U2 at the Sphere, Verizon buys Frontier & Marissa Mayer

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Verizon buys Frontier for twenty billion dollars, but it's also
cutting auto paid discounts for longtime customers. I'll explain bitcoin ATM.
Scams are on the rise. How to protect your cash?
A new security camera goes way beyond just recording. It
can deploy smoke and pepper spray. Is this the future
of protection? Plus your tech questions answered? What's going on?

(00:24):
I'm Rich Demiro and this is rich on Tech. This
is the show where I talk about the tech stuff
I think you should know about. It's also the place
where I answer your questions about technology. I believe 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, that's triple eight rich one oh one.
Email also an option. Just go to the website rich
on Tech dot tv and hit contact. If you want
to link to something I mentioned, just hit the light
bulb icon Guests. This week, we're going to talk to

(01:08):
YouTuber and the Apple Circle host Robert Rosenfeld. He's gonna
discuss trending iPhone apps. And the upcoming Apple event, which
is happening on Monday. Then we've got a special guest,
former Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer. She is going to discuss
her tech career, her new startup called Sunshine, and share

(01:30):
her views on AI's future impact. But here in Los Angeles,
it is so hot. It has been a heat wave
here in Los Angeles. It is so hot in Los
Angeles they've actually canceled plans for Frozen three. It is
so hot in Los Angeles. Even the electric cars are

(01:52):
begging for a sip of gas. It is so hot
in Los Angeles the actors are refusing to play it cool.
It's so hot in Los Angeles. Sand at the beach
has turned into glass. It is so hot in Los
Angeles people are hoping for an earthquake just to get
a cool breeze from the center of the Earth. It

(02:16):
is so hot in Los Angeles. Plastic surgeons are warning
that any procedure right now might make you look like
that mask from Scream. It's so hot in Los Angeles.
Hot yoga now just called yoga. It's so hot in
Los Angeles. Celebrities are limiting their outings to arawon only.

(02:36):
It's so hot in Los Angeles. Even the air conditioning
has gone on strike. It's so hot in Los Angeles.
People are now moving to Phoenix in Las Vegas to
beat the heat. And it's so hot in Los Angeles.
Al Gore tweeted for the first time in year, saying
I told you so, Yes, thanks for joining me. I'm

(03:02):
here all week. You know, look, when you tune into
rich On Tech, you never know what you're gonna get.
It's gonna be fun, it's gonna be different, it's gonna
be unique. But at the end of the day, we're
gonna have a good time, all right. So this week
I was in Las Vegas for just a short less
than I think. It was my quickest trip ever, less
than twenty four hours. But I got invited to see
this new v U two film at the Sphere and

(03:26):
I had to go. I wanted to be there for
the opening night because I was not able to go
to the opening concert night. So I said, well, the
next best thing is this film. And I was very
curious because this is not a live concert. This is
an immersive film that they shot at the Sphere during
the U two concerts that they did there. So if
you're not familiar with the Sphere, I'm sure you've seen it.
It's that giant globe looking thing that lights up in

(03:48):
Las Vegas. This is the first film to be shot
with the spheres Big Sky ultra high resolution camera, which
has a giant lens. I gotta look at this earlier
this year at Yes. And of course this film takes
advantage of the one hundred and sixty thousand square foot
LED screen, which is sixteen by sixteen K resolution, and

(04:09):
there's also haptic seats inside this theater. So what's it like? Well,
I got to say it was pretty incredible, better than
I expected. So first off, it starts around eight pm,
while our show did, but they give you about forty
five minutes to spend some time in the Sphere atrium,
which has all kinds of things in it, like talking robots,
holographic displays, and this audio demonstration. Because the Sphere has

(04:32):
this technology that can beam different sounds to each seat,
and so you can stand in these different beams of
light and you're hearing something different in each one. It's
pretty neat. Then you get into the show, which starts,
like I said, about forty five minutes later. Tickets for
this show are about one hundred dollars, so more expensive
than maybe like a movie, but less expensive than a

(04:53):
concert ticket, I mean, depending on the concert obviously, And
they see people in the center suitet spot of the theater,
so there are empty seats on the left and right
of you. But they do that for a reason. Now,
the show starts very simply, you see the guys on stage,
you two. But the neat thing they did was they
progress the show as you go along, so it gets

(05:14):
more immersive and more impressive. They make more and more
use of the magic of the venue as the show
goes along, so they kind of, you know, start out
slow and you're like, okay, this is cool. But then
slowly but surely, they just start doing these neat things
that you're like, oh that's cool. Oh that's really cool.
Oh that's even cooler. So at one point, for instance,
you feel as if the ceiling above you is moving

(05:37):
down towards you. So that's one neat kind of thing
that they do. But they use all these different tricks.
Another neat part is this was my favorite, and I'm
not giving away any spoilers, but kind they make the
wall in front of you seem to disappear, so all
of a sudden, it looks like the wall in front
of you melts away, and now you're sitting in your
seat looking at the band playing, but now they're playing

(05:59):
out side with the Vegas strip in the background, so
you feel like you're outside and the you two is
just playing in the middle of this like basically with
the strip behind you. That was really really cool. Then
there's some surprises, so of course the haptic seats they
rumble that surprises you at some point throughout the show.
That's pretty cool. The first time it happened, we were

(06:20):
all like, whoa wait, what And the people I was with,
my wife had been to the sphere, but the other
two people I was with had not, so they were
really taken aback by that. But it surprised all of
us even if you've been there before. And I'm not
sure how they did this because the screen is not
three D, but it literally looks like the band is
playing there in front of you. It's almost a holographic experience.

(06:44):
And that was probably the best part of the show,
is that if you kind of give up that suspension
of disbelief, like if you kind of have that a
little bit you are literally feeling as if you two
is playing there in front of you, but they're not.
I mean, it's a film. The audio and this experience
was absolutely impeccable. I mean I would say it might

(07:04):
even be better than the acoustics of a real concert.
I know that's a bold statement, but it was so perfect,
it was so crystal clear, and it was just so
great that I was thoroughly impressed with the audio. And
the Sphere is known for really good audio motion sickness.
I know everyone's worried about motion sickness. Inside the sphere.
You're not moving. This is not a ride at Disneyland.

(07:25):
This is not a ride at Universal. The seats do
not move, and you're not moving on an axis. It
may it may give you the appearance or the feeling
that you're moving because of the immersive screen. The screen
is pretty much taking up the entire stadium, so that
it does feel like you're moving at certain points. And
there was a one point of the show where we

(07:46):
all kind of looked at each other like, oh wow,
we're getting sick right now. But you can look away
from the screen, like look down, or look to the left,
or look to the right, to kind of center yourself
and you'll be fine. I don't think that's a big deal.
I mean, yes, some people do feel motion sickness inside
this fe I don't think that's the standard thing. But
it's also kind of fun because it is a little
bit of a different experience and it's like, Okay, I

(08:07):
feel that I can look, I'm okay, We're safe and sound.
It's fun. Overall. The sphere has created a new form
of storytelling and one that I will say I was
impressed with. I did not know what to feel or
what to think about this because I saw the thing
with Taylor Swift on the big screen. I didn't see
at the movie theater. I saw it at home, and

(08:28):
that's just a film of a concert. This is almost
a new way to experience a band. So there's these
unique physical and visual aspects that you might only experience
at a special venue like this, something that might have
been only at a theme park, something that might be
termed four D. But because this screen is so immersive,

(08:50):
and because this screen is so big and large, it's
just totally different than anything I've experienced. So I think
that this is really going to give creative types a
new way of using the Sphear's unique canvas to tell stories.
This is just the beginning. So far, they've only had
really four events at this They've got the opening movie,
which was like Postcard from Earth, which I saw, which

(09:10):
was great. Then they had YouTube play there, real like
actual playing in the sphere where they recorded this they
did like forty shows or something like that. And then
they had Death and Co or Death in Company Band
they played there. And of course they've done a couple
of events here and there, like I think the UFC
is now going to be there, but this is like

(09:31):
the first time they've kind of taken advantage of what
these creative people have made out there in the desert,
and it will see. I mean, this was an over
a two billion dollar project, so we'll see if they
can replicate this in the different cities. I know they
had these plan for other cities, but I think this
is a very expensive thing to build and the return

(09:51):
is probably a little bit slower than they imagined. And
by the way, just to make this film of You Too,
I'm sure was very expensive as well. But I liked
how they didn't go all at once with the sphere
like what it can do I liked how the show
gradually progresses to show off more of the unique aspects
and the magic of this venue. So overall, I would
say very unique experience, worth one hundred dollars, especially if

(10:14):
you like the band. They successfully blurred the line between
a film and a live performance, so if you're in Vegas,
kind of something fun to see. I thought it was great.
And for artists, what I think is neat about this
is their music can live on in a in a
unique new way. So I mean this you two show
can live on for very, very many years, and I
think fans would feel as if they are experiencing just

(10:36):
a small part of a live performance, but it's not live.
And by the way, the rockers never age, which is
also kind of nice. Anyway, that's my review of the
new v U two film at the Sphere. You can
read that on my website. Rich on Tech dot TV.
All right, coming up your questions eight eight eight rich

(10:58):
one oh one eight eight eight seven four two four
one zero one plus all the week's tech news. Let's
kick it off. You are listening to rich on Tech.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging
out with you talking technology at triple A Rich one
oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two
four one zero one. The website for the show Rich

(11:19):
on tech dot tv. If you want links to anything
I mentioned, hit the light bulb, or if you want
to just pruse the site sent up for the newsletter.
It's all right there. Let's go to David in Fresno, California. David,
you're on with Rich.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
Hi, thank you. My wife and I were watching the
US Open and I'm mindlessly scrolling through messages from a
group thing that we have on Facebook with my retired friends,
and one of them sends me a link for movie shorts,
and ultimately, ever since I clicked on that upper right

(11:55):
hand corner of my nac air, I get this pop
up about my viruses. I need to enroll in their
service because I've been at tapped and so I did
a virus scan. I have nothing what I can't get
rid of, and it's really starting to flummix me. I

(12:16):
cannot figure out how to get that dumb pop up
to keep from continuously popping up on my screen.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
It sounds like you got some malware installed by clicking
this link, and this is pretty typical. It can happen
very easily. Did you install any programs on your computer?
Do you think like, did you install any programs on
your Mac computer?

Speaker 3 (12:38):
No?

Speaker 1 (12:38):
Okay, so I think what happened. There's two ways to
kind of clear this out. I think it sounds like
you may have gotten an extension installed in your browser.
What browser are you using?

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Safari?

Speaker 1 (12:50):
Okay? Oh, well that's interesting, all right. So in that case,
I don't think that you got HM because installing extensions
on Safari is a little bit more deep detail than
it is on Chrome. So what I would do on
Safari is, now here's the question do you have? Does
this only happen when you're on the internet when you
open Safari?

Speaker 2 (13:11):
It only happens it appears to only happened when I'm
on Safari.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
Okay, all right, So what I would do is you've
got to clear out Safari completely. So I would go
when you go into Safari upper left hand corner of
your screen, you can tap where it says Safari and
where it says clear history, and then it gives you
an option clear last hour, Clear today, clear today, and
yesterday Clear all history. I would clear all history, and

(13:36):
that's going to remove all the fragments of the websites
that you visited from your browser. And I think what
happened is you may have enabled notifications from a website
and that's what's popping up in your upper right hand corner.
So once you clear the history that website, the settings
for that site will be reset and it will no

(13:57):
longer be able to send you those So I think
that's what's going to do it for you. If that
does not work, I would go into Safari and I
would go into your settings, and I would just look
under the extensions just to make sure that you don't
have any extensions installed. Mine says no extensions, That's what
your should say. And I would just look at let

(14:19):
me look at one more thing here. I would look
under your websites and where it says notifications, I would
make sure because it says these websites have asked for
permission to show alerts in notification center. I would also
look under there and make sure that no website is
in there. If a website is in there, remove it.

