March 25, 2022 • 59 mins
European regulators crack down on messaging apps that don't play nice with others; Instagram launches two new chronological feeds; T-Mobile's $10 cell phone plan; Roku OS 11 brings personal photo screensavers; Zoom introduces animal avatars; Arizona first to launch digital driver's license in Apple Wallet; Twitter lets you search DM's by keyword and YouTube takes on Tubi with free shows.Follow Rich!richontech.tvSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
My message might be forced to play nice with other
messaging apps. Instagram brings back an old school feature zoom
lets you show up to your meetings as a dog.
Plus your tech questions answered. What's going on. I'm Richardimiro
and this is rich on Tech, the podcast where I
talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about.
It's also the place where I answer the questions you
(00:33):
send me. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five
in Los Angeles. Thanks so much for joining me on
the podcast today. Welcome to my friends on the live
stream on Instagram. The IGTV are It's not even called
IGTV anymore. That was only for like a minute where
they called it that. But the Instagram video Instagram live video.
(00:55):
It's become a little tradition with the podcast. I kind
of like it. It brings a little energy to the show.
Makes me feel like I'm talking to an audience. I
feel like I'm doing like stand up in front of
a crowd. Now it's kidding, oh man, so fun fun times.
It's my wife's birthday this week, so I am throwing
her a little party, which is exciting. You know, my
(01:17):
wife didn't really want to party, but she's like, you
know what, She's like, you know, why, why why are
you doing this? And I said, well why not? You know,
why not? It's she doesn't like surprises. So anyway, well
now I just gave up the surprise. I forget that
sometimes I yeah that this is actually going out to people.
(01:39):
Sometimes I just feel like I'm talking to myself, you know,
when you're doing a podcast. But it does happen. But anyway,
after two years of you know, this whole COVID thing,
it's just, you know, I want any excuse to get
together with people because we can again, right, And it's
just so weird because in La, it was we had
such high restrictions around all this and then all of
(02:01):
a sudden they were all lifted like overnight, and you know,
depending on where you live, it was kind of different.
But yeah, no, and Greg, my wife does not listen
to my podcast. I don't think she might have listened
once and I was very like, what you listened to
my podcast? But anyway, so in LA, they just kind
of lifted everything all once, and it's just been so weird,
like going back into stores and you know, without a
mask and like all this stuff. So it's fun it's good.
(02:23):
I mean, obviously you still have to be careful in
certain aspects, but it's all been fun. So I am,
I don't know what this whole intro was, just just
totally who knows. All right, let me talk about the Volvo.
I think I talked about it last week, but I
did a test drive the Volvo see forty recharge and
(02:44):
I got to say, I had so many questions. We
aired it on KTLA today and so many questions. As
I'm walking out of the building, like literally, people were
just asking me left and right like about this car.
So I think that they really hit a nerve with
this car because it looks like a regular suv and
it drives like an electric car. So it's really fast,
(03:06):
it's really cool. Price tags a little high fifty nine grand,
but it does it is eligible for all of those rebates,
all the incentives and stuff, and I get it. Here's
the thing. I know, I'm talking about electric cars a
lot lately. The high gas price is like I'm not
telling you to buy an electric car, you know what
I mean, Like, I'm not saying you have to do it,
because here's the thing. If your car is working for you,
(03:27):
it's you know, it's probably cheaper to stay in your car.
That's the reality of it. It's probably just cheaper to
stay in whatever gas car you have. So buying an
electric car is not going to solve a problem of
high gas prices because you have to buy that car
and it's really expensive to buy the new car. So
but I will say, keep an eye on these electric cars.
They are definitely coming up in the world. And there's
(03:49):
more than just Tesla. I mean, Tesla's great, but there's
definitely a lot more options. And Mario obviously watched this
segment today because he said no leather seats perfect for
true vegans, which is true. Oh yeah, the new Volvo
doesn't even have a leather option. It's like it's half
of the car, not half, but a lot of the
car inside is made from recycled water bottles. So it's
pretty wild to see just the the advancement of all
(04:14):
this stuff. And this is why I love technology because literally,
even something simple as an app can transform a phone
that you've had forever, like your iPhone. You get a
different app that's cool and different and unique, and it
like totally makes your phone something new and useful. And
so this is why I love this stuff, because it
just really is changing very very rapidly, and it's fun
(04:34):
to be kind of watching it all happen and also
comparing that stuff. All right, let's talk about the first
story of the week. I just think this is really interesting.
The EU has has made some new anti competitive laws.
For see, they're clamping down on anti competitive things. Not
they didn't, I guess the laws are anti anti competitive.
(04:56):
So this is really interesting for the big tech companies
out there. And I think the main thing that I
take out of this is that, you know, Europe has
really been very forward, very progressive when it comes to
their tech rules. They have rules like when you get
a phone, like you know, it can't just default to
like one browser app. It has to say like do
(05:16):
you want to use this browser? Do you want to
use that browser? Do you want to use that browser.
They're the reason why we have all those really annoying
cookie pop ups, which, by the way, I'm for a
lot of these privacy laws and things, but when it
comes to those cookie pop ups, they are so useless,
they are so worthless, and like, give me a break.
Has anyone actually sat and said, like, oh, let me
opt out of some of these cookie things like no,
(05:38):
you just click yes and you just go to the website.
So that was kind of like a nonsense thing. But
the part of these new rules that the EU is
enacting is the fact that all the messenger apps have
to work together. And that means that I Message, which
has enjoyed a very nice run as a it's kind
(06:03):
of the big bully in the world of messaging, they
will no longer be able to just work with itself.
And now you can argue, Rich, oh, I message works
with with SMS. Now it does, but it doesn't. I mean,
it makes SMS like it begrudgingly works with regular text messages.
I mean number one, they show up green, which is
(06:23):
not very nice. And then of course you know that
you don't get any of the niceties of I message,
which are you know, the ability to share full resolution
or larger resolution videos and pictures and things like that,
and so and like Ryan said, I message is just
a bully in the US, that's true. Outside the US,
nobody cares. Nobody cares about I Message. Outside the United States,
(06:46):
it's it's either WhatsApp, it's Facebook Messenger. It is over
in like Asia, they use some we chat is big
over there line so again, but the interesting part about
this is that because Apple's going to be forced to
make this interoperable with things like Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp,
(07:09):
it kind of levels the playing field a little bit.
And I think that Apple will have to make those
same changes in the US. We'll see, maybe they'll just
keep it in Europe and they'll just kind of make
a secondary version of my message that works over there
with the other messaging apps, but that would be kind
of weird. So anyway, I thought that was a pretty
big deal. This is kind of a landmark thing. It's
gonna it's not gonna happen overnight, so the group chats
(07:31):
is going to be a period of four years that
they have to do this. I don't have in this
article from Politico when the when the uh I when
the messaging stuff happens for just regular messages. But anyway,
I thought that was a pretty big deal, and it
just has wide ranging implications. And because think about it,
in the US, we have those cookie you know, those
(07:53):
cookie whatever pop up banners on every website. That's not
a requirement in the US, it's requirement in Europe. And
but the websites just put him on the US stuff
as well, So I hope I explained that. Well, all right,
let's get to the first question from Richard Lopez. Richard says,
good morning rich Really it is still morning. I know
(08:13):
if you listen to this show a lot. There's a
joke that everyone that emails me says good morning rich
because they see me on the morning news and they go, oh,
I got to email that guy, and then they email
me and say good morning rich Is this email real
and from Facebook or is it a phishing attempt? My
initial feeling is that it's a scam. Thanks for all
your work at keeping us up to date and working
to keep us safe online, Richard. So, Richard sent a
(08:36):
screenshot that says your account requires advanced security from Facebook Protect.
Turn on Facebook Protect by April first. After that you'll
be locked out of your account until you enable it.
This actually is real, and it's funny because I got
this on my account and I was like, wait, what
is this? How am I being scammed? Like? What's the scam? Here?
(08:58):
This Facebook Protect and it said, because you have a
page that reaches a lot of people, we want to
make sure that your account is secure. And I'm like, ah,
that's kind of weird, like where's the log in stealing
situation here? And after a little research, I realized that
it is real. And my wife actually got the same
message because she's an admin on my page, and she's like,
what is this? This a scam? And then I got
(09:20):
a bunch of emails from other people and the number
one thing every person that's gotten this they either have
a large number of followers on their Facebook page or
they are an admin on a Facebook page that has
a large number of followers. I don't know what the
delineation delineation is for the large amount of followers. Could
be ten thousand, could be five thousand, could be a thousand,
(09:42):
I don't know. But if you have, if you somehow
manage a Facebook page with a bunch of followers, they
will ask you to turn on Facebook Protect. All I
had to do is click a link. There was nothing
I didn't I thought I was gonna have to do
like a secondary authentication or like submit my driver's license
or something. I did not have to do any of that.
I just had to say, all right, turn it on,
(10:03):
and they did so. I think what this does is
when you go to log into your account. It's just
a little bit tougher to log in, or like a
little bit more scrutinized than a standard login, like when
Facebook sees it you log in. Let's say you log
in from Los Angeles all the time, but then all
of a sudden they see that you log in from
Tokyo and they're like, hmm, that's weird, but they still
let it go through because you put in your right password.
(10:25):
Well maybe, and I'm just kind of imagining here with
Facebook Protect, they might scrutinize that log in just a
little bit more and say, we notice that you're joining
from like a city you don't typically join us from,
So can you verify you know, your phone number or
this code that we sent to you. So that's Facebook
Protect Richard, Yes, it is legitimate, and oh it says
(10:46):
hackers are often motivated to attack accounts that have a
lot of followers, run important pages, or hold some community significance.
So again, hackers want to get the best of people
that have like a large audience, a large following, or
are very prominent, and so you just have to be
careful and no matter who you are. And I talked about
this on the radio this week. But you know, they
(11:06):
talked about how Russia is looking to do cyber attacks
against the US. But realistically, you have to protect yourself.
Let me just go over some of the tips that
I talked about there, because it's just it's so wild. Yeah,
I mean, number one, set up two factor authentication. I've
talked about this a million bazillion times, but you know,
no one wants to do it because it's so much
work to get that little code. But you have to
(11:28):
do it. A lot of these accounts they're actually requiring
it now. All right, So two factor authentication. Back up
your files, like, make sure you have a backup. This
is the thing. I'm like a doctor. I see all
the problems, right, Like you go to the doctor. You've
got this one weird like rash or something. You're all
embarrassed to tell your doctor about it. They've seen that
(11:48):
a thousand times. They've seen not just that, but everything
you could imagine in your brain. They don't care. They
don't care. I mean maybe they laugh at their friends.
I don't know when they get home, but I don't
think they do. So, yeah, it might be embarrassing for
us to talk about something to our doctor. But they
have it all up here and they're like, yeah, I've
seen that. Okay, yeah take this, You're done. Same thing
(12:10):
with all this tech stuff. Like you hear about it,
it may not happen to you. I get emails every
single day from people that are hacked, hacked, hacked, hacked,
don't back up their stuff, have their pictures lost, have
their kids first, you know, baby picture lost. I mean,
it's it's really wild what happens. And sometimes I don't
I don't. I hate to say this, but sometimes I
(12:32):
don't feel bad because I said. You know, I've said
so many times the importance of backing things up and
at the very basic, you know, at the very least,
you need to back up your important files, and you
need to back up your pictures. If the rest of
your stuff on your computer is lost, like whatever, but
your pictures you've got to have those backed up and
(12:52):
your files. If you don't have your files backed up,
then it's you know, if something happens or your Facebook page.
People always come to me and they say, my Facebook
page is hacked. I don't know what to do. My Instagram.
They're starting to text my friends. I've told you, you
just have to you have to do two factor authentication. Now,
I did get an email from someone who had two
factor authentication. They had things backed up, but this person
(13:15):
was targeted in a whole different way. This is called
a SIM attack, where they actually steal your SIM card
information and they install your phone number on a different
phone and that enables them, the hackers, to get those
two factor authentication codes. So that's a next level kind
of thing, and it's really no fault of your own.
(13:35):
I mean, well, there is something you could do there too,
and that is you have to call your wireless carrier
and ask them to lock your account. And so what
they do is they lock your account so that nobody
can swap your SIM so they can't actually take your
phone number. It's a whole look this stuff. It's like
it's happening on a daily basis. It's happening everywhere, and
it's just wild because it's happening more and more because
(13:57):
a lot of these systems that the hackers use can
just be automated, or they can just you know, they
can target so many people at the same time. And
doctor J says, back up on a hard drive or
is a cloud enough? That's a great question. Doctor J.
The cloud is the bare minimum, but you should have
it on the cloud and an external hard drive just
(14:19):
for absolute security. I'll be honest. I don't do that
with every file, and I know I need to. So
you are putting yourself at risk if it's only in
the cloud. Yeah, is Google or Apple or all these
things going to go down? Probably not, but you never know.
