September 4, 2020 • 47 mins
Hands on impressions of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2; Facebook's tool to directly transfer photos to Dropbox; Nomad Base Station Pro wireless charger; Consent-O-Matic chrome extension; HearHere audio road trip app; using Google's Saved feature.Listeners ask about the WD My Cloud Duo, a way to play music in veterinary exam rooms, 2.4 GHz vs 5 GHz Wifi signals, replacing the battery on an aging Samsung phone, whether to keep or ditch a MacBook Pro and why Verizon is discontinuing Ring Back tones.Follow Rich:https://twitter.com/richontechSamsung Galaxy Z Fold2https://ktla.com/morning-news/technology/hands-on-samsung-galaxy-z-fold-2-smartphone-richontech/Facebook data portability toolhttp://facebook.com/dtpNomad Base Station Prohttps://ktla.com/morning-news/technology/nomad-base-station-pro-review-apple-watch-richontech/Consent-O-Matichttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/consent-o-matic/mdjildafknihdffpkfmmpnpoiajfjnjd?ref=yourstackHearHere apphttps://ktla.com/morning-news/technology/hearhere-audio-app-west-coast-road-trip-guided-tours/Google Saved Featurehttps://blog.google/products/maps/remember-better-with-updated-saved-tab/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Samsung's latest foldable phone is luxury all the way. My
thoughts on the new Nomad wireless charging pad, which is
pretty unique. A handy chrome extension to help you handle
all those GDPR consent pop ups. You know what I'm
talking about. Plus your tech questions answered? What's going on?
I'm Rich Dmiro and this is Rich on Tech. This
(00:29):
is the podcast where I talk about the tech stuff
that I think you should know about, and it's also
the place where I answer the questions that you send me.
In case you don't know, my name is Rich Dmiro,
tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Welcome
to the podcast. If you're listening for the first time,
thank you for finding me. If you're listening for the
one hundredth time, thank you for putting up with me.
(00:53):
I get a lot of emails from people about the
podcast now, which is pretty cool because when I first
started this, it was kind of like a little side project,
and now you know it is produced out of KTLA
or part of KTLA, but it's kept the same kind
of I don't know, like it just feels like it
nothing's changed, and that's what I like about it. I
(01:13):
was on vacation over the weekend. I'm a little bit
older now that I talk to you, because it was
my birthday, you know, recently, and so that was fun.
We went down to San Diego to this place called
Paradise Point, which my friend has been talking about this
place forever, and I never went. And finally, you know,
because you can't really go in many places right now,
(01:33):
San Diego seemed great, had great weather, great sun. Paradise
Point was there. My friend, my other friend told me
about it. He said, dude, we just went. We loved it,
So okay, that's where we went. We had a great time.
This resort reminds me of a place that sort of
transports you to a family place back in the day's.
It reminds me of Hawaii. It felt like Hawaii. It
(01:54):
was just really fun. The water was beautiful. We had
a nice beach front kind of view. It was just great.
And we stayed there for a couple nights and just
had such a nice time. And I just every morning
tried to just go out on the beach and just
kind of sit there for a couple minutes and kind
of reflect, because I'm trying to do that more often
these days, and It's not that easy all the time.
(02:17):
But anyway, let's get into the podcast. Let's get into
the first story of the week, which is the Samsung
Galaxy Z Fold two five G. This is the latest
smartphone that I've been playing with. It's also one of
the most expensive smartphones I think I've ever tested, certainly
ever sent to me as a review unit. So what
(02:40):
is unique about this device? You might remember this was
the device that Samsung had a little trouble with back
in the day when it first launched. They sent it
to a bunch of reviewers and next thing you know,
those reviewers had problems with the screen, and specifically, Samsung
figured out that there was some debris getting in behind
this and that was causing it to fail. And so
(03:02):
they went back to the drawing board. They came up
with some sort of little way to protect the back
of the or I guess the opening near the hinge,
and that fixed it for the most part. I'm not
sure how many of these phones they sold the first
time around. But now this is the new version, and
this new version is kind of revamped in some really
nice ways. Number One, the front screen is way bigger,
(03:23):
way more useful. Six point two inch screen on the front,
and the phone is kind of thin, so it's a
really thin phone, but it's thick because it's almost imagined
two phones stacked on top of each other with a hinge.
Then you've got this giant seven point six inch screen
when you open the thing up, and that's a foldable
ultra glass or ultra thin glass screen. Used to be plastic.
(03:44):
Now it's glass, and that's a miracle in engineering in itself.
It's got one hundred and twenty hrtz adaptable refresh rate.
It's got great sound. The hinge is now called the
Hideaway hinge, which means it's smaller than before. And it
also has sweeper technology, which they first introduced on their
other flip phone, which is the Galaxy Z Flip. And
(04:05):
it's kind of like it looks like a little kind
of sweeper brush, like a little broom inside the hinge
that theoretically just kind of brushes out any debris that
gets in there, and so that should take care of that.
It's also fully close, you don't really see it. Cool
things about this phone is that it's really luxurious. It's
kind of cool to have both a smartphone and a
(04:25):
tablet in your pocket at all times. You've got a
cool new feature. Where the old one only opened up
to one you can only open it up and that
was it, so it was either closed or opened. There
was no degrees of open, so you couldn't kind of
make the phone into its own little self standing tripod,
like put it in an L shape and just sit
it there and watch a show. Well now you can
(04:46):
do that. They call flex mode, So now you can
just bend the screen at any angle you want, in
a half fold, a quarterfold, and open fold, and you
can watch stuff. And you can also record videos hands free.
So that's kind of neat. But the camera is is good.
I mean it, you know, I haven't. I'm not doing
a full review on this device because it's not something
I think a lot of people are gonna purchase. To me,
(05:08):
I'm sort of just taking a look at it, understanding
what it's all about, so that I can talk about
it in the future before it goes back to Samsung.
So this is not a review. I think that if
I'm reviewing this device, I'm not sure I would recommend
someone purchasing this device unless you have money to burn,
because it's sort of a it's still almost in beta.
This is the second version. It's really expensive. It's two
(05:30):
thousand dollars. But again, I think they did a really
nice job and I love seeing this, and I actually
think that I will buy a foldable phone in the
future when it gets to a point where I feel
like it's a little bit more manageable, a little thinner,
and just kind of more what I need. But so far,
I mean, I could think of a lot of reasons
why this is cool, and I am tempted. Don't get
(05:53):
me wrong, I am tempted because it's so unique that
nobody else has anything like it, and how cool is
it as a tech person to have something that nobody
else has. I kind of like doing that kind of stuff.
Two colors, Mystic Bronze, Mystic Black, two fifty six gigs
of storage, twelve gigabytes of RAM and that's your only
option there. And the phone, again, like I said, is
(06:14):
two thousand dollars. If you go on Samsung's website to
buy it, they're really really trying to get you to
trade in another device to bring that price down. And
one other thing to know is that because the screen
is still pretty fragile, I think or I guess. Two
other things to know. Number one, it's not dust or
water resistant. They make that very clear. And you also
(06:35):
get a one time device protection against accidental display damage
within one year. So if you mess up the screen
within one year, send it back to Samsung, they will
send you a either a new one with a new screen,
or refurbish it or whatever they do. So there you
have it. Samsung Galaxy z Fold two pretty cool goes
on sale September eighteenth. All right, let's get to the
(07:01):
first question. Let's see here. Hmmm, let's see. Jesse from Glendora, Cali.
Let's see. Let's yeah. Jesse from Glendora, California, wanted your
thoughts about the Western Digital my cloud duo hard drive
backup system. I still perform backups on Google and iCloud.
I wanted something local at my house and not to
(07:22):
keep everything stored on my iMac. It fills up quickly.
I'm a little scared to have everything in the cloud,
photos and music. Your thoughts and opinions would be greatly appreciated.
Jesse from Glendora, you get a because this is a
fantastic idea. We should not have everything just in the cloud,
and you should have your things in a couple of
(07:42):
different places, some were physical in your home and then
somewhere in the cloud. And if you have them in
those two places, the good news is if one of
them fails, you've got him in the other place. So
I think the Western Digital MyCloud duo is great. I'm
not even sure you need the MYC Cloud duo because
the Cloud duo is I think that's the one that
has software that backs it up to the cloud. Oh no,
(08:07):
it just plugs directly into your WiFi router so that
way it's kind of like your own little cloud exactly.
So that's perfect. I love it. I think that that's
a fantastic idea. You should definitely do that. It's expensive.
I'm not sure that you need that big of a
solution unless you have a lot of stuff, Jesse with
your photos and videos I think are your photos and music.
I think what you can do is depending on the
(08:29):
kind of Oh you have an iMac. I think with
an iMac, what you should do is just buy a
two or four gigabyte hard drive and just plug it
into your iMac and just plug it in, turn on
time capsule, and just plug it in every once in
a while every week, every month and boom, just let
it back up everything on your iMac. Now that's given
(08:51):
that all of your photos are on your iMac, I'm
not sure if they are or not. And your music,
I'm sure it is. But no matter what you do,
I'm trying to give you a cheaper solution because just
a standard USB hard drive, it's gonna be a lot cheaper.
So I would say, just plug that in, let Time
Capsule do its thing. Do that every couple of weeks
or every week, whatever, however often you need. You think
(09:12):
you need to do that, But I think that's a
cheaper solution that would totally work for you. But yeah,
but if you can, if you're ready to spring for
the my cloud duo, sure, I mean I love having
a network drive. It's great. I don't have mine hooked
up right now because I've gotten sow into the cloud
and I actually get a because I've gotten really bad
(09:34):
about backing up my stuff in a second place. I
know it's on my drive, it's on my phone. I
also have a whole bunch of assorted hard drives around
my house with all kinds of backups on them that
one day, one of these days, I will go through
and finally back up and organize everything on those drives.
