Leo [00:00:10]:
And just like that, we're back. Hey, Gary, welcome back to. To civilization, I guess.

Gary [00:00:17]:
Well, I was in civilization the entire time, just a different one. Yeah, I've got a lot to talk about because now I don't think we.

Leo [00:00:26]:
Mentioned to our listeners before you left where you were headed off. Yeah, fill us in.

Gary [00:00:31]:
I went to Kenya and Uganda on an African safari tour and. Which I know a lot of other people have gone to do. I'm not the first, but it's a popular, popular tourist destination. You can see lots of really cool wildlife and stuff like that. And I've been looking forward to it for a while. And like, with all of my travel trips, technology always comes in, right? Because you and I are both tech people, so we're just going to be into tech no matter where we are. And also we have little tech empires to run while we're. While we're away and how do we do that and all this.

Gary [00:01:07]:
And so, yeah, it was interesting on this trip because I decided not to take a Mac with me, which was like the longest period of separation between me and a Mac in decades. Right. I mean, I take a MacBook with me on every trip, everywhere I go. And the longest I'm away from one is if I decide to wander around my own city for a few hours and then I don't have one, but then I'm back home with it. So it was odd being away from a Mac and trying to manage things like email and comments on YouTube and monitoring my site, all that. Without it, I didn't take an iPad either. I just took my iPhone. It was the only connection to the whole world of the Internet was my iPhone.

Gary [00:01:54]:
And I knew this was going to be a challenge, but it was a needed one because I. Very limited storage. I was going on a camping safari where we were very limited. What we could bring, basically one big backpack and a small bag. I could have taken up some of that space with my Mac, but I felt it was better spent with other things. And also that maybe since I'd be traveling with other people in a tour group, that maybe I shouldn't be in the evenings going away to some corner to answer comments on YouTube. Maybe I should be intentionally engaged with people and things, socializing.

Leo [00:02:30]:
What a concept.

Gary [00:02:31]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:02:32]:
Remind me again, how many weeks were you going?

Gary [00:02:34]:
So I was going a little over two weeks.

Leo [00:02:36]:
Okay.

Gary [00:02:36]:
It was basically a Kenya camping safari and then a Uganda camping safari, you know, with just hooked together. And I practiced ahead of time with. To get ready for this. Like, for instance, for weeks Ahead of the trip, I forced myself to start the morning off with just my iPhone, go through my comments, go through YouTube comments, go through my email with just my iPhone. It forced me to do things like decide how I would type. Because sometimes I type just by tapping on the letters. Sometimes I swipe type, sometimes I use predictive text. And it was like, now I got to commit to this.

Gary [00:03:15]:
So I ended up getting really good at swipe typing, being able to type pretty fast at that. So that was good to do beforehand. And also just ironing out the kinks, like seeing what could I do and what couldn't I do. Just using my iPhone in my daily routine.

Leo [00:03:31]:
Any major things you couldn't?

Gary [00:03:35]:
Yeah, well, the major thing I can't, I couldn't do was if somebody had a question about Macs, I have to use a Mac to figure out, like, you know, what's the button called? What's the. What are the steps? To prepare for that, I set up a more pro level VNC app on my Mac. You could just use the standard stuff in the operating system to screen share, but that's tricky with IP addresses and all sorts of stuff. So I just went and I spent a few dollars a month on subscription. That got me really solid. I could connect with my iPhone to my Mac on my. On my desk at any time and control it really well. And I practiced with that beforehand only to find out that over the course of the little more than two weeks, I used it zero times, which was great.

Gary [00:04:23]:
I mean, that was what I wanted, but it was there just in case. Right, Right.

Leo [00:04:28]:
Safety net.

Gary [00:04:29]:
So safety net. Yeah. But I was surprised that I didn't need it. I mean, I really. That was probably the biggest surprise out of the whole experiment. But it was nice to have the. Everything went pretty smoothly. Like, I use the YouTube.

Gary [00:04:43]:
There's a YouTube Studio app. I don't know if you use that. Yeah, I use that for comments. It's far from perfect. It's got a lot of weird idiosyncrasies, which it's good to know about ahead of time because you can really get ahead of it. It drives me crazy that once you read a message and you start responding to it, if you want to look at the message again to see what somebody said, you can't. It'll say you want to delete this message that you were composing. So you have to copy the entire thing, cancel, read the message, go back, paste back in.

Gary [00:05:13]:
It's a pain.

Leo [00:05:13]:
I have played with it. But I think some of those frustrations that you experienced are the kinds of things that I don't need this little bit of frustration in my life right now because I do have a laptop or a PC or.

Gary [00:05:27]:
Right, right. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's definitely slows you down. Other things I was able to. I was able to get pretty good at doing everything and it all turned out really nicely. Now once I'm traveling though, I do need a way to connect. And I know that the primary way I was going to connect, especially when trying to take care of things like that, was through WI fi. And I knew that different campsites had WI fi, different lodges I was staying at had WI fi.

Gary [00:05:53]:
And I could rely on that. I knew it was going to be great WI fi like I'm used to at home, but I could rely on that and I was able to. It wasn't much of a problem. I. But I needed something in between. Right. I wanted something where long drives between locations or whatever I could, I could rely on. So I wanted to connect with my mobile connection.