We saw Apple go down this week. Apple had all
almost every one of its online services went intermittent for
a while, and that was a major problem. I Message
(14:42):
was down, Apple Music was down, iCloud was down, Apple
Fitness was down. All of these services that people rely
on just weren't working. Now Apple got it back up again,
it worked fine, but then it went down again the
next day. And so they had this kind of like
stumble for this week of like three D eight where
things were just kind of like up in the air
of what's going on? And could you imagine if they
(15:04):
came back from something and it didn't work properly and
you did lose a couple files. And Rosie Rose Rosaliah,
can you recommend a good hard drive? I would just
say anything from Cgate or Western Digital. Really the main
hard drive brands are going to be just fine. All right,
let's talk about Instagram. They're bringing back two features, or
(15:25):
actually one feature that is pretty interesting, and then they're
adding another feature. But there is a lot of catches
to the Instagram's changes this week. And I'm here on Instagram.
Let's see if they just censor me and cut me
off because they don't like what I'm saying. But so
Instagram is launching a new chronological feed and a new
favorites feed. So chronological feed is pretty much, if you
(15:49):
want to think of this a different way, it is
old school Instagram. And so back in the day when
you first joined Instagram, if you can remember back this long,
you followed people. When those people posted something, you would
go to your list of stuff your feed, and you
would just look through those pictures in the order that
(16:09):
they were posted. And then Instagram got a little smarter
over the years and they said, huh, we think we
can make people like pictures and interact with them more
if they actually were in an algorithmic feed. And so
then they changed everything to an algorithm where it picks
pictures that it thinks you'll interact with more, put them
higher up at the list. And this works for the
(16:30):
most part, but people got very angry and it just
really wasn't. It wasn't there was no going back. Well,
now we hear this whole thing about Instagram sending people
down these spirals of like, you know, self loathing and
all this stuff because they just see the same things
over and over. Like let's say you look at, you know,
one skinny person on Instagram. Next thing you know, it
(16:51):
just starts showing you a whole bunch of skinny people
and you have, you know, some sort of body dysmorphia
whatever the term is, where you feel like you want
to be that skinny and next thing you know, it's
just reinforcing this feeling of like you're not good enough
and you got and it just sends you down the spiral.
And so that can definitely happen. I've seen it with
with TikTok especially it's or Instagram as well. When you
(17:14):
start looking at things on Instagram, it starts showing you
more and more of the same exact thing over and over.
Let me give you a little hint, by the way,
when you're on Instagram, if you're sick of seeing some
of the stuff that you see on there, like if
you looked at something one time and it just keeps
showing you that. You can go to your Explore page
and you can press and hold on a picture and
(17:35):
it will say a little option to say not interested.
And if you're on Android, you slide your finger down
to the three little dots and it will say not interested.
So iPhone it's a little bit more straightforward. You press
and hold and it will say not interested, and you
tap that and it will really affect your feet. I mean,
it really will affect what you see on there. So
definitely tweak these things. Same thing with TikTok if you
(17:57):
are seeing stuff that you don't like. If you looked
at one one Trader Joe's Healthy recipe like I did,
and now every third video is a Trader Joe's Healthy Recipe,
same thing. I believe. You can press a hold in
that video till it gives you a not interested option
and use it. Use it to kind of train these
algorithms to stop showing you stuff that you don't necessarily
care about anyway. So now Facebook has this new chronological
(18:20):
feed which is kind of old school Facebook or sorry,
old school Instagram, and to access it, you just tap
Instagram in the upper you know the logo when you
log into Instagram. If you tap the logo, you'll get
two new options. It says following and favorites Following. Think
of that as old school Instagram. It shows you your friends,
(18:42):
the people that they've you you have followed. It shows
them their posts in the order they posted them. So
it just reverse chronological, I guess. Just scroll scroll scrolls,
and then your favorites. You can pick up to fifty
people that you want to be your favorites and it
will show you only those pictures and that's it, only
the picture that they posted. So two new options really
(19:02):
does help you sort through your Instagram feed a little
bit more. Now, on the flip side of all of this,
the downside is that number one, you cannot set either
of these options as it a false. You can't say,
every time I open Instagram, I just want to see
my favorites, or every time I open Instagram, I just
want to see posts from the people I'm following in
the order they posted them. Can't do it. So again,
(19:25):
Instagram is doing a little flex here where they're giving
you an option, but they're not really making it an
easy option. So you have to choose one of those
feeds every single time you open up the app on
the flip side. Your main feed inside Instagram now is
going to get a lot more cluttered with people and
posts from people that you do not follow, And so
(19:45):
you will notice when you're scrolling through Instagram. You've probably
already noticed this that a lot of the posts are saying,
you know, suggested because you follow this person, or suggested
because you like this, And it's just the reality of
Instagram trying to expand because people might be exposed to
a post that then they'll follow that person. This is
good for creators, but it's definitely, you know, for the
(20:07):
average person. It's probably good in a way, but only
to a certain extent because you do see a lot
of stuff that you're like, wait, what's the deal, what's
the deal with seeing all this stuff that's not mine? Okay,
So that's Instagram two new features. Definitely check it out.
If you want to try the new feeds, just go
up to Instagram on the homepage, tap the logo and
(20:28):
or the name I guess and it will show you
the following and the favorites feed and have fun with it.
All right, Let's get to the next question. Oh wow,
this is a perfect perfect segue. Justin says, Hey, do
you know if users will be able to see if
(20:48):
you've added them to your favorites on Instagram? Appreciate all
the great tips, Justin. Wow, I didn't prepare the questions
in advance this time. Usually I do, but right now
I'm just scrolling through all the emails that i get
from people. But that's a great question. So on Instagram,
if you add someone to your favorites on your stories,
they don't get notified, but they can tell that they're
(21:10):
a favorite because that story has like a little green
star on it, and so they can know like, oh,
I'm on the inside here, like this story is only
shared with me on your favorites for the regular feed.
As far as I know, people are not notified that
they are in that feed. So let me go to
my favorites, and when I go to add someone, posts
from your favorites are shown higher in your feed. We
(21:32):
don't send notifications when you edit your favorites, so it
gives me a couple of people to confirm my favorites
that I can add, but it doesn't tell them that
I've added them to my favorites, nor does it tell
them when I've taken them away from my favorites. That'd
be Can you imagine all the problems that would cause
with people, Like there's so much drama with Instagram in general,
like you know you, I mean, it's it's just so like,
(21:54):
it's so interesting how Instagram has become such a big
force in our lives with everything. I mean, it's really
to me, it's fascinating that people know you from Instagram
and so yeah, it's just anyway, all right, me too,
says is there any way to erase photos off of
my phone? But not out of Apple iCloud? Oh, that's
a great question from Instagram here in the Instagram chat.
(22:19):
So here's the deal. There is no way to do that.
But what you can do because people don't realize that
that Google sorry, iCloud photos and the photos on your
iPhone are are very much linked up. And so if
you want to do that, okay, there's a there's a
setting your your computer, your phone will actually do this
(22:40):
for you, so you don't have to do it, all right,
So what you want to do, I'm trying to get
the actual instructions right now. So what you want to
do is go into your iCloud settings and you can
go into iCloud and there's a setting called optimize photos,
and once you go into that, it will let it
will your phone will manage the space on your phone,
(23:02):
so you actually don't need to go through and delete
pictures unless you want to permanently delete them. But here's
how you do it. Okay, So if you want to
just have your phone manage its own storage, go to settings,
tap your name, then go to iCloud and then photos
turn on iCloud Photos, which will probably already be on,
(23:23):
and then there's an option underneath this says optimize iPhone storage.
So once you do that, your phone will decide if
it needs to optimize the storage. You don't have to
do it now. If you want to delete your pictures,
yeah you can still do that. Just delete the picture,
but it will go out of your phone and it
will be removed from iCloud, so you will no longer
have a copy of that picture at all. It does
(23:45):
go to your recently deleted but that's a whole nother story.
But as long as you have enough space in iCloud,
you can still just store as many photos as you want,
It will not necessarily take up all the storage on
your phone. iCloud will manage this. So here's how this works.
When you look at when you scroll through your photo
camera roll on your iPhone, what you're seeing sometimes are
(24:06):
tiny thumbnails of those pictures that are stored in the cloud,
and so it's just downloading a tiny little version of
that to your phone. Then when you tap it or
you want to share it, it will go, oh, we
need this photo from the cloud, and it will quickly
retrieve that photo from the cloud for you. So it's
very seamless. It happens kind of in the background, but
on the flip side, your phone will say, Okay, Rich
(24:27):
is running low on storage. Let's delete some of these pictures,
these full resolution pictures off his phone, but we'll keep
them in iCloud. Now, if you use Google Photos, it's
very very similar. It's just a little bit easier to
understand because it's an actual app that you install on
your phone, and all the photos in there are a
version in the cloud that they just when you want
(24:48):
to share one or look at them or do anything
with them, they will download those pictures in real time.
All right, let's talk about Zoom Zoom has some new avatars,
these animal avatar, so you can show up to your
next meeting as a rabbit, a fox, a dog, or
a whole bunch of different animals. They kind of look
like memojis if you're familiar with those on the iPhone.
(25:10):
This is in the Zoom five point one zero update.
I was playing with this. It's cool. I think it's great.
It's for those times when you don't necessarily want to
show up at your meeting in full as we would
say on TV hair and makeup. You just want to
kind of roll out of bed and attend the meeting.
But you might say, rich, why not just leave my
(25:30):
camera off? Well, you've been on Zoom with people without
their cameras on, and it's kind of unnerving, right because
you're just like, are you there? Are you listening? Are
you doing something else? Like what's going on here? Like?
Why am I on camera? And you're not. So I
think that this animal situation these avatars is like a
good middle ground because the animals will mimic your movements,
(25:52):
so you can move left, right, you can blink your eyes.
I tested all this stuff, and you can smile, you
can frown, and the animal will show on the avatar
kind of what you're doing, and so your expressions are there.
And that's a huge part of kind of this online
video chat world is that you know you want to
show your expressions because when you talk face to face,
(26:14):
people understand you based on your expressions. Like if I'm like, hey,
what's going on, you know immediately I'm happy. If I'm like, oh, hey,
what's what's happening, you know that something's wrong, and you
would you would push and say what's what's wrong? Or Hey,
what's what's good? So if you want to try these
just you can try them next to the video start
stop button. So once you're in a zoom call, press
(26:35):
that little up arrow next to the video kind of
like where you choose your camera, and it will give
you an option to choose video filter and you check
the check that it will bring up this little menu
and you can use those those animals in your meeting.
Question from the comments, Jojo says, will the animals work
on teams? No, not that they This is just a
(26:58):
zoom feature right now. There is a third party program
you can get that works inside other things, but honestly,
it's I don't typically recommend these programs because a lot
of people don't know how to turn them off. And
even with this zoom animal and avatar, I would test
this out before you actually try to use it in
a meeting, just to make sure you're comfortable with it,
just to make sure you know how to turn it
(27:19):
off too. The other thing it does not do. It
does not show your hands, So if you're trying to
like raise your hand or like wave or clap or
anything like that, it does not show your hands. It
only shows your face moving back and forth and your expressions.
But it's still I think it's pretty cool and it's
really cute. It's just kind of fun, and it does
(27:39):
bring your meeting to life. I don't know if I
had a meeting yesterday, like a tech briefing with a company,
and I wanted to use this, but I didn't know
if it was appropriate. So you have to figure out
when it's appropriate to actually use the animal avatar for
your face. All right, let's go to the next question.
Uh okay, John says, Hey, Rich, I love your work
(28:01):
and your spot's on KTLA. My question for you, my
old laptop kind of died. My lovely Wifey was going
to trade it in for a credit on something else Apple,
but she waited so long it won't even start up,
so they can't figure out what it might be worth.
They gave us two options, turn it in to be
recycled free of charge, or pay fifty bucks to see
what it could be worth. But if it's not worth anything,
(28:22):
we don't get the fifty dollars towards a purchase. So
that's a gamble. Do you know someplace I could take it,
plug it in and recycle it or give it or
they'll give you fifty bucks for it. Or can I
reboot it and take it to Apple and trade it in.
If it's worth one hundred dollars, I'll charge you forty
and it'll be ready tomorrow. Something other than paying for nothing. Okay,
(28:43):
So basically words of advice, thanks John. Okay. Basically John
is saying he's got a laptop at home to troubleshoot
the laptop, just to get it working to see if
it's worth anything. It's going to cost him fifty dollars,
but that's a gamble because he could be out that
fifty bucks if they say no, this isn't worth anything. Now.
He did not say what year this laptop was. But
(29:05):
if the laptop is not turning on, a couple things.
Number one, if it's been sitting for a really long time,
sometimes these gadgets take a while to turn on again.
You also might not be using the right chord to
turn it on, like if you're using a slower cable
one that didn't come with it, like if it's USBC,
that could take a really long time to charge. It
could also be that the battery shot, so you might
(29:28):
want to just try leaving it plugged in for a
while to see if you can get it to turn on.