I don't want to delete anything because I don't know
(09:55):
if I've got the pictures in Google Photos, and I
just want to go off on one little tangent here
and this. I love, love, love Google Photos, but there
is one feature I just cannot stand about it anymore,
and that is there is no way to sync my
Google Photos collection with a backup drive. And yes, I
know you can do Google take out and download the
(10:17):
entire photo collection, but that is so unreasonable. All I want,
here's what I want. Google, Please just make a deal
with a hard drive manufacturer and make that deal so
that when I plug this drive into my computer or
just connect it to my WiFi, it is constantly downloading
and syncing my Google Photos library to that drive. That's
(10:40):
all I want. I don't think Google's going away anytime soon.
I don't think their system is gonna crash. But at
the same time, I just want a nice local backup
of my photos in my home, just because it just
makes me feel better. I mean, if something ever happened
to me, you think someone else is gonna figure out
how to download all my pictures? From good Google. One
(11:00):
of my family members. No, and I don't want to
get that dark. But the reality is it would just
be nice to have a local copy. And I think
that other platforms do offer that, some of the other
photo saving platforms, but I like Google Photos and they
used to have it and it's gone away, and I
just wish you would bring it back, Google, because it
would just be nice. I know you're trying to make
(11:21):
things simple, and also I think you're trying to make
them complicated because when someone wants to download their stuff,
think about it. If you have it on a drive
at your house at all times, how much easier is
it to just bring that somewhere else and you move
your business elsewhere. Let's move on to a new wireless
charging pad. This is from Nomad and it's called the
(11:43):
base Station Pro. I went up to Nomad and Santa Barbara.
I hope I didn't talk about this before on the podcast,
but I talked to the folks at Nomad who they
make really cool kind of I don't know, artisanal almost
products for iPhone and smartphones in general. My phone is
a big one. But they make cases, they make charging cables,
(12:03):
all kinds of stuff. But this new one is called
the base Station Pro and it is a wireless charging pad. Now, rich,
what's so new about a wireless charging pad. Well, let
me tell you. The neat thing about this wireless charging
pad is that it is positionless, which means you can
put three devices on here anywhere you want. Now, I
(12:23):
have a three device charger from Mophi, and you have
to place them exactly right. You've got to put stuff
on what's called a sweet spot. And if you don't,
your phone doesn't charge. And I've woken up many a
morning's where my phone has not charged overnight because it
either moved or stopped charging for some reason, or I
hit the nightstand whatever. So this you really don't have
(12:44):
that problem, and it works. It works great. There are
some caveats. I'll tell you about those, but let me
tell you how they did it. So instead of one
coil that charges your phone, they have eighteen coils underneath,
along with little software called free Power that detects where
you place your device and then it directs the power
to that device. Pretty cool, huh. I thought it was
(13:05):
pretty neat. Now I will tell you this, I think
hang on. I just took a sip of my tea,
my Green tea. I think that the free power actually
works better with Apple products than any other products. So
I don't know if it's an Android thing or some
(13:25):
weird stuff, but I just feel like when you put
your iPhone on there, it works. Now, I will say
with the Galaxy Z Fold two that's been working really
well as well. And there are three little there are
three little status lights on this thing too, which is
really cool. That will let you know if it's charging,
like if the power is going to the three little gadgets,
which is also kind of cool. And I found that
(13:47):
the Pixel did not work at all. The Samsung Galaxy
Note twenty Ultra did not work. It just it does
this really weird thing. Maybe I have a bad review unit,
but it does this really weird thing where it just
goes crazy. It's like selecting on screen. It's really strange.
It looks I got to get a video of it
and post it to Twitter because it's very strange. And
I asked no Mad about this and they said yes,
(14:09):
there are some issues. Officially, older Samsung devices S nine
and blow and all Pixel devices don't work. They're working
on a firmware slash software update. And also, oh yeah,
there is one more thing that does not work, the
Apple Watch. So when you really think about it, this
is for someone who has, you know, maybe two iPhones,
a work phone and a personal phone, plus a pair
(14:31):
of AirPods. It will work with the Samsung Buds and
other wireless It does work with things that are on
the Cheese standard, but it's not officially on the Cheese standard.
There must be something they did weird about it that
they can't officially say it's chea so I don't know.
But if you have Apple stuff, it works great. Otherwise,
if you could get into a store, like if they
(14:52):
had one of these in an Apple store, that would
be ideal because then you can test your your products
on it and see if it works. But it's really cool.
Two hundred and thirty dollar, I know, very expensive, but
the neat thing is really it feels like what the
future will bring with wireless charging, where you just throw
your device on there and you don't have to think
about how you placed it and it just sort of charges,
which is really neat all right, Angela writes in we
(15:20):
all watch you and love your suggestions with little heart.
Oh thank you. We were hoping you could offer a
solution to our problem. We have paper thin walls and
don't have a PA system and need some soft music
to play in our exam rooms. But I'm not even
sure what device we could use for this function. Suggestions
are appreciated. Thank you so much the staff at Family
(15:43):
Member Veterinary. Is it veterinary veterinary veterinary hospital, Veterinary, I
don't know veterinary. You know it's a hospital for dogs
and cats, animals, Angela. I think your best solution is
something that is so simple it might have evaded you.
I think a Google Nest Mini would be perfect in
every room, And now I think, yeah, so here's what
(16:07):
I would do. I would do a Google Nest Mini.
You can get those for I think they're like forty bucks.
Put them in every room. You can group them up
on the Google Home mapp and you can play music
to all of the rooms at the same time and boom,
now you have music in every room. You can also
use it as a PA system, so if you want
to like send messages throughout the whole office, you can broadcast.
(16:28):
I think the the syntax let's see broadcast Google Home.
So I think what you say is you can use
a little mic on your on your thing, or let's
see broadcasts from one speaker to others. You just say okay,
it doesn't tell you how to do it. Come on
what you need? Oh, here you go, You say h
(16:50):
Google broadcast there you go. You can also use the
commands shout tell everyone announce instead of broadcast. You can
say eah, Google, tell everyone one doctor needed in room seven.
Doctor needed in room seven. So you can do that.
And now the other thing is your guests will also
be able to say h Google. So what I would
(17:11):
do is probably turn off the microphone functionality. So there's
a little toggle on there to turn off the microphone
and then you can just have your music playing. And yes,
some of your smarter, more savvy guests might toggle the
microphone switch and mess with it, but I think that's
probably a small portion of people. The other thing I'd
recommend is they've got these great Google mounts on Amazon.
(17:35):
So if you look on Amazon Google Nest Mini mount,
you go on there and they've got so many great
mounts and you can just plug it into a plug
on the wall and it kind of keeps all the
chords great. I mean, you can really I think This
is such a simple solution. You're talking you know, a
couple bucks for the mount and you know forty bucks
for the minis. You can get them a two pack,
(17:56):
three pack or whatever you can find them on sale.
I think that's gonna do it just fine. All right,
let's move on to another tech topic of the week,
and this is Facebook. Remember I was just talking about
photos and videos. This perfectly talk. This kind of goes
to what I'm talking about. And Facebook is now expanding
(18:19):
what's called their Data Portability Tool, and now you can
send your photos and videos to Dropbox and also another
service called Koofer Koofr, which is something in Europe. We
don't I guess we don't really have it here in
the US. Maybe we do, we just don't really use it.
But so this is pretty simple. If you've got photos
(18:39):
on Facebook, remember there was a time when you were
uploading a ton of photos to Facebook, or even maybe
you even use that Facebook sink feature they used to
have back in the day, which I don't know why
they got rid of that, but people used to be
able to sync all the photos from your camera roll
and your phone to Facebook. They got rid of that.
But maybe you still have a bunch of photos lingering
in Facebook. Maybe you've been using it for fifteen years
now or whatever. However many years Facebook has been around,
(19:01):
and you've got a bunch of photos in there, and
you want to store them somewhere else. Well, now you
can do a direct transfer right from Facebook to Dropbox.
And also Google Photos is supported, and so all you
do is you go on your Facebook, you log in
to your other account. It'll like connect the two accounts,
you know, your drop Box or your Google Photos, and
it will start moving your pictures over. Now it's not
(19:25):
going to transfer them, it's going to copy them, so
they will still be on Facebook. And now you have
a copy of your pictures on Dropbox. And let's say
you want to get rid of Facebook. Boom, you can
get rid of Facebook. So that's pretty easy. So there
you go. That's kind of like that's it. There's not
much more to know about that. Everything is encrypted as
it moves between services. Facebook is quick to point out.
(19:47):
So it's just good. I love this is fantastic, and
in fact, I wish that Google would do something like
this for other services. And I think that that's the
goal of these services, to make it easy to move
things back and forth, especially as we are moving towards
the cloud, folks, so everything is going to the cloud,
(20:07):
and so when you have things in the cloud, what
happens Everyone wants it's easy to get your stuff into
the cloud. But if it becomes a thing where it's
really tough to get your stuff out of the cloud,
that is what scares me. Because it used to be
back in the day, all the services would sink so
easily to some sort of you know, network attached storage
or whatever, and then all of a sudden they started
(20:29):
backing out of those things, and it gets tougher and
tougher to get your stuff out of these services. And yes, again,
I know you can do Google takeout, and I'm sure
Microsoft has the equivalent and all these other services. I
know Facebook even has that equivalent where you can download
your entire Facebook. But it's kind of a pain. And
these files are giant, especially the longer that you've been
with these services. So who's gonna sit there and download
(20:49):
terabytes or you know, gigabytes and gigabytes of data. It's
gonna be tough. Let's hear from Bill. Bill says, I
just upgraded my internet speed to one hundred megabits per second.
I have a Netgear Nighthawk AC nineteen hundred router. I
(21:11):
wonder if you heard about that on wirecutter, because that's
I think the one they recommend, which works perfectly for
our three story home. Wow, that's surprising. I noticed my
speed is only about forty five megabits per second download
when connected to two point four gigaherts and one hundred
and two at five gigaherts. I've tried different channels and
currently found Channel three as the best out of the
eleven channels. I wanted to know if this is normal
(21:32):
for two point four gigaherts to have such a slower speed.