(14:40):
And I think that's what's happening to you, David.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
All right, I'll do those three things. I greatly appreciate
your advice.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
All right. Appreciate you listening there in Fresno. Hope you're
staying cool. I know it is a scorcher'er here in California.
Thanks for the call today. I appreciate that Verizon is
acquiring Frontier Communications for twenty billion dollars in cash. So
if you have Frontier as your internet service provider, it
will soon become Verizon in the next year and a

(15:10):
half or so. It's ironic because here in southern California
they actually acquired Frontier, acquired Verizon's service area a couple
of years ago, and now it's going back to Verizon.
Very very strange, but anyway, the merger is going to
combine Frontier's two point two million fiber customers with verizon
seven point four million FiOS customers. This will all be

(15:31):
rebranded as FiOS and the new network's going to reach
twenty five million houses across thirty one states. Frontier customers
are going to be sold on all of Verizon stuff,
so the cell phones and the home internet, the just
everything that Verizon has. And of course Verizon in their
release says it's going to provide more choice and access

(15:52):
to premium services. But we all know what's really going
to happen here. Your price for Internet is slowly but
surely going to creep up because less competition means higher
prices for consumers, and so the fact that there is
one less company fighting against another company that is not
very good for consumers. Because Verizon was heavily selling their

(16:13):
home internet, their wireless home internet in places where they
did not have fiber, and now that they have fiber
and more places, they don't need to sell that as
hard and the prices on that will probably go up
as well. Again, transaction expected to close in about a
year and a half. At the same time, Verizon is
cutting their autopay discount. If you have an older plan,
you might have gotten an email that says, hey, we

(16:34):
want you to switch to this newer plan or we're
going to cut your autopay discount from ten dollars a
month to five dollars a month. Change is going to
take effect on about October tenth. These affected plans are
the older plans they have. They want you to switch
to their new unlimited plan, which, by the way, yes
you'll get that full ten dollars autopay discount, but you're
probably going to be paying more overall for this plan

(16:56):
or getting less than you used to get my recommendation.
Check out Verizon Prepaid for sixty dollars unlimited or Visible
is a good alternative. Eight eight eight rich one O
one eight eight eight seven four to two four one
zero one. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro
here hanging out with you, talking technology at triple eight

(17:17):
rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four
to two four one zero one. The website for the
show Richontech dot TV. You can hit the contact link
if you want to send me an email. You can
also sign up for my newsletter there, and you can
hit the light bulb if you want links to what
I mentioned on the show. Coming up next hour, we're

(17:40):
going to talk to YouTuber Robert Rosenfeld. He is host
of the Apple Circle, and he's going to talk about
the upcoming Apple event happening next week, and just generally
covering the Apple ecosystem. It's such a wild world. I mean,
any video you do about Apple just seems to go
viral for some reason. I mean not for everyone, but
for him for sure. So we'll talk to him in

(18:02):
a little bit. Steve writes in from Salem Oregon, is
my SIM card corrupted? Messages and emails to me are
delayed by hours, The battery runs down fast. My phone
heats up about a half an hour to one hour
of use. Steve, I don't think that is your SIM card.
I think that sounds like either a connection problem. You

(18:22):
could be in an area where you're not getting a
strong connection, so that could run down your battery. I
would suggest getting on Wi Fi when possible. The phone
heats up, I mean, obviously it's a summer, the phones
are getting you know, they are working overtime right now,
and if it's getting you know, hot, after half an
hour or an hour of use, that is pretty typical.

(18:43):
Phones do heat up if you're using them for that
amount of time. And some of the you know, latest
phones do run a little bit warmer, especially the iPhone,
especially the not so much the Samsung anymore, but the
pixels definitely run a little warm. So as for the
messages and emails delayed by hours, I can understand messages
if you're not in a good spot with a signal

(19:05):
emails that seems to be odd. So your phone could
be in a low power mode, which means it's not
checking for messages as fast as it typically would, so
I would check to see if your phone is in
a low power mode. Otherwise, I'm a big fan of
what's called the network settings reset. Both the iPhone and
the Android let you do this. So if you go

(19:26):
into your settings, there is a way to reset your
network settings, and it's a little bit different for the
iPhone and for Android, but you can Google and get
the directions for your particular device. But once you do that,
that will reset your WiFi, that will reset your mobile settings,
and reset your Bluetooth all back to like kind of factory.

(19:46):
So that means you're gonna have to reconnect any of
your Wi Fi devices to your phone, not to your
route or just to your phone. So you're gonna have
to connect your phone to Wi Fi once again, whether
it's at home or at the office. Your mobile connection
that's going to ge a reset, so it's going to
kind of find the cellular towers again. And then your Bluetooth.
You are going to have to reconnect your phone to
any Bluetooth devices like your headphones or your car. But

(20:10):
that typically takes care of a lot of the issues.
The other thing I would check is to see if
you're on Wi Fi calling, if you're having trouble with
your network at your home, if you have a low signal,
then I would just sign up turn on the Wi
Fi calling at home, you know, so you can when
you're on your Wi Fi network at home, it'll default
to that instead of the cellular network. Thanks for the question, Steve,

(20:32):
appreciate it up there in Salem, Oregon. I bet it's
beautiful up there. New FTC data shows there is a
massive increase in losses due to bitcoin ATM scams. This
one surprised me. I've seen a lot of these Bitcoin
ATMs are typically in gas stations. I'm guessing that the
gas stations get sold on the appeal of a bitcoin

(20:55):
ATM because they probably get a small profit from whatever
transactions are done at the gas station, and that's where
I've mostly seen these things. But the FTC says there's
been nearly a tenfold increase since twenty twenty one. Hundred
and ten million dollars lost in just twenty twenty three alone,
and in twenty twenty four. Just the first six months

(21:16):
of this year, losses have already topped sixty five million.
So if you're doing the math and you're thinking, there's
another six months left in twenty twenty four, that's another
sixty five million. So that's more than last year. So
that's that's a pretty wild number, sixty five million dollars
in scams. You wonder why you get these text messages.
You wonder why you get these emails that are just

(21:37):
trying to get you to fall for one of these things,
because people do do it, and people over sixty are
three times more likely to fall victim to these scams
compared to younger adults. That makes sense too. And you know,
excuse I hear from my family a lot of times,
or just people in general. I didn't want to bother you.
I didn't want to bother you, bother your friends and family.

(21:59):
If you have a situation like this that's happening to you,
call your friends and family say hey, here's what's happening.
This person's telling me to withdraw my money from my
bank account and put it in a shoe box and
hand it to them in the back of a black suv.
Don't do that. People have done that. Yes, smart people
have done that. Or this scam with the ATMs. Here's

(22:20):
how it works. These people call you, they pretend they're
either from the government or from a business like a
bank or tech support, and they say, oh, you got
to protect your cash. You got to take it out
of the bank and you've got to deposit it into
a Bitcoin ATM to safeguard it. And then once you
do that, send us the QR code that they give

(22:40):
you and will make sure that your money is safe.
And that's the proof that it's safe. Well, guess what.
Once the scam artists get that QR code, they are
stealing your money. That's how they steal it. So how
do you protect yourself? Do not respond to these calls,
these messages, or even these pop ups you see that
come up on your computer. If they're on and you're

(23:00):
not thinking that something should be happening, don't do it.
Verify any contact information, so if someone contacts you and
they say they're from a particular place, go to the
back of your bank card, call the bank from that
phone number and ask take time to think, consult with
others like friends and family. Like I mentioned, never withdraw
cash from your account in response to these requests. And

(23:22):
if anyone's asking you to use a Bitcoin ATM, a
gift card or something like that to move money to
protect it. Come on, you just know that's not right.
You have a feeling, and what does it go back to?
It goes back to that old adage, if it seems
too good to be true, it probably is. So if
someone's calling you out of the blue and saying, hey,
you got to move fifty grand out of your your
hard earned savings account and put it into a bitcoin ATM,

(23:45):
come on, just think how silly that sounds. Don't do it.
Don't do it at all. On a lighter note, Google
Photos has a really cool feature that I've been playing with.
It is an AI feature. You know, I love Google Photos.
I have got all of my photos in there. I've
been using it since day one. In fact, before it
was Google Photos, it used to be called Picasa and

(24:07):
I loved it even back then. And Google Photos now
has this new feature called ask Photos and it's AI
to search your collection, which is really really incredible. So
you can now use natural language to search through your
photo collection. Now, I don't know about you, but I've
got I don't know, one hundreds, I've got so many photos.

(24:29):
Let's see if I can see how many photos I
have in my photo collection it's not an easy thing
to do on Android. But let's see. If I go
to my posts and let's see, I can go to
photos and let's see here, that's really tough. See all. Yeah, okay,
I don't really know how to see all my pictures,
but I've got a lot I think over like one

(24:51):
hundred thousand. Yeah, it doesn't let me do this very easily.
I thought there's a way to do that, but I
guess not. Anyway, The point is I've got a lot
of pictures in there, and once you have a lot
of pictures in there, it's kind of scary because there's
so many that it's like, I need to get these

(25:11):
backed up somewhere else, that's for sure. Anyway. My point
is finding photos I think is really easy on Google
Photos because you can search for things like airplane or
park or flowers or you know, someone's name that's in
your contacts. But now you can use much more natural language.
So you can say show me that concert I went
to in Las Vegas last year and it will bring

(25:32):
up those pictures, or show me all my pictures from
Ireland that involve food and it can bring up pictures
like that. So again it's much more like we're getting
used to it chat, GBT where we can just ask
things in a natural language. Now that's for your photo collection,
and this isn't unique to Google. Apple has also announced
that in iOS eighteen, with their AI powered stuff, you'll

(25:55):
be able to do this as well. But again, all
of these AI features are just making life so much
easier for us as humans because we can finally interact
with computers the way that we interact with other humans.
You wouldn't go up to another human and say concert like,
you wouldn't say that to them, right, you would say,
remember that concert we went to in Las Vegas last year,

(26:17):
how much fun it was. And now that's the way
we're able to talk to AI and it's able to respond.
But for so many years, everything that we've searched on
our computer has been like you have to think of
like maybe what the file name is, or like a
keyword in that file presentation. It's like, okay, you wouldn't
just search. You wouldn't ask someone presentation. You would say

(26:38):
that presentation that I did last year about elephants, and
that's how you'd find it. And that's how we're getting
to search on our computers. And that's what I think
is the best part of this AI revolution is we're
finally able to interact in the way that we've always
wanted to. In fact, I shared a little tip in
my newsletter this week, which you can sign up for
at the website rich on Tech dot TV. I know

(26:58):
I mentioned that I mentioned a lot because I love
my newsletter and I think I really give out great
free information for that thing. But I gave a tip
because last week I was trying to figure out how
to keep my coffee maker on past the automatic shut
off and it was really like I was like, there's
only so many buttons on this thing, like which one
does this? And so I downloaded the PDF for the

(27:20):
coffee maker. It's a brand new coffee maker, so I
didn't really know how to use it very well. And
I was like searching the PDF for that, like how
to keep this thing on? Couldn't figure it out. Well,
I said, you know what, let me try this. I
uploaded the entire pdf to AI and now I said,
I'm going to ask you some questions about this, and
I said, how do I keep my coffee maker on
past the auto shut off? And it said there are

(27:43):
three ways to do it, and it gave the three
ways in natural language, and the way that I wanted
was there's a caraffe icon you press that, you press
and hold it for three seconds, and it turns your
machine back on without brewing a whole nother brew. And
so it's like something that was very simple. I didn't
find it in the manual even though it was there,
but AI found it in seconds eighty eight rich one

(28:05):
oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four
one zero one. Coming up, I'll tell you why Roku
is getting better when it comes to screen savers and
backdrops for your TV. This is rich on Tech. Welcome
back to rich On Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out
with you, talking technology at Triple eight Rich one oh one.

(28:26):
That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one
zero one. Still lots to get through. On today's show,
Instagram is introducing comments for stories. I'll tell you about that.
And Roku is introducing a really really cool feature that
turns your TV into a work of art. I'll explain that.
Let's let's go to Mark in San Diego. Mark, You're

(28:49):
on with Rich. Hi, Rich, great show, Thank you. You know.