If you can't, there are places that you can do it.
I did a story on gizmo Go and if you
go to a gizmo gizmogo dot com, you can pop
in your laptop and they will give you money even
if it's not working. So let's just put in a Apple.
(29:49):
Let's just put a MacBook Air in there. Okay, MacBook Air.
Let's see. Let's do a really old one. Okay, so
even a twenty thirteen MacBook Air, two gigs of memory.
Let's do the lowest processor. Let's do damage does a
power on? Let's say no and see what happens. Does
the screen light up? Know? Is the Apple ID signed out? Oh?
(30:11):
Two bucks? Okay, So that's just basically a pure recycling move.
You know. Here's the thing. I don't know if I
would not pay the fifty dollars to gamble, because you're
probably gonna be out at fifty dollars, I might just
give this to Apple to to recycle free of charge,
but I would go I would do some research on eBay.
(30:33):
You can also you can also pop the number into eBay,
the laptop like model number into eBay and see because
a lot of people will buy this for parts they
may need. The screen could be worth three hundred bucks alone.
So I would definitely check eBay and see if you
can get money for it through there. Just selling it.
You could say sell as is four parts not turning on.
(30:54):
You know, you can buy it and someone there's a
lot of these people that are very smart. They know
how to turn these things on and kind of troubleshoot them,
and they may do that. You can also donate it
to someone that we'll kind of get it started up
again and redo it all. The only thing I would
make sure is that I'm a little concerned because this
thing died while you still had it. I'm wondering if
it's fully If it's fully like, what's the term erased, like,
(31:19):
you might still have your private information on there. I
see a lot of people chiming in with is best
by geek squad helpful here? I don't know. I have
not interfaced with them in a while. I'm not sure
that they troubleshoot anything for free at geek Squad. I
know that you break I Fix will troubleshoot it for
free and tell you what's wrong. At least you can
also bring it to one of those stores. So a
(31:40):
lot of options. But the main thing is that you know,
I wouldn't pay the fifty dollar. I wouldn't pay anything
to have someone troubleshoot this because it's just it's too
much of a gamble. It depends on the year. But
you have to kind of see what it might be
worth if it's good. So go on, gizmo, go see
what they would give you if this thing was totally working.
If it's one hundred and fifty bucks and it costs
you fifty to get it up and running again, sure
(32:01):
you just made a hundred bucks for not doing much.
But if it's two dollars and you're paying fifty dollars,
that is not a very good deal. All right, Next
story of the day, Roku finally will let you set
your own photos as a screen saver. Now, I don't
use a Roku as my primary device, but I did
look for this feature in my testing of Roku in
(32:23):
the past, and it did not seem like it was
very straightforward or easy to add your own photos as
a screen saver on Roku. I'm sure there were ways
to do it. I'm sure there were maybe channels that
would let you do that. But the Roku eleven software
will now let you simply and easily add your own pictures,
which is I mean, that's a million dollar feature right there.
(32:45):
That's just so nice. I mean, I love the fact
that my well, it's kind of funny. I have it
on my Apple TV, but I have not actually set
any of my own pictures because it's so much work.
But on the Chrome cast it's really easy because it
just pulls form my Google Photos. So Roku eleven, I
guess you would have to you know, you'd have to
have it, you have to send pictures to this thing,
(33:07):
but super easy. You can Finally, just send your favorite
pictures and they will show up as as your screen saver,
which is really nice. You can also share pictures so
you can start what's called a photo stream. Now, where
have I heard that term before? Oh yeah, Apple iPhone iCloud.
You can start a photo stream and you can share
that with your friends or family. So it's nice that
(33:27):
you can have friends across the mile that have a
Roku and they can see an ongoing stream of the
pictures that you share with them. On the I always
call it the best screen in the house, your TV,
the biggest screen. The pictures just look so nice. And
it's funny because you think a picture looks good on
your smartphone and then you see it on your TV
screen and it doesn't always look so good on there,
(33:48):
because it's it's you know, it's a lot bigger, it's
like blown up. So sometimes you just realize that you
might need to get those pictures more in focus sometimes,
or your smartphone camera is not as good as you
thought it was, or sometimes you're just blown away. You're like, wow,
how do I take a picture like this on my smartphone?
It's so nice? All right? Some of the other features
in Roku OS eleven is a new what to watch
(34:11):
on Roku menu, So this is going to be a
new hub on the home screen that has a whole
bunch of stuff to watch, kind of like what it's
kind of like what fire TV does on its home screen,
So it kind of pulls from your apps primarily, but
it also will just suggest popular stuff, things that people
are watching, things that you can watch for free, anything
that's kind of trending. So it's it's just all in
(34:32):
an attempt to get you to watch more TV, more
streaming stuff, and of course I'm sure it'll have a
healthy dose of Roku stuff as well. They also have
and this is very handy, new automatic speech clarity settings
so you can hear people better. Have you ever noticed
on TV shows and movies that like sometimes you can't
hear the dialogue as well? And so these companies are
(34:53):
very well aware of it. And I on my Sonos
I have a setting that that enhances the speech and
looks like that's coming to the Roku as well. So
Roku OS eleven be on the lookout. It's going to
go to all supported devices. I don't know which those
those devices you can look up online and see if
you do like Roku os eleven supported devices. It's a
wide swath, but it's not going to be every device.
(35:15):
Some we're going to fall out of a favor here,
but rolling out to these devices in the next few weeks,
so be on the lookout for that. All right, I'm
gonna take a little simple water here and we are
going to let's see. Dana says, good morning, Rich. Quick question.
(35:35):
There's that good morning. Oh the email address, by the way,
hello at richontech dot TV if you want to send
me a question right now and get it in on
the show. Quick question. I was just wondering if there's
a nearby gas price search app that you would recommend.
So good question. I know gas prices are are wildly
high right now, especially here in California, so gas Buddy
(35:56):
is really the gold standard when it comes to these prices.
Gas Buddy is crowdsourced, so the pricing information is as
good as the people that are going to the gas
stations and typing in those prices. The other thing that
you can do is there's one called gas Guru. That's
another app that's that's similar to gas Buddy. And then
(36:16):
there's an app that I'm actually featuring Monday on KTLA.
That is pretty cool. It's called I Exit I ex
so I the letter I exit like iPhone I exit.
And this is a really good one because it shows
you on the interstate you're on. It shows you which
exit ahead has the cheapest gas prices, and so that's
really handy because you know you can say, like, oh,
(36:40):
I can stop at this one this exit, or I
can stop in five miles and save like sixty cents
on a gallon of gas. Sometimes these freeway exits only
have like one or two places to choose from, and
the gas prices could be really high. And by the way,
gas prices are always typically higher next to the interstates.
I mean, it's just the way it is because they've
got all those you know, all those people that are
(37:01):
driving by, and it's just what do you I mean,
you don't want to go five miles off the highway
to get gas. You want to go right off the
freeway exit. And in fact, the exit the places that
have the big sign that you can see from the
freeway do even better because oh, I know, okay, there's
a chevron, I can go right there. So those are
the three apps I would recommend. The other place that
you can go is if you're worried about your privacy,
(37:23):
because there has been some talk about how gas Buddy
does collect a lot of private information like your location
and all kinds of data. So if you number one
in gas Buddy, I would turn a lot of those
features off. So if you have gas Buddy, go into
your settings and there's a setting that says don't collect
so much personal information, definitely toggle that switch. But I
(37:45):
would also recommend I guess according to Wirecutter, this is
so random, but Geico has gas prices on their website.
So if you'd want something really simple, just google Geico
gas prices and you can put in your zip code
and it will tell you the cheapest gas prices. And
I guess the Geico app does that as well. Now
does it tell me? Oh, they're getting their gas prices
(38:06):
from this thing called opis opis, and that's the same
place that I exit gets their gas prices from. And
the way they get their gas prices is direct from
the pumps, So the pumps report the prices to this
opis opis and that's how they get the price. So
it's not crowdsourced it's actually sourced from the pumps and
(38:28):
the gas stations themselves. And I guess also when people
swipe the credit cards at the gas station. I don't
know how that works, but apparently so there's two ways
of getting gas prices. It's crowdsourced, which is me going
to a gas station, and I guess there's just good
Samaritans in the world that say, oh, this is six
forty seven. They type it into the app and a
bunch of people do that and they verify it. And
then there's this direct data, which is from these companies
(38:52):
like Opis that go through and they just integrate into
these payment systems and they get the data that way.
So two ways to get the data. Either way, I
got to find those cheap gas prices. You know, I
haven't an EV, so I've been avoiding the gas price situation.
My wife still drives as a guess car, and believe me,
it's it's unbelievable how much these gas bills have gone up.
(39:14):
I mean, it's pretty pretty wild, especially here in California.
All right. Next story here a new prepaid mobile plan.
I don't think a lot of you are going to
get this plan, but it's interesting to know about. T
Mobile now has a ten dollars wireless plan. It's called
Connect by T Mobile, No credit check required. It's available
starting March twenty fifth, which happens to be the damn
(39:37):
recording this. I went online. Yes you can do it,
and it's ten dollars a month plus tax. It's the
lowest price smartphone plan ever from T Mobile. And what
do you get for that ten dollars? You get one
thousand minutes of talk, a thousand minutes of text, and
one gigabyte of high speed data. So who is this for?
This is for maybe Grandma, Grandpa, someone that that does
(40:00):
not need a lot of data. And yeah, I mean
you can be a grandma on Grandpa and be traveling
the world and need a lot of data. I'm just
using this as an example of the best example I
can think of is maybe and maybe I talked about this.
I felt like it did. I think it's really confusing
what I talk about during the week, because I'm on TV,
I'm on the radio several times, and then I also
(40:21):
talk to like people in life, and I also email
people back and instant message them and tweet them. So
I've answered these questions over and over a lot of
the times, because I get a lot of the same questions.
So I'm like, wait, did I mention that on the podcast? Yeah,
I don't think I did. But I give the example of, like,
maybe you have a loved one that oh and here's
(40:41):
Alejandro said, yeah, you said this on Handle and so
you're gonna hear me again if you heard me on
Bill Handle talking about this stuff. But I give the
example of sort of a loved one that lives in
a senior center, and so maybe they live in a
senior housing. They don't need a lot of data on
their phone because they're in Wi Fi all day. They're
inside the senior living center, so they've got this nice
Wi Fi signal. But you still want them to have
(41:03):
a phone. This is a really cheap way for them
to have a phone be able to check in on them.
A thousand minutes of talk, thousand minutes of text, one
gig of high speed data. So if they leave the
house to go on a walk or something around the block,
they can still use a bit of data for whatever
you know, comes through I messages or whatever, and it
just still works. But ten bucks a month very very cheap,
(41:23):
and I might just keep this around, just have like
an extra phone number or something. Maybe I can use
it for It's just I mean, that's a pretty good price.
So Connect by T Mobile and they also have other
plans that have a little bit more data as well
and a little bit more unlimited talk. So fifteen bucks
a month gets you what is fifteen bucks a month
(41:43):
gets you unlimited talk and text plus three gigs of
high speed data. So there you have it. Speaking of free,
YouTube is joining the ranks of all these like two
B and Roku and Plex and Visio and Sam's Song
that are all doing kind of the free ad supported
(42:04):
television stuff. It's so funny because we're going back to
the I don't know, not back to the future. We're
going back to the past. So TV has always been free, right,
Channels two through thirteen have always been free. How are
they supported? They're supported by ads. It's not a new
concept to be able to watch a TV show for free,
even popular shows like Modern Family or Gossip Girl or
(42:29):
you could tell them very dated with my TV references.
Can't even know what's on TV but YouTube or alf Oh,
I don't even know what's a new TV show. I
can't even tell you. I do know one there is
a new TV show that I do know. It's called
Abbot's Elementary. Isn't that a new show that people love?
(42:53):
People love that show? I should watch it. So it's
not a new concept to get TV for free, But
when it comes to streaming, it is because we started
out with streaming being ad not ads on streaming. You know,
you paid Netflix to have no ads, and you would
pay a premium to have that experience. Well, now as
(43:15):
we get is streaming has matured a lot more people
are now saying hey, and people prefer this. They really
like free stuff and so they like the idea of
streaming for free. Now YouTube has always been streaming for
free with ads, but now they're going to be doing
full TV shows with ads. So right now they've got
four thousand episodes of free TV. They've got ads on
(43:37):
these shows, of course, but there's all kinds of shows.
The let's see what the example is YouTube TV. Let's see,
let's see four thousand, four thousand shows. I'm trying to
get a list of like all the shows that they
have on there. The examples here are Hell's Kitchen and
(43:58):
and Drama I've never even heard of that. So let's
see if I can find a better example of some
of the shows. Let's see what YouTube says on their blog.