It's not really a problem because most of the streaming
devices are on five gigaherts. Anyway, any ideas, I don't
want to call Netgear because they charge for support. Oh wow,
that's interesting. Am I missing something? No? So Number one
when it comes to Wi Fi, if you're generally speaking,
(21:53):
you are not gonna get the speed that you get
coming into your house at the hub across all your
devices from the Wi Fi network. It's just a matter
of there's interference. There's a lot going on. There's a
lot of devices it's just generally going to be for
a lot of people, it's about half. If you can
get it more than half, that's fantastic. So if you're
(22:14):
getting two hundred, I used to get two hundred across
all my devices, I don't quite get that anymore. I
upgraded to a gigabyte or gigabit, and I don't quite
get it across all my devices. I'm still working on
getting it to there because it has to do with
all the routers and the way they talk to each other.
But the reality is, if you're getting one hundred at
(22:37):
five gigaherts, that's great. And I know you. You seem
like a technical guy because you've done all these tests.
You found much channel is the best. You've figured out
the two point four versus five. So most of today's
Wi Fi networks put out two signals. One that's two
point four gigaherts, which goes further but it's not as fast.
(22:57):
And then you have five gigaherts, which doesn't go far,
but it creates it carries data at a I guess
a higher through put if you want to say it
that way. So you figured that out on your own.
I don't think this is a problem. I think you're fine.
I'm surprised that the router is getting stuff to all
corners of your home for a three story house, so
(23:18):
I think you're winning there. And yeah, the two point
four giga hurts thing at forty five, it's still going
to be fine. And like you said, most of your
streaming stuff, most of the new stuff is on five
giga hurts. Anyway, two point four was kind of the standard,
that is the older standard that everything uses, and some
inexpensive devices used, like if they're trying to save money
by not doing a dual band, but most of the
(23:41):
new devices do five. So if you're getting one hundred
and two on five, I think you're okay. I think
eventually you may want to look into a mesh network,
but I don't think you need it right now if
your Nighthawk is working for you. All right, let's talk
about GDPR. Do you know what that is? That is
the the thing over in Europe, the oh my gosh,
(24:02):
what's it called? What does GDPR stand for? I remember
when I first did this, I remembered what it meant.
But it's called General Data Protection Regulation. And what this
is is the really intense privacy laws that they have
over in Europe. And so when you had this happen,
(24:23):
every website in the world had to adapt, they had
to adapt their privacy policy. And in fact, I think
part of this was that you you have the right
to be erased from the systems, and you also have
a right to the data in the systems. And if
you live in the EU, you can write an email
or a letter to any company that does business in
(24:44):
the EU, like Yahoo or Google, and say, hey, I
want to see all the data that you've collected on me,
and they have to send it to you, which, as
you can imagine, that's probably a big pain for these companies,
but you know, that's the cost of doing business, I guess.
And these regulations and it's really meant to protect people's privacy.
I'm not commenting on whether it goes too far or
whether it's annoying. But you know, the one thing that
(25:05):
we have seen because of this is everywhere in the world,
every website that you go to, there is a little
pop up that you've seen that says, what do you
like to accept cookies? Would you like to have your privacy?
Would you want to opt out of the privacy policy
or opt in or whatever. There's so many little things
that they ask every single website. It is pretty annoying.
(25:27):
I will tell you that. Now. I love the fact
that we have access to privacy controls and all this
good stuff, but it's a little bit much. And ninety
nine percent of the time I feel like I say
yes to these things or whatever. I just clicked the box.
I don't even know if I'm saying yes or no
or somewhere in between. And next time I go to
that website, I feel like it's there again. And I
(25:48):
feel like I'm always clicking in every website. By the
time you get to a website, number one, you gotta
click the GDPR, then you got to click the newsletter,
Then you got to click about you know, if you're
using an ad blocker, they they you know, talk about that,
which I get, you know. Then they talk about, you know,
do you want to allow pop ups or notifications or
what it's like, can we track your location? There's so
(26:09):
many things. All I want to do is read the article.
I just want to see what you said about this.
But I'm sitting there, like navigating this website. And so anyway,
I say all of this because there is a tracker,
a chrome extension. I just discovered that so far, I
think is really cool and I hope it's legit. But
it's called consent omatic, And according to the information here,
(26:34):
the consent to omatic was built and maintained by workers
at a university in Denmark. And these privacy researchers got
tired of seeing how companies violate the EUS General Data
Protection Regulation. Because organizations that enforce the GDPR do not
have enough resources, we built this add on to help
them out. They looked at six hundred and eighty different
(26:56):
pop ups and combine their data processing purposes into five
categories that you can toggle on or off. Sometimes their
categories don't match perfectly, but we will choose the one
that provides the most privacy preserving option. So here's what's
so great. Here is what's so great. So now they
say that these pop up cookie pop ups are designed
to be confusing. Oh okay, good, that's true. They want
(27:18):
to make you agree to be tracked. So this add
on automatically answers those consent pop ups for you, so
you can't be manipulated. You set your preference preferences once
and you let the technology do the rest. And so far.
I went to a couple websites with this Chrome extension
installed and it worked. I saw a little check mark
pop up on the Chrome extension when it kind of
(27:39):
went through the little box that popped up. I think
this is so cool. It's called the consent omatic. I
will link it in the show notes, so you make
sure you get the right one and you're not getting
some scammy one. The only thing is I've gotten really
cautious about installing Chrome extensions, especially the ones that say
we can read and write data on all of the
(28:01):
websites that you visit. And some of these things like
a Honey extension or a Wiki buy, they need that
because that's how they see what website you're on. And
I've toggled that feature off, and like you know, you
can enable it every time you want manually, but it
is a pain, and so you don't want, Like I
find this, it's easier to let them read it, right,
but you have to imagine you are giving them a
(28:23):
lot of data, and this is one of them. So
this says this can read and change site data on
all sites. So every website that you go to, this
little concent omatic is getting a record of that, as
I understand, so you have to weigh your options. Do
you want your privacy or do you want your annoyances gone?
(28:43):
And what I like about this little consent omatic is
that you have options, so you can go in and
your choice is they give one two three, one, two
three four. There's about five six categories information and storage
access and I have that off preferences and functionality off,
performance and analytics off, content selection, delivery and reporting off,
(29:07):
ad selection, off other purposes off. How great is that
all tracking is rejected by default, which is something I
don't think I would have done if I was doing
this manually. So I think this is a major two
thumbs up for not only the convenience, but also the
fact that it is blocking a lot of these trackers
that by default, a lot of us are just saying yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
(29:29):
go away, go away, go away, and we don't really
know what we're doing. So kudos to them, and I
will again put that link in the show notes. All right,
next question comes from Karen. Hey, Rich, you helped me before,
and I appreciate your wisdom. I have the same Samsung
(29:51):
four phone. Soon I hope it will be replaced by
a seven for my brother. But I'm struggling a little.
Number one. The phone will not hold a charge to
take a few pictures Google's something. Oh my god, it
shuts off. The short time frame is amazing. Do you
think it's just because the phone is old? Could it
be the charger or would a new battery help until
I get the next hand me down. I've also lost
the microphone feature for texting. It just disappeared. I've checked
(30:13):
YouTube videos, followed the path little microphone should appear. It
never does. Is it lost forever? Thanks so much for
your time, Thank you, Karen. All right, let's break this down.
Samsung four. Wow, number one, kudos to you for having
a Samsung S four. That phone was released in Let's
see what date that was. That was twenty thirteen, seven
(30:38):
years ago. Whoa, that is a long time. I think
most people are keeping their phones for about an average
of two to three years at this point. So you're
going seven's. That's amazing, So good for you. Number one.
The battery I think that, yes, the battery is probably fried.
Batteries have a certain lifespan what's called cycles. They only
(31:00):
get so many cycles, no matter how good you are
charging them, they do not last forever. So that's the
main thing. That battery is fried. Now the good news
is this is I believe a removable battery because it's
such an old phone that this was back in the
day when you could remove batteries. So I would go
on Amazon and see if you can buy a new battery,
(31:21):
see if you can replace that battery, and that would
be my first choice. If you're getting the S seven
from your brother, I would convince your brother to give
you that sooner than later and save the money on
the battery because it's still an old phone and the
seven is going to be a lot better for you.
Number two, the microphone for texting, I think that you
just it either got toggled off somehow or a software
update turned it off because of privacy reasons, and all
(31:44):
you need to do is turn it back on. So
I would go into your settings and let's see. Usually
it's under language and input. Let's see so settings General Management,
Language and input, and it should say physical keyboard or
no on screen keyboard, and then there should be Google
Voice typing, Samsung Voice input, and your keyboards. And I
(32:07):
would just go in and make sure that your voice
is on for the keyboard that you have selected, So
I like to use gboard depending on the keyboard you're using.
Just going there and check all those settings under on
screen keyboard and you should find it and it should
be there. So I don't think that that's gone forever
unless they somehow got rid of it. If you like
(32:27):
cool new apps like I do, here's another one. It's
called here here h E A R H E R E.
And what's cool about this is it is kind of
like an audio tour guide app for the places you go.
And what's unique about it is that it's just a
little snippets. So I just think this is such a
(32:48):
good idea because when I'm traveling, I am the kind
of person that likes to know what is going on
around me and what's the significance of that mountain or
that old you know, mission, or that church or that
giant rock, whatever it is, and you know, you can
go on. I don't know if there must be apps
(33:08):
that do that. I'm sure there are, But this is
cool because it's audio and it's an app out of
Santa Barbara. It's backed by Kevin Costner, the actor and
also one of the guys who founded the North Face,
which is like the outdoor Powall Company, or maybe they
do more than that, but they professionally edit and narrate
these little audio vignettes, and so it's kind of like
(33:28):
a little history book or a you know, visitor's guide,
but it's on your phone, and so it's also GPS tagged,
which means you can drive like I recently drove to
know Zion, Utah, and you can just fire up your
phone on the app and when you're in a little
small town and see if there's anything of note around
you and learn about it, which is really neat. Now.
(33:49):
To be fair, it doesn't work in Zion right now
because right now it supports the West Coast, which is California, Oregon,
and Washington. There's fifteen hundred stories. They hope to have
about ten thousand of them by next summer. And it's
only on iOS right now, and they hope to have
it on Android soon. But it's neat. I looked it
up for the stories around me. It's kind of cool.