Gary [00:06:16]:
In the past, I've just used AT&T's international traveling thing. Right. Which they've increased the price to. To $12 a day.

Leo [00:06:25]:
Usually pretty expensive. I know Verizon had the same thing last time I traveled.

Gary [00:06:29]:
I mean, $12 a day is cheap when you consider the previous alternative, which was just to charge you roaming and then you find out to like get directions on the maps. You just spent $400. You know, I mean, all these horror stories, which I think are. We've been doing this show long enough that I think we actually talked about them like way back in the day.

Leo [00:06:47]:
Yep.

Gary [00:06:48]:
So I wanted to. So $12 a day isn't bad. Especially when it's just one phone. I'm not traveling with my whole family, so it's not times three. It's just one. I thought, and I thought about just using that and then I thought, well, let me try this ESIM thing. And it was much easier than I expected. I just got a random app that does esims because there's a lot of them and you go in the app and you buy an esim.

Gary [00:07:13]:
They, you know, out of all the ones listed, covers the countries you want and whatever. And then, you know, with the iPhone, it's pretty straightforward. You just Suddenly you have two ESIMs instead of one and you turn the one off and turn the other one on and. And you're connected and it's fine. So I was impressed how cheap it was, how easy it was. I bought a three gig plan And I only had to renew it once. I think I used a total of about five gigs over time. I really tried to stick to using wi fi when I could and all that and it really wasn't a problem.

Gary [00:07:49]:
But here was the interesting thing that he really didn't realize until I did it. I chose a plane that was only data, no sms, no voice because they're cheaper. And it's like what am I going to do with some SMS number in Africa anyway? You know, it's like I'm not going to tell people, oh, text me here. But only until this day, you know. And I don't get much SMS anyway. I usually use iMessage, which is all Internet and email and FaceTime and all of that stuff. So I didn't need the voice and SMS thing. Then it occurred to me, well, what happens if I need a two factor.

Leo [00:08:25]:
Code.

Gary [00:08:27]:
To my sms?

Leo [00:08:29]:
Your other number? I mean, don't you have a different number? Right?

Gary [00:08:32]:
Yeah, a different number. So I won't get that. Even if I went and said, oh yeah, give me an ESIM with an sms, it's not going to go to that SMS number. So I don't get that. And it had me concerned. I was thankful that for a while now I have been really trying to root out all the SMS two factor stuff, right? Because it's not as secure. Whenever possible when I looking at security on a site I'm on, I go with the authenticator app of course option rather than sms. I've been updating some where I've been looking into it and say oh, what do I have for two factor? Oh, an SMS number.

Gary [00:09:09]:
Oh okay, let me change that. They now have an option for Authenticator app so I do that and I had hoped that I just was able to get by without it. I was concerned also that there's tons of stuff where you fill out forms and you give your phone number, like airlines and other travel plan things where it's like, boy, if I was this airline and I needed to contact me about something important about my ticket or whatever, a text message over SMS would be the first thing that would go out. So I'm like, oh, am I missing something important here? I remembered back in the day you could go and log on to AT&T site and then you could actually go to a screen that was like all your SMS messages.

Leo [00:09:53]:
Oh, I didn't know that.

Gary [00:09:54]:
Yeah, that's gone. I looked it up and I was not imagining things that did exist. That's gone. Maybe for security or whatever. I did Find it. Strangely, I was able to go to my billing section and see a list of everybody that text messaged me through sms. So I wasn't able to see the messages, but I was able to look at the list and say, and see like, oh, spam, spam, my dog sitter, spam, my dog sitter, spam. Right? And since my wife was dealing with the dog sitter directly, I didn't have to worry about that.

Gary [00:10:24]:
But I was able to see there was no like airline, you know, phone number or whatever. So I was like, all right, I got something where I could do it. But it was concerning. Like, I need to, I love to figure it out. I could have left a phone at home, used my ESIM on that phone with AT&T and then set that phone to forward all the SMS messages to imessage. But that is a lot. I mean, first of all, the only other phone I have that could have done that, I also took with me. I basically just, I wiped it and I put it in my bag with half a battery charge, thinking if I drop my phone into like a lion's mouth or something, I want to have something like, I don't want to.

Gary [00:11:09]:
An old iPhone 13 was not going to take up that much space in my bag and it might come in handy for some time lapse photography or something like that. Turns out I didn't use it, didn't need it at all, but it didn't take up much space.

Leo [00:11:21]:
But the whole SMS thing is a big problem for a lot of people that are traveling because of exactly what you've just described. You're overseas and you get a second factor notification via SMS and you're screwed. The problem of course, is also that even if your account has other sm, other forms of two factor, sometimes because you're traveling, they say, oh my goodness, he lives in Colorado, but this request is coming from Uganda. We're going to throw some additional security at him. And often that's in the form of an sms, even though you wouldn't normally use it.