Let's see four thousand TV shows, Heartland, also movies, fifteen
hundred movies, Runaway Bride, Legally Blonde. So I can just
stream legally Blonde. Yeah, I just pressed it and boom,
(44:21):
it's on. It's on my computer right now, streaming. That's
pretty neat. Now they've had YouTube movies and TV shows
for a long time streaming, so I think that the well,
you can follow the channel. It's called YouTube Movies and Shows.
I've got one hundred and forty nine million subscribers, and
so you can just oh wow, there's a lot. Oh,
(44:41):
the sand law is free. Ten things I Hate about you,
Little Shop of Horrors. Oh, here's some of the shows. Okay,
Hell's Kitchen, Heartlands, Scream Queens, Let's see the Unsolved Mysteries, Wolfred. Okay,
I haven't heard of any of these shows. I mean,
there's a bunch of stuff, and whether you need to
(45:03):
watch it as a whole nother question, I can't. I
can't comment on whether these are worthwhile of your time,
but you may find something you like. So now you
can watch stuff for free, and it'll work on a
lot of the you know, YouTube is everywhere, so you
can watch on your phone. And the company says they're
gonna add up to one hundred shows and movies each week.
So anyway, just a new way of watching stuff. The
channel is called YouTube Movies and Shows and I'm sure
(45:27):
that that's like probably tough to just search for. Let's see,
if I just search Google YouTube Movies and Shows channel,
does that bring up the actual channel? No, it really
does not, but you'll you'll just have to find it.
Good luck finding it, all right, let's get to the
next question. Oh yeah, Pluto TV. So Pluto TV. Fish
(45:51):
Taco Bob says Pluto TV is owned by Viacom CBS,
which is why it's constantly advertising CBS shows and services.
Fun little fact about Pluto TV. I was having lunch
with the guy who started Pluto TV back before it
was a big thing, and he said, yeah, I'm starting
this new thing called Pluto TV, and I'm like, ah,
that's interesting. He's like, yeah, it's like basically cable TV,
(46:13):
but for free. I was like, who's gonna watch that?
Who's gonna watch free? You know TV? Streaming, like, give
me a break, and he's like, well, it's ad supported.
We've got channels on like everything, like tech and like
extreme outdoors and comedy channels, and I'm like, give me
a break. Nobody's gonna watch that. Well, fast forward about
(46:34):
I don't know how many years it was, but you know,
five years later, CBS or Viacom bought Pluto TV for
like three hundred million dollars. So I guess I was
the U. I guess I was the one who was
wrong in that conversation. And I'm sure he's having much
nicer lunches than I am at this point because he
sold his business for three hundred million dollars and I
poo pooed it. So it's okay. But I'm doing a
(46:55):
podcast on Instagram, so everything's going okay for me, all right.
Paula says, Hey, Rich, I'm a huge fan because you
help us understand this information so easily. I was wanting
to know if you can record your conversation while speaking
at the same time on your cell phone. I have
an Android A fifty If so, how so I would
really appreciate it the answer, because I'm a caretaker for
(47:16):
my mom and it's super important for me. Have a
blessed ay, Paula, Paula. The app that I would recommend
for this is called Tape a Call. I know, Tape
a Call. Tapeacall dot com is the website. It lets
you record phone calls on iPhone and Android, and so
that's about it. The way that this works is basically
(47:38):
it initiates a three way call, and it may do
that automatically or it may be a manual process. I'm
not sure. I have not used this app personally, but
I interviewed the company behind the app a long time
ago and they basically said, yeah, we're like the number
one app for doing this. So Tape a Call is
the app. And Ryan says, what's the tape? Yeah? I know.
It's an old funny how you apps have old school names, right,
(48:02):
like notepad, Like now you're a digital note taking app.
Like you're not a notepad, you're you know, tape a call.
You're not taping it. You're digitally recording a call. Now.
The only thing I need to tell you about this
is that you need to This works for incoming calls
and outcoming calls. There's no recording limits. It does cost money.
(48:22):
It's not free, and so let's see how much it
costs if I look inside the app Store. By the way,
if you ever want to get an idea for what
a quote unquote free app is going to hit you
up for to charge you for things, just go into
their app listing and then you can go into there's
a little tiny section all the way at the bottom
(48:42):
that says in app purchases, and it will tell you
what those in app purchases are and how much they cost.
And so you can always just kind of get an
idea of like what the in app purchases are for
that app, because most of these apps they just want
to they just want to get you downloading them, so
they're free. But then there's a whole bunch of in
app purchases, but sometimes it don't always exactly tell you
(49:03):
what those in app purchases cost. So you can just
scroll onto the app Store and scroll down to the
section where it says in app purchases, and it will
give you an idea of what those little InApp purchases cost.
So on this tape a call, it's available for Android
and iOS, so you can get it for both platforms. Now,
I don't know you said it's for your mom's phone,
(49:24):
So it sounds like you want something that's very automatic.
I don't know if it's automatic for starting triggering these conversations.
So it may do that. I don't know, but you're
gonna have to look and see. Now. The other thing
is that you need to look at the laws in
your area. So every state has different laws for how
you can record phone calls and whether you need what's
(49:46):
called two party consent or one party consent. And I'm
not a lawyer, I can't advise you on that, but
you definitely need to look into those laws because in
certain states, if you do not ask the person expressly,
hey can I record this call, and then it'll give
you the permission then and you can't record it. And
if you've ever called an eight hundred number where it says,
you know, we're recording this call for purposes of product
(50:06):
development or whatever, that's why they do that is because
they're informing you that they're recording the call. So just
be aware of that before you before you launch into this.
Does anyone use Twitter? I don't think so. Does anyone
really use Twitter? Anyway? Twitter search got a big upgrade
this week. You can actually search for contents inside your conversations.
I've actually thought about this a lot, and I feel
(50:26):
like Instagram Messenger is the best messaging program out there
because every single person I know is on Instagram. Try
if you if you need to get a hold of
someone one time, just try messaging them on Instagram and
I'm telling you they will reply. I try this all
the time. I'm like, let me, let me Instagram messenger
this person, and sure enough, they always message back. Twitter
(50:47):
not so much. A lot of people have their dms
locked down or it's too like open, so they don't
really want to do a lot with dms. I use
it occasionally, like if someone needs to get in touch
with me, sometimes they'll DM me, and you know, I'll
see it once in a while. I don't see as often,
but you know, obviously, Twitter is still the smallest out
of all the social media platforms. It's very kind of
targeted to towards like news hounds, entertainment. Instagram is kind
(51:12):
of like the everyone really uses Instagram, so it's just
kind of like it's the what do they call it,
the I don't know, it's like the equalizer, Like everyone's
on there, so it's just really easy to contact people
that way. But Twitter not so much. You know, there's
not a lot of people, even if they have an account.
A lot of times people are not actively using their
Twitter account or they just kind of creep on Twitter.
They scroll through, they set up an account once, they
(51:35):
never look at it again. But by the way, I'm
on all these platforms at rich On Tech, I do.
I do post different things to different platforms, and so
I am active on all three, whether it's Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram. I would say that Instagram I'm probably the
most active on, and then Twitter and Facebook is just
kind of like more limited. But I do love facebooks.
(51:56):
I have the most followers there. So it's fun to
get some good conversations going. Because if I ever have
like this random thought, I'm like, I wonder if someone
else thinks that I just posted to Facebook. And believe me,
the answers come in. They come in fast and furious.
All right, So Twitter, you can now search your direct
messages for keywords in those messages. Let me just go
(52:16):
to an Apple feature. Apple's driver's license feature just launched
in Arizona. I had a good friend and listener of
the show, Jim Jim Lawson. He emailed me all the
screenshots of signing up for that. And so you basically
take your license, your driver's license or your state ID
and you can add it to your Apple wallet. And
(52:38):
because Arizona is one of the first places that this works,
you can also use your ID at the TSA security
checkpoint at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. So, coming down the line,
other states that are going to support these digital licenses Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Ohio, Georgia, Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma,
and Utah. What does this mean? Wow, the driver's license
(53:01):
is probably going to go away and move to a
digital format. I'm very excited about that personally because I
only carry a wallet begrudgingly, because uh, the driver's license
is one of the last things I actually need to carry. Yes,
I carry a little cash. Yes I carry a credit
card or a debit card. But I could do without
(53:22):
those things if I need it to. I would probably
just carry a twenty in my pocket for like true emergencies.
But yeah, I mean, I think that's so cool that
we are going to move to a digital license. I know,
it's scary, everything is all of you know, it's all
moving online, it's all moving to your phone. If you
lose your phone, it's kind of a problem. But the
(53:43):
reality is, when I my credit card was hacked a
couple weeks ago, the you know, the bank had just
had to overnight me a new card. And same thing
with my debit card that was hacked a couple months ago,
and they had to send me a new card. It
was a whole pain. But with these cards, if you notice,
when they send you a new one, it's updated in
your Apple wallet immediately, and in your Google wallet and
your Samsung wallet, the digital number is updated, so there's
(54:06):
no there's no time when you are out a card.
If it's a physical card, you have to wait even
you know, look the best banks, they're going to overnight
you your card. But the reality is you're still going to
be out a card for twenty four hours, whereas with
digital you're never out. So let's say you lose your
driver's license, you could see a world of you know,
if it's digital, they just basically send you a new
(54:27):
digital copy right on your phone. And so it's pretty
pretty wild that this is happening. Android. I know iPhone
is getting all the attention with this feature, but it
will come to Android as well. It's just that Apple
has kind of like they do. They've they've made the
system for it really fast and really easy and ahead
of the curve. The one thing you need to know
that's kind of interesting is that you don't need to
(54:49):
actually unlock your device or show your device at all
or hand it over to a TSA officer. All you
have to do is, you know, basically activate it in
your Apple wallet and then tap something and it will
transmit just the information you need to see. So a
lot of times I get like this when someone has
to look at my driver's license to verify something. It's
(55:12):
like kind of a privacy invasion because I know I'm
a little bit different than a lot of people with
the privacy stuff, but I like to be very private.
And so the fact that you know, if you're checking
my ID to make sure I'm of a certain age,
that you get to see all my other information as well,
Like why should you like you should just you know,
I should be able to tap my ID and it says, oh, yeah,
this guy's twenty one, or this guy's twenty five, or
(55:33):
this guy you know is I don't know lives in
California or this is address whatever. It's just a little
bit more private and a little bit a little bit
simpler that way. All right, let's see, can I get
to one last question before the end of the show. Here,
Wendy says, I have a question. How can I find
all the things I've asked Siria on my iPhone? Is
there a place there stored? Been wondering this for years
and I thought maybe you could help me out. Thanks
(55:54):
for advance, Wendy. Thanks in advance, Wendy. Great question, Wendy,
And the answer is no, you cannot hear what you've
said to Siri as far as I know. As far
as I know, you can delete the recordings that your
phone has made, but you cannot listen to those recordings. Now,
Apple's a little bit different than Amazon and Google in
(56:17):
this regard. Amazon and Google both let you listen to
your actual recordings of your voice. So if you said
to something like, hey, Gee, what's the weather in Tokyo today,
you can actually go on to Google on your phone
or on your computer and listen to how you asked
that or what it heard. And you can do that
(56:38):
by just typing in Google assistant Voice history and it
should bring you up. It'll give you an option to
check all of the recordings in your history, and you
can also delete those recordings and turn off that activity
as well. So if you want to find those audio recordings,
just basically go to Google. You just have to Google
(57:03):
this stuff. It's manage your Google account data and privacy,
web and app activity, and then manage activity and then
you'll see a recording for all of your recordings. So
I give Google props for actually going that extra mile. Amazon,
same thing. Just type in Amazon Alexa Voice recording history
(57:26):
and you should be able to find it in your
YEP listen to view and delete your voice recordings and
you can just do that right from that page. On Apple,
you can just delete those recordings. You can't actually listen
to them or kind of manipulate them or see kind
of like what you said in those things. So great question, Wendy,
(57:46):
And maybe Apple will do that at some point, but
I think they do a lot of the processing now
on your phone, so I'm not even sure that they
send a transcript or anything to Apple or if it's
saved or anything like that after the question is processed.
I think they just go ahead and delete it. I
don't know, I have to read up on how they
do it these days, but I know there's that big
(58:07):
kind of realization that these services are actually keeping recordings
of our voices. And that was an eye opening thing
for a lot of people. Wow, does this time just
fly by for you? It does for me. That's going
to do it for this episode of the show. If
you would like to submit a question for me to answer,
just go to my Facebook page, Facebook dot com slash
(58:28):
rich on Tech, hit the big blue send email button,
or go to rich on tech dot tv and hit
the email icon. Also, I would love it if you
would rate and review this podcast. Just go to the
listening app of your choice. Write a quick line about
what you like about this show to help others understand
why they should listen. You can find me on social
media at rich on Tech and no matter where you
live in the US, you can download the free ktla
(58:49):
plus app on Apple, TV, fireTV, and Roku. Want to
do scroll to the tech section and you can watch
all of my TV segments on demand. My name is
rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening. There are so
many ways you could spend an hour of your time, Netflix, YouTube, gardening,
playing with your kids. I don't know. I do appreciate
(59:11):
you spending it with me. I will talk to you
real soon
My message might be forced to play nice with other
messaging apps. Instagram brings back an old school feature zoom
lets you show up to your meetings as a dog.