(34:10):
It's professionally produced, and I think it's a nice alternative
to the tour guide. Now there's some audio tour guide apps,
or there used to be there was one that I
used up in San Francisco called Detour and it was
started by I think it was the guy who did
groupon and it was really cool. My wife and I
took the tour. It was fun, and they do like
(34:30):
audio and they play little you know, it's like it's
kind of like an audio tour of wherever you're going. Now,
this one was very involved, you know, cross the street,
look at this stand there. It was great and it
didn't last because it went away. This one also is
they do charge you, so it's five stories for free,
and then it's like fifty bucks for the year, which
(34:51):
you know is a little high. But they were doing
a twenty five dollars deal. I don't know if that's
still available. They're also doing seven dollars for the week.
So I think that look, if you're going on a trip,
a road trip, you're spending a lot of money. Anyway,
you're seven dollars for this app for access for the
week to learn about a couple of things on your way.
It's not that bad if you think about it that way.
(35:12):
You know, you have to figure you know, you're gonna
stop for fast food, that's gonna be a couple bucks,
So seven dollars for kind of like a tour is
really not bad. And again it's not a tour. It's
just a little audio snippets, so you can come and
go as you please, do as many as you want,
as little as you want. And I think this is
a great idea and I hope that it lasts. I
hope they expand it like they say they want to.
(35:33):
And I think that it's one of those things that
if you're traveling, I love just getting Even if I
travel to a place and I learn one thing about
that place and it sticks with me, I love it
and I feel like my job is done and I
feel like it's been beneficial to me to travel. And
right now we're all doing road trips because you don't
really want to fly places, so or we're not doing
(35:53):
a lot of big trips places, so this is perfect.
If you live on the West coast, check it out
here here h e ar h e r E. Try it.
It's free for the first five stories and I'll just
continue to follow that and see the GPS tagging, I
think is the really smart part about that app. I
(36:14):
also did a one of the tours in New Orleans.
I was there and I just downloaded some random MP
three and this was this was way back in the day,
and I just walked around that city doing a tour.
So I think also, if you're in a city and
you can find an audio tour and download it and
take it, it's great. I mean, why not. I mean
you could do a real tour that's even better. But
you know, if you're DIY, that works too. All right,
(36:41):
let's see what do we want to talk about next, Donnetta,
says mister Demiro. I need some advice. I recently read
an article about not purchasing a MacBook Pro because eventually
Apple will not support them. I have one that I
purchased a couple of months ago. My question is should
I keep it or should I sell it? Thank you,
don Netta, Uh no, you should definitely keep the MacBook
(37:04):
Pro that you purchased. Apple is going to support them
for a long long time. Yes, there's a lot of
confusion because they're switching. They're not even I mean, eventually
they're switching to their own processors, and it's not going
to be Intel. I guess I think they're switching to
their own like fully, but right now it's going to
be a slow, slow march to their own what they
call their own silicon or their own silicon silicon, and
(37:29):
so they are going to use their own processors inside
their devices. And that's gonna happen. And yes, it's gonna happen,
I think they said by the end of was It
twenty twenty twenty one. But don't worry about it. Your
your computer is going to be just fine. So let
me look up macOS Catalina, which is the newest operating system,
and let's see which Mac computers it supports. Usually if
(37:53):
you scroll all the way down, it will say which
ones they support. Okay, all right, let's let's take a
look see if your Mac can run mac OS Catalina
MacBook twenty fifteen and later MacBook Air twenty twelve and
later MacBook Pro twenty twelve and later MacBook Mini twenty
twelve and later iMac twenty twelve and later i'mc Pro
(38:13):
twenty seventeen and later mac Pro twenty thirteen. You're talking
this operating system that Apple just came out with, and
you know, in the past year supports computers from eight
years ago. You have a brand new MacBook Pro. You
are going to be just fine. When you say eventually
(38:33):
Apple will not support them, you're talking eight to nine years.
Because I now the new what's the new one? What's
it called mac Os? Is it big, sir? Mac Os?
Big sir, so big sir. Let's see what that one supports.
That's the one that's coming out next, and that's coming
(38:55):
out any any day. Now, really, let's see what that supports.
That supports. Okay, so we lost about a year. It
looks like so MacBook Air twenty thirteen, MacBook twenty fifteen,
MacBook Pro twenty thirteen. So they dropped the twenty twelves.
So again you're talking. Let's say, if we go from
today seven years, I think you are going to be
(39:19):
just fine. Doneta enjoy the MacBook Pro. Don't worry about
these articles you read online. No big deal. Okay, Oh
my gosh, we're already out of time. I can't believe
this show goes so fast. Let me talk about a
feature in Google that I just love. I've been using
it all summer to plan my trips, especially road trips,
and apparently Google updated it. And I kind of knew
(39:42):
when I looked at it that it looked a little different,
but they had a blog post about it, and this
is the feature called saved tab. All right, I guess
it's the saved tab. So if you go on to
Google and there's a couple of ways that you can
access this, but the easiest way is to go and
open Google Maps, and if you look at the bottom,
there is Explore, commute, and then something called saved And
(40:06):
this is a whole bunch of lists. And so the
default lists are favorites, want to go, start places and labeled.
But the cool thing is they have done a couple
of things to improve this. I love making lists, Like
for instance, when I went to Zion, I made a
Zion list and when I was cruising through, you know,
different recommendations you have to It's it's a little weird
(40:28):
because the easiest way to do it is to check.
Like let's say you want to go to a restaurant,
right you find out about a restaurant, search for that restaurant,
then in Google Maps, and once you search for that
restaurant in Google Maps, bring it up big. There should
be directions call and then something called save. You tap
save and then you can save it to one of
your lists. And what they've done with these lists is
(40:49):
they've made them really easy to find number one, and
then when you tap it to find it later, they
are showing you stuff based on how you know how
close you are to those things. So in Zion, what
I did is I just went to my list and
I saw what was closest. You can also see your
list on a map, so everything that you want to
do in that area is plotted out and you can
(41:11):
see kind of how far things are from each other.
It's really cool and I used to use Yelp for this,
which Yelp has a similar feature you can save collections,
but I just felt like this was easier and more
universal because it just seemed like it was a better
solution because you can save all kinds of stuff in
these lists. You can save recipes, whatever. Now the other
(41:32):
cool thing, and I think some people might think this
is scary, is that if you have location history turned on,
and a lot of people do, you can see all
the places that you've been to in your past. And
I've talked about this before, but they've made it a
little bit easier to find now. So if you go
into saved, then at the bottom you'll see timeline. You
can say, let's go and you can now see all
(41:56):
the places that you've been organized by category shopping, food
and drinks, hotels, attractions, airports. So if I want to
see all the airports that I've been to carrying a
phone in the world, I can see them, and they're
all sorted by how far they are. Well, they're not
sorted by how far they are from me, because San
Francisco is coming up. They're actually sorted by it looks
(42:18):
like time. But you can go to food and drink.
So maybe you went to this little little coffee house
in Tokyo and you can't remember the name because it
was written in Japanese. And now you can just go
on here and go to Tokyo because it's also done by cities.
Tap let's see. So let's go to let's see, where
was I Carlsbad a year ago? I went to the
(42:41):
well that was Lego Land. Okay, that wasn't very good.
But oh, Shanghai. Here's Shanghai. So I went to well,
I can't read the name of it, but it was
a shopping mall, and it's just you know, maybe I
couldn't remember the name of that shopping mall, but now
I can see it so I think this is a
really cool underutilized feature. Yes, is it that Google is
keeping track of everywhere you go? Yes, we get it.
(43:04):
It's creepy. Oh guess what. It's the world we live in.
And to me, it's really useful. And as long as
you know that it's happening and you're not surprised by it,
and nobody else has access to this information, why not.
It's just to me. It's to me there is a
I love privacy, but there is a fine line between
privacy and usefulness, And to me, I love the idea
(43:27):
that I can have a list of everywhere I've ever
went in the world without having to keep that list,
and in seconds I can look at my phone and
see all the different places I've went. So check it out.
It's called saved. There's other ways to access it through
the Google app and various things. But that's that's, uh,
you know, just one of the things that I think
is cool. All right, we'll get one more question before
(43:49):
the show ends. Lydia says, mister DeMuro. A lot of
people calling me mister DeMuro. Am I really that formal,
mister DeMuro? Mister DeMuro, I just called me rich, Rich
on tech. I apologize. I do not have Facebook nor Instagram.
I have a question. Do you know why Verizon is
(44:10):
discontinuing ring back tones as of October thirty first? Is
there any apps that you know that will provide ring
back tones? Please advise? Thank you? Ringback tones, Wow, I
haven't heard of those in a long time. All I
know is that when you search ringback tones, they are discontinued.
Effective let's see October thirty first, twenty twenty and effective
(44:35):
August twenty sixth, customers will no longer be able to
subscribe or purchase ringback tones. That's it doesn't give a reason,
but I'm guessing if I had to guess the reason,
it's because people stopped using them. They were costly, and
I don't know if any other Let's see, it looks
like does AT and T. My AT and T might
(44:57):
still offer them, but I I don't know. It's still
on their website, but it could be an old page.
Let's see if T mobile has some T Mobile has
caller tunes. It looks like that two thousand and four
rileys are old. I don't know if they have it anymore,
so I think you are out of lock. I should
I should get that thing all right? Well, that is uh,
(45:24):
that's gonna do it for this week's show. Can you
believe it? I say that every week. I can't believe.
It goes very fast. Let's see what do I say
at this point. That's gonna do it for this episode
of the show. If you'd like to submit a question
for me to answer, you can do it in several ways.
You can go to rich on tech dot tv, hit
the email button at the bottom of the page, or
(45:45):
you can send me an email Hello at richontech dot tv.
I think that's the email address. Also, we would love
it if you would rate and review this podcast to
help other people discover it. Techy one two four says
five stars rate podcast great content and very useful technical information.
Looking forward to it every week. Keep up the good work. Well,
(46:08):
thank you, techy one two four. If you want to
rate this podcast, go to rate this podcast dot com
slash rich on tech. I know you are rating and
reviewing it because I get a little email from ratethipodcast
dot com that says, rich you've gone over your quota
for the month. We're not giving any more reviews for you.