Speaker 4 (28:53):
I have had problems in the last couple of days
only watching YouTube on my piece at home and I
get a notice. It says, aw snap, something went wrong,
and then it says tie clearing your your.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Cash and cookies. So I did that on the computer.

Speaker 4 (29:13):
But now I'm thinking maybe I should have done it
on the Chrome browser.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
Yes, that's that's the thing. So this, uh, is this
an older computer?

Speaker 4 (29:22):
Yeah, that's an older nice old pavilion swim line. It's
I don't know, later nine years old.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, yeah, if it's working right. Okay, So here's how
you do this on on the Chrome web browser. So
you go into your settings and there is you know,
those three little dots in the upper right hand corner.
It's weird. I really wish that Chrome would add like
an actual like I don't know, like those three little

(29:49):
dots are just so tough to explain to people. But anyway,
you see them. So you go there and then you
go into your settings. Okay, and then on the left
hand side it says privacy and security, and then there's
something that says delete browsing data, and it says delete history, cookies,
cash and more. Do you see that?

Speaker 4 (30:06):
Here we go studying you just got the setting jab okay.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
And on the left hand side Privacy and Security. You
see that, Oh yes, okay, tap that and that the
almost the middle of the screen. It says delete browsing data.
Do you see that, clear browsing data. Oh, your says clear. Interesting,
you might have an older version of Chrome.

Speaker 4 (30:25):
Uh clear history cookies cash.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
Now does it give you when you click there? Does
it say cashed images and files? And it tells me
that I would free up ninety megabytes to say how much?
How much you have it.

Speaker 4 (30:36):
Freed up less than three point four megabytes?

Speaker 1 (30:38):
Oh okay? Interesting? Oh well, what's the time range? Jack?
Seven days? Oh okay, so I would do all time. Now,
this is going to get rid of all of your
history on your on your browser. So you know, you know,
how you start typing in a website and you've gone
to and it like completes it, you're gonna that's gonna
be gone. And also your logins are also going to
go away, so you're gonna have to, you know, make

(31:00):
you know how to log into the websites that you
typically go to. So just that's but anyway, so if
that's all fine, then you can just tap that and uh,
you know, once you do that, you can delete the
data and you're good. Now. The other thing you might
want to look at if you go into Advance before
you do this, see where it says hosted app data.

(31:23):
Let's see all the way at the end. So that
may have some fragments of YouTube in there as well,
so you might want to delete that as well, and
so that that may help and include that in the
clear data. Okay, yeah, so once you do all that,
hopefully that should clear it out. I would also if
I were you, once you do all this, I would

(31:44):
also go into your settings on Chrome and I would
go into about Chrome. So if you go in the
lower left hand corner where you saw the Privacy and
security all the way at the bottom, it says about Chrome.
You tap that. And I think that everyone should do
this because look at this. I just found Mike. Chrome
has an update. It doesn't always tell you update immediately.
It does generally, but sometimes you can find the update

(32:06):
quicker by going into this little settings about Chrome, and
mine says relaunch Chrome to finish updating. So Mark, I
would also go to there and make sure that your
Chrome is the latest for this computer. It may be
that you're running an older version of Chrome. Just because
this computer is an older model, it may not support
the latest Chrome. But that's what I would do, and

(32:27):
then I would relaunch Chrome once it's done, and then
I would restart your entire computer and go back to
YouTube and hopefully that takes care of that problem. So
a good question, and thanks for the call today in
San Diego. Appreciate it. Let's see here Instagram is adding
comments for stories. Now. This is funny because I actually

(32:49):
tweeted the guy who runs Instagram, Adam Oseri, and I said, hey,
why are you going to introduce comments for stories? And
this was years ago, maybe two years ago. He was like, ah,
We're not doing that, and he's like, stories are more
personal bla blah blah blah. I was like, I'm just saying,
you know, people would like this, and A it was
cool that he actually took the time to write back
to me, but B I knew it was a matter

(33:11):
of time before they added this because stories are the
hottest growth area on Instagram. I mean, reels are hot,
but everyone posts stories. Not everyone posts reels, right, but
everyone posts stories. And so now instead of just being
able to send a direct message, you can now comment
on stories. Now, this is rolling out, not everyone's going

(33:31):
to have it, so if you don't have it right away,
don't come yelling at me. I don't have it yet.
I've only seen one person that has it so far.
And the comments act just like they act on the posts.
Right you see a story that you like, instead of
direct messaging someone at the bottom, you can now comment
and other people will be able to see it. Now,
there are some caveats there, so comments will be visible
to anyone who can view the story, but for private

(33:55):
accounts only people that you also follow can leave a comment,
and for public account anyone that you follow can comment.
So if I follow someone on Instagram, they can comment
on my stories. Comments are temporary, they last up to
twenty four hours, and you can turn them on and
off for individual stories. Notice I said individual stories. They're
not letting you turn this off, just the whole thing,

(34:19):
like it's going to be on every story that you
have to turn it off if you don't want it now. Again,
comments can be preserved if you save the story as
a highlight. Otherwise they seem to go away. That's kind
of interesting to me. Since I don't have this, I
can't test it but I'm curious if you go into
your archive, which, by the way, you know all your
stories on Instagram are archived, right, so if you go
into Instagram and you know those stories don't really disappear

(34:42):
after twenty four hours. If you tap your profile and
then you go into the upper right hand corner, tap
those three lines to go into your settings. If you
go into archive, it'll show you all of your stories
that you've ever posted, which is good and bad. I mean,
if you posted something silly and you want to get
rid of it, you can go into that actual story
and and delete it for real, but otherwise it's going

(35:03):
to be saved anyway. Kind of fun. I'm all about
this because I get so many messages on a lot
of my stories. It'll be kind of nice to have
that little bit of conversation. But it has to be
people I follow, so it only limits it to certain
people anyway. Eight to eight rich one O one eight
eight eight seven four to two four one zero one.

(35:23):
Give me a call if you have a question about technology.
This is rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech.
Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology. The
phone number four. The show is eight eight eight rich
one O one eight eight eight seven four to two
four one zero one. Kim is standing by to take
your call and get you on the show. We'll take

(35:43):
some more calls in just a moment. Coming up this hour,
we've got the Apple Circle host Robert Rosenfeld. He's going
to discuss all things Apple. We've got a big Apple
event coming up next week. You can talk about his
YouTube channel and the coverage he does of the Apple ecosystem.
Have a fun conversation with him. My Instagram at rich

(36:04):
On Tech, I posted I was in Vegas. If you
heard the first segment, I was talking about my time
in Vegas. We stayed at this new hotel I think
you say it the fontin blue. It's kind of at
the end of the strip. Beautiful hotel, really really nice.
But I posted an instagram of the first thing I
do when I get to the hotel room. So I

(36:26):
know everyone has like a little routine. I show you mine.
So if you want to see that at rich On Tech,
and you can comment and let me know if you
do the same thing or if you do something different.
A lot of people commenting there. Beverly writes in on
the website rich On tech Dot TV hit contact and
you can get your email to me. Beverly says, hey, Rich,
great weather jokes. The heat wave is unbelievable, but listening

(36:48):
to your show and reading your fantastic newsletter provide some
great distractions. My question is it okay to use the
Wi Fi when renting an Airbnb? I wonder about the
security of connecting phones and computers with bank accounts and
other sensitive information. Generally, I would say, yes, you're gonna
be fine, but you specifically mentioned bank accounts and sensitive information,

(37:13):
so I think you're gonna be just fine with things
like your email and pretty much anything else you're doing
on there. But when it comes to checking your bank account,
specifically logging in there, I would say, use a VPN
or flip your phone, flip the Wi Fi off on
your phone, and use your mobile data. But anything else
you're going to do, whether you're using Netflix or whether

(37:35):
you are just surfing the web, that's all gonna be fine.
I mean, you know, modern Wi Fi networks are pretty secure.
Now you are using a quote unquote public network here,
because many people have access to this network. People could
have modified the network to spy on you. People could
have you know, there's just many, many things that could

(37:55):
happen when you're in an airbnb where many people have
access to this router and network, So I would be cautious,
So use a VPN if you're checking your bank account.
But better yet, save the money. Just flip your phone
out of Wi Fi into just mobile data from your
cellular carrier if you have to check your bank account
while you're there, and do that. And that's what I do.

(38:16):
I mean, it's funny because the other day I'd noticed
myself I was doing my routine on my computer. Then
all of a sudden, I was like, I want to
check something in my bank and I was like, oh
wait a second, I got to turn the Wi Fi off.
Same thing. Just anytime you're at an airport or a hotel,
anytime you're on a public network, just kind of be
aware of what you're doing. I think ninety nine point
nine percent of the time, your computer and your firewall

(38:37):
and all the stuff that's built in to modern systems
is going to protect you to a certain extent, but
it can only go so far. So just be aware
that anything you do that's sensitive. I would flip off
that flip off that didn't sound right, I would turn
off your Wi Fi and I would go into your
cellular or use your hotspot. So yesterday at the airport

(38:57):
in Vegas, I just said, you know, I want let
me just use my hotspot because that's the easiest thing
to do. So good question, Beverly. And I'm glad you
liked my weather jokes. I don't do jokes very often.
I may joke around, but I'm glad you enjoyed those.
Let's go to Angela in San Diego. Angela, you're on
with Rich.

Speaker 5 (39:18):
Thanks for teting my call.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
Rich.

Speaker 5 (39:20):
I caught a piece of the back end of a
piece that you did on the Bill Handle show last
week about making the best use of airline miles. And
I'm wondering if you could repeat that information because it
sounded like something that was really valuable.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
Oh well, thank you. You know, I try to share
valuable information all the time. But I'm glad what kind
of miles and points are you most interested in? Like,
what do you collect them? Do you try to get
them or what?

Speaker 5 (39:46):
Well, ordinarily I collect them and use them for flights,
but you pointed out that that wasn't the most prudent
thing to do. In fact, you if I, if I understood,
correctly recommended using them for upgrades rather than flights. And
you even alluded to some websites that indicate when you're
better off buying a ticket than using mile.

Speaker 1 (40:06):
Yes, okay, good listener, Angela, you get a gold star
for listening.

Speaker 5 (40:09):
That's but I don't I heard enough.

Speaker 1 (40:12):
Well, I'll tell I'll go through it right now. So okay,
So here's the deal. So I did mention a couple
of websites. This was inspired by my segment on KTLA
about tools to maximize your travel rewards. Now, with all
this said, I have hung out with the points guy.
Points are big business. This is big money. So if
you think you're getting ahead by, you know, getting these

(40:33):
points from your credit card and all these places, you're not.
They are having the last laugh. They are making money
on this stuff. And yes, you can enjoy free flights, upgrades,
all that good stuff. Just keep in mind don't go
into debt trying to rack up airline points because that
is not a winning game. And by the way, when
you are trying to use your credit card to accrue

(40:55):
these points, a lot of times you do spend more
money than you typically would because it's on a credit
card versus cash. Anyway, now I'm off my soapbox with
all those warnings. I collect points. I think they're fun.
I do them in a responsible way, and I'm not
setting out to try to game the system. But yeah,
I mean, I'm a member of Mario, I've got their points.
I'm a member of United, I've got their points and

(41:18):
various other things out there. So with all that said,
the things that you need to know Number one Points
Yeah dot com. We had Bart Welch from Points Yeah
on this show to talk about his points search engine.
This searches across twenty different airline programs and six different
bank programs. And what's really unique about that is, let's
say you have Chase points, or let's say you have

(41:40):
City Bank points. Those points are very valuable and they
could be transferred into airline programs at a higher usage
rate and a higher value than they would if you
just booked through Chase. So I think, Angela, that's what
you were alluding to when I was talking about some
of that stuff. So that's a great search engine. A
lot of it's free, but it is paid if you

(42:00):
want to get the maximum out of it, which means
searching on more days at once and also getting alerts
when the flight that you want for the points that
you want is available. Also, the Daydream Explorer tool is
a really cool tool because you can say, look, I
want to go to Europe business class, and let's see
the cheapest times or days or ways to do that,

