What's going on on rich dmiro And this is Rich on Tech.

This is the show where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about.

It's also the place where I answer your questions about technology.

I believe that tech should be interesting, useful, and fun.

Let's open up those phone lines at triple a rich one oh one.

That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one ero one.

Give me a call if you have a question about technology.

Email is also open.

Just go to rich on tech dot tv and hit contact.

This show is all about you.

I'm gonna be answering a lot of your questions.

I've got a backlog of emails.

I've got them ready to go.

You have.

You get in touch with me pretty much every day of the week, and so I figured I'd take this show to sort of just get through a bunch of these questions that I get that I think apply to a lot of people.

So we can help some folks out.

So email open, go to the website rich on tech dot tv, or if you want to call eight eight eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one ero one.

We do have some guests this week.

Three great guests in fact, tech journalists and podcaster Tom Merritt, host of the Daily Tech News Show, is going to talk about some of his favorite tech things recently, including the new x real glasses, and later, we've got technology journalists Sabrina Ortiz, senior editor at ZD Net.

She's going to join to talk all things AI and UH.

Later later in the show, we've got Josh Goren.

He is with Walt Disney Imagineering.

I told you I recently had the opportunity to take a tour meet up with those folks and got some cool inside looks at what you know, Disney does with cutting edge technology to bring all these experiences to life.

So we're going to talk to Josh about that this week.

I just got back from Kawai, Hawaii.

Always fun to go to Hawaii.

It's man.

We celebrated My wife and I celebrated our twenty year wedding anniversary, which is just wild because I remember going to Hawaii for our anniversary.

Thank you, Bobo, And it was great, really really nice.

It's one of these things where you got to take the time to do these things and just celebrate.

And you know, we felt bad leaving the kids.

We felt bad leaving work.

We had to change everything around the last minute because my wife is starting a new job, and so we had everything planned and we had actually a different place planned, and we had to just swap everything.

And it's these little things in life that you kind of come up against and you just power through it and you do it.

And we changed all the flights, we changed the hotel, and we did it all and it was great.

We had such a nice and if you haven't been to Kawhi, it is it's quite the experience.

I'm a big Jurassic Park fan, and so Kawai obviously is where they filmed a lot of that movie, and it is it is desolate.

There's not a lot there and that's what we wanted, and so we were hiking to breakfast, which was really cool, just stayed at the hotel most of the time, went to places locally around there, but there's not a lot.

There's not like chain restaurants.

There's not a lot of places to go and eat.

And I'm not really selling this place, but that's what we wanted.

And it rained every day we were there, which was really cool.

At night, went on a bunch of hikes which were just amazing.

I cannot speak highly enough of all trails.

If you are not if that, if that app is not on your phone, and you like to like hike at all, or even run or anything that's outdoors, that just opens up the world.

Like I will tell you when my wife and I went to Kawai ten years ago, I think, or fifteen years ago, it was we went on this hike that we had no idea what we were in for.

I'm talking this hike was about seven hours up and down mountains, muddy, slippery, going crossing rivers, and we were in crocs, we were in flip flops, and we had no idea what to expect out of this hike.

And that was before technology gave you the ability to know what to expect in this world.

And now you go on the hikes, you've got people leaving reviews from the day before saying, Hey, this is what you need to know, this is what you're up against.

This area was muddy, here's the trail, you can follow it, you can download it on your phone.

I mean, it really is quite incredible.

It's the same way kind of like with Google Maps.

I was talking to a couple on our vacation that was from you know, they lived in New York City, and I said, when I lived in New York City, it was so tough to get around before Google Maps.

You literally had to print out your entire route on this website called hop stop.

You would say where you're starting, where you're going, and it would print out directions to take the subway, and then you would exit the subway, you'd go the wrong way.

You'd start walking down the street and invariably going the wrong way.

So, I mean, our world has just gotten so much easier because of the smartphone and the apps, and it's it's just quite incredible now.

The thing that I do struggle with, I will tell you when I'm on vacation is my email.

So on this vacation specifically, I did not want to check my email.

And I understand that my emails on my phone, so of course I was looking at that.

But you know, I want it to be on vacation.

I want to be disconnected.

But the problem is I end up getting more stressed out watching all the.

Emails pile up.

And by the way, people are saying rich like I got someone that of your very nice thank you.

They said they're a listener of the show, and they said, this is my second request, this is my third request.

I'm like, excuse me, Like, okay, I get it, you're emailing me and you're not hearing back, but like, you have to understand that I am a human that is like going through life, and I have jobs and things and family, and like writing back to emails is not something I'm always able to do instantly.

And so I'm on my trip and I'm like, I'm telling my wife.

I'm like Lynn, I'm like, I really just need to bring my laptop and every day I just need to do my email for an hour in the morning and I'll be less stressed.

I know I'm on vacation, but I have to do that just to sort of triage things.

And she said, yeah, that's what my dad always did on vacation.

They would sit there, my mom and dad would have a coffee in the morning and they would sit there with their email.

And I didn't want to do that, but now I realize you kind of have to.

So it's something that I've always struggled with because I don't leave.

Some people do that thing where it says out of office.

I don't do that because no one's really out of the office ever anymore.

Right, Like there's a really truly important email it needed of responding to.

Of course I'd reply to it.

The other thing that I did is I tried watching movies on my phone.

I watched Happy Gilmore Too, which it was funny.

I know.

Someone literally texted me I posted on my Instagram that I watched this movie.

Someone was like, way to bow to the lowest common denominator in life.

I'm like, you know, I can enjoy a silly movie, like these are the things you bobo's just walking out of the room.

These are the things that you open yourself up to when you are a public person and posting on your social media.

Right, I posted my anniversary, posted that I watched Happy Gilmore.

I post all the time on my Instagram at richon Tech if you want to check it out.

But yes, you open yourself up to people saying, oh, that movie was silly too.

I thought it was funny.

I enjoyed it.

And also the people shaming you for watching a silly movie that, by the way, every single person in the United States watched Happy Gilmore on Friday night.

Give me a break.

When I looked at the top Google searches.

Every single search was related to Happy Gilmore.

And by the way, just how wild that, like thirty years later after the first movie, how much has changed in our world, Like just the age of people in that movie, the people that died, you know that were in the first original movie that are no longer with us.

But I did try watching movie on my phone because I want to bring a tablet, And that was another mistake I made, because I'm sitting there on the plane and I'm watching this like tiny The first movie I watched and now I can't even remember what it was, but I'm watching it.

It was like one of oh it was Sinners, which, by the way, was Sinners was interesting, That was an interesting movie.

But I'm watching it and it's like letterboxed inside the screen.

So not only are you watching it on a tiny screen, but there's also like two inches of border around the movie that you can't expand.

And so my wife is sitting there, She's like, what is going on on your screen there?

Like you're watching on a postage stamp.

I said, yes, I know, Uh so I do need to bring a tablet.

A one tip I will give you that I did.

I did pick up while I was at the Hawaii went to this like random grocery store, and of course you come to the checkout and you know, you have to put in your club card number.

And I'm telling you, and I've mentioned this before, but I'm going to tell you again because they're like, okay, club card, and it's always embarrassing to do this, but I'm telling you, you put in eight six, seven, five, three oh nine.

It works every time.

It works every single time.

The only thing I had to know was the area code for Hawaii, and I guessed it really quickly.

I think it was was it eight oh eight?

I think it was eight oh eight Hawaii area code.

Let me say, uh yeah, eight o waight, So I did eight OA.

And you know, the person that to check out is like waiting for me, and I'm typing it in and I'm like, I'm just waiting for like some sort of alarm to go off, you know, like or the song to start like playing on the speakers in the in the grocery store.

It didn't, but the guy's like, Okay, that worked, thank you.

And I'm telling you, I've used that so many times when I travel.

If it's not like one of the chain stores that you're you're you used to shopping in where your card may work.

Try it.

A six, seven, five, three oh nine works every time?

Not sure?

Why why is that number so prominent.

The other thing I will tell you about the trip is hotels need to figure out tipping in a cashless society.

Now, I will tell you this because the problem is housekeeping.

You want to leave a tip.

So first couple of days I had some cash on me and I'm like, okay, I'm leaving, you know, cash, And the problem is, if you don't get change, you can't really leave.

You know, if you only have twenties, you only have one hundred, whatever you have on you, you may not be able to you know, you might not want to leave that for every single time you want to tip someone.

Right, So I went around I'm not kidding.

The last day, I really I wanted to leave a tip for the housekeeper.

I went around to no less than like ten people around the like, I walked all around, all the bars, all the you know, the people around the pool.

Nobody had cash.

Sorry, can't make change.

Sorry, can't make change.

Sorry, can't make change.

And so finally when I was I was getting the car from the valet guy.

I was like, hey, do you have any change because I only have a twenty.

He's like, no, not really, so I had to tip him even more than I would like.

This guy that literally just brought me my car got like the biggest tip of the day just because I wasn't gonna not tip him.

So I was like, Okay, well here here's it.

You know, whatever you got.

You know, It's just my point is we need I've been in hotels where they have QR codes in the room.

I think every person that works at a hotel needs like a QR code to like be like, hey, yes, you can tip me, because the problem is you're just not getting as many tips as you used to get because people just don't have cash on them or they don't have an easy way to tip.

People want to tip.

They want to give you that money for helping them out and providing some sort of service, especially if it's a good service.

So hotels really need to figure that out.

My favorite thing on this trip watching people struggle to take selfies.

That is always that's a pastime of mine.

I will never it's so funny, especially in front of the sunset.

No camera can do that all right.

Eighty eight rich one oh one eighty eight seven four to two, four to one ero one.

You coming up next.

Welcome back to rich on Tech.

Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology at triple eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one ero one.

I was reading capping my trip to Hawaii and the valet person who had no change for me, Ki Kim wrote me and said, uh, I got played.

He's a valet guy.

Of course he has plenty of change, and I will give him this.

It was early in the morning.

I was like one of the first people to get my car, and so I think that was it.

And so because I did ask the valet person the first day I got there to break you know, break a hundred, and this guy pulled out a wad like I'm talking just tons of money, like he was embarrassed to show it.

It was so much money, you know, so much cash there.

And I remember when I was a waiter, I would always start my day with the right amount of change, right like that would be part of my preparation because you always wanted to be able to make change for folks that were paying their bill, and so you were prepared, so be prepared.

But yeah, nowadays, I'm telling you everything has gotten so digital, and so you know, people just they're not prepared.

And I think that some people think it might help them, which I guess in the case of the valet guy did.

But some people just.

If it's if it's not going to get changed, they're just like, okay, never mind, but yeah, let's go to uh, let's go to Tarin in Tennessee.

