now,
these other companies are going to work with Tesla. Ford
is the first one, but all of them are pretty
much going to do this. So if you have a
Ford EV which is either the Machi or the Lightning,
you can now charge at Tesla superchargers. You will need

(01:20:26):
an adapter. You can get an adapter for free. This
is a two hundred and thirty dollars value. The adapters
are free right now until June thirtieth. So if you're
listening to this and you have a Ford EV, go
on the website, get the free adapter, put it in
your trunk, and you can now charge at Tesla superchargers.
The website Ford dot com Slash Fast Charging Adapter, Ford

(01:20:52):
dot com Slash Fast Charging Adapter, and this adapter will
work at Tesla super chargers. The charging is not free,
by the way, that as far as I know, it
is not free to charge at a Tesla supercharger. Maybe
if you have an older Tesla that it was grandfathered in,
but that's not the case. And I don't think Ford

(01:21:14):
is giving any level of free charging away, but they
are giving the charger away.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
So get the adapter if you have a Ford and
that's pretty exciting.

Speaker 1 (01:21:24):
And next year's model years with a lot of these cars,
the Tesla charger is going to be built into the car,
so you don't need to have an adapter, but for
now you need the adapter. And finally, Uber has launched
its teen Rides feature. It is now available in California.
It's always been available, or it's been available in the
forty nine other states for a while. It is now

(01:21:45):
launching in California, so it's available in nationwide. This allows
a parent to invite their team to have their own
Uber account, a teen Uber account, and they can request
their own rides. This has got a bunch of safety
features built in, so parents can always see driver details
like their name, their vehicle info, and they can call
Uber the Uber Safety Line if necessary now the thing

(01:22:08):
about the drive, or they could also track their kid
on a map. This is for kids thirteen to seventeen.
Uber told me that only eligible drivers with thorough background checks,
which is the same background checks they do for regular drivers,
but the difference here is that they have to have
high ratings and they have to be experienced drivers before
they can accept teens. And any driver has the ability

(01:22:29):
to say I don't want to accept teens altogether. The
teen has to give the driver has to put in
a four digit code that the teen gives them when
they get in the car, and there's also this ride
audio recording feature. It is not mandatory, but I highly
highly recommend that if your teen is taking Uber Rides.

(01:22:50):
You turn that feature on, it records the entire ride.
The recording of audio is stored on the teen's phone.
If there's ever an issue, you can send that recording
to Uber again Uber teen Rides. You can get details
on that on my Instagram at rich on Tech. My
name is rich d'miro. You are listening to rich on
Tech More show. Come in your way right after this.

(01:23:13):
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here. Coming
up next, Richard Schneider is going to join us. He's
the president and founder of Antenna's Direct. He's going to
talk about some of the latest trends in cord cutting
and explain what it's like to go over the air
in a world of streaming. All right, let's take a

(01:23:35):
look at some of the emails we have gotten. Debra says, help.
The navigation systems used by the food companies Grubhub, Door Dash,
Postmates and others are routed to an area that cannot
be accessed.

Speaker 2 (01:23:48):
To my home accessed.

Speaker 1 (01:23:50):
Sometime around twenty twenty one, the navigation system changed. I've
tried contacting Google Maps, but nothing has been done. What
do I need to do to get the navigation system corrected?
For my home address. Well, I think I don't know
how you contacted Google Maps, but I think you just
need to change the marker on Google Maps. So I've
done this a couple of times for different addresses, and

(01:24:12):
it works. It just takes a little bit. So if
you go into Google Maps and you search for your address,
and once you find your address on Google Maps, you
can scroll up and it says suggest an edit, and
you tap that and it gives you a map with
a whole bunch of options, and you can say fix
an address, add or fix a road, and then you

(01:24:33):
can add opinions. So I would say fix an address,
and then it says drag the map to the position
the marker should be in. So Google Maps will show
you where it thinks it should be going. But let's
say that's leading to like a backside or a different
road or a different entrance. You can drag that to
where you need it to go. So let's say there