Gary [00:11:59]:
Exactly. And yeah, it's troublesome. Now my experiments that I've talked about Here earlier with VoIP services are interesting in that I could, I own that phone number technically, according to US law, Right. I could at some point, if I wanted to tell at&t, oh, by the way, I'm taking my phone number from you, assigned it to a voip a service, right. And then I, then I can do anything I want with it. Then I could really go to town on like, yeah, forward my SMS SMS messages here allow me to log in. I can log in and see them. I can do all sorts of stuff.

Gary [00:12:33]:
So it would be interesting to actually, like, if I. If I wanted to, I know who else would do this is to get another. Either take that number or get another number, start using that for everything. But not park that at a company like AT&T. Just park it at a VoIP service that allows me to do a million things with it.

Leo [00:12:52]:
So anyway, this almost sounds like something you could also do with Google Voice.

Gary [00:12:58]:
Yeah, well, exactly.

Leo [00:12:59]:
Same basic idea, a VoIP provider. And I've been using it for a long time. As a matter of fact, each of my Gmail accounts has its own VoIP number, but the original one was so that I didn't have to provide a quote, unquote, real number for my domain registrations.

Gary [00:13:20]:
Yes. And I actually used my Google Voice number. I use it occasionally to test SMS stuff because anything that goes out over it is going to be sms. And actually when I did that thing where I looked at my billing information to see who had texted me, the first thing I did was go to my Google Voice app and text myself a hello. So when I looked, I saw, oh, there's me texting the hello. I can't see the hello, but I can confirm that, yes, I am seeing the things coming through and they aren't coming to my phone in some weird way that I, you know, like some sort of way that it's being forwarded or something. Anyway, it's interesting so that it was really cool to use the esim and it opens up a lot of other things for ideas for travel and for using your phone. But the SFS thing is a bit of a mystery.

Gary [00:14:11]:
It does answer a question for me. I was going to go into this later, but I've always been curious as to why the rest of the world, all you use is WhatsApp. What's so great about it? I think this is a big piece of the puzzle. I noticed through especially Kenya. Most of the advertising I saw throughout Kenya was for Sims, mobile phone sims, and it was all over the place. I actually asked about this. Buildings are painted in the color of mobile phone services with an ad on them for their SIM plan. And I asked about it and I was told, oh, yeah.

Gary [00:14:58]:
So basically the buildings, the way they're constructed, they really need paint to protect them. And what happens is there's companies that will come out and say, I will paint your building for free, but this ad's going to go on it. And they all Say sure. So the building gets painted lime green or something like that. Then it says whatever ESIM with a phone number underneath. And then you just see building after building after building with that paint all over it with the same ad. And then all of a sudden you go to another town and it's light blue, but with another company's ESIM on it. Anyway, so there are tons of ads for this.

Gary [00:15:32]:
And I think what's going on here is basically is people are using purchasing cheap ESIM plans all the time to get cheap data, whatever the sale is, whatever they could find. Right. Constantly switching between them, which makes their phone number meaningless, which makes WhatsApp their main way of communicating.

Leo [00:15:50]:
One of the things that I've never really understood. I mean, I'm sure you get the questions all the time too. People that can't get back into their account for whatever reason. And I'm always harping on the fact that they got to keep their recovery information up to date. The recovery information is usually their mobile number so that they can get a text message. And to me, when you get a new phone, you just port your existing number. Yeah, but you've just explained why in other areas of the world, perhaps that's just not a thing.

Gary [00:16:21]:
Perhaps. Yeah, I don't think that's a thing. I think it's rely on their number.

Leo [00:16:25]:
Being constant for long periods of time.

Gary [00:16:26]:
Right. And I think it explains the WhatsApp thing and why that is so predominant there. So anyway, that was, that was kind of interesting there to find that out. And the funny thing is that traveling with people from all over the world and wanting to stay in touch, I had to actually just give in and sign up for WhatsApp because it was basically, it's like nobody was using phone numbers for SMS or any of that stuff. Even though almost everybody had an iPhone, they were using WhatsApp over iMessage. And the big factor was that simply everybody was from outside the United States. So yeah, so I'm now a WhatsApp user, at least to stay in touch with a particular group of people. So that was cool.

Gary [00:17:13]:
So getting away from that, I also learned some interesting things about keeping my devices charged. So like a lot of trips recently, I have absolutely no AC powered devices at all. It was all my phone camera, a little GoPro type camera and I think that was it. And then I had like a battery pack. Right. And so I needed a mobile phone charger that could plug into non US plugs. A big thing that's happened in the last year is now There are a ton of these that have the multiple types of prongs on the end and you actually slide out the one you want. I was like, oh, cool.

Gary [00:17:53]:
Nice development in this. And I got one, it has a US one, so I can just use it when I normally travel in the US and then it had ones for the more UK style, had the European style and everything. And it was good because Rwanda was actually going to be a different style than Kenya and Uganda, which were the British style. So I had one device and it was just my charger and it would plug into anything. So I.

Leo [00:18:19]:
240 down there?

Gary [00:18:21]:
Yeah, all 240. The interesting thing was that I quickly discovered that it's not a rapid charger. Right. I guess I take. I assume because at home I just plug it and charge stuff overnight, that it doesn't matter, the speed doesn't matter. But I found myself in a lot of situations where I wanted to charge something quickly. And I found out that I had basically purchased a 15 watt charger. Wasn't particularly fast.