Tarn You're on with rich.

By a little on about three to four acres.

I'm currently inside my home using the Aero product okay for my WiFi extenders and router and using Spectrum.

I recently had an Ethernet cable installed outside, so now I'm looking for some sort of hardwired Wi Fi extender weather proof to attached to the house to extend the Wi Fi projecting.

Out super easy.

You already have euro Euro has it.

They've got what's called the Outdoor seven and this is specifically meant for an outdoor setup, exactly what you're talking about.

And the good news is it sounds like you are and ready to just install this because you've already got the Ethernet, which means you're going to get a nice, clean, fast connection to this outdoor extender.

This thing works.

Let's see, it's Outdoor seven, that's what it's called.

Operates negative forty degrees to one hundred and thirty one degrees, so hopefully you're within that range.

If you're getting hotter than one hundred and thirty one degrees in Tennessee, then that that could be a problem.

It also provides up to fifteen thousand square feet of outdoor coveraging can connect up to one hundred devices.

I've not personally tested this, but I was actually just talking to someone that that has and it's it's getting great reviews.

So it's expensive.

It's three hundred and ninety nine dollars for one of these.

But it sounds like you've got a pretty good setup there.

Sounds like you've got a lot of outdoor space.

If you want those gadgets to connect properly, this is the way to do it.

And it doesn't sound like you're gonna need a lot of installation like it sounds like this is something you can do yourself since you already have the Ethernet jack.

The only thing is you may have to the only thing is you may have to get.

I'm looking to see if there's a plug that's required.

That might be the only thing you have to do is get a plug for this.

So but yeah, three hundred nine and nine bucks called the Eero Outdoor seven.

I think that'll solve all of your problems.

Taran Terran.

By the way, my sister's name is Arran.

You spell it t r e n.

My sister spells t r y n.

So unique name.

Thanks for the call today, appreciate it.

Uh, let's go to uh, let's see here Super Super and Berkeley.

You're on with her rye Hie.

Show.

Thank you love to hear that.

What's going on?

Well, so I'm visually in treed to I my friends let me use the raven of metaglasses.

Okay, And so I find out via my Instagram account and on Facebook.

And I was just thinking enough a college friend that I haven't talked to you in a while, and the only way I could get a hold of them is via Facebook.

So I went on to Facebook.

They sent me a code to type it in.

But then it looked like I created a new account and an account I don't see my old e fent from college.

I'm confused.

Okay, so it sounds like it sounds like you either have a different account or two accounts.

The way the meta quest works, is it or sorry, the meta glasses is they use your Facebook account to log in typically as far as I know.

So it sounds to me like, have you downloaded the app to your phone?

I'm sure you have, because you needed to sign up for these things.

Right, Yeah, I have the meta AI, but it's a meta through the glasses are through my Instagram now.

Okay, right, talking about Facebook, right, okay, so it sounds like you need to switch the account that you're using on these glasses.

So if you open up that meta.

Oh, they're not related.

They're not related at all.

What happened was that I haven't been on Facebook in a while, and but them getting the meta glasses inspired me to look up some college friends.

So when I when they sent me on my phone, they sent me a code.

I typed it in and it looked like I created a new account instead of my old account with all my college friends that I was trying to look for.

I'm not related, Okay, it just inspired me to get onto Facebook.

I got it, got it, got it, Okay, But you're sorry.

That you're enjoying the glasses.

I am.

Yeah, those things are incredible.

And you said you're you said your vision impaired.

Yeah, I'm totally blind.

So I was been reading menus and reading stuff off the store, and I even went to a small convenience serve out my house and pretty much ninety five percent it at myself.

Just grabbed a couple of baggageips and I drink and I had the glasses read it.

I love to hear it.

Super I've got to run, but I love to hear it.

I'm glad you're having a great experience with them.

Back after this with tom Merritt's Welcome back to rich on Tech.

Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology at triple eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one ero one the website rich on Tech dot TV.

Sarah writes in rude and I thought she was talking to me, but she said, I just heard you say some people repeat their email questions to you two or three times.

You're on vacation, your advice is free.

What's wrong with people?

Always grateful for any help I can get, either from you directly or your amazing.

Tip filled show best Sarah.

Thank you, Sarah.

I know I feel bad even sharing that, but you know it's it's comical sometimes, like I am not like sitting here as an operator like waiting for your emails to like write back, but yes I do right back to a lot of them.

So thanks for that.

Now I'm not going to get any emails anymore.

Bobo.

That's it.

We're done with the emails now.

Good news is I have a backlog of like ten years of them.

Let's join.

Let's bring Tom Merritt on the show.

Tom Merrit is host of the Daily Tech News Show and a former colleague of mine at SNET way way back.

Tom, Welcome to the show.

Thanks Rich, good to be here.

Man, good talk to you again.

So how is the show going.

You've been doing that for how long now?

How long has Daily Tech News Show been going on?

Eleven years now?

Oh my gosh, yeah, we've been keeping it consistent.

My co host Sarah Lane, my producer Roger Chang still with us.

So yeah, it's been going great.

We'd love it.

Now, would you call this Do you ever feel like there's ever a slow newsweek?

That is a point of contention with me and everyone else.

I always look at the news every day and I'm like, there's more things I want to talk about than I have time for.

But there are definitely times where it gets closer to manageable versus like overwhelming.

But that's just because I'm a news junkie and I love all this stuff.

Yeah, I feel the same way with this show.

Like I come in with like one hundred things printed out and like ready to go, and I might get to like just a fraction of them.

I want to mention that.

I want to mention that.

Oh I wanted to mention that, And it's like you just can't get to it all, even though time is unlimited on podcasting, and I guess, I mean not really on the radio, but I mean if you wanted like a seventeen hour podcast, I guess you could get through it all.

Right, Yeah, I mean you could do it.

I don't know if anyone will listen to it, but you you can make one for sure.

So you've got a newsletter this weekend.

You did your newsletter on some of your favorite apps, So tell me, well, first off, tell me your setup, because I see you on Instagram.

You're often taking pictures on like a pixel fold, right, don't you use like a dual phone set up or what?

Yeah?

I have an iPhone sixteen Promax that I use, and I have a pixel fold original.

I haven't upgraded it to the new one.

Although everyone says the new one's a little more powerful.

I like it, and I just I really like using the pixel fold when I travel because then I can do a little video without having to pull out a tablet or a laptop, just by unfolding it and increase I don't even see anymore.

What do you think of the foldable kind of You know, we had the new fold hooles come out from Samsung, and you know there really trying to make that happen.

It's been six years, I think, yeah.

And then of course Apple is going to come out with the next year and everyone's gonna go, oh my gosh, what's a fold of ball?

Yeah, right, as always happens when Apple finally jumps on the train.

I think they're too expensive, that's my main complaint with them.

But I find the book style foldable like I have to be really useful in replacing the small tablet.

I don't know if you remember the Next to seven way back in the day, Wow, I loved reading books on that and stuff, and this kind of fills that spot that I haven't had a gadget to fill in a long time.

And I think even the flips, like the Razor the Samsung Galaxy Flip are popular.

My wife has the Samsung Galaxy Flip and just loves it because it's compact but then folds out into a regular phone size not taking up as much room.

And the Flip.

And I'm doing my reviews of those phones soon, but I've realized the Fold for me is like it's great and it's amazing, and I think Samsung did a great It's just not for me personally, Like I just don't need that.

Yeah, But the Flip, I've noticed, actually does have utility for content creation, and that is the fact that it kind of stands on its own.

It can take pictures with the best cameras at all times.

Like I did a quick little video where I just you know, set the phone up and was able to see myself and record it.

And that is actually a physical like difference between that and like every other phone I've ever tested.

Yeah, the fact that you can do like selfies and selfie videos and everything, and it's built in stand is is pretty useful.

Sometimes.

I didn't really want to use the word selfie because I know Bobo will laugh at me for saying that, but yes, it is good for all of that stuff.

It really.

Yeah.

By the way, that the tablet that I've been testing that I kind of like for travel is called this TCL Tab ten and it's basically a smaller sized tablet that's Android and so it's perfect for like just watching movies and like it actually has this I don't know if you've heard of this next paper from TC from TCL.

Yeah, we're like almost mimics like a Kindle screen on it.

So that's interesting too, is you can almost use it as a Kindle not as good as like the standard Kindle display like the e ink, but it and it's not bad.

So yeah, if I remember right, because I think I saw it at CES.

I haven't been able to use it myself.

It looks kind of like e ink, but it has the refresh rate of a regular screen where e ink is so slow, so you kind of get the best of both worlds.

Yes, yes, and you can flip it into the different modes like you can have it like where it's just black and white or gray scale, and then you can have it like as a full color tablet, but the screen is not completely the same as like a standard I would guess it's probably closer to like what they're doing with the color soft Now, so tell me any apps in the newsletter that you should clue us into that are pretty handy.

Yeah, I'm not sure how many of these will be surprises, especially to you.

But the one that I swear by, and I was looking at my stats, you know, and like below the messages up and the Safari app on the iPhone, the one I use the most is called Feedley.

Are you familiar?

Is that like an RSS reader?

Yeah?

It is.

It's an RSS reader.

But they've done a great job over the years because they launched when Google Reader went away years and years ago, and they've done a great job over the years of expanding what it can do.

So, yes, you can still plug in your own RSS feeds and find RSS feeds, but they also can pull from blue Sky or x or something and put a feed in that way.

And they've got a few other sources.

So even if an outlet's say Reuter's, doesn't offer its RSS feeds anymore.

You can get their stories in other ways.

And it's great because for me, I just select all the stuff that I want to read and it becomes my news reader.

I use it for preparing daily tech news show, of course, because I have a technology section, but also have a sports section and a music section and a personal blog section that I can pop in on.

And it solves that problem of being overwhelmed by too many sources for me.

Well, yeah, that that sure eats my system, which is I have a folder here with seventy one blogs I open all the same time.

So I just opened seventy one tabs and go through them because I get a lot.

So much better to have seventy one blogs in one folder in an RSS reader.

To be overwhelmed, yes, no matter what, we will be overwhelmed.

And then my favorite part is when I when I want to read something later because I may not it may not be good for the show or whatever, but I'm like, oh, I want to read this article.

It's a long read, and I put it in my you know, I used to I'm flipping through so many different like insta paper pocket went away.

Now I'm using one called folio.

But the problem is Once I put an article in there, I'm guaranteed to never look at it again.

It just goes down the memory hole.

I know, I know what you're meaning.

Okay, so fee way, that's cool.

When Pocket went away, I was like, should I try to recover?

No, I'm just gonna there.

I forgot what's in there.