(42:23):
and it may be on an airline that you didn't
think of, but because you can transfer those miles from
American Express or whatever, or even a different airline into
another airline and get more value out of them, that
could really be a unique way to do that. The
other one that I really like is called point dot me,
and so point me is a great one. It's kind
of similar to Points.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
I think it's a little bit simpler in look because
it only really does one thing and it just searches
across all different points programs to find the best value
for your points. And I use this to find a
flight for my mom. Didn't even realize that we could
use our points with Jet Blue, and it found a
super cheap Jet Blue flight with points, and I immediately

(43:06):
signed up for Jet Blue their points program whatever it's called,
transferred my points into there and was able to buy
a flight for my mom way cheaper than the going
rate for cash for any flight for that weekend, And
so I was a believer there. Now point dot me
is a paid system. They used to offer like they'll

(43:26):
have specials here and there where you could do a
search for free or something like that, but they do
want you to pay if you're getting serious about using that. Now,
this is a really cool browser extension. It's called points Path,
and so you can install this on Chrome and then
when you search Google flights, it puts the points equivalent
right next to the flight prices. So it's really easy

(43:48):
to see, Like if you're searching for a flight to
let's say Hawaii, and it's you know, three hundred and
forty eight dollars with dollars, but it says this same
flight is only twenty thousand points. It will actually point
an arrow to the better value of your time and
money and resources. So if points are a better deal,
it will say use points. If money is a better deal,

(44:09):
it'll say, use your money and save your points. It
supports United American, Delta Jet Blue in Alaska. Now the
Points Guy mentioned the points Guy, Brian Kelly. He does
a great job with his website very successful there. He
has a calculator on his website called Awards versus Cash Calculator.
So if you go there and I'll link this all

(44:30):
up on my website, rich on tech dot TV, hit
the light bulb and you can get show notes for
today's show. This is show number eighty eight. It will
be in there. So if you go there, you can.
This is kind of a manual way of that points
path I just talked about. You pop in like, Okay,
here's the deal I found with points. Compare it to cash,

(44:50):
and it will tell you it's a better deal to
use your cash, or it's a better deal to use
your points, because sometimes it might be cheaper to use
cash because your points are worth more. And that's the
other thing I was talking about. Angela's a lot of
people like to use their points to upgrade because it
is a better value for them because they're getting like
a first class flight for something that they feel is

(45:12):
almost free. You know, they're points that they've racked up,
So always look at that as well. The points guy
there you go a ward wallet. I really like this
because it tracks your account balances across all the loyalty programs.
So for instance, myself, I signed up for this and
I had some Hyatt points, which by the way, are
very very valuable. So even though I only had thirteen
thousand points, that was like basically a free night. A

(45:35):
free night was fifteen thousand, and I didn't even realize that.
I was like, oh, I have only thirteen thousand. I'm
just gonna let those go to waste because I haven't
stayed at Higatt in a while. I'm not going to
get more points. And I got this alert from a
ward wallet that said, hey, use your points with Hygat.
They're going to expire at the end of September, and
my wife and I were going to a concert in
Orange County and I said, let me see if there's
any Hyatts near our concert we wanted to stay overnight,

(45:57):
and so sure enough, it saved me like a couple
hundred bucks on a hotel room. And I did have
to transfer in about a thousand points. But my point
is no pun intended that a ward walle it came
to save me about three hundred dollars, and it's a
free service. Just by saying, hey, these points are about
to expire, use them or lose them, and it gives
you all the ways you can actually extend those points.

(46:19):
A lot of times all you have to do is
some sort of transaction, like it might only take a
dollar transaction to extend the life of these points. So
a ward wall is really great for that. And then
the expert advice we got from Bart. You know, don't
don't don't keep, don't hold on to these points. They
don't earn interest, so it's best to just use them

(46:39):
as you accrue them, because otherwise the value of them
is going down. Great question, Angela from San Diego, Thanks
so much for calling. Eight to eight rich one oh
one eight eight eight seven four two core one zero one,
rich on tech dot TV coming up. I'll tell you
what Roku is doing to your TV. It's pretty cool.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging

(47:02):
out with you, talking technology at eight eight eight rich
one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to
two four one zero one. You can you can sense
the trend with the songs today. Yeah, it's hot in
Los Angeles. It is a heat wave. I think we're
finally close to getting through. But stay safe out there.

(47:24):
Don't do too much, you know what, you have an
excuse to just not do that much, you know, because
it's like you don't want to overheat yourself. Eighty eight
rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to
two four one zero one. Roku introducing a cool new feature.
I love this feature. It's called backdrops. You know how

(47:45):
when you have a Roku, it just shows that like
weird like Digital City with like the weird ads like
scrolling through. If you have a Roku, you know what
I'm talking about, Well, you can finally set this new
backdrop as your TV background. It's weird because I kind
of did it a little bit half, you know what,
so it's not going to be your screen saver. It

(48:05):
sounds like you have to activate this manually every single time.
But I'll take it because it's pretty neat. So they
call it backdrops, and it's basically a way to display
classic artwork and landscape photos on your Roku device when
it's not in use. And they give you a whole
bunch of images, so thousands of images like Claude Monet

(48:25):
and a whole bunch of other stuff. There are also
descriptions so you can understand what the art is all about,
plus geography. But the cool thing is You can also
upload your personal photos to use with this, or connect
your Google Photos account, and that is incredible. So no
matter what, you now can turn your Roku into sort
of a piece of art for your living room or

(48:47):
wherever your TV is. This feature is rolling out to
Roku branded TVs in the coming weeks, and if you
have a Roku box, you have to wait until the
some time. It already kind of is the fall, so
I'm guessing the next couple of months. But it's kind
of cool. I'm very excited for this. You have to
activate it manually. Apparently, maybe they'll change that if people say, hey,

(49:11):
can we just make it so that when my screen
times out after five minutes, it'll display this instead of
that weird scrolling city scape thing that's been around. It
looks like it's like, you know, ten years old from
the nineties or something. But I think Roku sells ads
on that weird digital screenscape thing, so that's probably why
they want to keep that there. But anyway, you'll be

(49:31):
able to activate this either manually with your voice or
by the settings. But kind of cool backdrops from Roku
that's new and it kind of gives new life to
your TV. I love putting on like kind of a
photo screensaver when I have people over. But then my
TV like times out after a while, and then it
like goes off, but it's kind of fun. And then

(49:51):
people get like they start looking at the pictures on
the TV. I'm like, you're not supposed to be like
looking at them. It's not a slide show. It's just
like the background, you know. And then like people are like,
what's that picture? What's that?

Speaker 2 (50:00):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (50:00):
Yeah, okay, let's go to Paul and Columbus, Ohio. Paul
your own with Rich.

Speaker 6 (50:05):
Well keep it cool, hey, Paul, a little a little
cooler you are today. But anyway, I've got a using
a fire TV cube with a High Sense TV and
I've got a Denim AV receiver and in the last
several days or a week or so, maybe periodically just

(50:25):
randomly a few times a day or evening, it goes
just goes to pause.

Speaker 7 (50:34):
To make a.

Speaker 6 (50:35):
Difference with the video sources as far as what channel
or service anything like that. But when it is on
a station, like I say, it just all of a
sudden will just pause itself.

Speaker 1 (50:48):
Hmm. Interesting, and it's just pausing any any kind of
streaming content is pausing.

Speaker 6 (50:54):
Whatever's on the whatever's on the system at that time.

Speaker 1 (50:57):
Yeah, okay. And are you are you pressing anything, touching anything,
doing anything when this happens?

Speaker 8 (51:03):
No?

Speaker 1 (51:04):
Nothing?

Speaker 3 (51:04):
And is it?

Speaker 6 (51:05):
Is it?

Speaker 1 (51:05):
Is it a buffering issue? Like can you tell if
your screen is buffering?

Speaker 6 (51:09):
It'll tell us the just the most show that it's
buffering if it's buffering.

Speaker 5 (51:15):
But okay, this is besides it.

Speaker 6 (51:17):
And I've got a good solid five hundred downs.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
Oh nice. Now when this happens, do you see the
playbar come up on the screen with the pause like enabled.
Is that what it looks like? No, it doesn't.

Speaker 6 (51:30):
It just pauses.

Speaker 1 (51:31):
Oh that's interesting.

Speaker 6 (51:32):
Okay, Well, no, I don't want to say that absolutely
that nothing shows up otherwise because I'm visually impaired. But
my wife would say there may be. Okay, So I
just pushed the pause button to you know, go back
to play, and it starts to play right away.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
Okay, So that would be that That would be something
I would be curious about, is the if the play
button comes up. There's a couple of things that could
be going on here. You know, another device on your
network could be interfering and controlling this and stopping it.
So there's something with HDMI called CEC, which is basically
one device can control another through little signals that they

(52:11):
send to each other. So if you have another device
on this network that's sort of turning on or firing up,
it may be sending that signal that's causing your fireTV
to pause. That's one thing. The other thing that I
would do is check your fireTV to make sure you
have the latest software. You can go into your settings
and check for the latest software update. Go to the
about page and that's where you find it and see

(52:33):
if that's the case. And I would also restart your
fireTV and I might disconnect it from your denin system
and see if this continues to happen because it sounds
like something is sending a signal. And don't forget some
of the other remotes can also pause these things too,
so make sure you're not like sitting on a remote
or something like that. Thanks for the call, Paul. Coming up,
we're talking Apple. Welcome back to rich On Tech. Rich

(52:55):
Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology at triple
eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven
four two four one zero one give me a call
if you have a question about technology. We'll get back
to the phone lines in just a little bit, but first,
Robert Rosenfeld is joining us. He is a YouTuber and
host of The Apple Circle, where he discusses all kinds

(53:18):
of Apple stuff and it's a great site, a great
a great channel on YouTube. So if you like Apple stuff,
go ahead and follow him. Robert, Welcome to the show, Rich,
Thanks so much for having me absolutely. Let's first off,
so you started this YouTube channel. You've had some pretty
good success. What's it like to be a YouTuber like people?
You know, people used to want to be like an

(53:39):
actor or a singer, like someone like a If you
ask a kid like what they want to do, they
want to be someone famous. You're living like the YouTube dream.
So what's that like?

Speaker 6 (53:48):
It is like.

Speaker 9 (53:49):
Living a dream as a kid. I was the one
watching YouTube videos. That's where I sort of got my news.
I was sort of the kid watching Apple keynotes like
it was Christmas Day, sort of seeing what presence there
would be to sort of unpack and what Steve Jobs
would sort of unveil on stage and to sort of
really take a couple of weird turns and be able
to do this like full time as a career. Is

(54:11):
It's a dream come true and it is so much fun,
especially with big days coming up, like the big Apple
event on Monday.

Speaker 1 (54:16):
Is it a lot of work because people think, you know,
you make it look easier, videos are slick, But is
it a lot of work.

Speaker 9 (54:22):
It's a lot of work with you know, research and
shooting and editing, and it's a lot of going down
rabbit holes and reading through legal jargon and technical documents
and going on Reddit threads and watching you know, great
reports from reporters like you, and trying to consolidate consolidate
that information in a way that hopefully is entertaining and
fun and hopefully not too long because I could ramble

(54:43):
and ramble for twenty five minutes, So to get that
into a nice, you know, eight to ten minute package
can sometimes be a little tough.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:50):
I know, as someone who is creative as well, you know,
it's like you sometimes go longer than you think and
you're like, I don't want to cut any of this,
It's all my baby, but sometimes you have to be brutal.
So what resonates on your YouTube channel the most with
people when it comes to Apple, I mean pretty much.
You know, I joked earlier that if you do an
Apple video it could like go viral because people just

(55:10):
they're fascinated with this company. But what do you find
that resonates with your viewers the most? You know, it's
so funny. It's the secrecy of Apple. The Apple lovers
want to know what Apple's going to do. The Apple
haters want to know what Apple's going to do next.
And because everything this company does is show shrouded in
mystery and secrecy, it's just fun to try to read

(55:31):
the tea leaves, so to speak, and put the puzzle
pieces together to see what is sort of coming up
next and what the new feature could be or what
the new product could be. I think a lot of
the people in our community who watch our videos, they're
Apple fans. They're the geeks.