Gary [00:18:51]:
Meanwhile, my battery that I had, they got bought a big new battery from Anchor, you know, standard thing that was an 85 watt charger. And I quickly find out I could basically charge my entire phone in about 45 minutes from like dead to 100% on that. But if I plugged it into the wall using the charger I brought, yeah, I was lucky to get like 10 or 15% an hour, you know, as it built built up. So the deal was always charge from the battery and charge the battery every night, and that's how I charged. But I could have circumvented that if I thought about it in advance. You can get the same chargers with much higher wattage.

Leo [00:19:31]:
Right.

Gary [00:19:32]:
And I should have paid attention. Probably would have cost like two or three bucks more, and I would have had one that I could have actually rapid charged when I had a plug as well as with the battery. But, you know, it was fortunately, you know, it didn't get in the way. But it is something to keep in mind.

Leo [00:19:49]:
Well, the battery's a nice safety net if you're away from lion's power for any length of time.

Gary [00:19:54]:
Oh, yeah. I would have had the battery regardless. Right?

Leo [00:19:56]:
Yeah. And how many times could you have charged your phone from the battery without recharging the battery?

Gary [00:20:03]:
I mean, according to the specs, four, but probably realistically, three.

Leo [00:20:07]:
Okay. So what that really means is then you're probably looking at about, you know, say two to three days worth of being able to be completely untethered. And not really suffer for it.

Gary [00:20:16]:
Yeah, well, I had to charge other things with it. I. I had figured out that all of my camera devices charged the battery in the camera. So I left behind, like, all my Sony charging stuff, a spare battery. And what I ended up doing was basically then charging, using the camera to charge the battery each night.

Leo [00:20:39]:
And that's based off what, a USB connection?

Gary [00:20:41]:
Yeah, USB c right into the camera. That was really nice. I never actually even had to use my second battery because of that. And it would have been weird too, because if I had two batteries to charge at night, it would have meant getting up at some point and switching them and all this. But it worked out really well. And having that battery pack with me meant if I was taking a lot of video with it and running the battery down, I could just simply in my bag, just connect the two and forget about it for like a half an hour. And then the battery was almost fully charged. So that was kind of nice to have.

Gary [00:21:16]:
And the same thing with my little GoPro style camera. I figured out it came with, like a battery charger that was the size of the device itself. And then I figured out, oh, wait a minute, if I just plug in to the usb, it actually charges that little battery inside. So that was kind of, kind of neat. In addition to that, another challenge I had with only an iPhone was, was dealing with my photos. So obviously I was taking photos with the iPhone and with my Sony mirrorless camera. I was taking RAW with my Sony mirrorless, but RAW plus heif and what I my plan was only load the heif onto my iPhone every night, leave the RAW on the SD cards because they're too big. You know, I'm going to fill up my iPhone and that way then everything backs up to icloud.

Gary [00:22:11]:
Well, no WI FI connection I had was willing to handle the amount of photos and videos I was taking. I never caught up. Like, I fell behind on my icloud syncing of those photos. Day one never caught up the entire trip. It gradually got there, like, you know, maybe 2,000 photos had been backed up or synced with icloud by the time I left, but it was still a thousand to go, right? And of course, I got home and within 10 minutes, it's all done. But yeah, I was never able to do that. And transferring with the SD card was hard because I didn't want to transfer the RAW photos. And nothing is set up for that.

Gary [00:22:50]:
It's like, just transfer everything. No, I don't want to transfer everything. Okay, select the Range. No, I don't want the range. I want every other one. It was like, well, you're gonna have to choose those manually. Oh, Thanks. I took 400 photos today, you know, so that was a pain.

Gary [00:23:05]:
And then getting. So I had transferred them all to my iPhone, but I had brought another SD card with as a backup. But getting them on, getting things onto my iPhone and then from my iPhone to this other SD card ended up being a whole thing that took up way too much time, all for me to simply place one SD card in my other bag. So everything was divided up between pocket bag and bag to go safely home, because nothing really was insured to be back up online. So it was a pain. Meanwhile, my friends, other friends on the trip who had brought MacBooks with them, right. They. Yeah, it was like they had, like, a rugged ssd.

Gary [00:23:44]:
So everything got backed up to. And it was like, no time at all for them.

Leo [00:23:48]:
I got to share what. What we did.

Gary [00:23:51]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:23:51]:
Fifteen years ago when we went on our anniversary trip to Australia, New Zealand, I actually wrote this up somewhere. But it was one of those things where, you know, the realization was that the only thing that was truly irreplaceable from that trip would be my life and my photos. Right. Everything else you can buy another one.

Gary [00:24:15]:
Of and I assume your wife's life as well.

Leo [00:24:20]:
It was the royal me.

Gary [00:24:20]:
The lies. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo [00:24:24]:
So what I decided to do, I did have a laptop with. But I took an external drive. And of course, every day we would copy the. At the end of the day, I would copy the photos from the compact flash cards that we were using at the time to the external hard drive. Great. But then, same thing. We were gone for two weeks. Every few days, I would take the compact flash cards that I'd accumulated that far and drop them in the mail.