Plus your tech questions answered. What's going on. I'm Richardimiro
and this is rich on Tech, the podcast where I
talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about.
It's also the place where I answer the questions you
(00:33):
send me. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five
in Los Angeles. Thanks so much for joining me on
the podcast today. Welcome to my friends on the live
stream on Instagram. The IGTV are It's not even called
IGTV anymore. That was only for like a minute where
they called it that. But the Instagram video Instagram live video.
(00:55):
It's become a little tradition with the podcast. I kind
of like it. It brings a little energy to the show.
Makes me feel like I'm talking to an audience. I
feel like I'm doing like stand up in front of
a crowd. Now it's kidding, oh man, so fun fun times.
It's my wife's birthday this week, so I am throwing
her a little party, which is exciting. You know, my
(01:17):
wife didn't really want to party, but she's like, you
know what, She's like, you know, why, why why are
you doing this? And I said, well why not? You know,
why not? It's she doesn't like surprises. So anyway, well
now I just gave up the surprise. I forget that
sometimes I yeah that this is actually going out to people.
(01:39):
Sometimes I just feel like I'm talking to myself, you know,
when you're doing a podcast. But it does happen. But anyway,
after two years of you know, this whole COVID thing,
it's just, you know, I want any excuse to get
together with people because we can again, right, And it's
just so weird because in La, it was we had
such high restrictions around all this and then all of
(02:01):
a sudden they were all lifted like overnight, and you know,
depending on where you live, it was kind of different.
But yeah, no, and Greg, my wife does not listen
to my podcast. I don't think she might have listened
once and I was very like, what you listened to
my podcast? But anyway, so in LA, they just kind
of lifted everything all once, and it's just been so weird,
like going back into stores and you know, without a
mask and like all this stuff. So it's fun it's good.
(02:23):
I mean, obviously you still have to be careful in
certain aspects, but it's all been fun. So I am,
I don't know what this whole intro was, just just
totally who knows. All right, let me talk about the Volvo.
I think I talked about it last week, but I
did a test drive the Volvo see forty recharge and
(02:44):
I got to say, I had so many questions. We
aired it on KTLA today and so many questions. As
I'm walking out of the building, like literally, people were
just asking me left and right like about this car.
So I think that they really hit a nerve with
this car because it looks like a regular suv and
it drives like an electric car. So it's really fast,
(03:06):
it's really cool. Price tags a little high fifty nine grand,
but it does it is eligible for all of those rebates,
all the incentives and stuff, and I get it. Here's
the thing. I know, I'm talking about electric cars a
lot lately. The high gas price is like I'm not
telling you to buy an electric car, you know what
I mean, Like, I'm not saying you have to do it,
because here's the thing. If your car is working for you,
(03:27):
it's you know, it's probably cheaper to stay in your car.
That's the reality of it. It's probably just cheaper to
stay in whatever gas car you have. So buying an
electric car is not going to solve a problem of
high gas prices because you have to buy that car
and it's really expensive to buy the new car. So
but I will say, keep an eye on these electric cars.
They are definitely coming up in the world. And there's
(03:49):
more than just Tesla. I mean, Tesla's great, but there's
definitely a lot more options. And Mario obviously watched this
segment today because he said no leather seats perfect for
true vegans, which is true. Oh yeah, the new Volvo
doesn't even have a leather option. It's like it's half
of the car, not half, but a lot of the
car inside is made from recycled water bottles. So it's
pretty wild to see just the the advancement of all
(04:14):
this stuff. And this is why I love technology because literally,
even something simple as an app can transform a phone
that you've had forever, like your iPhone. You get a
different app that's cool and different and unique, and it
like totally makes your phone something new and useful. And
so this is why I love this stuff, because it
just really is changing very very rapidly, and it's fun
(04:34):
to be kind of watching it all happen and also
comparing that stuff. All right, let's talk about the first
story of the week. I just think this is really interesting.
The EU has has made some new anti competitive laws.
For see, they're clamping down on anti competitive things. Not
they didn't, I guess the laws are anti anti competitive.
(04:56):
So this is really interesting for the big tech companies
out there. And I think the main thing that I
take out of this is that, you know, Europe has
really been very forward, very progressive when it comes to
their tech rules. They have rules like when you get
a phone, like you know, it can't just default to
like one browser app. It has to say like do
(05:16):
you want to use this browser? Do you want to
use that browser? Do you want to use that browser.
They're the reason why we have all those really annoying
cookie pop ups, which, by the way, I'm for a
lot of these privacy laws and things, but when it
comes to those cookie pop ups, they are so useless,
they are so worthless, and like, give me a break.
Has anyone actually sat and said, like, oh, let me
opt out of some of these cookie things like no,
(05:38):
you just click yes and you just go to the website.
So that was kind of like a nonsense thing. But
the part of these new rules that the EU is
enacting is the fact that all the messenger apps have
to work together. And that means that I Message, which
has enjoyed a very nice run as a it's kind
(06:03):
of the big bully in the world of messaging, they
will no longer be able to just work with itself.
And now you can argue, Rich, oh, I message works
with with SMS. Now it does, but it doesn't. I mean,
it makes SMS like it begrudgingly works with regular text messages.
I mean number one, they show up green, which is
(06:23):
not very nice. And then of course you know that
you don't get any of the niceties of I message,
which are you know, the ability to share full resolution
or larger resolution videos and pictures and things like that,
and so and like Ryan said, I message is just
a bully in the US, that's true. Outside the US,
nobody cares. Nobody cares about I Message. Outside the United States,
(06:46):
it's it's either WhatsApp, it's Facebook Messenger. It is over
in like Asia, they use some we chat is big
over there line so again, but the interesting part about
this is that because Apple's going to be forced to
make this interoperable with things like Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp,
(07:09):
it kind of levels the playing field a little bit.
And I think that Apple will have to make those
same changes in the US. We'll see, maybe they'll just
keep it in Europe and they'll just kind of make
a secondary version of my message that works over there
with the other messaging apps, but that would be kind
of weird. So anyway, I thought that was a pretty
big deal. This is kind of a landmark thing. It's
gonna it's not gonna happen overnight, so the group chats
(07:31):
is going to be a period of four years that
they have to do this. I don't have in this
article from Politico when the when the uh I when
the messaging stuff happens for just regular messages. But anyway,
I thought that was a pretty big deal, and it
just has wide ranging implications. And because think about it,
in the US, we have those cookie you know, those
(07:53):
cookie whatever pop up banners on every website. That's not
a requirement in the US, it's requirement in Europe. And
but the websites just put him on the US stuff
as well, So I hope I explained that. Well, all right,
let's get to the first question from Richard Lopez. Richard says,
good morning rich Really it is still morning. I know
(08:13):
if you listen to this show a lot. There's a
joke that everyone that emails me says good morning rich
because they see me on the morning news and they go, oh,
I got to email that guy, and then they email
me and say good morning rich Is this email real
and from Facebook or is it a phishing attempt? My
initial feeling is that it's a scam. Thanks for all
your work at keeping us up to date and working
to keep us safe online, Richard. So, Richard sent a
(08:36):
screenshot that says your account requires advanced security from Facebook Protect.
Turn on Facebook Protect by April first. After that you'll
be locked out of your account until you enable it.
This actually is real, and it's funny because I got
this on my account and I was like, wait, what
is this? How am I being scammed? Like? What's the scam? Here?
(08:58):
This Facebook Protect and it said, because you have a
page that reaches a lot of people, we want to
make sure that your account is secure. And I'm like, ah,
that's kind of weird, like where's the log in stealing
situation here? And after a little research, I realized that
it is real. And my wife actually got the same
message because she's an admin on my page, and she's like,
what is this? This a scam? And then I got
(09:20):
a bunch of emails from other people and the number
one thing every person that's gotten this they either have
a large number of followers on their Facebook page or
they are an admin on a Facebook page that has
a large number of followers. I don't know what the
delineation delineation is for the large amount of followers. Could
be ten thousand, could be five thousand, could be a thousand,
(09:42):
I don't know. But if you have, if you somehow
manage a Facebook page with a bunch of followers, they
will ask you to turn on Facebook Protect. All I
had to do is click a link. There was nothing
I didn't I thought I was gonna have to do
like a secondary authentication or like submit my driver's license
or something. I did not have to do any of that.
I just had to say, all right, turn it on,
(10:03):
and they did so. I think what this does is
when you go to log into your account. It's just
a little bit tougher to log in, or like a
little bit more scrutinized than a standard login, like when
Facebook sees it you log in. Let's say you log
in from Los Angeles all the time, but then all
of a sudden they see that you log in from
Tokyo and they're like, hmm, that's weird, but they still
let it go through because you put in your right password.
(10:25):
Well maybe, and I'm just kind of imagining here with
Facebook Protect, they might scrutinize that log in just a
little bit more and say, we notice that you're joining
from like a city you don't typically join us from,
So can you verify you know, your phone number or
this code that we sent to you. So that's Facebook
Protect Richard, Yes, it is legitimate, and oh it says
(10:46):
hackers are often motivated to attack accounts that have a
lot of followers, run important pages, or hold some community significance.
So again, hackers want to get the best of people
that have like a large audience, a large following, or
are very prominent, and so you just have to be
careful and no matter who you are. And I talked about
this on the radio this week. But you know, they
(11:06):
talked about how Russia is looking to do cyber attacks
against the US. But realistically, you have to protect yourself.
Let me just go over some of the tips that
I talked about there, because it's just it's so wild. Yeah,
I mean, number one, set up two factor authentication. I've
talked about this a million bazillion times, but you know,
no one wants to do it because it's so much
work to get that little code. But you have to
(11:28):
do it. A lot of these accounts they're actually requiring
it now. All right, So two factor authentication. Back up
your files, like, make sure you have a backup. This
is the thing. I'm like a doctor. I see all
the problems, right, Like you go to the doctor. You've
got this one weird like rash or something. You're all
embarrassed to tell your doctor about it. They've seen that
(11:48):
a thousand times. They've seen not just that, but everything
you could imagine in your brain. They don't care. They
don't care. I mean maybe they laugh at their friends.
I don't know when they get home, but I don't
think they do. So, yeah, it might be embarrassing for
us to talk about something to our doctor. But they
have it all up here and they're like, yeah, I've
seen that. Okay, yeah take this, You're done. Same thing
(12:10):
with all this tech stuff. Like you hear about it,
it may not happen to you. I get emails every
single day from people that are hacked, hacked, hacked, hacked,
don't back up their stuff, have their pictures lost, have
their kids first, you know, baby picture lost. I mean,
it's it's really wild what happens. And sometimes I don't
I don't. I hate to say this, but sometimes I
(12:32):
don't feel bad because I said. You know, I've said
so many times the importance of backing things up and
at the very basic, you know, at the very least,
you need to back up your important files, and you
need to back up your pictures. If the rest of
your stuff on your computer is lost, like whatever, but
your pictures you've got to have those backed up and
(12:52):
your files. If you don't have your files backed up,
then it's you know, if something happens or your Facebook page.
People always come to me and they say, my Facebook
page is hacked. I don't know what to do. My Instagram.
They're starting to text my friends. I've told you, you
just have to you have to do two factor authentication. Now,
I did get an email from someone who had two
factor authentication. They had things backed up, but this person
(13:15):
was targeted in a whole different way. This is called
a SIM attack, where they actually steal your SIM card
information and they install your phone number on a different
phone and that enables them, the hackers, to get those
two factor authentication codes. So that's a next level kind
of thing, and it's really no fault of your own.
(13:35):
I mean, well, there is something you could do there too,
and that is you have to call your wireless carrier
and ask them to lock your account. And so what
they do is they lock your account so that nobody
can swap your SIM so they can't actually take your
phone number. It's a whole look this stuff. It's like
it's happening on a daily basis. It's happening everywhere, and
it's just wild because it's happening more and more because
(13:57):
a lot of these systems that the hackers use can
just be automated, or they can just you know, they
can target so many people at the same time. And
doctor J says, back up on a hard drive or
is a cloud enough? That's a great question. Doctor J.
The cloud is the bare minimum, but you should have
it on the cloud and an external hard drive just
(14:19):
for absolute security. I'll be honest. I don't do that
with every file, and I know I need to. So
you are putting yourself at risk if it's only in
the cloud. Yeah, is Google or Apple or all these
things going to go down? Probably not, but you never know.