Speaker 9 (55:43):
They want to geek out and sort of know and
be in the loop on what could be coming next.
But I think more and more these days it's people
just trying to sort of validate their purchase decision. If
they're going to invest into a new iPhone or a
Mac or an iPad or whatever it may be, they
want to make sure they're buying the right device at
the right time, and they don't want to miss out
on something amazing that could be coming in two days

(56:04):
or three weeks or three months.

Speaker 1 (56:05):
So they just want to know what's coming next.

Speaker 9 (56:07):
So I think everyone sort of either selfishly sort of
an Apple fan maybe the Apple hater sort of wants
to know where Apple's going next door. Hey, I want
to spend a thousand bucks on a phone. I want
to make sure I'm buying at the right time.

Speaker 1 (56:18):
Yeah, And I always joke that the Apple stuff has
like this like ticking time bomb of a timeline where
if it's a product that they come out with, you
almost have to get it like right when it comes
out because they're going to have a new version like
a year later. And so like with a MacBook, I mean,
I know that they have a long lifetime with these things,
but for me personally, I'm like, Okay, I want that
new MacBook now because I know they're going to come

(56:38):
out with the new generation in a year, and I
want to like feel like I've gotten my use out
of this. If I buy it six months in now,
it's like, oh, I could have had six more months
of use before the new one. But anyway, that's just me.
Let's talk about some of the hot kind of like
iPhone apps and accessories that you like. Do you have
anything that we, you know, would find interesting.

Speaker 9 (56:57):
Yeah, you know, I'm always on the hunt for really
cool apps that extend beyond the iPhone. If they can
sort of tie into other parts the Apple ecosystem, AirPods,
Apple watches, I'm all in for that. One I've been
testing that I really like is an Apple called train Well.
And the idea of this app is they connect you
to sort of a real fitness professional. You've got your
own sort of personal trender who sort of you know,

(57:18):
you do a Google meet with them and they sort
of are able to craft their custom workout plan for you,
and then you go to the gym or you work
out a home. You open up the app whenever you
want to work out, and not only do you have
sort of you know, videos of what the workout is,
you can sort of see what you're doing and sort
of track along and make sure you're staying on pace.
But also, I think the secret sauce here is their
integration with the Apple Watch. So because a lot of

(57:40):
us are wearing these Apple watches on our wrists. It's
collecting our heart rate information, it's analyzing our movement. So
as I work out, the Apple Watch Companion app is
tracking all this information and I can get real time
info and feedback. So maybe I've got my AirPods in,
I'm doing dumbbell curls. I'm listening to the Ridge on
Tech podcast as I work out, and I'm getting sort
of a voice in my ear saying, hey, you're going

(58:02):
a little too high at the top or a little
too low at the bottom, or slow down that move
So I'm getting that real time feedback as I work out.
And then what's also cool is sort of post workout,
your trainer, wherever they are in the world, is able
to sort of look at that info, see if your
heart rate was where it needed to be, see how
your e motion was, and then they sort of message
you in the app and give you feedback to say, hey,
great job, or know this, you were a little too
fast on that, maybe we should adjust the weight. So finding,

(58:25):
you know, apps that sort of use the different parts
of the ecosystem, that's been super fun for me, and
this one has been quite love The Apple Watch integration
is so so cool.

Speaker 1 (58:33):
That's cool. Okay, so train well dot Net is that one.
So we've got this big event coming up on Monday.
This is the iPhone launch event. What do they call it?
Glow time? That's their It's glowtime. It's glow time. So
what are we expecting? I know the iPhone sixteen obviously,
but is there going to be any surprises with that
device or what? I hope We.

Speaker 9 (58:55):
Always sort of hope for that one more thing, that
special magical moment, and sometimes Apple does sort of throw
us for a loop and show us something we weren't expecting.
But I think that the Apple leaks have gotten so good,
especially the last couple of years, that we typically sort
of know by and large what's coming before Apple announces it.
So we will, of course see the iPhone sixteen. We're
expecting some minor re spec bumps to every Apple watching

(59:17):
the lineup, and I think the one wild card could
be in the air pods category. We're expecting an AirPods
Gen four, so a nice update to the regular standard
air pods with active noise cancelation for the first time
in a non pro seat of AirPods. That'd be awesome. Well,
we've also heard these rumblings about a ninety nine dollars
pair of AirPods, maybe a more base entry level Gen

(59:37):
four that we still have slick, you know, us sinking
between all your Apple devices, great batter like maybe minus
some of the bells and whistles of the pro stuff.
But you know, ninety nine dollars will not inexpensive in
the Apple world. That's sort of a bargain because they
don't usually do you know, higher end pristine products at
these price points. So that would be cool. And that's
the one thing I'm sort of hoping to see, hopefully

(59:58):
Tim or another exec show off on Monday.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
I mean that that sub one hundred dollars price is
music to anyone's ears, because I'm looking at the current AirPods.
You've got one hundred and twenty nine, one sixty nine
and two forty nine. So if you can get a
ninety nine dollars AirPods, and that's by the way, you know,
not on sales. I've seen AirPods as they get a
little bit aged up there, they do drop in price

(01:00:21):
a little bit, and you know, there this is an
easy win, like on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, like the
discounts on AirPods because people love getting earbuds and it's
like an easy gift, It's an easy thing to get yourself.
So that ninety nine dollars price point would be really nice.
And I know Samsung has done the fee models of
their stuff, which is a little bit cheaper but kind
of premium and so and I've seen that. You know,

(01:00:43):
there's just so many earbuds out there, and when people
look at the Apple stuff compared to the others, like
ah wa shuld I pay a little bit more, but
you do get that integration with the ecosystem. Do you
use like other devices like ever like Samsung or Google,
like to sample them or what you know?

Speaker 9 (01:00:58):
I do. I try to dabble in world of the
pixel and you know, Samsung devices, and I mean credit
to where credits do. Samsung and Google and other Android
manufacturers are doing some really great innovative things and bringing
a lot of competition to the space. But the problem
I always have time and time again is that I'm
so entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, this Apple walled garden,
that it can be sort of hard to sort of

(01:01:19):
break out. And there are ways to do it, but man,
when you've got a Mac and an iPad and air
pods and everything so seamlessly works, and you rely on
technologies like air drop while there are alternatives.

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
To be used.

Speaker 9 (01:01:30):
It's so it's nice and you know, as cliches it sounds,
Apple does have a little bit of that Apple magic
in there when you use all their stuff that it's
kind of hard to sort of break away.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
And you said something interesting. I interviewed you from my
KTLA segment which is airing Monday, and you said something
interesting there about how Apple does things a little bit
later sometimes, you know, like like a lot of the
features that have come out I was looking at like
some of the features that came out on the iPhone
over the years, like wireless charging and water resistance and
stuff like that, and like it's a lot of stuff

(01:02:01):
that Samsung had done in the past, you know. But
to explain what you said about how Apple does things, Yeah,
there's this mantra that Apple. You know, typically they're never
the first to enter a new product category or bring
a new feature. Usually they're a little late to the
party on some of these things. Other manufacturers have done
it first. But typically when Apple does decide to do something,

(01:02:23):
they do it really well. They bring their own spin
on things, They bring some sort of integration that we
just haven't seen before. And again, as cliche as it is,
that Apple Magic does exist. And when they're able to
introduce a new feature that fans have been clamoring for,
even if it's you know, laid and Android fans have
had it for five years, it's always sort of nice.
And Apple's always able to do sort of their unique

(01:02:44):
spin and do things their own way that users and
fans definitely appreciate. All right, And I imagine you'll be
watching very closely Monday morning, ten am Pacific. That's when
this event happens, and you'll have your whole round up
and all that good stuff.

Speaker 9 (01:02:57):
Absolutely, I will have full coverage, breakdown and every think
and I don't want to spoil things too much, but
I will say we've already got rumors. News cycle never
sleeps on the iPhone seventeen, So in a couple of weeks,
the iPhone rumor train will leave the station and start
up once again.

Speaker 1 (01:03:11):
Oh my gosh, All right, Robert Rosenfeld, we're gonna leave
it there. YouTube dot com slash the Apple Circle. You
can subscribe to h Robert there for all of his
Apple coverage. Thanks for joining me today. Honor to be here, Rich,
Thank you again. All right, thanks a lot, so exciting,
lots of fun stuff. Apple. You know, it's a it's
a company people either love or hate, you know. I mean,

(01:03:32):
I see a lot of iPhones out there, but I
a'll see a lot of androids, so you know, to
each his own. All right, coming up more of your questions.
Plus I'll tell you what Samsung is doing with their
AI features bringing them to more devices. Is yours one
of them? This is rich on Tech. Welcome back to
rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you,
talking technology at Triple eight Rich one oh one. That's

(01:03:55):
eight eight eight seven four two four one zero one.
You may me as the tech reporter on KTLA channel
five in Los Angeles. If you don't live in LA,
well you know me from right here and I'm happy
to be here with you. Richon Tech dot tv is
the website there. You can contact me. Hit the contact
button to send me an email. You can hit the

(01:04:17):
light bulb icon up at the top if you want
to get a link to something I mentioned on the
show or a guest mentions and be sure to sign
up for my newsletter while you're there. This week, I
talk about my experience at the new U two show
at Sphere in Las Vegas. What else do I talk about?

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):
Here?

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
You get to recap my TV segments, so if you're
not in La you can see those. Talk about some
of the tech news you need to know. I feature
a new app that gives you nature sounds if you
want to listen to those. Tell you how to download
videos from the Internet with a super simple website. And
let's see what else. Oh, I show you some the

(01:04:57):
video game that was a part of my childhood, Super
Mario Brothers three. I visited this cool store where they
have all retro video games and it was just like
a walk down memory lane. Anyway, that's all on the website.
Rich on tech dot TV. Let's go to Deborah in Carson, California. Deborah,
you're on with Rich.

Speaker 10 (01:05:16):
Hello.

Speaker 7 (01:05:17):
I have a situation where several times a year we
stay at this one house and we stay for about
two to three weeks, but there's no Wi Fi connection.

Speaker 10 (01:05:29):
There's no Wi Fi there.

Speaker 3 (01:05:32):
Up.

Speaker 7 (01:05:33):
What we've been doing is she's using my phone or
our phones to create a hotspot so we can, you know,
get onto our computers. But it does use up a
lot of data and it runs the phone battery down.
So I just came across a real quick myths about something.

(01:05:57):
I think it's called a travel modem. Okay, okay, would
that help us in this situation? They have better WiFi?

Speaker 1 (01:06:07):
Well, okay, so how many times a year are you
going to this house?

Speaker 7 (01:06:12):
About three times a year and then we're for about
two to three weeks?

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
Oh okay, so you're there for a while, okay, okay.
So there's a couple of things you can do. I mean,
I think that using your phone as a hotspot is
actually the best thing to do because you already have
the phone, and it's by the time you buy another
plan for like a Wi Fi hotspot, a dedicated Wi
Fi hot spot, it's probably going to cost you more
than just upgrading your phone plan to have more hotspot data.

(01:06:40):
What carrier are you using?

Speaker 10 (01:06:43):
Spectrum?

Speaker 1 (01:06:44):
Okay, so you're okay, So what do they give you?
How much do they give you on your on your WiFi?