We're not gonna I guess they redirect people to the
(46:30):
proper place whatever. I don't know. Anyway, if you get that,
if you if you hit a barrier, just go to
iTunes and just rate it that way. But we've got
one hundred and ninety reviews and we stand at five stars,
five out of five. That is no small fee. Thank
you so much. I do love doing this podcast. I
hope you know that it's one of my favorite things
(46:51):
of the week, and honestly, I'd probably go many more
hours if I could, but I only have so many
hours in the day and I have other things I
need to do for my job. I'm rich samiro On
behalf of everyone that gets this show to your ears.
Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you real soon.
Samsung's latest foldable phone is luxury all the way. My
thoughts on the new Nomad wireless charging pad, which is
pretty unique. A handy chrome extension to help you handle
all those GDPR consent pop ups. You know what I'm
talking about. Plus your tech questions answered? What's going on?
I'm Rich Dmiro and this is Rich on Tech. This
(00:29):
is the podcast where I talk about the tech stuff
that I think you should know about, and it's also
the place where I answer the questions that you send me.
In case you don't know, my name is Rich Dmiro,
tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Welcome
to the podcast. If you're listening for the first time,
thank you for finding me. If you're listening for the
one hundredth time, thank you for putting up with me.
(00:53):
I get a lot of emails from people about the
podcast now, which is pretty cool because when I first
started this, it was kind of like a little side project,
and now you know it is produced out of KTLA
or part of KTLA, but it's kept the same kind
of I don't know, like it just feels like it
nothing's changed, and that's what I like about it. I
(01:13):
was on vacation over the weekend. I'm a little bit
older now that I talk to you, because it was
my birthday, you know, recently, and so that was fun.
We went down to San Diego to this place called
Paradise Point, which my friend has been talking about this
place forever, and I never went. And finally, you know,
because you can't really go in many places right now,
(01:33):
San Diego seemed great, had great weather, great sun. Paradise
Point was there. My friend, my other friend told me
about it. He said, dude, we just went. We loved it,
So okay, that's where we went. We had a great time.
This resort reminds me of a place that sort of
transports you to a family place back in the day's.
It reminds me of Hawaii. It felt like Hawaii. It
(01:54):
was just really fun. The water was beautiful. We had
a nice beach front kind of view. It was just great.
And we stayed there for a couple nights and just
had such a nice time. And I just every morning
tried to just go out on the beach and just
kind of sit there for a couple minutes and kind
of reflect, because I'm trying to do that more often
these days, and It's not that easy all the time.
(02:17):
But anyway, let's get into the podcast. Let's get into
the first story of the week, which is the Samsung
Galaxy Z Fold two five G. This is the latest
smartphone that I've been playing with. It's also one of
the most expensive smartphones I think I've ever tested, certainly
ever sent to me as a review unit. So what
(02:40):
is unique about this device? You might remember this was
the device that Samsung had a little trouble with back
in the day when it first launched. They sent it
to a bunch of reviewers and next thing you know,
those reviewers had problems with the screen, and specifically, Samsung
figured out that there was some debris getting in behind
this and that was causing it to fail. And so
(03:02):
they went back to the drawing board. They came up
with some sort of little way to protect the back
of the or I guess the opening near the hinge,
and that fixed it for the most part. I'm not
sure how many of these phones they sold the first
time around. But now this is the new version, and
this new version is kind of revamped in some really
nice ways. Number One, the front screen is way bigger,
(03:23):
way more useful. Six point two inch screen on the front,
and the phone is kind of thin, so it's a
really thin phone, but it's thick because it's almost imagined
two phones stacked on top of each other with a hinge.
Then you've got this giant seven point six inch screen
when you open the thing up, and that's a foldable
ultra glass or ultra thin glass screen. Used to be plastic.
(03:44):
Now it's glass, and that's a miracle in engineering in itself.
It's got one hundred and twenty hrtz adaptable refresh rate.
It's got great sound. The hinge is now called the
Hideaway hinge, which means it's smaller than before. And it
also has sweeper technology, which they first introduced on their
other flip phone, which is the Galaxy Z Flip. And
(04:05):
it's kind of like it looks like a little kind
of sweeper brush, like a little broom inside the hinge
that theoretically just kind of brushes out any debris that
gets in there, and so that should take care of that.
It's also fully close, you don't really see it. Cool
things about this phone is that it's really luxurious. It's
kind of cool to have both a smartphone and a
(04:25):
tablet in your pocket at all times. You've got a
cool new feature. Where the old one only opened up
to one you can only open it up and that
was it, so it was either closed or opened. There
was no degrees of open, so you couldn't kind of
make the phone into its own little self standing tripod,
like put it in an L shape and just sit
it there and watch a show. Well now you can
(04:46):
do that. They call flex mode, So now you can
just bend the screen at any angle you want, in
a half fold, a quarterfold, and open fold, and you
can watch stuff. And you can also record videos hands free.
So that's kind of neat. But the camera is is good.
I mean it, you know, I haven't. I'm not doing
a full review on this device because it's not something
I think a lot of people are gonna purchase. To me,
(05:08):
I'm sort of just taking a look at it, understanding
what it's all about, so that I can talk about
it in the future before it goes back to Samsung.
So this is not a review. I think that if
I'm reviewing this device, I'm not sure I would recommend
someone purchasing this device unless you have money to burn,
because it's sort of a it's still almost in beta.
This is the second version. It's really expensive. It's two
(05:30):
thousand dollars. But again, I think they did a really
nice job and I love seeing this, and I actually
think that I will buy a foldable phone in the
future when it gets to a point where I feel
like it's a little bit more manageable, a little thinner,
and just kind of more what I need. But so far,
I mean, I could think of a lot of reasons
why this is cool, and I am tempted. Don't get
(05:53):
me wrong, I am tempted because it's so unique that
nobody else has anything like it, and how cool is
it as a tech person to have something that nobody
else has. I kind of like doing that kind of stuff.
Two colors, Mystic Bronze, Mystic Black, two fifty six gigs
of storage, twelve gigabytes of RAM and that's your only
option there. And the phone, again, like I said, is
(06:14):
two thousand dollars. If you go on Samsung's website to
buy it, they're really really trying to get you to
trade in another device to bring that price down. And
one other thing to know is that because the screen
is still pretty fragile, I think or I guess. Two
other things to know. Number one, it's not dust or
water resistant. They make that very clear. And you also
(06:35):
get a one time device protection against accidental display damage
within one year. So if you mess up the screen
within one year, send it back to Samsung, they will
send you a either a new one with a new screen,
or refurbish it or whatever they do. So there you
have it. Samsung Galaxy z Fold two pretty cool goes
on sale September eighteenth. All right, let's get to the
(07:01):
first question. Let's see here. Hmmm, let's see. Jesse from Glendora, Cali.
Let's see. Let's yeah. Jesse from Glendora, California, wanted your
thoughts about the Western Digital my cloud duo hard drive
backup system. I still perform backups on Google and iCloud.
I wanted something local at my house and not to
(07:22):
keep everything stored on my iMac. It fills up quickly.
I'm a little scared to have everything in the cloud,
photos and music. Your thoughts and opinions would be greatly appreciated.
Jesse from Glendora, you get a because this is a
fantastic idea. We should not have everything just in the cloud,
and you should have your things in a couple of
(07:42):
different places, some were physical in your home and then
somewhere in the cloud. And if you have them in
those two places, the good news is if one of
them fails, you've got him in the other place. So
I think the Western Digital MyCloud duo is great. I'm
not even sure you need the MYC Cloud duo because
the Cloud duo is I think that's the one that
has software that backs it up to the cloud. Oh no,
(08:07):
it just plugs directly into your WiFi router so that
way it's kind of like your own little cloud exactly.
So that's perfect. I love it. I think that that's
a fantastic idea. You should definitely do that. It's expensive.
I'm not sure that you need that big of a
solution unless you have a lot of stuff, Jesse with
your photos and videos I think are your photos and music.
I think what you can do is depending on the
(08:29):
kind of Oh you have an iMac. I think with
an iMac, what you should do is just buy a
two or four gigabyte hard drive and just plug it
into your iMac and just plug it in, turn on
time capsule, and just plug it in every once in
a while every week, every month and boom, just let
it back up everything on your iMac. Now that's given
(08:51):
that all of your photos are on your iMac, I'm
not sure if they are or not. And your music,
I'm sure it is. But no matter what you do,
I'm trying to give you a cheaper solution because just
a standard USB hard drive, it's gonna be a lot cheaper.
So I would say, just plug that in, let Time
Capsule do its thing. Do that every couple of weeks
or every week, whatever, however often you need. You think
(09:12):
you need to do that, But I think that's a
cheaper solution that would totally work for you. But yeah,
but if you can, if you're ready to spring for
the my cloud duo, sure, I mean I love having
a network drive. It's great. I don't have mine hooked
up right now because I've gotten sow into the cloud
and I actually get a because I've gotten really bad
(09:34):
about backing up my stuff in a second place. I
know it's on my drive, it's on my phone. I
also have a whole bunch of assorted hard drives around
my house with all kinds of backups on them that
one day, one of these days, I will go through
and finally back up and organize everything on those drives.
I don't want to delete anything because I don't know
(09:55):
if I've got the pictures in Google Photos, and I
just want to go off on one little tangent here
and this. I love, love, love Google Photos, but there
is one feature I just cannot stand about it anymore,
and that is there is no way to sync my
Google Photos collection with a backup drive. And yes, I
know you can do Google take out and download the
(10:17):
entire photo collection, but that is so unreasonable. All I want,
here's what I want. Google, Please just make a deal
with a hard drive manufacturer and make that deal so
that when I plug this drive into my computer or
just connect it to my WiFi, it is constantly downloading
and syncing my Google Photos library to that drive. That's
(10:40):
all I want. I don't think Google's going away anytime soon.