We saw Apple go down this week. Apple had all
almost every one of its online services went intermittent for
a while, and that was a major problem. I Message
(14:42):
was down, Apple Music was down, iCloud was down, Apple
Fitness was down. All of these services that people rely
on just weren't working. Now Apple got it back up again,
it worked fine, but then it went down again the
next day. And so they had this kind of like
stumble for this week of like three D eight where
things were just kind of like up in the air
of what's going on? And could you imagine if they
(15:04):
came back from something and it didn't work properly and
you did lose a couple files. And Rosie Rose Rosaliah,
can you recommend a good hard drive? I would just
say anything from Cgate or Western Digital. Really the main
hard drive brands are going to be just fine. All right,
let's talk about Instagram. They're bringing back two features, or
(15:25):
actually one feature that is pretty interesting, and then they're
adding another feature. But there is a lot of catches
to the Instagram's changes this week. And I'm here on Instagram.
Let's see if they just censor me and cut me
off because they don't like what I'm saying. But so
Instagram is launching a new chronological feed and a new
favorites feed. So chronological feed is pretty much, if you
(15:49):
want to think of this a different way, it is
old school Instagram. And so back in the day when
you first joined Instagram, if you can remember back this long,
you followed people. When those people posted something, you would
go to your list of stuff your feed, and you
would just look through those pictures in the order that
(16:09):
they were posted. And then Instagram got a little smarter
over the years and they said, huh, we think we
can make people like pictures and interact with them more
if they actually were in an algorithmic feed. And so
then they changed everything to an algorithm where it picks
pictures that it thinks you'll interact with more, put them
higher up at the list. And this works for the
(16:30):
most part, but people got very angry and it just
really wasn't. It wasn't there was no going back. Well,
now we hear this whole thing about Instagram sending people
down these spirals of like, you know, self loathing and
all this stuff because they just see the same things
over and over. Like let's say you look at, you know,
one skinny person on Instagram. Next thing you know, it
(16:51):
just starts showing you a whole bunch of skinny people
and you have, you know, some sort of body dysmorphia
whatever the term is, where you feel like you want
to be that skinny and next thing you know, it's
just reinforcing this feeling of like you're not good enough
and you got and it just sends you down the spiral.
And so that can definitely happen. I've seen it with
with TikTok especially it's or Instagram as well. When you
(17:14):
start looking at things on Instagram, it starts showing you
more and more of the same exact thing over and over.
Let me give you a little hint, by the way,
when you're on Instagram, if you're sick of seeing some
of the stuff that you see on there, like if
you looked at something one time and it just keeps
showing you that. You can go to your Explore page
and you can press and hold on a picture and
(17:35):
it will say a little option to say not interested.
And if you're on Android, you slide your finger down
to the three little dots and it will say not interested.
So iPhone it's a little bit more straightforward. You press
and hold and it will say not interested, and you
tap that and it will really affect your feet. I mean,
it really will affect what you see on there. So
definitely tweak these things. Same thing with TikTok if you
(17:57):
are seeing stuff that you don't like. If you looked
at one one Trader Joe's Healthy recipe like I did,
and now every third video is a Trader Joe's Healthy Recipe,
same thing. I believe. You can press a hold in
that video till it gives you a not interested option
and use it. Use it to kind of train these
algorithms to stop showing you stuff that you don't necessarily
care about anyway. So now Facebook has this new chronological
(18:20):
feed which is kind of old school Facebook or sorry,
old school Instagram, and to access it, you just tap
Instagram in the upper you know the logo when you
log into Instagram. If you tap the logo, you'll get
two new options. It says following and favorites Following. Think
of that as old school Instagram. It shows you your friends,
(18:42):
the people that they've you you have followed. It shows
them their posts in the order they posted them. So
it just reverse chronological, I guess. Just scroll scroll scrolls,
and then your favorites. You can pick up to fifty
people that you want to be your favorites and it
will show you only those pictures and that's it, only
the picture that they posted. So two new options really
(19:02):
does help you sort through your Instagram feed a little
bit more. Now, on the flip side of all of this,
the downside is that number one, you cannot set either
of these options as it a false. You can't say,
every time I open Instagram, I just want to see
my favorites, or every time I open Instagram, I just
want to see posts from the people I'm following in
the order they posted them. Can't do it. So again,
(19:25):
Instagram is doing a little flex here where they're giving
you an option, but they're not really making it an
easy option. So you have to choose one of those
feeds every single time you open up the app on
the flip side. Your main feed inside Instagram now is
going to get a lot more cluttered with people and
posts from people that you do not follow, And so
(19:45):
you will notice when you're scrolling through Instagram. You've probably
already noticed this that a lot of the posts are saying,
you know, suggested because you follow this person, or suggested
because you like this, And it's just the reality of
Instagram trying to expand because people might be exposed to
a post that then they'll follow that person. This is
good for creators, but it's definitely, you know, for the
(20:07):
average person. It's probably good in a way, but only
to a certain extent because you do see a lot
of stuff that you're like, wait, what's the deal, what's
the deal with seeing all this stuff that's not mine? Okay,
So that's Instagram two new features. Definitely check it out.
If you want to try the new feeds, just go
up to Instagram on the homepage, tap the logo and
(20:28):
or the name I guess and it will show you
the following and the favorites feed and have fun with it.
All right, Let's get to the next question. Oh wow,
this is a perfect perfect segue. Justin says, Hey, do
you know if users will be able to see if
(20:48):
you've added them to your favorites on Instagram? Appreciate all
the great tips, Justin. Wow, I didn't prepare the questions
in advance this time. Usually I do, but right now
I'm just scrolling through all the emails that i get
from people. But that's a great question. So on Instagram,
if you add someone to your favorites on your stories,
they don't get notified, but they can tell that they're
(21:10):
a favorite because that story has like a little green
star on it, and so they can know like, oh,
I'm on the inside here, like this story is only
shared with me on your favorites for the regular feed.
As far as I know, people are not notified that
they are in that feed. So let me go to
my favorites, and when I go to add someone, posts
from your favorites are shown higher in your feed. We
(21:32):
don't send notifications when you edit your favorites, so it
gives me a couple of people to confirm my favorites
that I can add, but it doesn't tell them that
I've added them to my favorites, nor does it tell
them when I've taken them away from my favorites. That'd
be Can you imagine all the problems that would cause
with people, Like there's so much drama with Instagram in general,
like you know you, I mean, it's it's just so like,
(21:54):
it's so interesting how Instagram has become such a big
force in our lives with everything. I mean, it's really
to me, it's fascinating that people know you from Instagram
and so yeah, it's just anyway, all right, me too,
says is there any way to erase photos off of
my phone? But not out of Apple iCloud? Oh, that's
a great question from Instagram here in the Instagram chat.
(22:19):
So here's the deal. There is no way to do that.
But what you can do because people don't realize that
that Google sorry, iCloud photos and the photos on your
iPhone are are very much linked up. And so if
you want to do that, okay, there's a there's a
setting your your computer, your phone will actually do this
(22:40):
for you, so you don't have to do it, all right,
So what you want to do, I'm trying to get
the actual instructions right now. So what you want to
do is go into your iCloud settings and you can
go into iCloud and there's a setting called optimize photos,
and once you go into that, it will let it
will your phone will manage the space on your phone,
(23:02):
so you actually don't need to go through and delete
pictures unless you want to permanently delete them. But here's
how you do it. Okay, So if you want to
just have your phone manage its own storage, go to settings,
tap your name, then go to iCloud and then photos
turn on iCloud Photos, which will probably already be on,
(23:23):
and then there's an option underneath this says optimize iPhone storage.
So once you do that, your phone will decide if
it needs to optimize the storage. You don't have to
do it now. If you want to delete your pictures,
yeah you can still do that. Just delete the picture,
but it will go out of your phone and it
will be removed from iCloud, so you will no longer
have a copy of that picture at all. It does
(23:45):
go to your recently deleted but that's a whole nother story.
But as long as you have enough space in iCloud,
you can still just store as many photos as you want,
It will not necessarily take up all the storage on
your phone. iCloud will manage this. So here's how this works.
When you look at when you scroll through your photo
camera roll on your iPhone, what you're seeing sometimes are
(24:06):
tiny thumbnails of those pictures that are stored in the cloud,
and so it's just downloading a tiny little version of
that to your phone. Then when you tap it or
you want to share it, it will go, oh, we
need this photo from the cloud, and it will quickly
retrieve that photo from the cloud for you. So it's
very seamless. It happens kind of in the background, but
on the flip side, your phone will say, Okay, Rich
(24:27):
is running low on storage. Let's delete some of these pictures,
these full resolution pictures off his phone, but we'll keep
them in iCloud. Now, if you use Google Photos, it's
very very similar. It's just a little bit easier to
understand because it's an actual app that you install on
your phone, and all the photos in there are a
version in the cloud that they just when you want
(24:48):
to share one or look at them or do anything
with them, they will download those pictures in real time.
All right, let's talk about Zoom Zoom has some new avatars,
these animal avatar, so you can show up to your
next meeting as a rabbit, a fox, a dog, or
a whole bunch of different animals. They kind of look
like memojis if you're familiar with those on the iPhone.
(25:10):
This is in the Zoom five point one zero update.
I was playing with this. It's cool. I think it's great.
It's for those times when you don't necessarily want to
show up at your meeting in full as we would
say on TV hair and makeup. You just want to
kind of roll out of bed and attend the meeting.
But you might say, rich, why not just leave my
(25:30):
camera off? Well, you've been on Zoom with people without
their cameras on, and it's kind of unnerving, right because
you're just like, are you there? Are you listening? Are
you doing something else? Like what's going on here? Like?
Why am I on camera? And you're not. So I
think that this animal situation these avatars is like a
good middle ground because the animals will mimic your movements,
(25:52):
so you can move left, right, you can blink your eyes.
I tested all this stuff, and you can smile, you
can frown, and the animal will show on the avatar
kind of what you're doing, and so your expressions are there.
And that's a huge part of kind of this online
video chat world is that you know you want to
show your expressions because when you talk face to face,
(26:14):
people understand you based on your expressions. Like if I'm like, hey,
what's going on, you know immediately I'm happy. If I'm like, oh, hey,
what's what's happening, you know that something's wrong, and you
would you would push and say what's what's wrong? Or Hey,
what's what's good? So if you want to try these
just you can try them next to the video start
stop button. So once you're in a zoom call, press
(26:35):
that little up arrow next to the video kind of
like where you choose your camera, and it will give
you an option to choose video filter and you check
the check that it will bring up this little menu
and you can use those those animals in your meeting.
Question from the comments, Jojo says, will the animals work
on teams? No, not that they This is just a
(26:58):
zoom feature right now. There is a third party program
you can get that works inside other things, but honestly,
it's I don't typically recommend these programs because a lot
of people don't know how to turn them off. And
even with this zoom animal and avatar, I would test
this out before you actually try to use it in
a meeting, just to make sure you're comfortable with it,
just to make sure you know how to turn it
(27:19):
off too. The other thing it does not do. It
does not show your hands, So if you're trying to
like raise your hand or like wave or clap or
anything like that, it does not show your hands. It
only shows your face moving back and forth and your expressions.
But it's still I think it's pretty cool and it's
really cute. It's just kind of fun, and it does
(27:39):
bring your meeting to life. I don't know if I
had a meeting yesterday, like a tech briefing with a company,
and I wanted to use this, but I didn't know
if it was appropriate. So you have to figure out
when it's appropriate to actually use the animal avatar for
your face. All right, let's go to the next question.
Uh okay, John says, Hey, Rich, I love your work
(28:01):
and your spot's on KTLA. My question for you, my
old laptop kind of died. My lovely Wifey was going
to trade it in for a credit on something else Apple,
but she waited so long it won't even start up,
so they can't figure out what it might be worth.
They gave us two options, turn it in to be
recycled free of charge, or pay fifty bucks to see
what it could be worth. But if it's not worth anything,
(28:22):
we don't get the fifty dollars towards a purchase. So
that's a gamble. Do you know someplace I could take it,
plug it in and recycle it or give it or
they'll give you fifty bucks for it. Or can I
reboot it and take it to Apple and trade it in.
If it's worth one hundred dollars, I'll charge you forty
and it'll be ready tomorrow. Something other than paying for nothing. Okay,
(28:43):
So basically words of advice, thanks John. Okay. Basically John
is saying he's got a laptop at home to troubleshoot
the laptop, just to get it working to see if
it's worth anything. It's going to cost him fifty dollars,
but that's a gamble because he could be out that
fifty bucks if they say no, this isn't worth anything. Now.
He did not say what year this laptop was. But
(29:05):
if the laptop is not turning on, a couple things.
Number one, if it's been sitting for a really long time,
sometimes these gadgets take a while to turn on again.
You also might not be using the right chord to
turn it on, like if you're using a slower cable
one that didn't come with it, like if it's USBC,
that could take a really long time to charge. It
could also be that the battery shot, so you might
(29:28):
want to just try leaving it plugged in for a
while to see if you can get it to turn on.
If you can't, there are places that you can do it.
I did a story on gizmo Go and if you
go to a gizmo gizmogo dot com, you can pop
in your laptop and they will give you money even
if it's not working. So let's just put in a Apple.