(01:24:54):
was two ways to get to your house. You might
drag that marker to the front of it and then
press next, and then it will show you if you'd
submit that. Once you know, it'll show you all the
information that you have, and you press submit. So I've
done this for a couple of different things and it
does work. I actually submitted a one way street one
time because Google Maps made me go down a one

(01:25:17):
way street the wrong way and all these people are
honking at me. I was like, yes, hi, I'm rich
from TV. Good to see it too, and they're like, no,
you're going the wrong way. I was like, oh, whoops,
just kidding, but yeah, people were honking at me, and
so I said, oh my gosh, I can't believe that
Google sent me on a right turn down that street.
And so I submitted the correction and within a couple

(01:25:38):
of days. I don't know, maybe it took longer than that,
but it was corrected. So, Deborah, I think that's the
way to do it. All these companies use the same
the same Google Maps data, so I think once you
fix it there, it will be fixed in other places.
Let's see Tim says, hey, I briefly heard you talk
about using Wi Fi calling internationally. I have a Motorola

(01:25:59):
with Wi Fi calling my cell provider's consumer cellular, and
when I call them, I get varying instructions. How does
one use it without accruing charges? Do I want airplane mode.
While using it, I'll get a local simcard as well
for a second phone I travel with. I found your
show recently on KXL in Portland, Oregon.

Speaker 2 (01:26:16):
Thank you, Tim. So Tim.

Speaker 1 (01:26:21):
We talked about Wi Fi calling last week on the show,
and after doing some more research, it's interesting I was
not aware that some of the companies will charge you
for calling that is through Wi Fi calling, which is
kind of news to me. So I think the way
most of them work is that here's what I typically
do when I get to a different place. Let's say

(01:26:42):
I wasn't using a third party SIM on my phone,
which I always use most of the time, I would
flip my phone into airplane mode. I would turn on
the Wi Fi and find a network right at the
hotel or out and about in town or whatever. And
I would also make sure that my phone has Wi
Fi calling turned on. And you probably want to activate

(01:27:02):
this before you go on your trip, but you should
be able to turn it on. So once Wi Fi
calling is on, the main thing you want to do
is make sure that your roaming is turned off. Now,
every company is a little bit different, and it seems
like Consumer Cellular in particularly in particular.

Speaker 4 (01:27:21):
They're not so.

Speaker 2 (01:27:23):
Forgiving when it comes to these calls.

Speaker 1 (01:27:25):
Some companies will treat the calls as if you are
as long as you're not calling international numbers, they'll be fine.
So let's say you're in Italy and you're calling the US.
Since it's a US number, they will just build that
as your normal typical call that you would make. But
I'm looking at this Consumer Cellular and when you look
at Wi Fi calling, it says does Wi Fi calling

(01:27:48):
use minutes from my phone? And it says Wi Fi
calls are built the same as calls made over the
cellular network. They do use minutes from your plan and
will show usage. They will show in usage details. That's
really interesting. So my advice is that I would if
you have this in this particular instance, I would really
I would call Consumer Cellular and ask them very specifically, say,

(01:28:11):
if I'm in Italy on Wi Fi calling and I
call a number in Italy, am I charged? And they
may say, yes, you'll be charged an international call. If
I call a number in the US, am I charge?
And they say, well, it's charged against your minutes, but
you have unlimited minutes, so it'll be fine.

Speaker 2 (01:28:26):
It'll be free.

Speaker 1 (01:28:27):
So I would no matter what provider you have, I
would make sure you understand how Wi Fi calling works
before you activate it. But in my experience it works
pretty well for you making calls and also getting your texts.

Speaker 2 (01:28:40):
But just check with them to make sure.

Speaker 1 (01:28:43):
Speaking of calls, Barbie flip phone coming out this summer.
Pink Barbie flip phone coming out in summer twenty twenty
four from HMD. This is HMD and Mattel are teaming up.
Do we need a pink Barbie flip phone?

Speaker 2 (01:28:59):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:29:00):
Why not?