I'll just leave it at that.

Open Vibe is another app and get this or Android and iOS that can cross post to blue Sky, Threads, Mastodon and Noster, which is a lesser known platform.

It doesn't work on X because X has closed its API, but I use a lot to just cross post across all of those blogs or all those microblogs when I have a thought that, I'm like, yeah, it's appropriate for all those outlets.

Well, that's interesting, and that is that sort of like open source.

It's like free, you don't have to pay for that.

Yeah, it's an open source project.

App is free and when I first got it worked ninety five percent of the time.

Every once in a while install out.

But I have to say in the last month or so, they really tightened things up and it posts pretty fast and reliably all the time.

Okay, cool, do you want to do another one, or you want to talk about these x ral We've got a couple minutes left here.

Yeah, let's talk about the x Raal glasses.

I was using these this morning for something that is of questionable use, which is watching an episode of Bob's Burger's while in the backyard playing with my dog.

But I really just kind of wanted to see if I could do it.

The x Raal glasses kind of look like sunglasses when you're wearing them, but they allow you to plug into anything with the USB C port and see what is on that device, so laptop, phone, whatever.

I have been using them to watch video though, because I can get a big two hundred inch screen floating in space, I can have it sit in one spot, or I can have it follow me around like I did when I was playing with the dog, and then I get a really good video screen without having to find a big video screen or sit down in one particular place.

So it's really allows for flexibility and the video is pretty good.

It's not the highest resolution you could possibly get, of course, but it's decent for just watching TV.

Yeah.

I was gonna say so, I mean cause I have the VR headsets and it's like The ideal would be to watch like a movie in like an Apple Vision Pro or something like that, but I never have gotten to that level of feeling comfortable enough or like, what's the advantage these I did get a chance to put them on at ces.

They're instant, they're quick.

They mirror what's on your phone, which I think is really nice because I already know how to use that and it's already set up and logged in.

So have you watched like anything substantially long on there or is it more just for like just kind of one out with some videos on YouTube or something.

Yeah.

I watched like three or four episodes in a row of Squid Game right when the latest season had come out, and I did get a little tired towards like the third hour.

So I think they're good for a movie, but if you're going to go for more, at least for me, it started to get tire sim and I used them for work.

I put him on and plugged him into my laptop and made it a second screen instead of mirroring, so I could just pull things up and it worked great for that because you can see down.

They're not an entire headset.

That's covering right.

They're just glasses, so you can see down at your keyboard, you can see down at your desktop, but then you've got this huge monitor hanging in front of you.

And it actually helped my posture a little because I wasn't having to figure out how to position the monitor.

I could just have it where I'm looking.

So it's almost like a solution for someone that wants VR to watch video but like or do like a little bit of light work with your computer instead of the entire VR setup that like is much more complicated to kind of get going with.

Yeah, because these you just plug in the USBC cable, put them on your face, and you're you're done.

You don't have to put a whole headset around you.

You look a little weird because they are a bit thick, but you're gonna get fewer looks than you would with, like, you know, a quest on your head or something.

The next thing for me is to try them on the airplane.

I have some friends who've said they're great for, like, you know, watching movies on the airplane.

They have their own built in audio which works really well around the house.

I imagine on an airplane, I'm gonna have to use headphones, but you can do it that way.

Too interesting, all right, I'm just looking up the prices on these things.

What is it?

What do they range from?

Do you know?

I think the ones I have these are the the x real Pro start at six ninety nine right now?

Wow, okay, I'm trying to see what's the cheapest, do we know?

Let's see here, six two ninety nine looks like the cheapest on their website.

So yeah, that's the preview model.

I think it's just a little lower resolution, little smaller field of view, but mostly the same tech.

All right, Tom Merat, it's been fun.

Uh.

Where where can folks find you?

Follow you all that good stuff?

Yeah?

If you if you want to catch us on the Daily Technews Show, where at Dailytechnews Show dot com or just put it in a search in your podcast catcher, YouTube, Twitch, anywhere like that, and you can find me at free Tomnewsletter, Free toomnewsletter dot com smart url.

I like that one.

Thanks Tom Merrett, thanks so much for joining me.

Eighty eight rich one O one eighty eight seven four to two four one ero one more of your calls and emails after this.

Welcome back to rich On tech Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology at Triple eight Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one ero one.

All the show notes on the website just go to rich on tech dot tv.

This is episode one thirty one.

So if you hear something mentioned on the show and you're like, wait, I want to link to that, just go right to the website rich on tech dot tv.

Everything is linked up there.

Got an email from Rick, he says, talking about the valet with a change.

He said, I had a twenty dollars bill.

I asked valet if he had fifteen dollars to give back to me.

He said no, thinking he'd get my twenty.

When it appeared he was getting nothing, he suddenly quote found a forgotten lot of bills in his left pocket.

That's so funny.

It's like, okay, I could you could either give me change or nothing.

It's like, oh hold on, let me dig a little deeper into my pocket and find that change.

But here's the thing.

If you are, you know, in this in this sort of a service industry, have that change or have a way Like I'm not kidding the amount of people that grumble about accepting Venmo.

I'm like, dude, like take it.

It's so much easier, Like you will get paid more if you accept Venmo, and it's just amazing.

Or any of these systems that let you take the money.

When I was selling my book, I use Square and it was like, yeah, it costs a little bit of money.

That's the other thing.

All these companies, Like I noticed a trend in Hawaii.

These companies are like, oh, I got to charge you, you know, four percent, three percent extra because we take a credit card.

I'm like, hold on, that's called the cost of doing business.

Just raise your prices by thirty cents and don't charge me, Like just it doesn't matter, Like we're already paying, Like we get it.

It costs money to do this stuff, but it's always better.

Where was I.

They wanted cash and it's like, no, just pay with with my card.

It's much easier tap to pay.

Linda and Burbank, what's up?

I heard something worse than what you were talking about earlier when you couldn't get fund and you can get.

Get cash from people.

Yeah, sometime it's.

In a laws.

On the other hand, Lenn Dix said, it's going through the tocause Congress passed it.

The digital dollar.

Oh well, and the digital dollar, you know, the government will track on everything we buy it and it will limit what we can buy.

Yeah, there's a lot of people that don't want the digital dollar.

Now.

Now here's the thing I'm I probably actually would not advocate for that because when you have a digital dollar, the government is really in control of everything you do and all of this spending.

And I'm not sure that's something we want, right like number one cash, Yeah, well that's the thing, like that would be well, here you understand why they want to do a way of cash, right.

To track down everything we buy.

Exactly, and not just that, but also taxes because you know, there's there's a there's an element of cash is not necessarily trackable in a big way.

I gues.

I get if you win ten thousand dollars at the casino, they make you fill out a form.

But you know, cash in general, small amounts has just kind of moved around freely, and with a digital dollar, that would not happen anymore.

And I'm not sure we want to live in a world where the government knows where every single dollar you have to your name, where it goes, and you know where that was transferred to.

There are governments that are trying this.

I believe China has a pilot program with a digital currency, and I guess that makes sense for them.

So for me personally, I'm all good with the Venmo tap to pay.

I just want the options, right.

There are times when cash is king and it's amazing to use, and it's great, and of course, you know you want to leave a tip for somewhere you want to pay in cash, great, but there's also times when it's just easier to tap to pay or use Venmo or whatever.

But yeah, Linda, I don't think in the US right now, I don't think we're even experimenting with the digital dollar just yet.

So hopefully it stays that way for a while.

John Let's see.

Johnny writes in from New York, New York.

Hey, Rich, I'm trying to email a video file that's currently on my iPad.

It's about one hundred and eighty megabytes.

I downloaded the Compressed Video and re Size app and managed to compress the video to six megabyte.

When I try to attach it to the Yahoo mail app, it thinks the attachment is over twenty five and will not attach.

Do you have any suggestions on getting the video attached to email?

I enjoyed one of your shows where you mentioned Gateway two thousand.

They were great computers.

Yes, what I would do, Johnny, is go to this website wormhole dot App.

I know it sounds silly, wormhole dot app, but what you can do is upload the file there.

They will give you a URL and you can just put that URL into the email.

And what I like about this wormhole is that you don't have to sign up, you don't have to.

Do anything special.

It's super fast, it's super easy, and it's private, it's end to end encrypted, and you can send up to ten gigabytes of a file, So literally could not be easier.

Just go to wormhole dot app, upload the file there, get the link and send it.

You can even make it where the link expires after one or two downloads.

Great question, rich On Tech dot TV.

If you want to submit your questions, we'll have more of them coming up right after this.

Welcome back to rich On Tech.

Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, Talking Technology Triple eight Rich one one eight eight eight seven four to two four one ero one Guests on the show today include technology journalist Sabrina Ortiz, senior editor at ZD Net.

She's going to talk about all things AI.

And then later we've got Josh Goren.

He is with Walt Disney Imagineering.

He's going to talk about how Disney uses technology to bring all their experiences to life.

What a cool place to visit, the Walt Disney Imagineering, Very very fun.

You can find that stuff.

By the way.

You can see some of the videos I shot there on my Instagram at rich on Tech.

Just check it out.

I've got like the little robots that I saw there, also tried a lightsaber which was really cool.

And then there's a floor.

I don't think I posted the floor yet, but there's like a floor that lets you kind of walk infinitely in any direction, which is pretty cool.

They haven't figured out how they're going to use that yet, but when they do, that'll be neat website for the show rich on Tech dot TV.

There you can sign up for my free newsletter.

You can also email me and that is what many of you do.

You can also watch my TV segments.

I've got them all there as well.

So lots to do there.

Let's take an email from Lucia writes in from South Carolina, listening on fifteen to ten.

My ninety three year old mother who's in assisted living, has an older Google phone with incoming and outgoing calls.

After they connect, she tries to press speaker, but frequently hits a different button and inadvertently hangs up.

Is there an app that would automatically turn the volume all the way up and put the phone on speaker with each call?

There is some assistance features built into smartphones, and I think on the pixel this would be under the accessibility settings.

This is a feature called call routing, so basically, whenever you get a call, it would route it to the speaker.

I think you can choose Bluetooth speaker or just standard so this in this case, you'd want to choose speaker, So go accessibility settings, accessibility touch, and then call audio routing.

If that doesn't work, just search for audio routing and you should find speaker phone and that's probably the best way to do it.

The other thing is the volume.

I think you're just gonna have to leave that turned up one time, and there is a way to On most phones, there's a way to decouple the volume key from changing the volume for everything all at once, So look into the settings on that and just look at volume and see if there's an option to sort of say I don't want everything to be, you know, turned up or down by the volume key.

I know they do it on the iPhone, and it's drives some people nuts because that's not the way it used to be, but that's the way it is now I think by default.