(29:49):
Let's just put a MacBook Air in there. Okay, MacBook Air.
Let's see. Let's do a really old one. Okay, so
even a twenty thirteen MacBook Air, two gigs of memory.
Let's do the lowest processor. Let's do damage does a
power on? Let's say no and see what happens. Does
the screen light up? Know? Is the Apple ID signed out? Oh?
(30:11):
Two bucks? Okay, So that's just basically a pure recycling move.
You know. Here's the thing. I don't know if I
would not pay the fifty dollars to gamble, because you're
probably gonna be out at fifty dollars, I might just
give this to Apple to to recycle free of charge,
but I would go I would do some research on eBay.
(30:33):
You can also you can also pop the number into eBay,
the laptop like model number into eBay and see because
a lot of people will buy this for parts they
may need. The screen could be worth three hundred bucks alone.
So I would definitely check eBay and see if you
can get money for it through there. Just selling it.
You could say sell as is four parts not turning on.
(30:54):
You know, you can buy it and someone there's a
lot of these people that are very smart. They know
how to turn these things on and kind of troubleshoot them,
and they may do that. You can also donate it
to someone that we'll kind of get it started up
again and redo it all. The only thing I would
make sure is that I'm a little concerned because this
thing died while you still had it. I'm wondering if
it's fully If it's fully like, what's the term erased, like,
(31:19):
you might still have your private information on there. I
see a lot of people chiming in with is best
by geek squad helpful here? I don't know. I have
not interfaced with them in a while. I'm not sure
that they troubleshoot anything for free at geek Squad. I
know that you break I Fix will troubleshoot it for
free and tell you what's wrong. At least you can
also bring it to one of those stores. So a
(31:40):
lot of options. But the main thing is that you know,
I wouldn't pay the fifty dollar. I wouldn't pay anything
to have someone troubleshoot this because it's just it's too
much of a gamble. It depends on the year. But
you have to kind of see what it might be
worth if it's good. So go on, gizmo, go see
what they would give you if this thing was totally working.
If it's one hundred and fifty bucks and it costs
you fifty to get it up and running again, sure
(32:01):
you just made a hundred bucks for not doing much.
But if it's two dollars and you're paying fifty dollars,
that is not a very good deal. All right, Next
story of the day, Roku finally will let you set
your own photos as a screen saver. Now, I don't
use a Roku as my primary device, but I did
look for this feature in my testing of Roku in
(32:23):
the past, and it did not seem like it was
very straightforward or easy to add your own photos as
a screen saver on Roku. I'm sure there were ways
to do it. I'm sure there were maybe channels that
would let you do that. But the Roku eleven software
will now let you simply and easily add your own pictures,
which is I mean, that's a million dollar feature right there.
(32:45):
That's just so nice. I mean, I love the fact
that my well, it's kind of funny. I have it
on my Apple TV, but I have not actually set
any of my own pictures because it's so much work.
But on the Chrome cast it's really easy because it
just pulls form my Google Photos. So Roku eleven, I
guess you would have to you know, you'd have to
have it, you have to send pictures to this thing,
(33:07):
but super easy. You can Finally, just send your favorite
pictures and they will show up as as your screen saver,
which is really nice. You can also share pictures so
you can start what's called a photo stream. Now, where
have I heard that term before? Oh yeah, Apple iPhone iCloud.
You can start a photo stream and you can share
that with your friends or family. So it's nice that
(33:27):
you can have friends across the mile that have a
Roku and they can see an ongoing stream of the
pictures that you share with them. On the I always
call it the best screen in the house, your TV,
the biggest screen. The pictures just look so nice. And
it's funny because you think a picture looks good on
your smartphone and then you see it on your TV
screen and it doesn't always look so good on there,
(33:48):
because it's it's you know, it's a lot bigger, it's
like blown up. So sometimes you just realize that you
might need to get those pictures more in focus sometimes,
or your smartphone camera is not as good as you
thought it was, or sometimes you're just blown away. You're like, wow,
how do I take a picture like this on my smartphone?
It's so nice? All right? Some of the other features
in Roku OS eleven is a new what to watch
(34:11):
on Roku menu, So this is going to be a
new hub on the home screen that has a whole
bunch of stuff to watch, kind of like what it's
kind of like what fire TV does on its home screen,
So it kind of pulls from your apps primarily, but
it also will just suggest popular stuff, things that people
are watching, things that you can watch for free, anything
that's kind of trending. So it's it's just all in
(34:32):
an attempt to get you to watch more TV, more
streaming stuff, and of course I'm sure it'll have a
healthy dose of Roku stuff as well. They also have
and this is very handy, new automatic speech clarity settings
so you can hear people better. Have you ever noticed
on TV shows and movies that like sometimes you can't
hear the dialogue as well? And so these companies are
(34:53):
very well aware of it. And I on my Sonos
I have a setting that that enhances the speech and
looks like that's coming to the Roku as well. So
Roku OS eleven be on the lookout. It's going to
go to all supported devices. I don't know which those
those devices you can look up online and see if
you do like Roku os eleven supported devices. It's a
wide swath, but it's not going to be every device.
(35:15):
Some we're going to fall out of a favor here,
but rolling out to these devices in the next few weeks,
so be on the lookout for that. All right, I'm
gonna take a little simple water here and we are
going to let's see. Dana says, good morning, Rich. Quick question.
(35:35):
There's that good morning. Oh the email address, by the way,
hello at richontech dot TV if you want to send
me a question right now and get it in on
the show. Quick question. I was just wondering if there's
a nearby gas price search app that you would recommend.
So good question. I know gas prices are are wildly
high right now, especially here in California, so gas Buddy
(35:56):
is really the gold standard when it comes to these prices.
Gas Buddy is crowdsourced, so the pricing information is as
good as the people that are going to the gas
stations and typing in those prices. The other thing that
you can do is there's one called gas Guru. That's
another app that's that's similar to gas Buddy. And then
(36:16):
there's an app that I'm actually featuring Monday on KTLA.
That is pretty cool. It's called I Exit I ex
so I the letter I exit like iPhone I exit.
And this is a really good one because it shows
you on the interstate you're on. It shows you which
exit ahead has the cheapest gas prices, and so that's
really handy because you know you can say, like, oh,
(36:40):
I can stop at this one this exit, or I
can stop in five miles and save like sixty cents
on a gallon of gas. Sometimes these freeway exits only
have like one or two places to choose from, and
the gas prices could be really high. And by the way,
gas prices are always typically higher next to the interstates.
I mean, it's just the way it is because they've
got all those you know, all those people that are
(37:01):
driving by, and it's just what do you I mean,
you don't want to go five miles off the highway
to get gas. You want to go right off the
freeway exit. And in fact, the exit the places that
have the big sign that you can see from the
freeway do even better because oh, I know, okay, there's
a chevron, I can go right there. So those are
the three apps I would recommend. The other place that
you can go is if you're worried about your privacy,
(37:23):
because there has been some talk about how gas Buddy
does collect a lot of private information like your location
and all kinds of data. So if you number one
in gas Buddy, I would turn a lot of those
features off. So if you have gas Buddy, go into
your settings and there's a setting that says don't collect
so much personal information, definitely toggle that switch. But I
(37:45):
would also recommend I guess according to Wirecutter, this is
so random, but Geico has gas prices on their website.
So if you'd want something really simple, just google Geico
gas prices and you can put in your zip code
and it will tell you the cheapest gas prices. And
I guess the Geico app does that as well. Now
does it tell me? Oh, they're getting their gas prices
(38:06):
from this thing called opis opis, and that's the same
place that I exit gets their gas prices from. And
the way they get their gas prices is direct from
the pumps, So the pumps report the prices to this
opis opis and that's how they get the price. So
it's not crowdsourced it's actually sourced from the pumps and
(38:28):
the gas stations themselves. And I guess also when people
swipe the credit cards at the gas station. I don't
know how that works, but apparently so there's two ways
of getting gas prices. It's crowdsourced, which is me going
to a gas station, and I guess there's just good
Samaritans in the world that say, oh, this is six
forty seven. They type it into the app and a
bunch of people do that and they verify it. And
then there's this direct data, which is from these companies
(38:52):
like Opis that go through and they just integrate into
these payment systems and they get the data that way.
So two ways to get the data. Either way, I
got to find those cheap gas prices. You know, I
haven't an EV, so I've been avoiding the gas price situation.
My wife still drives as a guess car, and believe me,
it's it's unbelievable how much these gas bills have gone up.
(39:14):
I mean, it's pretty pretty wild, especially here in California.
All right. Next story here a new prepaid mobile plan.
I don't think a lot of you are going to
get this plan, but it's interesting to know about. T
Mobile now has a ten dollars wireless plan. It's called
Connect by T Mobile, No credit check required. It's available
starting March twenty fifth, which happens to be the damn
(39:37):
recording this. I went online. Yes you can do it,
and it's ten dollars a month plus tax. It's the
lowest price smartphone plan ever from T Mobile. And what
do you get for that ten dollars? You get one
thousand minutes of talk, a thousand minutes of text, and
one gigabyte of high speed data. So who is this for?
This is for maybe Grandma, Grandpa, someone that that does
(40:00):
not need a lot of data. And yeah, I mean
you can be a grandma on Grandpa and be traveling
the world and need a lot of data. I'm just
using this as an example of the best example I
can think of is maybe and maybe I talked about this.
I felt like it did. I think it's really confusing
what I talk about during the week, because I'm on TV,
I'm on the radio several times, and then I also
(40:21):
talk to like people in life, and I also email
people back and instant message them and tweet them. So
I've answered these questions over and over a lot of
the times, because I get a lot of the same questions.
So I'm like, wait, did I mention that on the podcast? Yeah,
I don't think I did. But I give the example of, like,
maybe you have a loved one that oh and here's
(40:41):
Alejandro said, yeah, you said this on Handle and so
you're gonna hear me again if you heard me on
Bill Handle talking about this stuff. But I give the
example of sort of a loved one that lives in
a senior center, and so maybe they live in a
senior housing. They don't need a lot of data on
their phone because they're in Wi Fi all day. They're
inside the senior living center, so they've got this nice
Wi Fi signal. But you still want them to have
(41:03):
a phone. This is a really cheap way for them
to have a phone be able to check in on them.
A thousand minutes of talk, thousand minutes of text, one
gig of high speed data. So if they leave the
house to go on a walk or something around the block,
they can still use a bit of data for whatever
you know, comes through I messages or whatever, and it
just still works. But ten bucks a month very very cheap,
(41:23):
and I might just keep this around, just have like
an extra phone number or something. Maybe I can use
it for It's just I mean, that's a pretty good price.
So Connect by T Mobile and they also have other
plans that have a little bit more data as well
and a little bit more unlimited talk. So fifteen bucks
a month gets you what is fifteen bucks a month
(41:43):
gets you unlimited talk and text plus three gigs of
high speed data. So there you have it. Speaking of free,
YouTube is joining the ranks of all these like two
B and Roku and Plex and Visio and Sam's Song
that are all doing kind of the free ad supported
(42:04):
television stuff. It's so funny because we're going back to
the I don't know, not back to the future. We're
going back to the past. So TV has always been free, right,
Channels two through thirteen have always been free. How are
they supported? They're supported by ads. It's not a new
concept to be able to watch a TV show for free,
even popular shows like Modern Family or Gossip Girl or
(42:29):
you could tell them very dated with my TV references.
Can't even know what's on TV but YouTube or alf Oh,
I don't even know what's a new TV show. I
can't even tell you. I do know one there is
a new TV show that I do know. It's called
Abbot's Elementary. Isn't that a new show that people love?
(42:53):
People love that show? I should watch it. So it's
not a new concept to get TV for free, But
when it comes to streaming, it is because we started
out with streaming being ad not ads on streaming. You know,
you paid Netflix to have no ads, and you would
pay a premium to have that experience. Well, now as
(43:15):
we get is streaming has matured a lot more people
are now saying hey, and people prefer this. They really
like free stuff and so they like the idea of
streaming for free. Now YouTube has always been streaming for
free with ads, but now they're going to be doing
full TV shows with ads. So right now they've got
four thousand episodes of free TV. They've got ads on
(43:37):
these shows, of course, but there's all kinds of shows.
The let's see what the example is YouTube TV. Let's see,
let's see four thousand, four thousand shows. I'm trying to
get a list of like all the shows that they
have on there. The examples here are Hell's Kitchen and
(43:58):
and Drama I've never even heard of that. So let's
see if I can find a better example of some
of the shows. Let's see what YouTube says on their blog.
Let's see four thousand TV shows, Heartland, also movies, fifteen
hundred movies, Runaway Bride, Legally Blonde. So I can just
stream legally Blonde. Yeah, I just pressed it and boom,
(44:21):
it's on. It's on my computer right now, streaming. That's
pretty neat. Now they've had YouTube movies and TV shows
for a long time streaming, so I think that the well,
you can follow the channel. It's called YouTube Movies and Shows.