Speaker 1 (01:29:01):
Remember the Motorol eraser that was pink. That was a
flip phone that was popular. Coming up next, we're going
to talk cord cutting. You are listening to rich on Tech.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here talking technology.
The website rich on tech dot tv. If you hear
something mentioned that you want to link for, just go

(01:29:22):
right there to the big red banner at the top
and you can get the link. Coming up is the
feedback segment. So if you heard me talk about something
on the show you want to get your two cents in,
go to the website rich on Tech dot tv, hit
contact and submit your comments right now. We'll get to
them right after this, but this is really exciting. A

(01:29:44):
company is named Antenna's Direct. Richard Schneider is the president
and founder. And it's ironic how much antennas have a
place in our lives, with how much tech and streaming
we have. But a lot of people like their antenna. Richard,
thanks so much for joining me having me.

Speaker 10 (01:30:02):
Uh yeah, a lot of people think the age of
antennas are behind us, and uh, I'm myself and this
company doesn't seem to think so though.

Speaker 2 (01:30:11):
No, So tell me tell me about Antenna's Direct, Like,
what made you start this?

Speaker 10 (01:30:16):
So actually it was a hobby that morphed into a business.
So I was a hunk theater enthusiast and at the time,
the only way to get high definition television was from
an antenna. This actually pre preceded Blu ray, and the
cable and satellite companies had not caught up yet. But
there was wonderful uncompressed loops of these pollinating plants and

(01:30:40):
things in two thousand and three, and it was me
and maybe four other people in the in my market
that we're watching the HD broadcast, and the broadcast engineer
at the local CBS affiliates said, you know the only
form of broadcasting I know where I know all my
viewers on a first name basis.

Speaker 2 (01:30:58):
Yeah, And so.

Speaker 10 (01:31:01):
We started making antennas for people in the home theater hobby.
And I never thought it would actually amount to more
than maybe twenty maybe twenty five antennas a month. And
I was making them in my garage, and there were
tuned to the frequencies on which the digital stations were broadcast,
and the stuff you bought in the stores at the
mass market really didn't work as well. And so what

(01:31:24):
happened was people started telling the other limited fringe people
on the home theater forums and it just started to
spiral exponentially, and we actually were.

Speaker 7 (01:31:37):
On the.

Speaker 10 (01:31:39):
Forbes five hundred list four years in a row as
fastest growing company. And all this time we had no
venture capital, no investors, nothing like that. They we're just
doing it out of cash flow, just credit card sales
on our website. And then around two thousand and six,

(01:32:01):
there was a Gadgets for Guys segment on the Today
Show and Riche de Muro was the presenter. That was
man there, I don't remember, and there was.

Speaker 2 (01:32:14):
A it was a it was a picture frame antenna.

Speaker 10 (01:32:19):
Very good, very good.

Speaker 1 (01:32:20):
And so I was in the makeup room that morning
at the Today Show and uh, the makeup person I
was like, Oh, this is so exciting because the whole
point was that they had just gone to HD and
like they you know, it was all kind of new.
And so the makeup person, I'm sitting there in the
makeup chair and I said, Hey, I'm like, how came
you're not watching your show in HD.

Speaker 2 (01:32:39):
She's like, what do you mean?

Speaker 1 (01:32:40):
And I said, well, you got to change the channel
to like the FOURD dot one whatever it was in
New York City. And she's like what And I go,
can I do it? And I pick up the remote
and I change it and the whole thing just was like,
you know, popped into like clarity, and she was like
blown away and it was such a cool moment.

Speaker 2 (01:32:56):
So yeah, it stackers it.

Speaker 10 (01:32:59):
It was the imagination that people who work in broadcasting
are not aware that they actually broadcast. This is my
This is my biggest challenge. It's not other I'm not
worried about competing with other antenna companies. My biggest challenge
is that about sweet thing, about seventy percent of the
population is completely unaware that over the air digital broadcasting exists.

(01:33:21):
And in a market like Los Angeles, you need one
hundred and fifty plus channels, and a small market where
I live, it's Saint Louis is about fifty seven channels,
And it absolutely it frustrates me. We've we've done morning
news shows and the reporter doesn't isn't isn't aware? And
I'm literally having their transmitting power in the background. Yeah,

(01:33:44):
and the morning reporter is like, really, I can I
can get TV from an antenna? Well do you think
that thousand foot tall thickies?