I don't think their system is gonna crash. But at
the same time, I just want a nice local backup
of my photos in my home, just because it just
makes me feel better. I mean, if something ever happened
to me, you think someone else is gonna figure out
how to download all my pictures? From good Google. One
(11:00):
of my family members. No, and I don't want to
get that dark. But the reality is it would just
be nice to have a local copy. And I think
that other platforms do offer that, some of the other
photo saving platforms, but I like Google Photos and they
used to have it and it's gone away, and I
just wish you would bring it back, Google, because it
would just be nice. I know you're trying to make
(11:21):
things simple, and also I think you're trying to make
them complicated because when someone wants to download their stuff,
think about it. If you have it on a drive
at your house at all times, how much easier is
it to just bring that somewhere else and you move
your business elsewhere. Let's move on to a new wireless
charging pad. This is from Nomad and it's called the
(11:43):
base Station Pro. I went up to Nomad and Santa Barbara.
I hope I didn't talk about this before on the podcast,
but I talked to the folks at Nomad who they
make really cool kind of I don't know, artisanal almost
products for iPhone and smartphones in general. My phone is
a big one. But they make cases, they make charging cables,
(12:03):
all kinds of stuff. But this new one is called
the base Station Pro and it is a wireless charging pad. Now, rich,
what's so new about a wireless charging pad. Well, let
me tell you. The neat thing about this wireless charging
pad is that it is positionless, which means you can
put three devices on here anywhere you want. Now, I
(12:23):
have a three device charger from Mophi, and you have
to place them exactly right. You've got to put stuff
on what's called a sweet spot. And if you don't,
your phone doesn't charge. And I've woken up many a
morning's where my phone has not charged overnight because it
either moved or stopped charging for some reason, or I
hit the nightstand whatever. So this you really don't have
(12:44):
that problem, and it works. It works great. There are
some caveats. I'll tell you about those, but let me
tell you how they did it. So instead of one
coil that charges your phone, they have eighteen coils underneath,
along with little software called free Power that detects where
you place your device and then it directs the power
to that device. Pretty cool, huh. I thought it was
(13:05):
pretty neat. Now I will tell you this, I think
hang on. I just took a sip of my tea,
my Green tea. I think that the free power actually
works better with Apple products than any other products. So
I don't know if it's an Android thing or some
(13:25):
weird stuff, but I just feel like when you put
your iPhone on there, it works. Now, I will say
with the Galaxy Z Fold two that's been working really
well as well. And there are three little there are
three little status lights on this thing too, which is
really cool. That will let you know if it's charging,
like if the power is going to the three little gadgets,
which is also kind of cool. And I found that
(13:47):
the Pixel did not work at all. The Samsung Galaxy
Note twenty Ultra did not work. It just it does
this really weird thing. Maybe I have a bad review unit,
but it does this really weird thing where it just
goes crazy. It's like selecting on screen. It's really strange.
It looks I got to get a video of it
and post it to Twitter because it's very strange. And
I asked no Mad about this and they said yes,
(14:09):
there are some issues. Officially, older Samsung devices S nine
and blow and all Pixel devices don't work. They're working
on a firmware slash software update. And also, oh yeah,
there is one more thing that does not work, the
Apple Watch. So when you really think about it, this
is for someone who has, you know, maybe two iPhones,
a work phone and a personal phone, plus a pair
(14:31):
of AirPods. It will work with the Samsung Buds and
other wireless It does work with things that are on
the Cheese standard, but it's not officially on the Cheese standard.
There must be something they did weird about it that
they can't officially say it's chea so I don't know.
But if you have Apple stuff, it works great. Otherwise,
if you could get into a store, like if they
(14:52):
had one of these in an Apple store, that would
be ideal because then you can test your your products
on it and see if it works. But it's really cool.
Two hundred and thirty dollar, I know, very expensive, but
the neat thing is really it feels like what the
future will bring with wireless charging, where you just throw
your device on there and you don't have to think
about how you placed it and it just sort of charges,
which is really neat all right, Angela writes in we
(15:20):
all watch you and love your suggestions with little heart.
Oh thank you. We were hoping you could offer a
solution to our problem. We have paper thin walls and
don't have a PA system and need some soft music
to play in our exam rooms. But I'm not even
sure what device we could use for this function. Suggestions
are appreciated. Thank you so much the staff at Family
(15:43):
Member Veterinary. Is it veterinary veterinary veterinary hospital, Veterinary, I
don't know veterinary. You know it's a hospital for dogs
and cats, animals, Angela. I think your best solution is
something that is so simple it might have evaded you.
I think a Google Nest Mini would be perfect in
every room, And now I think, yeah, so here's what
(16:07):
I would do. I would do a Google Nest Mini.
You can get those for I think they're like forty bucks.
Put them in every room. You can group them up
on the Google Home mapp and you can play music
to all of the rooms at the same time and boom,
now you have music in every room. You can also
use it as a PA system, so if you want
to like send messages throughout the whole office, you can broadcast.
(16:28):
I think the the syntax let's see broadcast Google Home.
So I think what you say is you can use
a little mic on your on your thing, or let's
see broadcasts from one speaker to others. You just say okay,
it doesn't tell you how to do it. Come on
what you need? Oh, here you go, You say h
(16:50):
Google broadcast there you go. You can also use the
commands shout tell everyone announce instead of broadcast. You can
say eah, Google, tell everyone one doctor needed in room seven.
Doctor needed in room seven. So you can do that.
And now the other thing is your guests will also
be able to say h Google. So what I would
(17:11):
do is probably turn off the microphone functionality. So there's
a little toggle on there to turn off the microphone
and then you can just have your music playing. And yes,
some of your smarter, more savvy guests might toggle the
microphone switch and mess with it, but I think that's
probably a small portion of people. The other thing I'd
recommend is they've got these great Google mounts on Amazon.
(17:35):
So if you look on Amazon Google Nest Mini mount,
you go on there and they've got so many great
mounts and you can just plug it into a plug
on the wall and it kind of keeps all the
chords great. I mean, you can really I think This
is such a simple solution. You're talking you know, a
couple bucks for the mount and you know forty bucks
for the minis. You can get them a two pack,
(17:56):
three pack or whatever you can find them on sale.
I think that's gonna do it just fine. All right,
let's move on to another tech topic of the week,
and this is Facebook. Remember I was just talking about
photos and videos. This perfectly talk. This kind of goes
to what I'm talking about. And Facebook is now expanding
(18:19):
what's called their Data Portability Tool, and now you can
send your photos and videos to Dropbox and also another
service called Koofer Koofr, which is something in Europe. We
don't I guess we don't really have it here in
the US. Maybe we do, we just don't really use it.
But so this is pretty simple. If you've got photos
(18:39):
on Facebook, remember there was a time when you were
uploading a ton of photos to Facebook, or even maybe
you even use that Facebook sink feature they used to
have back in the day, which I don't know why
they got rid of that, but people used to be
able to sync all the photos from your camera roll
and your phone to Facebook. They got rid of that.
But maybe you still have a bunch of photos lingering
in Facebook. Maybe you've been using it for fifteen years
now or whatever. However many years Facebook has been around,
(19:01):
and you've got a bunch of photos in there, and
you want to store them somewhere else. Well, now you
can do a direct transfer right from Facebook to Dropbox.
And also Google Photos is supported, and so all you
do is you go on your Facebook, you log in
to your other account. It'll like connect the two accounts,
you know, your drop Box or your Google Photos, and
it will start moving your pictures over. Now it's not
(19:25):
going to transfer them, it's going to copy them, so
they will still be on Facebook. And now you have
a copy of your pictures on Dropbox. And let's say
you want to get rid of Facebook. Boom, you can
get rid of Facebook. So that's pretty easy. So there
you go. That's kind of like that's it. There's not
much more to know about that. Everything is encrypted as
it moves between services. Facebook is quick to point out.
(19:47):
So it's just good. I love this is fantastic, and
in fact, I wish that Google would do something like
this for other services. And I think that that's the
goal of these services, to make it easy to move
things back and forth, especially as we are moving towards
the cloud, folks, so everything is going to the cloud,
(20:07):
and so when you have things in the cloud, what
happens Everyone wants it's easy to get your stuff into
the cloud. But if it becomes a thing where it's
really tough to get your stuff out of the cloud,
that is what scares me. Because it used to be
back in the day, all the services would sink so
easily to some sort of you know, network attached storage
or whatever, and then all of a sudden they started
(20:29):
backing out of those things, and it gets tougher and
tougher to get your stuff out of these services. And yes, again,
I know you can do Google takeout, and I'm sure
Microsoft has the equivalent and all these other services. I
know Facebook even has that equivalent where you can download
your entire Facebook. But it's kind of a pain. And
these files are giant, especially the longer that you've been
with these services. So who's gonna sit there and download
(20:49):
terabytes or you know, gigabytes and gigabytes of data. It's
gonna be tough. Let's hear from Bill. Bill says, I
just upgraded my internet speed to one hundred megabits per second.
I have a Netgear Nighthawk AC nineteen hundred router. I
(21:11):
wonder if you heard about that on wirecutter, because that's
I think the one they recommend, which works perfectly for
our three story home. Wow, that's surprising. I noticed my
speed is only about forty five megabits per second download
when connected to two point four gigaherts and one hundred
and two at five gigaherts. I've tried different channels and
currently found Channel three as the best out of the
eleven channels. I wanted to know if this is normal
(21:32):
for two point four gigaherts to have such a slower speed.
It's not really a problem because most of the streaming
devices are on five gigaherts. Anyway, any ideas, I don't
want to call Netgear because they charge for support. Oh wow,
that's interesting. Am I missing something? No? So Number one
when it comes to Wi Fi, if you're generally speaking,
(21:53):
you are not gonna get the speed that you get
coming into your house at the hub across all your
devices from the Wi Fi network. It's just a matter
of there's interference. There's a lot going on. There's a
lot of devices it's just generally going to be for
a lot of people, it's about half. If you can
get it more than half, that's fantastic. So if you're
(22:14):
getting two hundred, I used to get two hundred across
all my devices, I don't quite get that anymore. I
upgraded to a gigabyte or gigabit, and I don't quite
get it across all my devices. I'm still working on
getting it to there because it has to do with
all the routers and the way they talk to each other.
But the reality is, if you're getting one hundred at
(22:37):
five gigaherts, that's great. And I know you. You seem
like a technical guy because you've done all these tests.