Let's see.

Yeah, on iPhone, the feature is also audio routing, so just look under calling audio Routing speaker, and there's also an auto answer it looks like on the iPhone as well, so you can have it where the phone just automatically answers as well.

So yeah, good.

Question, Thanks for that, Let's see.

Larry writes in from listening on KFI.

Hey, Rich, I'll be starting a new job with a claims company that requires lots of photos of damaged property and contents.

I currently have an Android, but we'll be purchasing a new phone for business use.

What's your recommendation for best quality picks?

Android or iPhone?

Do you have a model preference?

Thanks and continue, Thanks for continuing to enlighten us non tech listeners.

Larry, I mean, look, I think any modern smartphone is going to work for this.

I think if you want the absolute best camera out there, probably the iPhone.

I mean, if you want the absolute best of the best, probably have to go to the iPhone sixteen pro.

But I think that the iPhone sixteen's probably gonna be okay with this unless you need a bunch of oom.

So those are probably my two choices.

I think the pixel would be fine.

The thing is, the reason I would go with an iPhone in this case is because you're gonna want accessories and a case, and I think that when it comes to these phones, you're going to find that the iPhone has a lot of options out there, and just when you're using a job a phone for a job like this, it might just be the best.

And you might also be texting or air dropping these photos to your computer.

So I think it's just gonna be easier.

I don't want to, you know, pooh pooh Android.

I think it's great, But I think if you're trying to do something that's simple, streamlined, and a lot of your colleagues are probably gonna have the same or similar phone, the iPhone sixteen might be the best.

So go iPhone sixteen if you don't need Zoom, if you just need like a standard camera, but if you need anything with Zoom, you probably got to go iPhone sixteen Pro.

So yeah, that's that's what i'd recommend.

Let's see, we just going through all these emails.

Rosita writes in from upland, Hey, Rich, I'm seeking your expertise.

I've an iPhone fifteen Pro that I need to free up some storage.

I don't want to purchase a monthly subscription.

I was looking for a device that I can transfer to.

There are so many options.

I'd like your advice on which one to purchase.

So this email actually sparked an entire segment and Instagram video and a blog post because you would be surprised how many people email me about wanting to bypass the cloud or not using the cloud or freeing up storage.

And I will say, number one, please use the cloud.

It is easy, it is simple, it is safe, it is a good way to do this.

And I understand that it gets annoying to have to pay the monthly, but I get so many emails from people on a daily basis that say, Rich, I lost my phone, I dropped my phone, I something happened.

Everything got erased, and I don't have a backup.

What can I do?

There's nothing you can do.

If you don't have your phone backed up, you are not recovering those pictures.

It's just not happening.

People's phones fall in the bottom of a lake.

It's a summer, people are out, they're about, and you never think this is going to happen, right Like, you don't think this is going to happen to you, But it does and it can so at the very least, if you are truly against cloud storage, you can do what I'm about to tell you, But I think the cloud is the easiest way to do it.

And there are many, many options, right, I mean, even if you're using Google, they have a feature on their Google Photos that's called Storage Saver.

So if you are, let's see, there is a I'm gonna open up Google Photos.

Here, go into my settings and okay photos settings, backing up, okay, so backup quality.

You can do Storage Saver.

And what it does is it compresses your photos to sixteen megabits megapixels sorry, and then your videos are high definition.

So if you take a giant four K video, that's gonna gobble up a gig or two of your storage.

When it goes into Google Photos to be backed up, it's just gonna.

Compress it to be HD.

Same thing with your photos.

You take a giant two hundred megapixel photo, it's gonna compress it to sixteen megapixels and it's gonna save much more in the same space.

So if you are looking to free up storage, like if you're using if you're using Google Photos, and you're just like you know, you don't want to pay for more storage, look into that storage saver setting.

A lot of people say they can't even tell the difference.

So the other option obviously is iCloud if you're on iPhone.

But Amazon Photos offers a completely freeway to back up your photos unlimited if you are an Amazon Prime member, So yes, you do have to be a paying Amazon Prime member, but you can store unlimited photos there.

Now for video, you only get five gigabytes.

But the nice thing is that Amazon does give you an option to not even back.

Up your videos.

So if you don't want to deal with like the storage being full in about two seconds with your videos, you can just say, back up my photos and at the very.

Least if something goes wrong.

At least you have your photos.

You won't have your videos if you drop your phone in the ocean, but you'll have your photos.

The other thing is, I mean you still have flicker.

Flicker is still there, and I think they're unlimited for like, let's see Flicker pro.

Gosh, they even give you the come on Flicker, where's the price?

I hate.

I hate when websites don't give you the pricing, like right away, like it should always have Okay, here we go.

Flicker Pro unlimited, full resolution photos, sharing and backup on all your devices.

You can pay monthly ten dollars a month, annual six dollars a month two years, prepaid five dollars and fifty four cents a month, five dollars and fifty four cents a month for two years.

So that would be six dollars times twenty four, one hundred and forty five dollars for two years of not worrying about your photos getting lost forever.

Anyway, if you want to back them up to a flash drive, you can do that.

I recommend the PNY Duo link.

They've got a brand new one V three and it's super fast.

You plug it into the bottom of your iPhone or your Android and you can copy the pictures over.

There's actually an easy way to do this and I've linked it up on my Instagram at rich on Tech you can see how to do it, or you can just go to the website rich on tech dot tv.

Look under popular and it says how to transfer photos from iPhone to flash drive And I put that on there, and let's see I put the Android one yet, No, but I'll put the Android one there as well.

But basically, if you have a recent model phone with USBC, this is super simple.

It's a little bit easier on Android than it is on iPhone.

And the reason is Samsung gives you a select doll, so it shows you images and videos and it says select all, and you can select every image on your phone in one tap.

iPhone doesn't give you that option.

You got to select them manually.

But there are some easier ways of doing that.

If you have an older iPhone, you'll need what's called the sand disc I expand, which uses a lightning connector.

But you can plug the flash drive into your phone, copy the photos over, and now you have them on a flash drive before you delete them from your phone.

I do recommend that you have them backed up in the cloud or somewhere else.

All right, I'll put that all on the website.

Rich on Tech dot TV.

Good question.

All right, Well, plenty more of your questions coming up right here on this all feedback edition of Rich on Tech.

Welcome back to rich on Tech.

Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology triple eight Rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four two for one ero one.

Also taking your emails at richon Tech dot TV.

Hit contact.

Let's go to Kathy and Los Angeles.

You're on with Rich.

Hey, Hi, Rich Hi, all right.

I bought and returned a water leaf detection system.

Called go v G o v e E okay, and.

I set it up and it just wasn't connecting to the Wi Fi.

And then I did a little bit more homework.

I have a five G network and the GOVI only works on two point four.

Ah.

Yes, I did talk to Jane Sharp last week weekend and he said this no system that works on five G.

So I'm thinking if can I get another like router or modem that can can go between two point four and five point ero?

Well, okay, A couple things let's break this down.

Number one, I feel like I'm being punked right now because I didn't mention this because I don't want to be a Debbie Downer.

But we came back from our vacation to a giant water leak in our home.

So and I'm laughing because I'm crying inside because you know the expense of cleaning up that disaster, because we actually had this happen once before in a different area of our home, and I actually got a water detector for that area, but not for the new area.

So anyway, yes, I'm glad you're getting the water detectors because they this would have prevented you know, someone was actually coming to look at our house to check on it, and of course we would have known that this was going on.

But so you're doing the right thing.

But here's the deal.

How do you know that your router does not support two point four at all?

Like who's your provider for your router?

Like what type of router?

Do you?

Okay?

And have you called Spectrum and ask them about this?

No?

Okay, because typically on the router, if you go into the settings, there is a way to toggle on a two point four gigahertz network, even if it's just temporarily.

So the smarter kind of routers nowadays, we'll figure out if something will only connect to two point four and it will connect.

But the some of the you know, non smarter, you know, the ones they provide you from the cable company are not typically the best out there.

And so you know, there may be a setting that you can toggle on this router.

So if you're feeling no, it's typically it's typically a log in like if you look at them, yeah, and that's what I'm saying.

So this is, you know, it's something that you may not want to tackle on your own, which is why if you call Spectrums customer service, they may be able to walk you through it.

But typically on the bottom of your router there is a special address that lets you tap into the settings of that router, and inside those settings, it'll say two point four network, five gigahertz network, like do you want to activate those?

And so that could be a possibility.

The other thing is, yes, you're absolutely right.

A lot of these smart home IoT devices, a lot of them only support that two point four because they're just they don't have the expensive antennas in them to support everything.

So where are you at now with these censors?

Do you have them anymore?

You are no, I returned them.

But here's the thing.

I was on vacation also, and I have a house built in nineteen twenty nine, so I have a basement.

Yeah.

I happened to go down the basement on Mother's Day to look for a base and I saw water.

I had to replace the two water heaters, and so when the water heater guys came, they gave me these water detection sing them a jig okay, and it's very low tech.

Place them on the floor, water hits it and this alarm goes off.

Yeah, which is great.

Yeah, if you're if you're I'm not home, Yeah, I'm screwed.

Right, So right now I have nothing?

Okay, Well there is Okay.

So the one that I'm I use at my house is from ircon I R co O N and it is uh, it is wi Fi.

But I'm looking at it.

I'm looking at the details.

And this one's super easy because, like you said, it does sound an alarm, but it also will text you if there's a problem and if there's no monthly fear or anything like that.

But here's the deal.

I'm looking at it, and the specs say that it's only supporting two point four gigahertz as well, So I think you're probably going to find a lot of these water leak detectors do the same thing.

And I don't have a good recommendation for another one, like another brand outside of it.

Do you have a five gig or you have two points four in your house?

I've got both my I use euro E E R O which supports both.

So and I've only had one gadget that has not been able to connect to the to the dual network, which was an outdoor plug.

But anyway, but yeah, where did you get ero?

You can?

You can get on Amazon.

I wouldn't.

You might not want to go that far.

I would.

What I would do is I would call Spectrum and just ask them just I know it's a pain to call them and wait on hold and all that stuff, but like I would just call them and say, hey, look, does my router support a two point four gigahertz network in anyway?

Can I toggle that on through the settings and see if they will walk you through that, Because if you can just get these things to link up once that's all you need and then they will stay on that network, you know, forever.

So that's probably the easiest way.

And in the meantime, I'll see if I can get another recommendation for a Wi Fi sensor that says it supports the five gigaherts network.

The problem is that maybe more expensive, so but let me let me look into that.

Thank you, Kathy, and sorry that you had the same thing happen.

It is a pain, it is.