Speaker 10 (01:06:50):
Uh I I don't know off my head, but I
do know that or there maybe about four three fourths
of the time that we're there, we're getting messages.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):
Yeah, you're over. Yeah. Okay. So it looks like Spectrum
gives you five gigabytes of monthly hotspot, which is not
very much because if you're using any kind of streaming
or whatever. Yeah, so if you're on an Unlimited Plus line,
you get ten gigabytes, which a little bit better. But
after your five gigs or ten gigs are up, they

(01:07:28):
slow you down to a crawl, which you've probably noticed.
You can't do anything at that speed. It's really really bad.
So with that said, so you can either you may
not be able to upgrade your plan if you're already
on that Unlimited Plus, or you can ask them and
see what the difference is. If it's like five or
ten dollars, that may be worth it. For one hundred
and twenty dollars for the year, you can get a

(01:07:48):
separate What you would need is a hot spot, so
you can go to like Verizon, you need a mobile hotspots,
you can go to Verizon, you can go to AT
and T, you can go to T Mobile and buy
one of these hot spots. The problem is the hot
spot itself is going to cost you anywhere from one
hundred to two to you know, sometimes three hundred dollars
for that. Then you have to have a monthly plan

(01:08:10):
for that as well, so that is that's going to
be kind of an expensive proposition for six weeks a year,
so or nine weeks a year or whatever you're doing there.
The other thing you can do is you can get
what's called five G home Internet and that is through
te Mobile or Verizon, and the plans on those are

(01:08:33):
around i'd say thirty five dollars a month, so again
you're talking thirty five times twelve. That's four hundred and
twenty dollars for the year. So that's another option, but
that's again kind of pricey. The other option you can
do is there are standalone kind of dedicated like you
mentioned travel hotspots. The company that I like is Solace Solis.

(01:08:58):
They have a product where you can get hot spot.
They have one that's the light or the five G
So this is anywhere from one hundred and fifty to
three hundred dollars, but that's meant to be used worldwide,
so it's kind of a hot spot that's used everywhere,
and so you're going to pay more for your data,
which is you know, it's it's going to be an
expensive proposition for the data. That's the problem with that.

(01:09:20):
So if you look at their plans that they have,
let's see their plan that they have. The plan, Yeah,
they have USA unlimited data is let's see here how
much eighty nine dollars for let's see twelve months. Let's
just see how much it is. Five six months would
be three hundred and seventy three dollars. So again, all

(01:09:41):
of these options, besides your phone as a hotspot, are
getting very expensive. Now here's my other question. Where this
house is located, do they have a free Wi Fi
signal that you can latch onto or does Spectrum have
a Wi Fi signal in that area that you can
log onto, because you would get that included in your
Spectrum plan. Good question, I would look into that.

Speaker 7 (01:10:06):
Don't show the answer to that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:07):
So now the other thing you can do is you
can get what's called an eSIM for your phone, and
that's an add on, and you can get an eSIM
for the US and use that as a hotspot. So
if you can find a cheap eSIM that that would
work in the US, which there are several, you can
do that, or you can switch carriers. I mean, if

(01:10:29):
you go to something like Visible, you're still going to
be on that Verizon network that you're on with Spectrum.
But they do offer unlimited hot spot for forty five
dollars a month and that includes a plan, So that
may be another way to go, But of course that
involves changing carriers, something not everyone wants to do. So Deborah,
you've got options, but I think I mean, I'll tell
you what my dad did. He he switched carriers. He

(01:10:52):
was at a place where he goes to a vacation
home where his phone didn't work, and he switched to
another carrier where and he upgraded to the one hundred
gargabytes of Wi Fi hotspot a month because he needed
his hotspot when he went there, and so he took
that plunge there and changed carriers. She may have to
do that, Debra, Thanks for the call. Eighty to eight

(01:11:12):
rich one oh one more rich on Tech right after this,
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging
out with you, talking technology. The phone line is eight
eight eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven
four to two four one zero one. The website rich
on Tech dot tv and feel free to follow me
on Instagram. At rich on Tech, we just had a

(01:11:34):
caller who was trying to figure out her hotspot situation
in a place where she was running through her hotspot
on her phone very quickly. Leslie from Santa Ana writes
in rich I'm listening to your show right now, and
I wanted to suggest a solution. Why not recommend visibles hotspot.
I use it for streaming Hulu, Netflix and other services.
It works great. She can even buy an affordable phone

(01:11:55):
like the Moto G Play for about ninety bucks to
use as a dedicated hotspot. Just trying to help out
a fellow listener. Have a great day you're listening to
rich on Tech. Haha, thank you, Leslie.

Speaker 2 (01:12:07):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:12:08):
I did recommend Visible because of their unlimited hotspot service,
but and I do think they have it capped at
a certain speed, but I think that should be fine.
Like you said, it works for Hulu, Netflix, but that
would require, like you said, a different phone completely and
you know, I think that most people probably don't want
to have a separate phone for just for hotspot. But

(01:12:29):
you know, if you switch to Visible, you could use it.
And I did recommend that, so good choice, good selection,
and it's definitely. It's a very visible is really like
a sleeper service because it's great for the price. I mean,
let's see, if you go to the website, I mean, oh,
right now they're doing oh wow, if you're a T

(01:12:49):
mobile customer, you can switch and you get fifteen dollars
a month for five years. Wow, that's pretty good. Now
that's for their basic plan. They have two plans, so
their basic plan is usually twenty five dollars a month
that just includes your talking text and your data like unlimited.
But if you move up to their forty five dollars

(01:13:10):
a month plan, you get the premium data, faster, hot Spot,
smart watch service included, and even some global roaming. So
that's pretty good. I mean, this is very very good.
And it's the trick is it is visible. They own
Verizon owns this company. Why is this so much cheaper
than Verizon. It's because there's no stores. You cannot go
into a store to get help with this. You have

(01:13:31):
to do everything online or through chat or whatever, and
so that may turn off certain people who like to
actually go to a store to do things. But if
you don't mind doing it, diy, I mean, believe me,
it's pretty good. Coming up this hour, We've got former
Yahoo CEO Mersa Meyer. She is going to talk about
her tech career, her new startup called Sunshine. She's going

(01:13:54):
to talk ai and you know her from Yahoo, she
was the CEO there. But also you know she was
Google employee number twenty number twenty, joined in nineteen ninety nine.
So she has had a very long and very fruitful
tech career. So we're looking forward to talking to her.
Let's go to Gary in Laguna Neguel. Gary, you're on
with Rich.

Speaker 3 (01:14:15):
Yes, Rich, got a couple of questions.

Speaker 1 (01:14:17):
A couple questions we charge after the first.

Speaker 3 (01:14:20):
I was just in Arizona. One of my favorite places
to go to is Portal, Arizona, Okay, poking up on
a map. It's far in the southeastern corner of Arizona.
They used to have Horizon cell service there and they've
now switched to AT and T. So how do you
get your Verizon phone to work with AT and T?

(01:14:42):
And I'm here on the phone right now. You know,
I'm not talking to you on the phone, but I'm
looking at the settings on the phone. So if I
switch over to like either Global or LTE GSM UMTS,
would that do any good?

Speaker 1 (01:14:58):
Not if you're are you you're a subscriber of Verizon, right, yes,
well it's not going to latch onto the eight and
T network unless you're unless you're a subscriber to eight
and T. So do you mean the whole city changed
over to EIGHTE and T. What do you mean by
they switched to AT and T? Who switched?

Speaker 3 (01:15:14):
Well, see, it's well if you look at Portal, Arizona
that it's a very very small community. It's in the
Cherokeella Mountains. But they've had Horizon for the last twenty
years and then they just switched over AT and T
two years ago. When I was there, I couldn't get
my phone to work anywhere, got it?

Speaker 1 (01:15:32):
Okay, So they kind of they switched their their tower.
I guess they must. Maybe the city itself runs the towers,
and they switched the agreement.

Speaker 3 (01:15:41):
Community not really a city, it's part of the state
of Arizona, got it?

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
But you know that you know that AT and T
works there?

Speaker 5 (01:15:50):
Well?

Speaker 3 (01:15:50):
Yeah, yeah, matter of fact, I talked to the owner
of the Portal Peak Lodge, which is the place one
of the places I go to stay on and a
lot of other birdwatchers see this is.

Speaker 1 (01:15:59):
A birdwatching are ah, okay.

Speaker 3 (01:16:01):
And it's it's out of the middle of nowhere, you know.
But it's so nice because so many birds in the area.
It's such a beautiful environment out there. It's really really
a great place to go. And the last ten times
I've gone there, my Verizon phone has work great. But
now they switch over to AT and T. And I
can tell you rich, when when I'm traveling, I'm doing

(01:16:22):
my job. It's just photographing birds. There's so many places
that AT and T does not work yet Verizon does.
I mean the mountains on the town.

Speaker 1 (01:16:31):
Well, yeah, you probably know where Anso Barrigo is, right,
I've heard of it. Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:16:36):
AT and T doesn't work out there, but yet Verizon
works fantastic, right, And it's just an example.

Speaker 1 (01:16:42):
Yeah, And here's the thing. So I do think Verizon
for rural areas works very well. The way I see
the three carriers, I think T mobile urban areas like
they have that covered and they're getting better at other
places with the acquisition of Sprint and all that. Verizon,
I feel like just overall everywhere, it's like right in
the middle, it just works really well everywhere. And then

(01:17:04):
AT and T is kind of like they're a mix.
They're like they have some of those traditional areas that
they work really well in and the rural, but they
also have a lot of those urban areas. So it's
kind of mix of Verizon and T Mobile with the coverage.
But you know, I typically recommend people to go with
the carrier that works where they work and where they live,
because those are the two places you are the most. Now,

(01:17:25):
if you what kind of phone do you have?

Speaker 3 (01:17:27):
Well, that's the other thing I want to ask you
about is my telephone I have. I love my phone,
but it just seems to be pretty outdated. It's a
Samsung Galaxy Stene m okay, and when I look at
all the modern phones out there, Rich, I mean, put
yourself in my position. You're wearing a photo best. You
need a fairly small phone because I carry teleconverters, I
carry a bottle of water on me carry my phone.

(01:17:49):
And you know these phones that are made nowadays, I
mean these things are gargant. One well, then begin to
fit in.

Speaker 1 (01:17:55):
I will tell you, I think the phone for you
is the Pixel nine, not the Pro. I mean, if
you want the Pro for the Zoom, but I think
the Pixel nine is incredible. It's a great value, it's small,
it's pocketable. I've been carrying around the Pixel nine Pro,
which they also made in a small version this year,
so I know that we have that trend of the bigger,
giant phone screens, which is great if you want to

(01:18:16):
watch movies and stuff. But I think that the Pixel
nine would be a great upgrade from this phone. With
that said.

Speaker 3 (01:18:23):
Pixel nine, yeah that take a small micros media or
because I use that all the time. Yeah, no phones
med cards whenever I have different photo students.

Speaker 1 (01:18:32):
Yeah, no phones are going to do that. None of
the new modern phones have the SD card slot at all.
But you could use an SD card reader on the
bottom of the phone, so you can just grab a
on Amazon an SD card reader like a micro SD
card USBC reader. It's like, you know, under ten bucks plug.

Speaker 3 (01:18:50):
But see that that stuff and I have to have
it externally. Look to the phone. I want to have
an internal into the phone.

Speaker 1 (01:18:55):
Well yeah, you're that's yeah, that's going to be tricky
these days because the phones just do not have But look,
if you're gonna stick with your phone and you want
to switch to AT and T, the thing you have
to do is go to the website on AT and
T this phone. Maybe so nowadays, nowadays, every pretty much
every phone is compatible with all the networks. I would
say a majority of the phones just work with everything.

(01:19:18):
But back in the day, and especially with this phone
that you have is a little bit older, it may
be specifically just Verizon bands. So if you want it to
consider switching to AT and T, go to their website,
search a compatibility checker. So search what I search here
AT and T compatibility checker and then you click that
and it will say check compatibility. And basically you have

(01:19:41):
to type in your phone's IMEI number and it will
tell you how to do that. And so once you
type that in, it will tell you if your phone
is you know, compatible or not, and it just needs
to have those certain bands. But they will be able
to tell you that pretty simply if you go to
their website and you can do that. So if you

(01:20:01):
want to check to see and switch to AT and
T and keep your phone that you have, that'd be
the easiest way to do this. But you know, that's
kind of the main thing. It's interesting they've got a
thing on their website that says the phones that are
approved for their network. Samsung, let's see, you've got the
S ten e and I'm looking on here Samsung S

(01:20:25):
ten e. Yeah, I see the S ten on there
S ten plus S ten e. So they've got a
couple of them on there that look like they are compatible.
But again, go to the website do that compatibility checker
with the IEMEI and that's the way to do it.
Thanks for the call, Gary, And it sounds like you've
got quite the fun there in portal checking out those birds.