You found much channel is the best. You've figured out
the two point four versus five. So most of today's
Wi Fi networks put out two signals. One that's two
point four gigaherts, which goes further but it's not as fast.
(22:57):
And then you have five gigaherts, which doesn't go far,
but it creates it carries data at a I guess
a higher through put if you want to say it
that way. So you figured that out on your own.
I don't think this is a problem. I think you're fine.
I'm surprised that the router is getting stuff to all
corners of your home for a three story house, so
(23:18):
I think you're winning there. And yeah, the two point
four giga hurts thing at forty five, it's still going
to be fine. And like you said, most of your
streaming stuff, most of the new stuff is on five
giga hurts. Anyway, two point four was kind of the standard,
that is the older standard that everything uses, and some
inexpensive devices used, like if they're trying to save money
by not doing a dual band, but most of the
(23:41):
new devices do five. So if you're getting one hundred
and two on five, I think you're okay. I think
eventually you may want to look into a mesh network,
but I don't think you need it right now if
your Nighthawk is working for you. All right, let's talk
about GDPR. Do you know what that is? That is
the the thing over in Europe, the oh my gosh,
(24:02):
what's it called? What does GDPR stand for? I remember
when I first did this, I remembered what it meant.
But it's called General Data Protection Regulation. And what this
is is the really intense privacy laws that they have
over in Europe. And so when you had this happen,
(24:23):
every website in the world had to adapt, they had
to adapt their privacy policy. And in fact, I think
part of this was that you you have the right
to be erased from the systems, and you also have
a right to the data in the systems. And if
you live in the EU, you can write an email
or a letter to any company that does business in
(24:44):
the EU, like Yahoo or Google, and say, hey, I
want to see all the data that you've collected on me,
and they have to send it to you, which, as
you can imagine, that's probably a big pain for these companies,
but you know, that's the cost of doing business, I guess.
And these regulations and it's really meant to protect people's privacy.
I'm not commenting on whether it goes too far or
whether it's annoying. But you know, the one thing that
(25:05):
we have seen because of this is everywhere in the world,
every website that you go to, there is a little
pop up that you've seen that says, what do you
like to accept cookies? Would you like to have your privacy?
Would you want to opt out of the privacy policy
or opt in or whatever. There's so many little things
that they ask every single website. It is pretty annoying.
(25:27):
I will tell you that. Now. I love the fact
that we have access to privacy controls and all this
good stuff, but it's a little bit much. And ninety
nine percent of the time I feel like I say
yes to these things or whatever. I just clicked the box.
I don't even know if I'm saying yes or no
or somewhere in between. And next time I go to
that website, I feel like it's there again. And I
(25:48):
feel like I'm always clicking in every website. By the
time you get to a website, number one, you gotta
click the GDPR, then you got to click the newsletter,
Then you got to click about you know, if you're
using an ad blocker, they they you know, talk about that,
which I get, you know. Then they talk about, you know,
do you want to allow pop ups or notifications or
what it's like, can we track your location? There's so
(26:09):
many things. All I want to do is read the article.
I just want to see what you said about this.
But I'm sitting there, like navigating this website. And so anyway,
I say all of this because there is a tracker,
a chrome extension. I just discovered that so far, I
think is really cool and I hope it's legit. But
it's called consent omatic, And according to the information here,
(26:34):
the consent to omatic was built and maintained by workers
at a university in Denmark. And these privacy researchers got
tired of seeing how companies violate the EUS General Data
Protection Regulation. Because organizations that enforce the GDPR do not
have enough resources, we built this add on to help
them out. They looked at six hundred and eighty different
(26:56):
pop ups and combine their data processing purposes into five
categories that you can toggle on or off. Sometimes their
categories don't match perfectly, but we will choose the one
that provides the most privacy preserving option. So here's what's
so great. Here is what's so great. So now they
say that these pop up cookie pop ups are designed
to be confusing. Oh okay, good, that's true. They want
(27:18):
to make you agree to be tracked. So this add
on automatically answers those consent pop ups for you, so
you can't be manipulated. You set your preference preferences once
and you let the technology do the rest. And so far.
I went to a couple websites with this Chrome extension
installed and it worked. I saw a little check mark
pop up on the Chrome extension when it kind of
(27:39):
went through the little box that popped up. I think
this is so cool. It's called the consent omatic. I
will link it in the show notes, so you make
sure you get the right one and you're not getting
some scammy one. The only thing is I've gotten really
cautious about installing Chrome extensions, especially the ones that say
we can read and write data on all of the
(28:01):
websites that you visit. And some of these things like
a Honey extension or a Wiki buy, they need that
because that's how they see what website you're on. And
I've toggled that feature off, and like you know, you
can enable it every time you want manually, but it
is a pain, and so you don't want, Like I
find this, it's easier to let them read it, right,
but you have to imagine you are giving them a
(28:23):
lot of data, and this is one of them. So
this says this can read and change site data on
all sites. So every website that you go to, this
little concent omatic is getting a record of that, as
I understand, so you have to weigh your options. Do
you want your privacy or do you want your annoyances gone?
(28:43):
And what I like about this little consent omatic is
that you have options, so you can go in and
your choice is they give one two three, one, two
three four. There's about five six categories information and storage
access and I have that off preferences and functionality off,
performance and analytics off, content selection, delivery and reporting off,
(29:07):
ad selection, off other purposes off. How great is that
all tracking is rejected by default, which is something I
don't think I would have done if I was doing
this manually. So I think this is a major two
thumbs up for not only the convenience, but also the
fact that it is blocking a lot of these trackers
that by default, a lot of us are just saying yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
(29:29):
go away, go away, go away, and we don't really
know what we're doing. So kudos to them, and I
will again put that link in the show notes. All right,
next question comes from Karen. Hey, Rich, you helped me before,
and I appreciate your wisdom. I have the same Samsung
(29:51):
four phone. Soon I hope it will be replaced by
a seven for my brother. But I'm struggling a little.
Number one. The phone will not hold a charge to
take a few pictures Google's something. Oh my god, it
shuts off. The short time frame is amazing. Do you
think it's just because the phone is old? Could it
be the charger or would a new battery help until
I get the next hand me down. I've also lost
the microphone feature for texting. It just disappeared. I've checked
(30:13):
YouTube videos, followed the path little microphone should appear. It
never does. Is it lost forever? Thanks so much for
your time, Thank you, Karen. All right, let's break this down.
Samsung four. Wow, number one, kudos to you for having
a Samsung S four. That phone was released in Let's
see what date that was. That was twenty thirteen, seven
(30:38):
years ago. Whoa, that is a long time. I think
most people are keeping their phones for about an average
of two to three years at this point. So you're
going seven's. That's amazing, So good for you. Number one.
The battery I think that, yes, the battery is probably fried.
Batteries have a certain lifespan what's called cycles. They only
(31:00):
get so many cycles, no matter how good you are
charging them, they do not last forever. So that's the
main thing. That battery is fried. Now the good news
is this is I believe a removable battery because it's
such an old phone that this was back in the
day when you could remove batteries. So I would go
on Amazon and see if you can buy a new battery,
(31:21):
see if you can replace that battery, and that would
be my first choice. If you're getting the S seven
from your brother, I would convince your brother to give
you that sooner than later and save the money on
the battery because it's still an old phone and the
seven is going to be a lot better for you.
Number two, the microphone for texting, I think that you
just it either got toggled off somehow or a software
update turned it off because of privacy reasons, and all
(31:44):
you need to do is turn it back on. So
I would go into your settings and let's see. Usually
it's under language and input. Let's see so settings General Management,
Language and input, and it should say physical keyboard or
no on screen keyboard, and then there should be Google
Voice typing, Samsung Voice input, and your keyboards. And I
(32:07):
would just go in and make sure that your voice
is on for the keyboard that you have selected, So
I like to use gboard depending on the keyboard you're using.
Just going there and check all those settings under on
screen keyboard and you should find it and it should
be there. So I don't think that that's gone forever
unless they somehow got rid of it. If you like
(32:27):
cool new apps like I do, here's another one. It's
called here here h E A R H E R E.
And what's cool about this is it is kind of
like an audio tour guide app for the places you go.
And what's unique about it is that it's just a
little snippets. So I just think this is such a
(32:48):
good idea because when I'm traveling, I am the kind
of person that likes to know what is going on
around me and what's the significance of that mountain or
that old you know, mission, or that church or that
giant rock, whatever it is, and you know, you can
go on. I don't know if there must be apps
(33:08):
that do that. I'm sure there are, But this is
cool because it's audio and it's an app out of
Santa Barbara. It's backed by Kevin Costner, the actor and
also one of the guys who founded the North Face,
which is like the outdoor Powall Company, or maybe they
do more than that, but they professionally edit and narrate
these little audio vignettes, and so it's kind of like
(33:28):
a little history book or a you know, visitor's guide,
but it's on your phone, and so it's also GPS tagged,
which means you can drive like I recently drove to
know Zion, Utah, and you can just fire up your
phone on the app and when you're in a little
small town and see if there's anything of note around
you and learn about it, which is really neat. Now.
(33:49):
To be fair, it doesn't work in Zion right now
because right now it supports the West Coast, which is California, Oregon,
and Washington. There's fifteen hundred stories. They hope to have
about ten thousand of them by next summer. And it's
only on iOS right now, and they hope to have
it on Android soon. But it's neat. I looked it
up for the stories around me. It's kind of cool.
(34:10):
It's professionally produced, and I think it's a nice alternative
to the tour guide. Now there's some audio tour guide apps,
or there used to be there was one that I
used up in San Francisco called Detour and it was
started by I think it was the guy who did
groupon and it was really cool. My wife and I
took the tour. It was fun, and they do like
(34:30):
audio and they play little you know, it's like it's
kind of like an audio tour of wherever you're going. Now,
this one was very involved, you know, cross the street,
look at this stand there. It was great and it
didn't last because it went away. This one also is
they do charge you, so it's five stories for free,
and then it's like fifty bucks for the year, which
(34:51):
you know is a little high. But they were doing
a twenty five dollars deal. I don't know if that's
still available. They're also doing seven dollars for the week.