It is not fun to come home to any sort of water damage because you know that they're gonna have to tear so much up and replace things, and yeah, it's it's not fun.

Okay.

Coming up technology journalist Sabrina Ortiz from d net.

We'll talk to her next about all things AI.

Welcome back to rich on Tech.

Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology triple eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one ero one.

Before the break, we had Kathy asking about connecting a smart device to her network and it was only on the two point four gigahertz frequency and she said her network didn't support that.

Well, she has spectrum and I was able to in the break look up the support for Spectrum and yes, their routers do support two point four and five gigahertz frequencies.

And so what you want to do is you can actually sign in to your Spectrum account on your services page, select Internet, navigate to the setup smart device two point four gigaherts, select switch to two point four gigaherts, and there you go.

You can set it up.

So they've thought of this before and they figured it out, so it's a lot easier.

You can also log into your router and do it manually, but it looks like they've kind of taken care of this in a nice way for their customers.

So again, if you have Spectrum, you're trying to connect one of those smart home devices and it's only got that one network, you can go into your settings and change it.

It looks like right from your Spectrum account, which is kind of cool.

So that's a good thing.

Okay, we've got our guests.

We're trying to work through some audio situation with that, but we've got Sabrina on hold.

As soon as we get the audio up, we will bring her on.

But we'll just give me the word when we've got that.

In the meantime, let's go to jammy Hey rich a huge fan.

Notice when I try to search for old emails in my Gmail, they are no longer there or they're not showing up.

It will show emails from a few years ago, but not the one in the last six months.

My husband is noticed this as well in his Gmail account.

Any insight on this issue.

Yes, this actually drove me nuts because I was looking for an email I sent to someone and it was literally not showing up, and I said, I know I sent an email to this person, and sure enough I realized what happened.

Gmail recently made a change to how Gmail search works, so now it's using much more AI to prioritize emails that are the most relevant in your search results, not necessarily the results that are ordered by time.

So if you are searching for an email that you know is in there, like I will search for this email and up at the top there's a toggle and it says most recent or most relevant.

So it looks like they changed the default to most relevant, and that means it's going to show emails out of chronological order.

So if you're like me and your brain sort of works like, Okay, I know I sent this person in an email.

I want to see them in the order I sent them.

You might want to change that toggle instead of most relevant to most recent.

Now this is it's interesting because Gmail has always had sort of smart search.

When you're up at the top and you're searching.

While you're searching, you'll notice you'll get a list of the most relevant emails, and so that's always been the case.

But now, but when you pressed actual search, it would then reorder those in the order that you were sent or received.

Now it's actually putting that most relevant up at the top instead of putting them in the order of the receive.

So Jammy, definitely you found something.

You stumbled upon something that is a little tricky, and it is a major change on the way Gmail does stuff.

So good, good question, because that is something that's really important for people to know.

Let's go to Ron in Los Angeles.

He says, Hey, Rich, I love your show.

I listened on K and later on your podcast during my daily walks.

I don't want to miss anything.

I saw an ad for a smart watch called the e Fit two.

It looks full featured and it only costs about one hundred dollars.

It claims to include an always on display and even blood pressure monitoring.

And let's see here, what do you think of it?

Well, here's the deal.

Number one, I don't think that.

I well, Number one, I've never heard of this brand, e Fit.

I've never heard of.

Number two.

I have not heard of blood pressure monitoring on a watch just yet.

I know they're trying to do that, and I know there's some solutions for that that involve a cuff, but I personally would just recommend what's called the amaze Fit.

They don't have the blood pressure monitoring, but a maze Fit I would say makes the best inexpensive smart watches.

And there is a band that's coming out soon next year that's already for sale in Europe that will become the first wearable that lets you monitor blood pressure without a cuff.

I think you use the cuff the first time and then later on and that's called high Low h I l O High Low band.

All right, it looks like we have worked through some of our issues with audio and now welcome to the show.

Show Sabrina, hold on, I gotta mute myself.

Sabrina Ortiz from d net.

Thanks for joining me, Hi, I'm.

So excited to be here.

Let's talk all things AI.

Yes, So first off, just tell me what you do at d net Totally.

I leader AI coverage, which means I write about AI every day, I test the tools every day.

I read about it, research it all the things.

Okay, So I mean AI is a buzzword everywhere, and so I know there's a bunch of different brands of AI out there, from chat Gibt to Gemini Copilot Claude, you want to start with chat Gibt.

What tell me about Chatchibt.

Yeah, As you know, Chatchabt has almost become synonymous with generative AI, with AI chatbots, because it's really the first one that popular rise of technology, right e Luanda, November twenty twenty two.

And since then, the term AI has exploded.

And it's because of chatchipt's incredible capabilities, right, Like, it could do.

Anything from answering how.

A simple question, the way you would use Google with a conversational prompt, which is really what makes it unique and what drew I guess people to AI chatbox to composing an entire song, essay, research peoper, you name it.

Yeah, that's what's so wild is that it's become like everyone knows chatchibt.

Here's the thing I've noticed though, when people download chatchibt to their phone or computer, they're not always getting like the actual, you know, official app.

So people need to be aware that if you're not getting like go to chat Gibt's website and make sure you get the right app, because people pay money sometimes without even realizing like some third party for this.

You can start for free.

Rich.

That's such incredible advice because there's so many different knockoffs on the App Store or the Google Play Store of people trying to impersonate chatch GPT.

And again, the apps are free to download.

So if first of all, first food flag if you see price to download, not open AI tax GPT.

And then also, like you mentioned, there's different tiers, but you could always get started for free.

The minute that there's a money.

Pop up and that's like a block or two using it, then you're probably using the wrong thing.

Yeah, let's talk Gemini.

So this is Google's what do you think Gemini strength is?

You know, Google's positioned so well in the AI space right now because they have a product that we have multiple products, but the product Google Search up people use every single day, So people are already familiar with Google, and now you can access Gemini without even having to visit the individual chatbot.

Right, Like, if you've ever Googled something and you see an AI summary on top or those like AI overviews, those are Gemini generated.

I think that's a strength because you don't even have to go out of your way to access AI.

Like we were just talking about downloading the chattypt app or going to the actual website in your browser.

With Google, you're already using it and now it just pops up.

But yeah, it's similar to chat ept in functionality, conversational responses, conversational prompts that you could enter, and yeah, it also uses Google Search, which is a really good advantage for people who trust, you know, search results and want their answer stuff link to.

Google and also the stuff that you have in Google.

It's a pretty powerful way to slice and dice that.

Like I noticed I was I opened a PDF and like Google Drive and it literally like Gemini showed up on the side and it like summarized all this stuff.

I was like, wait a second, I don't even asked for that.

Yeah, did you like that?

Though?

Because I feel like that's also a two edged sword, right, Like I happen to also be a fan that in all of these workspace apps that I use every day for work, it's already there.

But I also I think some people are kind of turned off, like, stop pushing throwing this on me.

I didn't ask for this.

I just wanted to use my Google doc in peace.

Yeah.

No, I totally understand that.

And I you know, I think it's cool, But I think I could see the side of someone saying, hey, I didn't ask to use this, but you know, here it is popping up in front of me.

But at the same time, if you get used to it and see the power of it, I think that's what they're trying to do is show you, like, hey, this is the benefit of AI in like a way that you're already using it could be beneficial.

Now Copilot, now talk about you know, putting it everywhere.

I mean, Microsoft is really pushing Copilot in everything from Windows to you know, Outlook to all of their services.

Yeah, Copie it's a unique one.

When it first came on the scene, there was a point in time where I would actually preach to the everybody that would listen that co Pilot was a stronger chatbot than chat GBT because it was actually using open ayes most advanced AI models for free in Copilot, where Chat Gypt you would have to pay for them, So at one point it was really really competitive.

I think it's lost its edge a little bit.

Like you mentioned, the strongest I guess appeal of it now is that if you are ready in an office Microsoft Office three sixty five user, where you know Excel, Microsoft Word PowerPoint, now it's embedded in there really seamlessly.

So again for ease of access, it's great.

But if you're going to access the standalone chatbot experience, I don't really know if there's many reasons to use it over Gemini or chat ept unless you're a diehard bing user, because then in that case you get to experience it the same way you would in Google.

But I don't know how many people how many.

Are AST's say, I don't think I've ever heard the term diehard bing user because I've never met someone.

Most of the time, it's just kind of like, oh, I landed on being somehow now here.

It's funny you said that about Copilot because I used to sing the praises of Claude.

Like when chatch Ebt first came out, I was using Claude for everything, and I still think that it excels in like writing.

But tell me what Claude's strengths are, you know, I.

Still think that Claude is positioned really really well in this space.

And I'll tell you a couple of its advantages.

If you talk to anyone, I mean, like, not even people who are like hardcore devs, I mean anybody who has any interest in coding, even if just like for fun, if you want a vibe code, you know, use kind of natural language prompts to build your own app for stuff.

Claud's a really powerful tool for coding.

And I've heard this from again all the way, inspect from beginners to like people who live, eat, and breathe programming developers all that.

So that's one unique aspect of it.

And the second thing that I think really draws users is that security in privacy.

They've never from the beginning, they've taken pride and never training on your input data.

So for that, just you know, most of these models generated iMOS, they get smarter by using what you give it, and that's your personal information.

A lot of time, and a lot of people don't want that.

So there's been a lot of you know, you hear it all the time, people like I don't really want to feel comfortable using these fool I don't want to give my data From the beginning, Anthropic took that position.

It still holds true to it, and I think that's really really it's draw and I think it's great that they're doing that.

We we need somebody who seeking a slightly different approach.

Yeah, that's a that's a good differentiator.

And I wasn't aware of that as someone who has fed like pretty much all of my information into chat GBT because I'm like, ah, whatever, what are they gonna do with it?

This time?

I even't had someone needed like my like information for like flights to like book flights.

I just said, hey, chat ebt, do you have all my information?

Like can you just write down like my you know tsa pre check it.

It didn't have it, but it didn't, like say, it remembered it.

But anyway, that's a call out too because you could always turn off the settings in chat GBT to train it off so it doesn't train on your data like I have that off because I love chat to BT.

I love its interface.

It's probably what I go to the most.

But if you still want privacy, you do have that option, you can turn it off.

Okay, that's a great, a great tip.

I'm gonna so go to your settings and let's see it says personalization, Let's see connectors, schedule security.

All right, we got to I'll find that.

I'll find that setting so I can tell people how to do that, because that's a really interesting one that I think I turned off at some point and it's probably a good pricy all right.

Sabrina Ortiz from d net.

How can folks follow your work online?

Yeah?

First again, all my coverage over at d net.