Speaker 2 (01:33:52):
So what let's what do you think? Okay?

Speaker 1 (01:33:55):
Because people think of antennas as they don't work. They
the signal is fuzzy. See, you know it's tough to
get these channels. What do you think people need to
know about antennas today?

Speaker 10 (01:34:06):
Okay? So the picture quality is actually better than that
a satellite or cable. There's little to no compression, and
that's a technical word of how they have to squeeze
the bits and bites down the pipeline. So if you
watch over the air versus cable or satellite or even streaming,
if you switch back and forth, you'll notice it pops.
It's just the vibrancy and the details greater over the ear.

(01:34:29):
Now the challenge is the frequencies are a little bit
higher than they were in the old analog days, so
they don't penetrate building materials or hills as well, So
you're going to be it'll be more reliable. If you
can get an antenna near a window. Outdoors is always
the most reliable. And the good news is the science

(01:34:52):
of antenna development has really advanced a lot in the
last twenty years, and so antennas are you know, ten
percent of the size they would have been in your
grandparents day, and they're much more powerful. And then they're
more aesthetics, so you don't really have to worry about
having one in your house or on your roof. It
won't it won't look like something from the I Love

(01:35:12):
Losey days. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:35:14):
I'm always impressed when I plug an antenna in on
a TV and a random room in my house and
it does pull in like a majority of the channels
and with great fidelity.

Speaker 10 (01:35:25):
Yeah, and and our system of broadcasting again, you know
the good news and the bad news is, you know,
if you want every channel, you just need to get
it away from metallic objects or or you know, masonry
structures or things like that. But it's really not that hard.
A window you can you know, we've we required Mohu

(01:35:45):
a few years ago and they invented an antennae just
it just sticks in the in the window glass. It's
a bin film antenna and it works great. So you
don't really need to be a tech technical person to
be able to get over the air. And but again
the challenge a lot of people think it's illegal. And
we have a problem in that our TikTok videos are

(01:36:06):
constantly being taken down because people are reporting that we're
that we were promoting illegal activities, piracy and and in
the various activities, and it's really frustrating. We got our
TikTok accounts suspended for over a month.

Speaker 2 (01:36:23):
That's wild.

Speaker 10 (01:36:25):
It's just really I'm trying to tell the story and
not just that an attendance exists. That is, you're not
breaking the law, there's no there's no catch.

Speaker 2 (01:36:35):
That's wild.

Speaker 1 (01:36:36):
It is that like okay, okay, well what about this
ATSC three point zero have you?

Speaker 2 (01:36:41):
What's the deal with that?

Speaker 10 (01:36:43):
So I get to sit on the meetings we are
I'm I'm a member of that of the it's called
the Advanced Television Standards Committee, And uh, what's it's the
new new format and what it's going to allow. It's
it's what they call spectral efficient, meaning you can fit
more bits of bytes through the same television channel six

(01:37:05):
megahertz channel that a station broadcast. They can fit anywhere
from you know, thirty to one hundred percent more data through,
so that means they can broadcast in four K. They
can provide metadata, you know. Uh, and it's IP based,
so it's essentially over the year streaming. It's Internet broadcasting
using using odd IP broad broadcasting standards, and and there'll

(01:37:28):
be all kinds of ways you could interact with the programming.
It can also allow yours TV to be addressed in
times of emergency, if there's a typhoon or a hurricane.
It can actually have the ability to wake up your
television for people who live in that in that in
the path of a tornado. Obviously, they're also going to

(01:37:49):
use geo targeting to probably narrow cast some marketing, so
you might see a different ad than your neighbor might
might see. That's interesting, yeah, and I you know, it
helps pay for the pre broadcasting is you might see
ads for pickup trucks, and your neighbors might might see
something for for lawnmowers. I don't know whatever your interests are,

(01:38:11):
so but but the being more spectful efficient means it
has the capacity for more channels and it will be
bi directional, so you can you can interact with your
programming and there will be ways of if you know,
interacting with the ads like you do essentially on the computer.
And uh, it's it's gonna have a lot of features,

(01:38:32):
uh that will be comparable to paid streaming.