Gary [00:24:52]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:24:53]:
I would mail them to myself so that when I got home, even if I'd lost that external hard drive, all of the photos would slowly arrive here. It turns out, again, same thing. You didn't need any of that. Right. It all just worked. But I just thought it was an interesting way to. To truly back up something that couldn't get replaced some other way.

Gary [00:25:13]:
Yep. I definitely need to come up some sort. It was probably easier in Australia, New Zealand than in Kenya and Uganda to mail things back home, especially international. But yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's interesting. It's a problem. I don't have a great solution for it. I mean, what I.

Gary [00:25:32]:
The solution I had was probably the best I could do at the time just having everything divided up among multiple cards like that.

Leo [00:25:40]:
The other thing I also did was to make sure that. And you. I sounded like you kind of did. This is my camera and its cards were with me in the cabin.

Gary [00:25:52]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:25:53]:
The backup drive was in checked luggage.

Gary [00:25:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what I did with that extra SD card.

Leo [00:25:58]:
Okay. Yeah.

Gary [00:25:59]:
Is. I checked it. I didn't check anything going there because I did not want to be delayed coming back. That wasn't an issue. So I just put. That was. That backup SD card was the only real piece of tech that traveled in my suitcase with my dirty laundry. Yeah.

Gary [00:26:14]:
So, yeah, there was that. Let's see what else? Oh, other things on the trip. The age ranges of the people that were on that trip were. I was towards the upper end. The lower end was 25. I found it interesting. There were a lot of people in their 30s, and everybody had iPhones. IPhones.

Gary [00:26:36]:
There were one or two Android phones, but mostly iPhones. I found it interesting when people whipped out their iPhones to take pictures. Not so much of the animals and all of that, but just like, oh, something fun. Or let's take each other. Let's. A group photo. Who immediately went vertical and went horizontal. Right.

Gary [00:26:52]:
And it was all by age, Right? It was like, totally by age. And then the funny thing is, we're handing phones to each other. Oh, you take a picture of me with my phone and all that. And so the joke was I would hand my phone to somebody who was younger, and they would be like, oh, I guess you want this horizontal, right? I was like, yes, please. And this one other fellow traveler would take one horizontal and said, I can only do that if. Then I take one vertical for you. Like. Like, I have to.

Gary [00:27:23]:
Like, yeah, I have to do it the right way. I can't just do it the wrong way. I'm like, but you were doing it the right way. No, no, no, no. It's got to be vertical. So it was funny.

Leo [00:27:32]:
I had this discussion with a lot of the volunteers that I work with at one of the organizations I support. It's exactly the same thing. Right. I'm looking for horizontal video, horizontal shots, and as you get younger in the organization, the camera starts to rotate.

Gary [00:27:49]:
Yep. Yeah. It's interesting. I even took. At one point, there was a sunset, and I was behind two younger people, and they both had their iPhones out, and they were taking a picture with their iPhones of the sunset, both vertical. I took a picture of the sunset and them two taking pictures of the sunset. Horizontal which would not have been possible to take vertical because it was like person with phone, sun in the middle, person with phone on the right. So it was just a.

Gary [00:28:17]:
It was a whole meta look at the horizontal vertical photo thing. It was so bizarre. Funny, but yeah, that was funny. Another issue I dealt with, which was really interesting. So I took and I did. I did so much photography with my Sony mirrorless camera, especially because it had a zoom lens on it. Right? Now, technically, a telephoto would have been longer. This went up to 300 millimeters, which was great because I had 60 megapixels in the camera, so I could still crop and still get decent photos.

Gary [00:28:50]:
And I got really good photos like other people, including somebody with almost the same camera I had who had a true telephoto lens on it. I'm thinking it was probably 600 mm. They had the problem where they couldn't zoom out as far without changing the lenses, right? So I had a little more versatility on that end. And also, of course, the one they would zoom in, they. It was hard for them to find their subject, right? Harder for them. So there was that. But I took with my pictures with my iPhone a lot, and I went back and forth and I was surprised sometimes to find out there were some pictures like, oh, look at that. That picture is great.

Gary [00:29:29]:
And then I looked at the info and was like, wait a minute, I took that with my iPhone. Like, I could have sworn that would have been one for my Sony. And so I get great shots with both, and they both are good for individual things. The funny thing is, is I would never travel with or not use my iPhone because there were certain things only the iPhone could do, whereas there were certain things that either camera could do, but the Sony could do better because of the telephoto, right? And for instance, handing your phone to somebody to get a picture of you with whatever's behind you, I can't expect it. I can't do that with the telephoto lens on the. My Sony camera, number one, all right? And I can't expect somebody to just, you know, accept Sony mirrorless camera and know what to do to take a photo of me, right? It's not. It's not as simple. So having the iPhone is important for that.

Gary [00:30:19]:
There was like other features like panorama and night vision and all this stuff. I got some great photos. But there was one big downside to the Sony mirrorless camera that I had not counted on. And it was a. It was a problem on this trip. I notice after the first day or two, there's some dust not on the camera lens, which meant it was between the lens and the sensor inside the camera. Right. It was on the sensor.