Every single day you will get a new story from me and even newsletters now too.

But also on my personal please follow me on Instagram.

I'm constantly sharing all my stories on there, Sabrina with an extra AFPN dot orts on Instagram and then also on Twitter or x so Sabrina actually at the end, underscore Ortiz there.

Thanks a lot more rich on Tech right after this.

Welcome back to rich on Tech.

Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology, triple eight Rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one.

The website for the show Rich on tech dot TV.

If you want to email me there, you can do that, just hit contact.

If you want to sign up for the free newsletter, you can do that.

Also.

You can look at the episode notes.

This is episode one thirty one, So everything that I mentioned here is linked up there so you can easily go back and reference it.

Later.

We got a note from Kim said, a plumber called in and said about the water leaks, you can get a mowing flow.

It works on spectrum and it should work.

And yeah, this is actually you know, it's funny because covering technology for so long, pretty much every startup, every company, they come to me and they say, hey, can we do this?

Can we install this at your house?

Can we give you this to test out?

Can you try this?

And I can't do it all?

And I remember these this flow type technology.

I think the other one was finn pH y N And it's these systems that actually attach to your main water.

Whatever you want to call it.

You're you're you're in right your water pipe, and they basically monitor the water use on your system and if they notice something going wrong, it can actually turn off the water at the source.

And so.

Yeah, Finn p h y N is one of them, he said, the Mowen flow flo And so this is a smart device that monitors for leaks and immediately takes action to help prevent them.

So it'll actually it'll go between your main you know, sort of water pipe and it will and it will turn off.

It monitors interesting, it monitors a flow.

So it uses like an algorithm to notice like, hey, number one, are using a ton of water this month more so than other months, and it will tell you that.

And number two it will figure out if there's a leak and it will turn off the water.

And this has this does have a monthly fee thirty dollars a month.

Wow, that's that's a lot.

Ultimate protection.

The standard protection, I guess enhanced is twenty dollars a month.

So it's not cheap.

But when you're talking, when you're talking any sort of water damage at your home, it is not cheap.

And even if you have insurance, you're still gonna be paying your deductible.

And by the way, it's just it's a nightmare in general.

Like we had this happen when our kid was born.

We were at the hospital, so we didn't notice the leak until we came home and my wife stepped on the floor and it was soggy, and that that is a feeling you don't want.

Jim from Orange County rights in or no Orange, California.

First off, I enjoy enjoy your reports on KTLA, even when the tech doesn't apply to me.

I still love hearing about what's new.

I've been having a terrible time with Nitro pro pdf.

I think my subscription expired but never got to notice.

Support's impossible to reach.

I was even shown a charge to a card that isn't mine.

I've spent hours trying to sort it out, no luck.

I'm thinking of just starting over as a new user.

Any advice, Jim, That does not sound good.

But if you need to edit PDFs, it depends like what your level of need is.

But if you're just casually trying to edit and do things with PDFs, check out a website called I lovepdf dot com.

All the tools you need and they're free to do whatever you need.

Merge PDFs, split PDFs, compress PDFs, convert PDFs, rotate, unlock, watermark, or even edit so you've got everything you need if you want a PDF to word, pdf to PowerPoint, create a pdf, watermark a PDF, and then edit pdf.

Of course, if you want to add text, shapes, comments, and highlights, that'll do it.

So those are the That's probably the website I'd recommend Nitro pdf.

I'm not too familiar with, but it looks like it's just standard, you know, competition for Adobe.

If you can get in touch with them, you like what they're doing, then yeah, go ahead.

But if you don't like what they're doing, then just check out that website.

I love pdfu dot com and you should be able to do a lot of stuff there.

You know.

Adobe also has a level of free tools that you can use with their with PDFs there.

You know.

Don't forget a lot of these companies are going to try to make you pay at some point.

So dependsing on depending on what you want to do.

Like if you want to edit the actual PDF, you may have to pay for that functionality.

Eighty eight rich one oh one eighty eight seven four to two four to one zero one more rich on Tech after this, Welcome back to rich on Tech.

Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology.

Triple eight rich one o one eight eight eight seven four to two four one ero one.

So far we've had quite the show, packed with a lot of your calls and emails, lots of great interviews.

We have one more coming up this hour.

Josh Goren from Walt Disney Imagineering is going to talk about the tech that Disney used to bring all their experiences to life.

Also, we talked to.

Sabrina over at d net and she mentioned there was a setting inside chat gbt that you can turn off if you don't want chat gbt to train on your data.

So if you don't want that to happen, which I did look and I did have that actually turned off already.

But the setting is under data controls.

So if you go to chatgbt dot com, tap your name in the lower left hand corner, tap settings, and go to data Controls.

It says improve the model for everyone, and you can toggle that off, and if you don't, it says allow your content to be used to train our models, which makes chat gbt better for you and everyone who uses it.

We take steps to protect your privacy.

Learn more and if you tap here, it talks all about how it can use your data to basically improve their model, So it's learning from what you're doing.

And so if you don't want to help open ai, and there are billions and billions of dollars of whatever they're doing, I mean, look, I love what open ai is doing.

But I understand if if you're you know enough, people probably have this turned on where they're not going to hurt if I tell you that it's okay to turn this off.

So if you turn off improve the model for everyone, they basically will not use your data to improve the model.

And you know, you may not care, but some people might.

And by the way, there's a whole bunch of options in here that you can look at, and you may not be familiar with a lot of these.

There's so many.

You can change themes, the language, the voice notifications, how it's personalized.

You can even look at the memories that it has of you.

So I can look, I'm scrolling through all the things that I've told chat GBT over the years, and it's or over the years.

Yeah, I guess this is so random.

Yeah, it's got a bunch of stuff in here.

You can delete those.

You've got connectors, so if you want to connect things like Gmail, Google Calendar, outlook.

You can do that in there.

You may have to be paid for some of those schedules data controls, so you can delete all the chats you've had with chat GBT security two fracture authentication.

I would definitely, definitely, definitely turn that on.

Just like any other website.

If you log in and it doesn't recognize the log in, it will say, hey, let's text you a code or email you a code.

You can also log out of all of your devices.

So if you're like me, you log in from a bunch of different places, you can log out of all those from the website.

You can also look at your account.

Oh little hack, because I've got fifty percent off for the next three months if you go to cancel.

If you're a paid subscriber of chat ebt, if you go to cancel your subscription, it may offer you fifty percent.

Just it did it to me, So I've got fifty percent off until October third, So that's kind of cool.

Now, someone emailed me.

I think I mentioned that on my Instagram and someone said, hey, just cancel my account.

Immediately said whoops.

So your mileage may vary, but typically it will tell you what it's doing before it actually just cancels everything out.

But yeah, there is a lot of stuff in here that you can check out with chat ebt.

Yeah so much.

I mean I do everything in there, So that's that's that's a popular service at this point, Janine writes in says, I received an email with a PDF attachment supposedly an invoice with a thank you for ordering.

I use AOL email and Norton three sixty with LifeLock neither flagged it as spam.

But I'm afraid to open the email or the attachment.

How can I tell if it's legit or if someone's trying to scam me.

The sender's address is just a Gmail account, Janine, I'm very proud of you for being on top of this, because this is a major problem.

The invoice scam is a big one, and it doesn't come for just it comes from all kinds of things.

I've seen it for geek Squad, from best Buy, confirmation that you've purchased an iPhone, confirmation of a some sort of anti virus order, and they send you an attachment that's basically looks like a receipt or an invoice, and it's saying thank you for your order.

It's got your information on there, and sometimes it has all of your information like your address, your email, your phone number, depending on how much data they've scraped from data hacks out there, data breaches, and then what it wants you to do.

And what the trick here is that you see this invoice and you go, I didn't order an anti virus.

Wait, what do you mean three hundred and sixty seven dollars?

You're charging my card?

And it has a phone number says if there's any problem, call this number.

And what people do is they call that phone number to say, hey, I didn't order this, Can you cancel this?

What's happening?

And that's when the scam starts.

And that's when they say, Okay, no problem, ma'am.

Let me just get some information from you.

Give me your name, give me your email.

Which credit card did you use?

Is it the one ending in three two seven nine?

Yes?

Oh okay, can you confirm the rest of that?

Yes?

And by the time you go through.

This whole rigamarole, you have now just given all of your information to these people, these scam artists, and they are now taking that information and running with it.

So that is the scam So how do you tell if this is a scam?

Number one, use your Spidey sense.

You seem to do that with the Gmail account.

So check the sender.

That's the number one way.

When you see one of these emails that you get, check the sender and see who sent it to you.

Now, sometimes they will spoof the sender, but a lot of times you can tell pretty quickly that it is a spamy sender.

So let's see if I can find one on here.

I'm looking at my spam emails.

Let's see here to do.

No, that one's not it.

So many, there's just so many, like there's just too many to go through.

But anyway, what I would do is check the center number one.

Number two, you can actually forward the email to a website called snitcher dot space.

I think I mentioned this on the last show.

Uh Snitcher dot space.

You can email the Yeah, just forward the email to scan at snitcher dot space and they will analyze the email and reply to you with if they think it's fake or not.

Now, there's also some other ones you can do out there.

I think Norton actually has their own Norton Yeah, Norton Ai Genie and so Norton ai Genie is another one where you can just basically put the email in there and it will You can just copy and paste the entire email and it will take a look at that and tell you if it is bogus or not.

And that's another way to do it.

The other way you can do it is literally just copy and paste into chatchubt or Gemini and it will tell you say, hey, I got this email.

I'm a little suspicious of it, and it will look at all the different kind of indicators on that email of whether they think it's fake or not, and it will tell you, now, ninety nine point nine percent of the time this stuff is fake.

But I know because people forward me this stuff all the time.

Sometimes it is legitimate.

And that's what these scam artists do is they try to make it look like something we would receive and they imitate that, and then they get it to a place where you don't really know, and so you click a link not thinking, actually, I can tell you I got an email from someone a DM over the weekend or sorry, over the week when I was in Hawaii and they said, hey, let's see if I can find this.

Okay, they said, rich, is this legitimate keeper.

I guess Keeper is one of the brands of you know, the I'm trying to find this as Oh here it is.

Okay, they said, hey, rich is keep her password manager a valid site.

I got a message from them saying my Amazon account saying I need to log in to verify my account.

Now, anytime you get an email like that, be very careful because what they want you to do is they're tricking you into logging into your Amazon account and then they're capturing your username and password.

Which is why I always recommend that you have two factor turned on, because in that way, even if you logged in you would get the two factor code.

They would not have that right because when you log into Amazon with two factor turned on, they send you a code to your email or your text.

So the scam artists, if they captured your password, they would not get that two factor code, but they've gotten tricky about getting that from you as well.