I've got one hundred and forty nine million subscribers, and
so you can just oh wow, there's a lot. Oh,
(44:41):
the sand law is free. Ten things I Hate about you,
Little Shop of Horrors. Oh, here's some of the shows. Okay,
Hell's Kitchen, Heartlands, Scream Queens, Let's see the Unsolved Mysteries, Wolfred. Okay,
I haven't heard of any of these shows. I mean,
there's a bunch of stuff, and whether you need to
(45:03):
watch it as a whole nother question, I can't. I
can't comment on whether these are worthwhile of your time,
but you may find something you like. So now you
can watch stuff for free, and it'll work on a
lot of the you know, YouTube is everywhere, so you
can watch on your phone. And the company says they're
gonna add up to one hundred shows and movies each week.
So anyway, just a new way of watching stuff. The
channel is called YouTube Movies and Shows and I'm sure
(45:27):
that that's like probably tough to just search for. Let's see,
if I just search Google YouTube Movies and Shows channel,
does that bring up the actual channel? No, it really
does not, but you'll you'll just have to find it.
Good luck finding it, all right, let's get to the
next question. Oh yeah, Pluto TV. So Pluto TV. Fish
(45:51):
Taco Bob says Pluto TV is owned by Viacom CBS,
which is why it's constantly advertising CBS shows and services.
Fun little fact about Pluto TV. I was having lunch
with the guy who started Pluto TV back before it
was a big thing, and he said, yeah, I'm starting
this new thing called Pluto TV, and I'm like, ah,
that's interesting. He's like, yeah, it's like basically cable TV,
(46:13):
but for free. I was like, who's gonna watch that?
Who's gonna watch free? You know TV? Streaming, like, give
me a break, and he's like, well, it's ad supported.
We've got channels on like everything, like tech and like
extreme outdoors and comedy channels, and I'm like, give me
a break. Nobody's gonna watch that. Well, fast forward about
(46:34):
I don't know how many years it was, but you know,
five years later, CBS or Viacom bought Pluto TV for
like three hundred million dollars. So I guess I was
the U. I guess I was the one who was
wrong in that conversation. And I'm sure he's having much
nicer lunches than I am at this point because he
sold his business for three hundred million dollars and I
poo pooed it. So it's okay. But I'm doing a
(46:55):
podcast on Instagram, so everything's going okay for me, all right.
Paula says, Hey, Rich, I'm a huge fan because you
help us understand this information so easily. I was wanting
to know if you can record your conversation while speaking
at the same time on your cell phone. I have
an Android A fifty If so, how so I would
really appreciate it the answer, because I'm a caretaker for
(47:16):
my mom and it's super important for me. Have a
blessed ay, Paula, Paula. The app that I would recommend
for this is called Tape a Call. I know, Tape
a Call. Tapeacall dot com is the website. It lets
you record phone calls on iPhone and Android, and so
that's about it. The way that this works is basically
(47:38):
it initiates a three way call, and it may do
that automatically or it may be a manual process. I'm
not sure. I have not used this app personally, but
I interviewed the company behind the app a long time
ago and they basically said, yeah, we're like the number
one app for doing this. So Tape a Call is
the app. And Ryan says, what's the tape? Yeah? I know.
It's an old funny how you apps have old school names, right,
(48:02):
like notepad, Like now you're a digital note taking app.
Like you're not a notepad, you're you know, tape a call.
You're not taping it. You're digitally recording a call. Now.
The only thing I need to tell you about this
is that you need to This works for incoming calls
and outcoming calls. There's no recording limits. It does cost money.
(48:22):
It's not free, and so let's see how much it
costs if I look inside the app Store. By the way,
if you ever want to get an idea for what
a quote unquote free app is going to hit you
up for to charge you for things, just go into
their app listing and then you can go into there's
a little tiny section all the way at the bottom
(48:42):
that says in app purchases, and it will tell you
what those in app purchases are and how much they cost.
And so you can always just kind of get an
idea of like what the in app purchases are for
that app, because most of these apps they just want
to they just want to get you downloading them, so
they're free. But then there's a whole bunch of in
app purchases, but sometimes it don't always exactly tell you
(49:03):
what those in app purchases cost. So you can just
scroll onto the app Store and scroll down to the
section where it says in app purchases, and it will
give you an idea of what those little InApp purchases cost.
So on this tape a call, it's available for Android
and iOS, so you can get it for both platforms. Now,
I don't know you said it's for your mom's phone,
(49:24):
So it sounds like you want something that's very automatic.
I don't know if it's automatic for starting triggering these conversations.
So it may do that. I don't know, but you're
gonna have to look and see. Now. The other thing
is that you need to look at the laws in
your area. So every state has different laws for how
you can record phone calls and whether you need what's
(49:46):
called two party consent or one party consent. And I'm
not a lawyer, I can't advise you on that, but
you definitely need to look into those laws because in
certain states, if you do not ask the person expressly,
hey can I record this call, and then it'll give
you the permission then and you can't record it. And
if you've ever called an eight hundred number where it says,
you know, we're recording this call for purposes of product
(50:06):
development or whatever, that's why they do that is because
they're informing you that they're recording the call. So just
be aware of that before you before you launch into this.
Does anyone use Twitter? I don't think so. Does anyone
really use Twitter? Anyway? Twitter search got a big upgrade
this week. You can actually search for contents inside your conversations.
I've actually thought about this a lot, and I feel
(50:26):
like Instagram Messenger is the best messaging program out there
because every single person I know is on Instagram. Try
if you if you need to get a hold of
someone one time, just try messaging them on Instagram and
I'm telling you they will reply. I try this all
the time. I'm like, let me, let me Instagram messenger
this person, and sure enough, they always message back. Twitter
(50:47):
not so much. A lot of people have their dms
locked down or it's too like open, so they don't
really want to do a lot with dms. I use
it occasionally, like if someone needs to get in touch
with me, sometimes they'll DM me, and you know, I'll
see it once in a while. I don't see as often,
but you know, obviously, Twitter is still the smallest out
of all the social media platforms. It's very kind of
targeted to towards like news hounds, entertainment. Instagram is kind
(51:12):
of like the everyone really uses Instagram, so it's just
kind of like it's the what do they call it,
the I don't know, it's like the equalizer, Like everyone's
on there, so it's just really easy to contact people
that way. But Twitter not so much. You know, there's
not a lot of people, even if they have an account.
A lot of times people are not actively using their
Twitter account or they just kind of creep on Twitter.
They scroll through, they set up an account once, they
(51:35):
never look at it again. But by the way, I'm
on all these platforms at rich On Tech, I do.
I do post different things to different platforms, and so
I am active on all three, whether it's Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram. I would say that Instagram I'm probably the
most active on, and then Twitter and Facebook is just
kind of like more limited. But I do love facebooks.
(51:56):
I have the most followers there. So it's fun to
get some good conversations going. Because if I ever have
like this random thought, I'm like, I wonder if someone
else thinks that I just posted to Facebook. And believe me,
the answers come in. They come in fast and furious.
All right, So Twitter, you can now search your direct
messages for keywords in those messages. Let me just go
(52:16):
to an Apple feature. Apple's driver's license feature just launched
in Arizona. I had a good friend and listener of
the show, Jim Jim Lawson. He emailed me all the
screenshots of signing up for that. And so you basically
take your license, your driver's license or your state ID
and you can add it to your Apple wallet. And
(52:38):
because Arizona is one of the first places that this works,
you can also use your ID at the TSA security
checkpoint at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. So, coming down the line,
other states that are going to support these digital licenses Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Ohio, Georgia, Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma,
and Utah. What does this mean? Wow, the driver's license
(53:01):
is probably going to go away and move to a
digital format. I'm very excited about that personally because I
only carry a wallet begrudgingly, because uh, the driver's license
is one of the last things I actually need to carry. Yes,
I carry a little cash. Yes I carry a credit
card or a debit card. But I could do without
(53:22):
those things if I need it to. I would probably
just carry a twenty in my pocket for like true emergencies.
But yeah, I mean, I think that's so cool that
we are going to move to a digital license. I know,
it's scary, everything is all of you know, it's all
moving online, it's all moving to your phone. If you
lose your phone, it's kind of a problem. But the
(53:43):
reality is, when I my credit card was hacked a
couple weeks ago, the you know, the bank had just
had to overnight me a new card. And same thing
with my debit card that was hacked a couple months ago,
and they had to send me a new card. It
was a whole pain. But with these cards, if you notice,
when they send you a new one, it's updated in
your Apple wallet immediately, and in your Google wallet and
your Samsung wallet, the digital number is updated, so there's
(54:06):
no there's no time when you are out a card.
If it's a physical card, you have to wait even
you know, look the best banks, they're going to overnight
you your card. But the reality is you're still going to
be out a card for twenty four hours, whereas with
digital you're never out. So let's say you lose your
driver's license, you could see a world of you know,
if it's digital, they just basically send you a new
(54:27):
digital copy right on your phone. And so it's pretty
pretty wild that this is happening. Android. I know iPhone
is getting all the attention with this feature, but it
will come to Android as well. It's just that Apple
has kind of like they do. They've they've made the
system for it really fast and really easy and ahead
of the curve. The one thing you need to know
that's kind of interesting is that you don't need to
(54:49):
actually unlock your device or show your device at all
or hand it over to a TSA officer. All you
have to do is, you know, basically activate it in
your Apple wallet and then tap something and it will
transmit just the information you need to see. So a
lot of times I get like this when someone has
to look at my driver's license to verify something. It's
(55:12):
like kind of a privacy invasion because I know I'm
a little bit different than a lot of people with
the privacy stuff, but I like to be very private.
And so the fact that you know, if you're checking
my ID to make sure I'm of a certain age,
that you get to see all my other information as well,
Like why should you like you should just you know,
I should be able to tap my ID and it says, oh, yeah,
this guy's twenty one, or this guy's twenty five, or
(55:33):
this guy you know is I don't know lives in
California or this is address whatever. It's just a little
bit more private and a little bit a little bit
simpler that way. All right, let's see, can I get
to one last question before the end of the show. Here,
Wendy says, I have a question. How can I find
all the things I've asked Siria on my iPhone? Is
there a place there stored? Been wondering this for years
and I thought maybe you could help me out. Thanks
(55:54):
for advance, Wendy. Thanks in advance, Wendy. Great question, Wendy,
And the answer is no, you cannot hear what you've
said to Siri as far as I know. As far
as I know, you can delete the recordings that your
phone has made, but you cannot listen to those recordings. Now,
Apple's a little bit different than Amazon and Google in
(56:17):
this regard. Amazon and Google both let you listen to
your actual recordings of your voice. So if you said
to something like, hey, Gee, what's the weather in Tokyo today,
you can actually go on to Google on your phone
or on your computer and listen to how you asked
that or what it heard. And you can do that
(56:38):
by just typing in Google assistant Voice history and it
should bring you up. It'll give you an option to
check all of the recordings in your history, and you
can also delete those recordings and turn off that activity
as well. So if you want to find those audio recordings,
just basically go to Google. You just have to Google
(57:03):
this stuff. It's manage your Google account data and privacy,
web and app activity, and then manage activity and then
you'll see a recording for all of your recordings. So
I give Google props for actually going that extra mile. Amazon,
same thing. Just type in Amazon Alexa Voice recording history
(57:26):
and you should be able to find it in your
YEP listen to view and delete your voice recordings and
you can just do that right from that page. On Apple,
you can just delete those recordings. You can't actually listen
to them or kind of manipulate them or see kind
of like what you said in those things. So great question, Wendy,
(57:46):
And maybe Apple will do that at some point, but
I think they do a lot of the processing now
on your phone, so I'm not even sure that they
send a transcript or anything to Apple or if it's
saved or anything like that after the question is processed.
I think they just go ahead and delete it. I
don't know, I have to read up on how they
do it these days, but I know there's that big
(58:07):
kind of realization that these services are actually keeping recordings
of our voices. And that was an eye opening thing
for a lot of people. Wow, does this time just
fly by for you? It does for me. That's going
to do it for this episode of the show. If
you would like to submit a question for me to answer,
just go to my Facebook page, Facebook dot com slash
(58:28):
rich on Tech, hit the big blue send email button,
or go to rich on tech dot tv and hit
the email icon. Also, I would love it if you
would rate and review this podcast. Just go to the
listening app of your choice. Write a quick line about
what you like about this show to help others understand
why they should listen. You can find me on social
media at rich on Tech and no matter where you
live in the US, you can download the free ktla
(58:49):
plus app on Apple, TV, fireTV, and Roku. Want to
do scroll to the tech section and you can watch
all of my TV segments on demand. My name is
rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening. There are so
many ways you could spend an hour of your time, Netflix, YouTube, gardening,
playing with your kids. I don't know. I do appreciate
(59:11):
you spending it with me. I will talk to you
real soon
Host
Rich DeMuro
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