So I think that look, if you're going on a trip,
a road trip, you're spending a lot of money. Anyway,
you're seven dollars for this app for access for the
week to learn about a couple of things on your way.
It's not that bad if you think about it that way.
(35:12):
You know, you have to figure you know, you're gonna
stop for fast food, that's gonna be a couple bucks,
So seven dollars for kind of like a tour is
really not bad. And again it's not a tour. It's
just a little audio snippets, so you can come and
go as you please, do as many as you want,
as little as you want. And I think this is
a great idea and I hope that it lasts. I
hope they expand it like they say they want to.
(35:33):
And I think that it's one of those things that
if you're traveling, I love just getting Even if I
travel to a place and I learn one thing about
that place and it sticks with me, I love it
and I feel like my job is done and I
feel like it's been beneficial to me to travel. And
right now we're all doing road trips because you don't
really want to fly places, so or we're not doing
(35:53):
a lot of big trips places, so this is perfect.
If you live on the West coast, check it out
here here h e ar h e r E. Try it.
It's free for the first five stories and I'll just
continue to follow that and see the GPS tagging, I
think is the really smart part about that app. I
(36:14):
also did a one of the tours in New Orleans.
I was there and I just downloaded some random MP
three and this was this was way back in the day,
and I just walked around that city doing a tour.
So I think also, if you're in a city and
you can find an audio tour and download it and
take it, it's great. I mean, why not. I mean
you could do a real tour that's even better. But
you know, if you're DIY, that works too. All right,
(36:41):
let's see what do we want to talk about next, Donnetta,
says mister Demiro. I need some advice. I recently read
an article about not purchasing a MacBook Pro because eventually
Apple will not support them. I have one that I
purchased a couple of months ago. My question is should
I keep it or should I sell it? Thank you,
don Netta, Uh no, you should definitely keep the MacBook
(37:04):
Pro that you purchased. Apple is going to support them
for a long long time. Yes, there's a lot of
confusion because they're switching. They're not even I mean, eventually
they're switching to their own processors, and it's not going
to be Intel. I guess I think they're switching to
their own like fully, but right now it's going to
be a slow, slow march to their own what they
call their own silicon or their own silicon silicon, and
(37:29):
so they are going to use their own processors inside
their devices. And that's gonna happen. And yes, it's gonna happen,
I think they said by the end of was It
twenty twenty twenty one. But don't worry about it. Your
your computer is going to be just fine. So let
me look up macOS Catalina, which is the newest operating system,
and let's see which Mac computers it supports. Usually if
(37:53):
you scroll all the way down, it will say which
ones they support. Okay, all right, let's let's take a
look see if your Mac can run mac OS Catalina
MacBook twenty fifteen and later MacBook Air twenty twelve and
later MacBook Pro twenty twelve and later MacBook Mini twenty
twelve and later iMac twenty twelve and later i'mc Pro
(38:13):
twenty seventeen and later mac Pro twenty thirteen. You're talking
this operating system that Apple just came out with, and
you know, in the past year supports computers from eight
years ago. You have a brand new MacBook Pro. You
are going to be just fine. When you say eventually
(38:33):
Apple will not support them, you're talking eight to nine years.
Because I now the new what's the new one? What's
it called mac Os? Is it big, sir? Mac Os?
Big sir, so big sir. Let's see what that one supports.
That's the one that's coming out next, and that's coming
(38:55):
out any any day. Now, really, let's see what that supports.
That supports. Okay, so we lost about a year. It
looks like so MacBook Air twenty thirteen, MacBook twenty fifteen,
MacBook Pro twenty thirteen. So they dropped the twenty twelves.
So again you're talking. Let's say, if we go from
today seven years, I think you are going to be
(39:19):
just fine. Doneta enjoy the MacBook Pro. Don't worry about
these articles you read online. No big deal. Okay, Oh
my gosh, we're already out of time. I can't believe
this show goes so fast. Let me talk about a
feature in Google that I just love. I've been using
it all summer to plan my trips, especially road trips,
and apparently Google updated it. And I kind of knew
(39:42):
when I looked at it that it looked a little different,
but they had a blog post about it, and this
is the feature called saved tab. All right, I guess
it's the saved tab. So if you go on to
Google and there's a couple of ways that you can
access this, but the easiest way is to go and
open Google Maps, and if you look at the bottom,
there is Explore, commute, and then something called saved And
(40:06):
this is a whole bunch of lists. And so the
default lists are favorites, want to go, start places and labeled.
But the cool thing is they have done a couple
of things to improve this. I love making lists, Like
for instance, when I went to Zion, I made a
Zion list and when I was cruising through, you know,
different recommendations you have to It's it's a little weird
(40:28):
because the easiest way to do it is to check.
Like let's say you want to go to a restaurant,
right you find out about a restaurant, search for that restaurant,
then in Google Maps, and once you search for that
restaurant in Google Maps, bring it up big. There should
be directions call and then something called save. You tap
save and then you can save it to one of
your lists. And what they've done with these lists is
(40:49):
they've made them really easy to find number one, and
then when you tap it to find it later, they
are showing you stuff based on how you know how
close you are to those things. So in Zion, what
I did is I just went to my list and
I saw what was closest. You can also see your
list on a map, so everything that you want to
do in that area is plotted out and you can
(41:11):
see kind of how far things are from each other.
It's really cool and I used to use Yelp for this,
which Yelp has a similar feature you can save collections,
but I just felt like this was easier and more
universal because it just seemed like it was a better
solution because you can save all kinds of stuff in
these lists. You can save recipes, whatever. Now the other
(41:32):
cool thing, and I think some people might think this
is scary, is that if you have location history turned on,
and a lot of people do, you can see all
the places that you've been to in your past. And
I've talked about this before, but they've made it a
little bit easier to find now. So if you go
into saved, then at the bottom you'll see timeline. You
can say, let's go and you can now see all
(41:56):
the places that you've been organized by category shopping, food
and drinks, hotels, attractions, airports. So if I want to
see all the airports that I've been to carrying a
phone in the world, I can see them, and they're
all sorted by how far they are. Well, they're not
sorted by how far they are from me, because San
Francisco is coming up. They're actually sorted by it looks
(42:18):
like time. But you can go to food and drink.
So maybe you went to this little little coffee house
in Tokyo and you can't remember the name because it
was written in Japanese. And now you can just go
on here and go to Tokyo because it's also done by cities.
Tap let's see. So let's go to let's see, where
was I Carlsbad a year ago? I went to the
(42:41):
well that was Lego Land. Okay, that wasn't very good.
But oh, Shanghai. Here's Shanghai. So I went to well,
I can't read the name of it, but it was
a shopping mall, and it's just you know, maybe I
couldn't remember the name of that shopping mall, but now
I can see it so I think this is a
really cool underutilized feature. Yes, is it that Google is
keeping track of everywhere you go? Yes, we get it.
(43:04):
It's creepy. Oh guess what. It's the world we live in.
And to me, it's really useful. And as long as
you know that it's happening and you're not surprised by it,
and nobody else has access to this information, why not.
It's just to me. It's to me there is a
I love privacy, but there is a fine line between
privacy and usefulness, And to me, I love the idea
(43:27):
that I can have a list of everywhere I've ever
went in the world without having to keep that list,
and in seconds I can look at my phone and
see all the different places I've went. So check it out.
It's called saved. There's other ways to access it through
the Google app and various things. But that's that's, uh,
you know, just one of the things that I think
is cool. All right, we'll get one more question before
(43:49):
the show ends. Lydia says, mister DeMuro. A lot of
people calling me mister DeMuro. Am I really that formal,
mister DeMuro? Mister DeMuro, I just called me rich, Rich
on tech. I apologize. I do not have Facebook nor Instagram.
I have a question. Do you know why Verizon is
(44:10):
discontinuing ring back tones as of October thirty first? Is
there any apps that you know that will provide ring
back tones? Please advise? Thank you? Ringback tones, Wow, I
haven't heard of those in a long time. All I
know is that when you search ringback tones, they are discontinued.
Effective let's see October thirty first, twenty twenty and effective
(44:35):
August twenty sixth, customers will no longer be able to
subscribe or purchase ringback tones. That's it doesn't give a reason,
but I'm guessing if I had to guess the reason,
it's because people stopped using them. They were costly, and
I don't know if any other Let's see, it looks
like does AT and T. My AT and T might
(44:57):
still offer them, but I I don't know. It's still
on their website, but it could be an old page.
Let's see if T mobile has some T Mobile has
caller tunes. It looks like that two thousand and four
rileys are old. I don't know if they have it anymore,
so I think you are out of lock. I should
I should get that thing all right? Well, that is uh,
(45:24):
that's gonna do it for this week's show. Can you
believe it? I say that every week. I can't believe.
It goes very fast. Let's see what do I say
at this point. That's gonna do it for this episode
of the show. If you'd like to submit a question
for me to answer, you can do it in several ways.
You can go to rich on tech dot tv, hit
the email button at the bottom of the page, or
(45:45):
you can send me an email Hello at richontech dot tv.
I think that's the email address. Also, we would love
it if you would rate and review this podcast to
help other people discover it. Techy one two four says
five stars rate podcast great content and very useful technical information.
Looking forward to it every week. Keep up the good work. Well,
(46:08):
thank you, techy one two four. If you want to
rate this podcast, go to rate this podcast dot com
slash rich on tech. I know you are rating and
reviewing it because I get a little email from ratethipodcast
dot com that says, rich you've gone over your quota
for the month. We're not giving any more reviews for you.
We're not gonna I guess they redirect people to the
(46:30):
proper place whatever. I don't know. Anyway, if you get that,
if you if you hit a barrier, just go to
iTunes and just rate it that way. But we've got
one hundred and ninety reviews and we stand at five stars,
five out of five. That is no small fee. Thank
you so much. I do love doing this podcast. I
hope you know that it's one of my favorite things
(46:51):
of the week, and honestly, I'd probably go many more
hours if I could, but I only have so many
hours in the day and I have other things I
need to do for my job. I'm rich samiro On
behalf of everyone that gets this show to your ears.
Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you real soon.
Host
Rich DeMuro
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