(01:20:46):
My brother is a burder what do you call it,
a birdwatcher, but I think the pixel off also if
you're taking pictures of birds, the pixel I just saw
they just added it to my phone, the new super zoom,
like the old rez zoom thing that you can now
zoom in on your picture. Remember like on the TV
shows where they show like the police like zooming in

(01:21:07):
on the or the CSI like zooming in on something
and it's like pixelated, but then all of a sudden
it like gets clear, like a license plate. Well now
they've added that feature to Google Photos and I can't
wait to try it out. I just saw it pop
up my phone. I'm like, oh, that's cool. Before we
go to break, Samsung bring in AI to more devices.
So if you have an older Samsung S twenty three series,

(01:21:28):
the z Fold five, z Flip five, you are getting
an update that includes these new AI features, the composer,
the sketch to image, auto zoom, all kinds of features.
So if you have one of these phones, the S
twenty three or the Folds from last year, go ahead
and check that software update. This is one UI six
point one point one. So Samsung just on a roll

(01:21:51):
with bringing these AI features to like all of their
back catalog of phones. I love that you don't need
to spend money and your phone feels like it's got
cool new fe eighty to eight rich one oh one
eight eight eight seven four two four one zero one.
I'll tell you why earthquake alerts are going national if
you have an Android phone, coming out. Welcome back to

(01:22:13):
rich On Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you
talking technology.

Speaker 6 (01:22:18):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
Android earthquake alerts. We have them here in the LA area,
also in California, Oregon, and Washington, but now they're going national.
So if you have an Android phone, Google is expanding
these life potentially life saving alerts. Across all fifty states.
So they're using the accelerometers in Android phones to detect earthquakes.

(01:22:42):
So all of the Android phones in the US are
now little earthquake detectors. Uses crowdsource data to determine if
an earthquake is happening, and if it is, it will
alert other users in that area. So there's two types
of notifications. One is light shaking, which gives you a
small pop up on this and if it's moderate to
extreme shaking, you'll get a full screen take action alert

(01:23:04):
with safety instructions. And they say even a few seconds
of warning can help people move to safer areas. They've
been working with experts. Google has to improve the accuracy.
But this is really great because in California, Oregon, and
Washington they actually have like little censors in the ground
and that system even took a while to get up
and running on people's phones, and that works on iPhone Android.

(01:23:27):
But this is really neat because now we have earthquake
alerts everywhere because earthquakes, I don't know if you've noticed,
but not just California, Like there's been earthquakes in various
states across the nation, and so I love that they
did this, and so if you go in your Android phone,
just make sure this is turned on. It's under the
Google settings and like usually under emergency there. So kind

(01:23:50):
of cool. Let's go to Maria in Los Angeles. Maria,
you're on with rich Hi.

Speaker 11 (01:23:57):
Can you hear me?

Speaker 1 (01:23:58):
I hear you?

Speaker 11 (01:24:00):
Uh yeah, thank you so much for picking my call.
I'm calling because I would like to ask you if
you can suggest me a wait to control my thirteen
year old I iPhone. He I have an Android. I
have an iPhone. I'm sorry, I have an Android ten

(01:24:22):
and he he used to have a NiFe an Android,
but when he when I and I have the risk
to an I iPhone and now the Google apps friends,
that control doesn't work anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:24:35):
Yeah, yeah, that's not gonna work.

Speaker 11 (01:24:38):
I mean I tried the Tea mobile app. It doesn't
work either. I do have an iPod because I know
sometimes Apple communicate with.

Speaker 1 (01:24:46):
Apple, right, yeah, but not the iPod.

Speaker 5 (01:24:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:24:50):
So to manage to manage screen time, that's what you
need to do. So you have to manage the screen
time on there. Uh. And what you can do is
you have actually have to you would have to get
his phone obviously with his approval and set this up
from his phone. So you can go into his phone

(01:25:10):
into settings and you would set a pin code number one,
and then you would and then you would go in
there and kind of change all the settings. So how
long he could spend on certain websites, restricting certain websites,
you know, whatever it is. But basically it's all kind
of controlled from screen time and your your pin code

(01:25:31):
that you set is the key to unlock it. So,
but you'd have to use his device to do it
if you don't have another device. I don't know if
you can do it from the website, like if you
went to iCloud dot com. I don't think so. I
think you have to do it from his device. So
or if you had an iPhone or an iPad and

(01:25:52):
he was part of your family on there like the
iCloud family, you could do it from there. But really,
realistically you have to use his phone to do this.

Speaker 10 (01:26:00):
I have a knife, I have a night bus.

Speaker 11 (01:26:02):
I try to do it through the family sharing, I think, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:26:07):
Are you saying iPad? I'm sorry, did you say iPad?

Speaker 11 (01:26:10):
I have a night bud?

Speaker 2 (01:26:11):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (01:26:11):
Oh iPad? Okay, yes, you should be able to do
it through there.

Speaker 11 (01:26:14):
Yeah, but the part is that every time I do it,
for some reason, he gets the notification or input the
code and everything, but all of a sudden it disappeared.
It said, uh, you know, his name was removed from
the family Sharing, but he did not do anything. So h.

Speaker 1 (01:26:34):
That's tricky. Well, he has to be on the family
Sharing for it to work, for these things to take
to take effect. Now I'm not sure why it's saying
he's being removed from there. That's something that you got
to figure out. Maybe go to the Apple store and
see what they say. But you he shouldn't. Once you
add him, he has to accept that. Then he's part
of your family and then you can add those those

(01:26:55):
screen time controls to his device. If you want to
just do it manually, you can just go to his
device and say, hey, look, we're going to set this
up on your device, and you just set it up
directly there and then he doesn't have to be part
of the family Sharing. So that's a little bit of
an easier way if you want to skip the family Share.
But the only issue with that is then you can
check things on your iPad and you know, give you

(01:27:15):
all that that control. There are third party programs that
you can use if you want it, something like Barkbark
dot us. That's another family control program that you can use.
But I will tell you, with my kids, you know,
this stuff is tricky. It's not easy, it's not straightforward,
it's not simple, and a lot of times the kids

(01:27:36):
are a little bit smarter than us when it comes
to this stuff. So you got to be aware when
you're typing in your pass code that they those little
eyes are sometimes watching it and they will change settings
without you knowing. So just keep in mind all of
those things. But if it's if it's the problem of
you understand how to set it up, but it's just
not letting you add him as the family member, then
I would go ahead and take it to the Apple

(01:27:56):
Store and say, hey, look, I'm trying to add my kid.
We're trying to do the right thing. It's just not working.
And see if there's some kind of block on your
account or something that you have to enable on there
to make that work. But otherwise, if you want to
skip all that, you can just go directly to his
device and say, hey, look we're gonna set this up,
make that pin code, and there there you go. Thanks
for the call, Maria, give me an update on the website.

(01:28:18):
Rich on Tech dot TV. Hit contact and let me
know if you get that sorted out. Coming up, we're
gonna talk to former Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer. She is
discussing her tech career, her new startup, and AI. It's
all right here on rich on Tech. Welcome back to
rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you,
talking technology the website for the show rich on Tech

(01:28:40):
dot TV. Yeah, it's been a heatwave here in Los Angeles,
so we're playing all songs inspired by the heat. Joining
me now, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer, also one of
Google's earliest employees, now with her own startup called Sunshine.
Welcome to the show, Marissa, thank you very much for

(01:29:02):
having me. Very exciting. Let's talk about first off, the
early days I want to hear about Google. So I
mean back, I mean you joined in like nineteen ninety
nine or somewhere around there, so I mean people were
just learning that word for the first time. What were
your thoughts about joining that company?

Speaker 8 (01:29:21):
Well, when I first started, there were just seven people,
and instead of a conference table, they had a pool,
a ping pong table, and so the office was you know,
pretty messy. They were also working on building computers that
would eventually become prototypes for what they put in the
data centers. But they had a real vision for how
search could change the Internet and could change how all

(01:29:44):
this live our everyday lives. And so it was really
an exciting and interesting time.

Speaker 1 (01:29:49):
Wow, that's incredible, And it was it fun there? I mean,
did you have a good time? And you started some
pretty good projects there and did some pretty great things.

Speaker 8 (01:29:58):
I had an amazing time at Google. Wonderful place to work.
You know, for so many of my colleagues, you know,
they are lifelong friends because we just had such a
set of formative experiences and I'm really proud of what
we've built and how it's helped shape everyday lives and technology.

Speaker 1 (01:30:16):
And then talk about the transition to Yahoo. What made
you go to Yahoo and kind of what was your
mission there?

Speaker 8 (01:30:26):
Well, there, I got a call from a recruiter who
was helping the board try and identify the next CEO.
And I wasn't looking to leave. I was just at
the end of my first trimester with my son, and
I had, you know, my plan for what I wanted
to accomplish before my maternity leave and my plan for

(01:30:46):
a long maternity leave, and I got this call, but
I have to say, Yeah, who's a company I always admired,
And it was one that was really a company that
we all looked up to at Google. You know, they
were a really important partner for us for our early days,
a very spat after partner, and you know, the role
from a product perspective really embodied a lot of the

(01:31:07):
products I had already worked on, search, mail, news, maps,
you know, social, mobile, and so I was really excited
to take my learnings for my time at Google and
apply them in a new way at a new company,
especially one that I admired, and so I knew it
would be a hard job. At the same time, it

(01:31:29):
was one I was really drawn to. I really value learning,
and I love working with smart and nice people. And
I think there are also a lot of smart and
nice people at Yahoo as well as at Google. And
so it was a challenge that I ultimately, you know,
took us some rearranging in terms of plans on my side,
but it was a challenge I was excited to take on.

Speaker 1 (01:31:49):
So a little bit of trivia for myself, I actually
got a job offer at Yahoo many many years ago,
and I remember getting the welcome kit in the mail
and they would you would open it up and it
would go Yahoo when you opened like the little box.
It was like one of those greeting cards you get,
you know that has like the music inside. That's what
they did, and I was like so impressed with that.
I have one of those.

Speaker 8 (01:32:10):
I also there's a button, a yodel button where you
can press it and actually has like six different modes
so you can hear the Yahoo yodel like six different ways.

Speaker 1 (01:32:18):
And I still have my T shirt. They also sent
a T shirt in that packet. I mean, it was
like a very thorough packet of like welcome to Yahoo,
even though I hadn't really accepted the job yet. I
don't know if they whatever. Anyway, it was kind of
the offer situation. Yeah, didn't end up working there, but
it was great and it was fun to tour the campus.

Speaker 8 (01:32:34):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:32:35):
It was back in the day when like, you know,
you go to these campuses and they're just like, you know,
the volleyball courts, and it was just so cool. So
now you've got something new. You're you're doing a startup
called Sunshine Tell me what this is all about now.

Speaker 8 (01:32:50):
Well, at someshine, we're really focused on how to we
take cutting it edge technology, especially AI, and apply it
to everyday tasks. So I've always worked in the consumer space.
I like to take everyday tests and make them easier
and make them better. And so we've been focused, and
we started off the company we were really focused on
contacts and management of birthdays and important events, and most

(01:33:14):
recently we have started working in the photo space with
photos and events. Basically, how do you share with a
group of ten twenty fifty people, Because we think one
to one sharing works really well, and we think one
to many broadcasting photos works really well. All at Instagram
we find that intermediate case doesn't work that well, and

(01:33:36):
there's places where we think that a lot of what
AI can do in terms of curating photos, suggesting photos
that you may want to share based on your patterns
is something that really needs a lot of improvement.

Speaker 1 (01:33:48):
Yeah, Like it's always a challenge when like, let's say
it's like a group birthday party or something you're like, oh, everyone,
let's pull these photos together. Like if you took some
great photos and people are just they argue on are
they disagree on how to do that, whether it's you know,
a shared album or you know, some people want to
use air drops, some people are Android, some people want
to text the photos. It's just a mess every time.

(01:34:10):
So how does Shine make that easier?

Speaker 5 (01:34:13):
Right?