Anyway, she tapped the link that this keeper sent.

It says, Hey, we've temporarily placed your Amazon account on hold and canceled any pending orders.

We took this action because we detected unusual activity.

Please log into your Amazon account to verify the requested information, and so she logged in and that's when Amazon said, hey, this is a scam, and so you have to be very careful with this stuff.

And so I told her when she sent me the second screenshot, I can look at it, and it's actually pretty good.

Her Google web browser, Google Chrome, actually jumped in and said, hey, you just entered your password on a deceptive website.

So that was pretty good.

So if you're using Chrome, they do scan for this stuff, but the problem is it's not always immediate and you may not get caught in time.

So, by the way, when I saw the URL that she was trying to log into completely fake.

I mean you could tell from this url it is not the official Amazon website.

But again they try to trick you, so be careful with this stuff.

Definitely ask a friend, family member, or use one of these websites I just mentioned, Norton, Genie, Snitcher, dot Space, or you can just copy the entire email into something like chat, gubt or Gemini and see what they say.

Don't take what they say as you know, that is gospel.

It may not be right every time, but it can help you understand.

And there's a great website called scamspotter dot org scam scamspotter dot org, and that will help you understand these tactics that I just mentioned.

And this has brought to you by Fight Cybercrime dot org and Google.

They created this website to help you understand the scams that target users.

So familiarize yourself with that and also send that to anyone in your family or friends that may not understand this stuff so they can understand these scams.

Eighty eight rich one O one eighty eight seven four two four one ero one rich on.

Tech dot TV back after this.

Welcome back to rich on tech rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology.

The website for the show is rich on tech dot TV.

The email address, well, you know, I just go to the website rich on tech dot do you This is what happens when I get distracted.

I'm trying to tell you something, I'm looking at my phone to try to look something up, and then I realize I'm like, wait a second, why am I giving this out again?

But the website is rich on tech dot TV.

Can go there and you can hit contact that will send your message directly to me.

That's exactly what Tim did.

He said, I was just listening to the show, and I have the flow smart shut off valve and I also have the optional flow leak detectors.

There is an option for no monthly fee.

The difference is they don't pay your deductible if there is a flood and the warranties only a year.

The leak detectors are amazing.

They are hooked up to your house Wi Fi.

You place some new your water sources and if they get wet, they instantly shut the water off to your house.

I have tested them.

It takes about three seconds.

Amazing show, my friend.

Thanks for everything you do.

Tim.

Well, that's you know, but I think I'm going to install that today.

I think you've sold me, Tim, because I you know, two water leaks is enough.

I And it's funny because you know some of you listening maybe saying rich when you had the first leak, why didn't you install the stuff I did.

I put a leak detector near the water heater.

This time it wasn't the water heater, it was the washing machine.

So I should have done the leak detector near the washing machine as well.

But again it's you know, you live in your learn you know, these things are things that you hear about, you see on TV.

You know, you got to protect this and that.

And even if you have insurance, like I said, it's still expensive.

They still want their deductible and in many cases that's going to be pretty expensive.

So, no matter what, you're looking at a mess.

And it's not just the money, it's also the time and energy and effort and everything that you have to go through to recover.

And I call this kind of thing getting back to where you started.

So it's like when you place the tires on your car, right, your car doesn't drive any better.

I mean, yeah, maybe if you know you know, but like you know, I replaced the tires on my car a couple months ago, and it's like, you're spending all this money just to get back to where you started.

I call that, you know, the repair that just literally it's like, Okay, let's say your alternator goes on your car.

Your car is not driving any better with a new alternator, but you just spent fifteen hundred, two thousand bucks.

I call it getting back to where you started, but just spent a whole bunch of money to do it.

Also, by the way, if you want to follow me on Instagram at rich On Tech.

John is in Newport Beach.

What's up, John?

Hi?

I want to transfer an MP four file from a hard drive to a flash drive.

Easy enough.

Now, the MP four file is on my flash drive and I want to copy protected so that it cannot be duplicated from the flash drive.

I'm using Windows eleven Home.

Ah, okay, can you can you just make it read only?

Perhaps you can make it read only on your on the security tab under properties if it's on your hard drive, right, But then you can't transfer to your flask drive.

Once you transfer to your flask drive and you go to properties, there is no security tab to give it those attributes.

Yeah.

See, I'm thinking this is this is almost like a copy protection thing.

Like it's almost like, uh, you know, like these companies go through like really you know, they have their own DRM basically you know, if you're if you're a you know, Amazon or an MP three file whatever it is that they have where they make it where you can't really copy your transfer.

But that's those are like really big systems.

Have you found I don't know of an app off the top of my head that'll do this easily?

I mean, I'm just doing a search and it.

You know, there's there's one called Cockasoft.

Did I see that?

I try.

I tried a free trial on that and I just didn't get anywhere with that.

Interesting because this says USB copy protection for PDFs, office audio image files, EXSE.

That comes up.

It's that's how much was let's see.

Yeah, I mean this one gives you like full access to everything per habit printing.

This didn't work.

Huh, Well, I think I was having trouble trying to use it.

It might have been my fault.

So maybe I'll just try that one again.

But it appears not to be just a simple no setting or security setting that you can make.

You've got to use some outside software.

Yeah, it's definitely not.

It's not a simple setting.

And now there are ways to you know, there are there are many ways like encrypt the drive make it so that it's like tough to access if someone just found it.

But for actual copying of that file, if you don't have access to that functionality, it's really like I don't know off the top of my head how to do that.

So that program seems to be I'm trying to see if there's like a free freeware version of that, and there may be.

And that's the beauty of this show is that hopefully someone that's listening knows how to do this, and we'll say like, hey, you got to use this app, but I don't know off the top of my head, John.

I will experiment a little bit with this and see if I can come up with something.

But I'm not seeing something quick and easy that's sort of built into Windows.

That's that's the main thing that, Yeah, that I'm coming up against.

USB copy Yeah, Like even if I go I typically go into this website alternative to dot net to see if there's like a USB tool that we can use to do this, and I'm not finding something there.

How about copy protect?

Yeah, nothing interesting.

None of this stuff's coming up.

So this is definitely a tricky problem.

But I will write this down in my notes.

Now I've got homework to do, so I will figure out how we can make this video where you can't transfer it.

Coming up next, we are going to talk to Josh Goren at Walt Disney Imagineering.

This is rich On Tech.

Welcome back to rich On Tech.

Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology.

Well, if you've been around this world for a while, you've probably heard the term imagineering.

It sounds magical, mysterious, and of course very Disney.

But what does it mean and who are the people behind the magic?

Well, recently I had the chance to visit Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, California to see some of the cool stuff they're working on, and there I talked to Josh Goren, an executive R and D imagineer at Walt Disney Imagineering.

He's one of these creative minds blending art, technology and engineering to bring Disney stories to life across all their properties, not just theme parks.

Here's some of our conversation herm imagineering over the years.

Imagineer sounds like this very magical, mysterious thing.

What does that mean exactly?

So, Imagineers are the people who conceive, design, and build Disney physical experiences all around the world.

The rides, the lands, the theme parks, the hotels, the cruise ship those are made by imagineers, and imagineers are all over the world.

We come from over one hundred different disciplines.

So it's artists, designers, engineers, fabricators, all coming together to create these impossible worlds that you know from Disney Parks.

A lot of this does involve technology and in different ways, but I also read that you can come up with any concepts, Like the way you come up with these rides and things is, hey, if we can do anything, this is how we do it.

And then it goes into the process of how do we make this?

Can you explain that a little bit?

At Imagineering, everything starts with story.

We are storytellers.

Walt created Imagineering by pulling his favorite talent from the studios, artists, engineers, fabricators to create these imagined worlds and to bring them to life.

At Imagineering we continue that today.

So we don't start with how do we make this type of ride or use this type of robot?

You start with what's the story?

How do we want guests to feel?

And even when you're adapting a Disney film for the parks, it's not just copy paste.

Where would you want to be in this world?

Who would you want to meet, who would you want to be, and what would you want to do?

And so it starts there, what's the story we want to tell and how do we want to tell it and then the technology serves the story and hopefully, when we do our jobs correctly, the guests I'm going in saying wow, what amazing technology.

Hopefully that technology stating to the background and they're just experiencing a story, a character, a world, interacting with their family, having a great time.

That's what we ultimately create is emotions.

Emotions are our product.

Technology is just one more tool in our toolkit to make that happen.

So interesting note on the technology side of things.

During my tour here, we saw the Spider Man that is a robot that kind of does a flip at one of the theme Parks's California Adventure and I've seen that several times, never realizing that that was not a human or some sort I don't even know what I thought that was.

But now that I know that's a robot that has been engineered in a way to do that flip every time perfectly, that's pretty wild.

So that goes to show that the technology did blend into the background.

For me, Yes, Centronics is such a great project because that was the goal to make you believe that Spider Man was doing these larger than life flips and the reality is a human performer could not physically withstand the g forces that that character goes through, much less twelve times a day.

That was a story that could only be told through a stunt tronic, through an advanced character robot.

But I'm so glad that it got you because that was the goal, was for anyone coming into Avengers campus to feel like they were part of a real world and getting to see Spider Man as they knew him from the films, even if that wouldn't have been physically possible with a human.

How has technology aided what you do and how has that changed over the years.

What's funny about technology in Disney is it's not new, it's super core to our history.

Walt Disney was kind of obsessed with how to use the latest and greatest in technology to bring his stories to life in new ways.

Even before the theme parks.

You look at Snow White as the first feature length animated film, the multiplane camera that gave different levels of depth stereophonic sound in Fantasia.

Walt had this very early fascination with using the latest tech of his day to bring these stories and characters to life.

And we're just extending that legacy now, so we love technologies that make people believe anything as possible.

One of my favorite quotes is from the science fiction author Arthur C.

Clark, and he said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And here at Imaginary Research and Development, that's kind of our job to harness technology to make people believe magic is real.

And so whether that's.

Creating the next great advanced character robot or an illusion, an effect, or an interactive experience, that's what the people here do is try to make emotion through technology and to creatively apply them in new ways to bring those Disney stories characters in worlds to life.

Something like the BDX robots.

I mean, that's quite the undertaking because they feel so realistic.

Give me a little insight into.

Those We love the BDX droids, so they are part of our Advanced Character Robotics program, which is how do we bring expressive, emotive characters to life using the latest and greatest in technology.

What's really cool about the bd X droids is they've appeared in Disney parks all around the world, including our ships, and people just fall in love with them.

They're so cute and they're based on some really cutting edge technology using reinforcement learning.