Speaker 1 (01:38:36):
Awesome, all right, Richard, I've got a run but final
piece of advice for consumers.

Speaker 10 (01:38:42):
Well, it's not as difficult as you think. You dumber
people than you have figured this out.

Speaker 5 (01:38:48):
Uh.

Speaker 10 (01:38:50):
And the pitchure quality, you'll be shocked. It's going to
be better than pay television.

Speaker 2 (01:38:54):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:38:55):
Richard Schneider, President and founder of Antenna's Direct. Check them
out Antenna's Direct, find what works for you. You could
pop in your zip code, they'll recommend the best antenna
for you and grab that free over the air signal.
Don't always have to pay for streaming. Coming up next,
we are going to open up the feedback. You are
listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech.

(01:39:21):
Bit of news this week that Apple canceled its electric
car project after a decade of work on it. This
is the project they never publicly announced, but apparently they
were building an electric car for ten years and they
spent many, many many dollars on this project, Project Titan.

(01:39:41):
Apparently they had almost two thousand people working on this.
But again none of this was ever mentioned by Apple.
So did it really happen. We don't know, but this
is the report out of Bloomberg that they are closing
down their work on their electric car project.

Speaker 2 (01:39:57):
How sad.

Speaker 1 (01:40:00):
So team members are going to shift their focus to
artificial intelligence. That makes a lot of sense. Why did
they not do this? Cooling ev demand, manufacturing issues, profitability concerns,
and times have changed. You know, it's tough when they
probably started this, if they ever started this, very skeptical.

(01:40:20):
You know, times are different. Now you've got some pretty
big players in the electric car world. I think Apple
could easily be up there, and I think they should
just buy Lucid and they can change that car to
the Apple car.

Speaker 2 (01:40:32):
That's really what they want to build. Anyway. UFI has a.

Speaker 1 (01:40:36):
New three hundred and sixty degree four K camera that
does not need Wi Fi or power outlets. This is
a two hundred and fifty dollars four K camera called
the Ufee four G LTE Cam S three P thirty
three hundred and sixty degree views seventy degree tilt. Can
connect to LTE cellular networks instead of Wi Fi, so

(01:40:57):
you can put it anywhere. It's got a solar panel
so you can charge the battery anywhere it is, and
uses AI to detect people. It's got Google and Alexa integration.
It can sort recordings locally for up to eight months
on a micro SD card. Now, uf has had some
privacy issues in the past, but it sounds like every
single security camera company at this point has I can't

(01:41:20):
think of one that has not had an issue. They've
all had their lapses. But it's kind of cool. If
you need a four G LTE camera on your property somewhere,
that's another option. I have not tested it, so I
can't vouch for it.

Speaker 2 (01:41:34):
Let's see.

Speaker 1 (01:41:36):
Schwalby says, Rich, can you tell me how to turn
Can you tell me how to turn off the microphone
on my iPhone? So sound and voices will not be
recorded while I'm videoing. I need to do an inspection,
and they don't want me to record their voices in
case they say something confidential. Your shows are awesome. I
watch you on TV and listen to your weekend shows,
and I check out the website. There is not a

(01:41:56):
way that I know of to turn off the microphone
while recording on the iPhone. Couple of options. You can
use a third party app that may give you that ability,
something like Film Micpro Camera. Plus there's a lot of
apps that can let you record on the iPhone. They
may give you the ability to turn off the sound
before you record it. You can also mute the sound

(01:42:17):
after the fact, so you can go into a video
on the iPhone and press edit and there's a little
like it looks like a speaker icon. You just tap
that and that will mute the audio, and then you
can save that video without the audio. Or you can
get some kind of microphone that you can plug into
the phone and have that muted, and you know that
would mute the sound as well. Joe says a longtime listener,

(01:42:40):
I've consistently found value in your discussions. Today's topic on
locating stream URLs particularly picked my interest. I thought it
might be beneficial to share my personal setup with you
and your audience. I use an application called stream Writer
on my Windows system for listening to streams and to
capture the stream RL. I rely on the Bulk Media

(01:43:00):
Downloader extension on Chrome. This hope this information proves useful
to you as well as others.