Leo [00:30:44]:
Right.

Gary [00:30:45]:
I had basically said, yeah, that's something that occasionally rarely happens. No need to bring my cleaning kit on a trip like this. And here I was, there's something on the sensor and I don't have a cleaning kit. I was able to borrow, you know, brush from somebody else, but more stuff got on it during the course of the trip. And I didn't change the lens that frequently. I think there was probably stuff that had in the past had gotten in there that due to the nature of riding in a vehicle that was shaking and moving around all the time, just constantly was just getting on the lens, on the sensor rather. So I have lots of shots where they're great shots. But yeah, you could see there's like particles out of focus, particles with stuff that got on the sensor.

Gary [00:31:34]:
And it's just not something that happens with an iPhone camera or a point and shoot solid body camera that has no lens on it. And it doesn't really happen with a DSLR because like my previous camera, DSLR has, first of all, the mirror flips. Right. So there's movement in there. And it has a sensor cleaning thing. Right. That. That shakes the sensor, which I took for granted, I guess, for 15 years.

Gary [00:32:00]:
And now I've got a mirrorless camera. And it's like you need to carry a brush with you, you need to pay attention, and you need to occasionally blow out anything that could have gotten caught in the chamber there between the lens and the sensor. So it's a shame. It's a shame.

Leo [00:32:17]:
I.

Gary [00:32:17]:
It's not like I lost great shots. Not like I'm publishing a National Geographic here, but there's a couple times when.

Leo [00:32:23]:
It'S like, I gotta say, the photos that you have shared so far, I haven't looked through all of them because there's a bucket load.

Gary [00:32:29]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:32:29]:
But. But yeah, they look awesome. They look wonderful.

Gary [00:32:33]:
Thanks. Yeah, I got some. I got some good ones. And my main secret is I took more than 3,000. So that's why I have 100 good ones.

Leo [00:32:41]:
Yeah. And that's what I keep telling people about digital in general, is that it just gives you the freedom to shoot like hell. And just for a while. There's.

Gary [00:32:48]:
There are some I got. There's one you may or may not have seen of a leopard climbing down from a tree. And the thing that sucks is that I. I snapped one when it was in the tree, I saw it start to climb down. I snapped again, and then I snapped a third time when it's already halfway down and its head is obscured by a bush. It's like, why didn't I just hold the shutter button? I would have gotten, like, 27 right photos. But there I, I. Instead of just having one good one, I would have gotten, you know, maybe even better one, a better position.

Gary [00:33:23]:
I don't know. So there's a lot of different things like that. I made a ton of mistakes, but I also made. I got a ton of really good shots during the trip. And, yeah, pretty happy with that. I think that sums up all the technology things. But I did have one more interesting thing that wasn't about me or my technology. On the trip, I crossed the equator, at least I think it was seven or nine times during the trip.

Gary [00:33:54]:
Okay, right on the equator. I mean, Nairobi is south of the equator. Samburu, where I was, north of the equator. So there were two crossings there. In Uganda, I stayed at a lodge or campsite that was almost on the equator. And then every morning from that place, getting up and going into Queen Elizabeth national park meant crossing the equator again. So tons of equator crossings, which was really cool. But the first time I crossed the equator, I got excited, and I pulled out my phone with the compass app, and there were people on the vehicle with me were geeky enough to also notice what I was doing and be like, ooh.

Gary [00:34:31]:
And then we watched as it went from, like, you know, 0 degrees, 0 minutes, you know, 15 seconds south, 14 seconds out, 13 seconds out there, like, oh, cool, cool. And I want to see when it gets to zero. Does it say north or south? Does it just say zero? What? You know, so I started screen recording and all this stuff. And then the interesting thing was is that we got to the equator crossing rest stop area first, still shy of the actual equator. And at that point, I think it's like 31 meters per second. And we were, like, still like eight seconds or whatever, you know, away from it. Yet there's a sign, there's a marker, everything. And I thought, huh, well, GPS isn't completely accurate.

Gary [00:35:19]:
That's fine. Then in Uganda crossing again, there's a much, much bigger crossing, a huge metal globe with, like, the equator and a line drawn through it and a huge sign and a viewing area, and it's, like, glorious. And I looked, and it's like, oh, this is, like, nine seconds away from the equator. The equator's, like, way over there, you know, and there's A line on the ground that they. That's not even painted. It's like metal they put into it. So but if I look at maps, the maps show me like it shows the road. I can see the road over there where you turn in and all this.

Gary [00:35:54]:
It's like the maps are completely accurate like to the gps can't be off by that much. Can't be off by half a kilometer here. Right. So what's going on? So I asked ChatGPT and I got an interesting answer that didn't occur to me. It was these road stops they were put in before gps. They used surveying techniques to figure out where the equator was at the time and they placed the roadside stops at convenient locations near where the survey said the equator hit the road. And that accounts for the inaccuracy. Even though they know where the equator is now.

Leo [00:36:38]:
Sure.

Gary [00:36:39]:
Very accurately. None of these countries are going to invest in moving the stops.

Leo [00:36:43]:
But you said that the maps lined up with.