So the way they learn to move is that we make a three D model of them and put them in a computer and train them how to walk in balance.

But we don't just train them how to stay upright.

We've put in the input of a Disney animator to give them that expressiveness, that personality, and so they learn how to walk and perform through that animator's guidance into what you see today.

So again, at the end of the day, we don't want guests focusing on the technology, even though they're technically robots.

We want them to focus on the characters and their person reality and to make an emotional connection.

You know, the Disney Company started with this idea of animation, and animation is the illusion of life through movement, and so whether that sells on a page or images on a screen, or a robotic droid right in front of you, that's what we do.

Create the illusion of life through movement, and the BDX terroids are one very cute example of that brought to life.

Now, how do you keep what the traditionalive of certain things at Disney versus what you want to push forward with technology and newness?

You know, We've always had one foot in the past and one foot looking to the future.

Our legacy doesn't hold us back.

It inspires us.

We have this strong history of technologically enabled guest experiences, going back to opening day at Disneyland.

The idea of Disneyland itself, the idea of a theme park, a place where you went in and experience the stories in immersive way that was at the time a new idea.

So our legacy pushes us to keep trying harder, to keep exceeding expectations, to keep surprising and delighting.

Things that don't change.

Our commitment to story, our commitment to surprising and innovating, our commitment to quality and detail.

That stays the same.

The stories we tell as new films come out and new characters get popular, The technologies we use as we see new things happening in industry.

The techniques those will change and evolve.

But the core values that drive what we do as imagineers and the way we do it that stays constant.

Well, can we look forward to seeing from your team and in your future at Disney Properties.

I can't talk specifically about some of the things we're working on.

We've got some real top secret stuff behind these walls.

But what I can tell you is this is an incredibly exciting time to be an imagineer, an incredibly exciting time to be a Disney Parks fan.

We have global expansion happening all over the world and on our ships, and new parks being announced like the one in Abu Dhabi that provide these amazing canvases to bring stories to life in new ways to surprise people.

So while I.

Can't get into the specifics top secret projects beyond these doors, I can tell you we are are so excited and can't wait for our guests to experience them themselves.

If someone is interested in joining the team here, explain what that process is like and how is that even possible.

Yeah, you know, every imagineer has a story of how they got here, and each one's unique.

But imagineering is something that is possible.

It's something that real people come and do.

Usually it starts with finding what you're great at and getting really passionately involved in it, whether that's the robotics side or the creative side, the music choreography.

Again, we have over one hundred disciplines here, so there's a high chance that something you do is represented at Imagineering.

So for young people, what I always say is start making now.

There are so many amazing tools and information resources available now for kids and aspiring imagineers to just start creating.

We have, for example, Imagineering in a Box, which is a free educational program we developed with the CON Academy, which is hours and hours of programming about how we do what we do, with interactive lessons and guides, all available for free online.

There's a ton of amazing books about imagineering, many written by imagineers that talk about our design process.

We have the Imagination's College Program, which allows for college students to develop projects and potentially get a chance to be flown out to Imagineering and present to Imagineering leadership, potentially leading to an internship.

So there are many roads to imagineering no matter what people study or what they do.

As long as you're passionate and you work hard, and you're talented, you may be able to find your place here.

There you have it.

Josh Goorn from Walt Disney Imagineering once again he mentioned Imagineering in a Box that's a free online resource for future creators.

You can find it on the CON academy website.

I will put the link on mine rich on Tech dot tv, and if you want to see some of the videos that I took at Imagineering, just go to my instagram at rich on Tech.

Coming up, we're.

Opening up the feedback once again.

For more of your comments.

To close out the show, Welcome back to rich On Tech.

Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, Talking technology.

Got an email from Vincent talking about the callers question regarding copy protection.

He says the potential solution could be with sand discs secure access software.

So I looked up secure access from sand disc.

Looks like they changed it now to private access, which it encrypts and password protects files on sand Disc USB flash drives.

Doesn't necessarily say that you can't copy stuff on them, but that may be a feature.

But you do need to use a sand Disc USB or I expand flash drive to use this private access software.

But that's one more option.

So again, private access if you don't want people to be able to copy the stuff.

But I'll have to investigate that see if it works properly.

Thanks for the email there.

Open up the feedback now.

We've got lots here.

Tiffany writes in from Huntington Beach, Hey, Rich, just wants to alert you of a scary text that looks like a scam targeting moms.

I received a text yesterday from a Boston phone number saying, Hi, Mom, my phone is broken.

Text me now on this number right here, and it gives a phone number.

My oldest is living in Baltimore and always refers to me as MA, so I knew it wasn't him.

That's interesting.

The scariest part is I almost fell for it, and I could easily see a mom worried about our kid and getting scammed.

It feels like a personal assault on moms everywhere.

Wow, Tiffany, thanks for that.

Is that's scary because, yeah, think about it.

Your kid might be living somewhere and they say, hey, my phone's broken, text me here.

You may not think twice call them from there.

Wow.

Good warning there.

Mark from Laguna Noguel, California writes in, Hey, Rich, thanks for warning listeners about simlocking.

I wish I had known sooner.

Back in February, someone ported my number without my approval and it's kicked off three months of stress and account takeovers.

The attacker access my bank email, Amazon Google, PayPal, and more.

Resetting passwords using my phone number.

Even when I changed passwords, they just do a reset again.

Mint said it would take forty eight hours to get my number back, but it took a full week, and once I had it, call still wouldn't come through.

Eventually, I gave up and got a new number.

Mark's advice lock your SIM with a carrier, use an authentication app instead of text based two factor authentication, keep emergency contact info for key accounts, and report things.

To the FBI's IC three.

Oh my gosh, Nicole writes in Hey Rich, I've been using a device called the PCI Tracker.

It lets you control your PC completely with just your eyes, no hand movement needed.

A friend gifted it to me, and I'm in love with it.

I thought it might be something you want to check out or even feature, especially since it could be helpful to others.

That's good to know, PCI Tracker.

There's also I tracking built in to Apple with Settings Accessibility eye tracking, so no extra hardware necessary, so check that out Settings Accessibility, I Tracking.

Mike from Denver new listener here, love your show.

I listened to the podcast weekly and I'm learning so much.

I followed your instructions to turn on simswap protection for Verizon, and while I was in my account, I noticed a bunch of other security and privacy settings I'd never looked at.

Thanks to your heads up, I was able to enable number lock, set an account pen, and turn off a bunch of privacy default privacy settings like CPN, I sharing and custom Experience.

Plus.

Just wanted to say thank you and maybe remind listeners to log in and check those other privacy settings too.

I'm glad I did.

Great tip, Mike, thanks for being a new listener.

And yes, just have some fun.

Instead of going out on a Saturday night hanging out with friends, going out to the bar, restaurant, dinner with your family, just check the I, acy and data settings on all of your accounts.

You know, just spend a Saturday night doing that and enjoy.

Just see what you find.

I'm kidding, but that's what I do.

That's how nerdy I am.

I go through my phones and I just go step by step every every single setting you can imagine.

I just like to see what's available and just you know, see and I'm like, oh that's interesting, let's see.

Yeah.

Nerd for sure.

Mark another interesting another mark about SIM swapping.

Thanks rich for warning people to lock their SIM I didn't and I paid the price.

My phone number was ported without my approval.

In the next three months were a nightmare.

Wait is that the same thing?

I think that's the same email sounded like it.

Richard from Ocean Side writes in I added the watch Duty app to my phone last week.

Super easy.

I got two alerts for a fire near La Mesa on July fourth, and two more on July fifth for a fire near the Ocean Side Airport.

I haven't seen anything on the news or heard anything from my San Diego County emergency app.

Thanks for having that guest on your show.

Great recommendation.

Yeah, watch Duty is essential if you live in an area that might have fires, and I think they're expanding to floods next, he said, Bruce, Oh my gosh.

Another hacking story.

Back in May, my Facebook account was hacked.

The hacker changed the log in credentials, locking me out.

I tried all the usual recovery routes and nothing worked.

Everyone I talked to you said the only way back in was knowing someone on the inside at META.

Eventually I tracked down a few email addresses for a few Meta attorneys and executives and explained my situation.

A few days later, a real person for Meta support reached out and helped me recover the account.

It wasn't smooth selling, but I finally got access back and added two factor authentication right away.

Okay, yeah, tracked down those email addresses.

Steve from Cincinnati writes in on your last show, you mentioned that Amazon now has price history.

Well, camel Cammell Cambell has been doing it better for a while.

Their browser extension, the Camelizer, gives you at least six months, sometimes a year, of price history.

Thanks for the great show.

Rich.

By the way, my last name sounds like the word cool.

I don't have his last name in here, but you are cool, Steve.

Thank you.

I like the Amazon price history because it's simple and it's right there.

But yes, there are many options out there.

Ray writes in magic Jack is still around.

It now connects directly to your router, not your computer using an Ethernet cable.

You just need internet service.

It's about fifty dollars a year with no monthly fee.

I've used it for over fifty years with both corded and cordless phones, even an answering machine.

I'll not say something.

Yes, look at the monitor right to your left.

H that's from tmz Dare you see this?

This is okay?

So this says your Google customer, Congratulations, you're one of one hundred users we have selected for free stuff.

And it looks just like Google.

It does.

Man, if you look at the website, that's not a Google website, get mega love.

Yeah, no, that is not.

That is not You have to be careful, and this happens.

This is really called malvertising.

So advertisers inject stuff like this into legitimate advertising.

But they do it so quickly that before the Google systems or any of the advertising systems have a chance to figure this out, they've already netted a couple people.

That happens all the time, literally tmz dot com and opened it a few minutes later.

It just popped up.

It can happen on any website, even legitimate ones.

Just be careful with that stuff.

But if you get that thousand dollars gift card, you gotta split it with me.

Leo from the South Bay says, great show.

We've had uma for many years.

It works great.

Also, you overestimated the cost.

We're only paying about seven to seventy five a month for free nationwide calls.

Okay, good clarification, Leo, I mentioned ten to twelve dollars a month in taxes and fees.

It could be lower depending on your location.

Let's see.

Do we have one more to get to before the break here?

Oh?

Danny writes in from Charlotte, North Carolina, and Rich, you can get good moon pictures with an iPhone, but it takes practice.

A tripod works best.

Adjust the exposure by tapping the screen to set the focus, then drag the exposure slider to manually just brightness.

Eh, just get a Samsung S twenty five Ultra, gona take it all right.

That's gonna do it for this episode.

Next week, how AI is taking over the fast food drive through, and how it's helping you plan for long term care.

Thanks to everyone who makes this show possible.

Find me at rich on Tech.

My name is Rich Dmiro.

Talk to you real soon.