Speaker 8 (01:34:13):
So we have an app as Our app is available
on iOS and on Android, which is one of the
big friction points in a group that size. As soon
as you get to ten people, you definitely have users
of both platforms. And from there we you set up
an album and you can declare an event and a place,
and you can decide do you want to explicitly share

(01:34:34):
photos or do you want to share them through what
we call magic mode. And what magic mode does is
it looks at a photo, it tries to understand if
it's the type of photo someone would want to share,
and asks us of people in it it seems really
visually interesting, and you'd either suggest that you share it
or if you're in magic mode, it automatically shares it.
So it works really well for events and gets togethers.

(01:34:55):
And also I found his work worked really well on
trips and travel. So those are some of the use
cases working on now. But we're also working on expanding
the types of use cases that we cover.

Speaker 1 (01:35:08):
And I do, like, I know the Sunshine Contacts has
been around for a while, but I really I don't
know if you remember this company back in the day,
it used to be called Trello. I think it was
that they would like, Yeah, so it kind of reminds
me of like the magic of that, where like it
just kind of finds the information from your contacts in
your emails and things like that and like kind of

(01:35:28):
puts in that missing information. So how's that going. Are
people finding that pretty handy or what?

Speaker 7 (01:35:33):
Yeah?

Speaker 8 (01:35:34):
I think we have the highest rated Contacts app in
the app Store that's also available on iOS and Android.
And what we do is we take your contacts from
your phone, We ask for permission to your email, We
interface with Gmail and Outlook and a few other carriers,
and then we do as we look through there, figure

(01:35:55):
out who have you emailed back and forth with, what
to signature information is there, and then we cross correlated
with publicly available information from the white Pages and other
sources LinkedIn, and we actually give you a much more
comprehensive contact card, so you end up with really nice
complete contexts that stitch together phone number, email address, your job,

(01:36:18):
your role, all those different pieces, and we even show
you the last email you exchanged with that person to
give you more context.

Speaker 1 (01:36:25):
Yeah, it's so much easier than trying to search in
your email for like a cell phone number, like whenever
I need contact info for someone, And I like how
it also tells you, like which email address is like
the most recent or the most up to date versus
like an old one that you might have for them,
But it still shows you. And by the way, I
meant to say Placo, I don't know if that was
the company Plaxo.

Speaker 8 (01:36:44):
Yeah, Plaxo Paso. You know, I become kind of a
historian on contact apps in Silicon Valley, and Paxo and
Keen really reigned supreme from two thousand to two thousand
and three. And then it will say they kind of
We kind of went through the Winter of Contacts where
not many people worked on them for a lot on time,
and then Microsoft and Apple standardized the format for contacts

(01:37:06):
around twenty ten twenty twelve, and that made it much
easier to standardize contacts, But nobody really did a lot
of work, and we thought was interesting is we did
more than a three thousand user surveys, and every single
person reported that their contacts were in terrible shape. And
the other thing we found, which is one of the
reasons why we found it would be so important to say,

(01:37:28):
tell you what you've used most recently, is about one
in five contacts on your phone. About nineteen percent of
contacts on people's phones are obsolete. Yeah, and so our scale.
So if you tried to go and use that phone
number or that email address right now, you actually wouldn't
reach the person you hoped to reach.

Speaker 1 (01:37:45):
Yeah, that's always a problem. Then you're trying to scramble
and figure out, you know, where this stuff is. And
that's why I like this. It's I'm trying to see
how many Usually it doesn't it tell you, like how
many contacts? Oh yeah, here we go. So I have
seven three hundred and eighty six total contacts. Sunshine improved
six thousand in three hundred and sixty two. That's a
lot of people. One of these days I'll go through

(01:38:05):
those and organize well.

Speaker 8 (01:38:07):
And one of the core of thoughts for Sunshine is
that we really want to be help people be thoughtful.
And so the old adage of you know, if a
tree falls in the forest. It doesn't make a sound
if you email or call someone and you're thinking about them.
They don't know that you're thinking about them if you
don't reach them. So making sure that contacts really work
well as something that's foundational, because we also knew that

(01:38:30):
we wanted to build Sunshine into a portfolio company where
we have a set of apps so will be more
popular than others. But ultimately we really wanted to get
to the space that we're starting to work in now
around photos, events, groups, those kinds of tasks that we
think have been you know, less less of focus in
recent years and really trying to ease the friction there.

(01:38:50):
But to actually do events and groups and even photos
arguably well, you actually need to have your contacts in
resonably good shape.

Speaker 1 (01:38:59):
I want to get sure thoughts on AI real quick.
We only have about a minute. But I'm curious, Like
I mean, this is something I'm sure you've thought about
for many, many years, but now of course the public
is getting their taste of it with you know, all
these new AI tools. Is it going to change everything
in the next couple of years or what.

Speaker 8 (01:39:17):
For certain, I've been fascinated by AI since my cologyears.
Both of my degrees are actually in artificial intelligence, and
I think that it's wonderful to see you having this moment,
and it won't be without some challenges, but overall, I'm
incredibly optimistic in terms of the type of power and
creativity is going to unleash for people.

Speaker 1 (01:39:37):
And your advice to not just young women but anyone
interested in tech, still a good time to do that
or what?

Speaker 6 (01:39:43):
For sure?

Speaker 8 (01:39:44):
I really think that technology is just such a wonderful field.
There's just so many If you like ideas and you
like learning and always having the challenge of learning something new,
it's wonderful to have a career in tech.

Speaker 1 (01:39:56):
All right, we're going to leave it there. Mersa Meyer,
early employee at Google, former Yahoo CEO, and now doing
her own thing at Sunshine dot com. Check it out.
They've got a couple apps for photo sharing, contact management,
and also birthdays. Thanks so much for joining me today, Marsa.

Speaker 8 (01:40:14):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (01:40:15):
Rich.

Speaker 1 (01:40:16):
All right, coming up, we've got your favorite segment. It
is the feedback. We're going to get to your emails
that you've sent me throughout the week about the show.
The website if you want to link to sunshine. By
the way, rich on Tech dot TV, we'll be right back.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. What a great interview.

(01:40:36):
Just reflecting on Marissa Mersa Meyer. Oh my gosh, what
a career Google, Yahoo, doing your own thing. I mean,
it's just incredible. Okay, before we get to the feedback,
just want to tell you about this new crime deterrent
solution from Deep Sentinel. This is a company that has

(01:40:58):
security cameras that have virtual security guards. So basically, these
virtual security guards can view a live fee of the camera,
see what's going on, scare people off, whatever. But now
they have a new product called flash Bang and this
can deploy smoke bombs, pepper spray, and ear piercing sirens.

(01:41:19):
And these are mostly for businesses for business theft, and
so of course the guards watch the camera or get
flagged when there's an issue, you know, with something going on,
and then of course they get fair warning and then
they can deploy this flash Bang technology remotely. They say
that they're getting interest from various businesses and it's just

(01:41:43):
it's just wild. We did a story with this Deep
Sentinel a while back and they showed us the cameras,
which are interesting. You know the fact that someone like
kind of watches them live if they need to. But
this is a whole other thing. So smoke bomb and
pepper spray from a camera. Lots of comments on my
Instagram and Facebook about that one and the YouTube video.

(01:42:05):
It's a little different time for feedback. Let's so open
up the feedbag here with Bruce from San Diego. He said,
I recently upgraded my older ACER desktop to Windows eleven.
I'm happy to report it went better than expected. After
a few upgrades, disc cleanups, and to fragments, the system
is running smoothly. I'm still getting used to shutting down
the computer's power off button, but overall, I'm enjoying THEOS.

(01:42:29):
By the way, I love catching your show every Saturday
after work. Thanks for keeping us informed and have a
great weekend. Thanks Bruce. Appreciate that Michael from Philadelphia rights in.
As someone who is hard of hearing and legally blind,
I understand the challenges of navigating technology. I've been adapting
to text based system since the DOS days. For the
blind caller you had recently, I suggest they look into

(01:42:51):
local resources. Here in Philadelphia, we have the Free Library
for the Blind, and I imagine most major cities have
similar services. The caller could benefit from basic knowledge about
how technology can assist them. My advice would be to
contact their local city library and ask to be connected
with services for the visually impaired. They can provide valuable

(01:43:11):
guidance on accessible tech options. Great advice, Michael, thanks for
listening there in Philadelphia, I talked about my Sonos issues
and the echo situation. Barry from Orange County, New York
rights in Thanks for keeping us informed. Rich I heard
your comments about discovering Amazon Echo devices for music and
wanted to share my experience. We use a mix of

(01:43:32):
Echo Dot and full size Echo devices. While the dots
sound quality is good, the regular Echo is good to excellent.
We stream your podcast on a phone and connect it
to an Echo via Bluetooth. Regarding stereo sound, you can
actually pair two Echo devices for stereo output using the
Alexa app. It's a great way to enhance the audio experience.
Hope this information is helpful. Yeah, I should try pairing

(01:43:56):
two of them. By the way, you can just ask
to listen to the podcast directly. You can just say
listened to the Rich on Tech podcasts and it should
bring it right up. Phil from Orange County rights In.
I wanted to share some valuable information about the Jackerie
portable power station you recommend it to Marry on your
August third episode Southern California. Edison gives you one hundred
and fifty dollars rebate on these types of products. You

(01:44:16):
can check for eligibility by searching for Jackerie on the
SCE marketplace website. I recently purchased an Anchor portable power station.
I can confirm I got my one hundred and fifty
dollars rebate check from about thirty days. I keep minding
the car trunk for emergencies. Just wanted to pass along
this money saving tip to your listeners. Thanks for always
sharing your tech wisdom with us. So, if you live

(01:44:38):
in Southern California or anywhere that might have this, just
search for the rebate marketplace for your local you know
what do they call that utility? Let's see ray rights In.
After listening to your recent broadcasts on MV and o's,
I wanted to share my experience with Hello Mobile. After moving.

(01:44:58):
I ported my landline to Hello and then to Hello
Mobile as a secondary number on my iPhone. Their plan
offers onlimited talk and text plus five hundred megabytes of
data for just five dollars a month taxes included. I'm
considering eventually moving this number to Google Voice for permanent parking.
The ease of porting numbers has me always looking for
better deals. Thanks for keeping us informed about these budget

(01:45:20):
friendly options. Gary from Orange, Connecticut rights in rich your
show has become my new Saturday companion. I wanted to
share another great benefit of mint Mobile. They offer a
forty five dollars credit for each new customer you refer,
up to three or four per year. I just renewed
my fifteen dollars a month five gigabytes for another year.
It's been reliable for the past fifteen months. Thanks to

(01:45:43):
convincing three friends to sign up, I only paid about
sixty bucks for the next twelve months. That's five dollars
a month plus my friend's got credit too. It's an
unbeatable deal. Thanks for the great information you provide on
your shows. And finally, Michael from Santa Fe, New Mexico
writes in your recent discussion reminded me of something from
my past. About fifty years ago, I worked with a
computer console that had built in recessed cup holders about

(01:46:06):
twelve inches to the side of the main interface. It's
some forward thinking designer had already considered the importance of
keeping drinks away from the equipment. Looks like they were
ahead of time in preventing coffee spills on Important Tech.
Would you believe it? After I mentioned the coffee spill,
I spilled water on my computer, my brand new MacBook.
Over the weekend. I put down a water bottle. This

(01:46:27):
is my new fear, and the water, it was so high,
splashed out of the top onto my keyboard. So I
immediately was using the compressed air and I was drying
it out. Seems to be okay, but please keep that
water away from your computer. You don't want to have
to get that keyboard relate replaced, or that logic board
or whatever might short circuit. All right, that's gonna do

(01:46:47):
it for this episode of the show. You can find
everything I mentioned on my website. Go to richontech dot tv.
Find me on social media at rich on Tech. Next
week we've got the Apple event. I'll be there. We're
gonna have I Justine on the show to talk about
all things Apple. Thanks so much for listening. There are
so many ways you can spend your time. I really
appreciate you spending it right here with me. Thanks to

(01:47:09):
everyone who makes this show possible. My name is rich Demiro.
I'll talk to you real soon.

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Rich DeMuro

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