Gary [00:36:48]:
The maps lined up with the. With the roads telling me that the GPS was accurate. Like the map was accurate, the GPS was accurate but the equator was not here. It was further away than where they, where they marked the equator to be Fascinating. Yeah. So. And both Kenya and Uganda had that issue. But yeah, both would have been established long before.

Gary [00:37:09]:
Long before.

Leo [00:37:09]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:37:10]:
In fact I'm pretty sure in Kenya the sign looked like at least the one in the one in Uganda. I could say well they probably had a. Like the stop was here and this is like an updated, you know, statue or whatever. But. But yeah, that was interesting. So sometimes it was disappointing too. I wanted to stand. I wanted a picture of me standing there at 000.

Leo [00:37:28]:
And yeah, you want to straddle the north and south hemisphere.

Gary [00:37:31]:
Exactly. And at the Kenyawan there's the. There's the kind of con man. Not really. It's a really soft con where they do a demonstration, right. They take a bowl and they put a stick in it and then there's like a hole in the bottom of the bowl and they pour water in and then the stick rotates and then they step, make a few steps over to the other side. Right. And then they, and then they tell you about it like the magnetic fields of the earth and I'm like oh, it's the Coriolis effect and it's not anything to do with magnets and it doesn't work like this at all.

Gary [00:38:01]:
And, and this isn't the equator. The equator is a half a kilometer down the road. But you know, it's a Very soft con, because it's just like a fun little demonstration and everybody gathers around and takes pictures and then, you know, a few people will tip a few bucks and. And that's all it is. But, yeah, it was kind of funny.

Leo [00:38:21]:
That is pretty funny.

Gary [00:38:22]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:38:23]:
Well, I'm glad you mentioned ChatGPT, because we hadn't talked about AI enough segue.

Gary [00:38:27]:
Yes.

Leo [00:38:30]:
To be completely honest, I was thinking about it before we started recording. It's been kind of a boring month, tech wise.

Gary [00:38:40]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:38:41]:
Summer, which is. Which is nice. I mean, I, you know, I mean, it's bad for podcasts that want to talk about exciting stuff, but there's just not been a whole lot going on. And I mentioned AI specifically because one of the things that did happen, of course, is that last week or the week before OpenAI announced ChatGPT 5, and everybody had these great expectations that it was going to be, you know, another order of magnitude. You know, three to four was. Was huge. Four to five is going to be amazing. It's not.

Leo [00:39:13]:
It's apparently fairly boring. It's better at some things somewhat, but it's not the leaps and bounds. So a lot of people, in fact, they even got a lot of backlash because one of the things they did was they removed access to all of the previous models when they rolled out ChatGPT5. And a number of people were quite upset about that because they had built workflows or relationships with specific models, and they actually managed to get Chat GPT to turn that back on again so that they could get back to 4 and 3.0 or 03 or whatever the heck it was. So. So. But honestly, the AI world, okay, that's been kind of a yawn on my little corner the world. Microsoft, I think it happened before you left.

Leo [00:39:59]:
Microsoft announced these extensions, extended service updates for Windows 10 so that people could continue to use Windows 10 and get security updates for an additional year for $30. It was controversial. Still is. But what's interesting is that I think while you were gone, they announced a couple of different ways now to get it for free. So you can continue to get your extended security updates for free for Windows 10 if you turn on backing up your settings and your files to OneDrive, which is horrible for a whole raft of reasons that I won't get into now, but I've written too many articles on the topic. Or if you've ever used Bing or apparently played with some of its other stuff, you may have accumulated rewards points, and apparently you can turn in some number of rewards points for Your extended service updates, which I thought was kind of. Kind of cool. So I quick.

Leo [00:41:06]:
I had. Not something I was shooting for, not something I paid attention to. So I quickly ran over to the Bing Rewards page and lo and behold, I had 7,000 points for reasons I have no clue on. And I think I only need like maybe a thousand for the extended security update. So. But honestly, you know. Yeah, that's probably about as exciting as things seem to have been here for the last month. You've had a lot more excitement than.

Leo [00:41:32]:
Than we have for sure.

Gary [00:41:33]:
Yeah. I mean. Yeah, definitely picked a. I mean, it was kind of intentional too. I knew that Apple, you know, Apple World gets busy in September and so I probably shouldn't disappear for two weeks in the middle of September. Should do it.

Leo [00:41:48]:
I used to have this vision of you watching a keynote on your phone in Uganda. Right. Really bad. Bad WI Fi or something.

Gary [00:41:54]:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, it's not. Yeah, it's definitely. It was kind of planned that way. And summer is typically kind of like that. I did hear about the, you know, the, the new OpenAI stuff. I do mean to like, I want to go in.

Gary [00:42:12]:
I have a prompt. You know, you can have your overall prompt. You know that your default prompt and my default prompt is a lot about be brief with me. You know, you don't need to go into. And I want to. I know that's part of the, you know, it's briefer now, I guess, the new model. So. But I, I'm probably not seeing that because of the, A lot of the things that.