Speaker 2 (01:43:07):
Thanks Joe, Thanks Joe. Interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:43:11):
Leo said he forgot to mention a couple things in
his interview. This was about Chrome os flex installation is
totally successful about eighty to ninety five percent of times.
I was going to mention Chrome os Flex combined with
an SSD, a solid state drive can really make an
old machine fly as opposed to the disc based hard drive.

(01:43:34):
You may get calls from people who are trying to
install this on their Mac computer. I didn't make it
clear that on a Mac you would first download the
Chrome browser and then use the Chromebook Recovery utility from
there out.

Speaker 2 (01:43:44):
Thank you, Leo.

Speaker 1 (01:43:47):
Shane says, speaking of Wi Fi doorbells and security, it
applies to kids watches too. Parents should not buy Chinese
made connected kids watches because the server that allows the
watch to communicate with parent apps might not be safe,
and it connects to the manufacturer servers in China. The
best is to buy from US mobile operators offering kids
watches because they're certified in the US by mobile operators too.

(01:44:10):
All US mobile operators must use their own servers in
the US and make sure they're always secure due to
COPA and CCPA certification. I know this because I have
twenty years experience in connected wearables and my company provides
the back end platforms and servers to all mobile operators
in the US and Europe. Thank you, Shane. That's interesting. Wow,

(01:44:30):
good to know. Yes, look, I think a lot of this.
You know, you just have to be aware of security
issues when you're buying a third party product that may
not adhere to the same standards we have in the US.
Dawn Marie says, Hey, Rich, I watch you every day.
I'm curious why can't all phones have the SOS help
Why is it just for iPhones? I have a Samsung.

(01:44:52):
I feel it's important for everyone to have this option
for safety.

Speaker 2 (01:44:55):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 5 (01:44:56):
So.

Speaker 1 (01:44:57):
Dawn is referring to the SOS emergence and see help
over Satellite that the iPhone fourteen and fifteen have it
looks like that feature is coming soon to Android. Just
this week, some of the blogs found out that the
Pixel phones, it looks like they are getting that first.
It'll probably be a big feature on the new Pixel phones.

Speaker 2 (01:45:20):
Let's see. Laurel says, thanks for your tech smart program.

Speaker 1 (01:45:23):
I just saw your video clip on kron up here
in San Francisco about subscribing to social media. I don't
subscribe to any social media. There are too many whackos
and bad guys out there on the Internet. And like
a fool, I opened an email message from a person
unknown to me who turned out to be a hacker.
Yahoo is now trying to fix the email address of mine,
which the hacker hacked. I'm eighty two years old. There

(01:45:45):
was no internet, electronic devices, or television sets when I
was growing up in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties.
I'm beginning to think the world was a better place
back then. Well, it's certainly a different place, and I
thought TV came out in the fifties.

Speaker 2 (01:45:57):
But I get it. I see what you're saying, Laurel.
I get it. The world has changed.

Speaker 1 (01:46:02):
Not all of it's good, but UH get on TikTok
and just check it out now as you kiddick, you
don't have to get on board with all this stuff,
but I appreciate you watching and believe me. I sit
there on days and I sit there and say, wow,
things used to be different. I think many things are better.
In fact, Laurel, the fact that you can email me
without sending a stamp or you know, buying a stamp

(01:46:23):
for a couple, you know, sixty five cents whatever they are, Now,
that's a pretty amazing thing. You couldn't do that back
in the day. If you can believe it, that is
going to do it. For this episode of the show.
You can find links to everything I mentioned all on
my website. Just go to rich on tech dot tv
for the show notes. You can find me on social
media twenty four to seven, Laurel, hide your ears. I

(01:46:43):
am at rich on Tech, on Instagram, on x on Facebook, everywhere.
Next week Rivian is on veiling their newest ev Will
it be enough to save that company? Thanks so much
for listening. There are so many ways you can spend
your time. I do appreciate you spending it right here
with me. Thanks to everyone who makes this show. Possible

(01:47:06):
Bobo Kim Bill. Everyone, my name is rich Demiro. I
will talk to you real soon

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Rich DeMuro

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