Leo [00:42:34]:
A lot of the prompts that I use include word counts. So that kind of stuff doesn't change. Like, for example, one of the things I ask it to do frequently is summarize an article in 50 words or less. So that's not going to change. Right.

Gary [00:42:47]:
Or.

Leo [00:42:47]:
Or generate a paragraph. No more than 100 words of this. But yeah, it's. It's. The other thing is they've had it come back and forth on how sycophantic it was. You know, how, how, how much it tried to suck up. And I think they had to dial that back as well.

Gary [00:43:07]:
That is annoying. Especially. Yeah. Especially when you would tell it that it's like it got something wrong and I'm so sorry. And, and you're. You're in. You know, when I do, I'm interested. Getting the right answer.

Gary [00:43:20]:
Right. So I'm like, okay, that didn't work. Or I know that's not true.

Leo [00:43:24]:
Right.

Gary [00:43:24]:
I don't need an apology. Right. You're a large language model. You don't need to be like, oh, I'm so sorry, blah, blah, no, just, just go right into the. Okay, given that, let's go into, let's look at something else. And so yeah, I haven't used it enough. I've been using it since I got back as normal, but I have not really. I, I, because I guess because I had this break that I probably didn't notice.

Gary [00:43:47]:
Like if I had been like a lot of the other people and suddenly overnight it changed, I might have noticed. And yeah, I did read about all the people that had, were using chat GP GPT for relationship kind of stuff and go friends and stuff like that, that, that are kind of mourning the loss of the model.

Leo [00:44:07]:
Their friend just had a complete personality change.

Gary [00:44:10]:
Right, I know. And it's almost like, you know, I'm wondering if. I know there are certain companies that deal specifically with like, that's all they do is like a friend model kind of thing or therapist or whatever. And I'm wondering if the idea of like intelligence and personality almost needs to be kind of looked at by companies like OpenAI and the others and say, oh, is there a way that we can isolate the personality and from the intelligence and then improve the intelligence model and have like, you know, this is intelligence model five and personality model four.

Leo [00:44:46]:
Right, right.

Gary [00:44:47]:
So it's going to be more accurate but it's still going to behave like the other one. Or maybe they could have something when they change models where, you know, if you use it for that, it could go and say, oh, I'm going away for the weekend and to a wellness spa and I'm really going to, to look, be taking a good long look at myself and try to improve myself. And then you have two days where you can't talk to it and then it comes back and it says like, oh, I'm a new me. You know, and then it helps you kind of adjust to the change would be interesting. But yeah, anyway, I do have a.

Leo [00:45:25]:
Get off my lawn.

Gary [00:45:26]:
Yeah, yeah, I'll pile onto this. Go ahead.

Leo [00:45:28]:
Good, Excellent. One of the, one of the videos that's actually doing fairly well for me right now on YouTube, it talks about how I'm no longer using Google Search for a variety of reasons, advertising, AI summaries, just poor search, poor quality search results. But in it I mentioned that I was experimenting with Kaji, which is a paid service. And actually as it turns out right now Kaji is my default search engine. I'm actually quite happy with it. I'm not getting paid to say that. I wasn't getting paid for that video. And yet the number of people who are saying, oh, you must be getting paid by kaji, or you're just shilling for kaji or whatever.

Leo [00:46:14]:
No. And my reaction is, okay, yeah, I get it. We're all cynical, right? It's a very cynical world right now where you. Honestly, it's really hard to trust pretty much anybody. But does that mean that I can't talk about anything that I might have paid for without being accused of being sponsored by them? I mean, it's just. It's frustrating. So in an article that I wrote just yesterday or the day before, it'll come out in a couple weeks, I actually talk about should you use AI instead of a search engine? And, you know, it's not an either or. The bottom line is that they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Leo [00:47:04]:
And so I point out that I use Kaji, which I pay for, but they don't pay me. I use Perplexity, which I pay for, but they don't pay me. I use ChatGPT, which I pay for, but they don't pay me. I mean, it's frustrating to have to spell that out every single time just because people will assume the worst. So, anyway, that's my little rant.

Gary [00:47:27]:
No, and I get the. I get the same thing. I try to. I've. I've learned over the years. I. I try to denigrate the. The thing that I have to talk about that I pay for.

Gary [00:47:38]:
I just did it, actually. Earlier today. I did a video for my patrons about using EIMS on the iPhone. And I'm going to show on my iPhone the app I was using. Sure. And the app, of course, you pay for these ESIMs, right. I put very little thought into which app I would use. So I made a joke about that, that I basically didn't really research this at all.

Gary [00:48:00]:
I said, this is going to take hours to research. I'm just going to pick this one and move forward. I'm sure it's fine. Then I made a joke, and then I further went and said, I'm sure it's not even the best. I'm sure if I research it, probably chances are one of the others will be better than this one. So I really have no idea. I point that out a lot, and I've done that in the past with things. I'm like, oh, I'm using this product and it's a few bucks or whatever.

Gary [00:48:24]:
It's probably not the best One out there, you know, that kind of thing. But you still get some people like that and for good reason. I'm actually researching a video now because I did a search on Mac. What's like the most popular Mac based tutorials on YouTube now are. And I noticed that out of like the top 100, a large number of them were 10 free apps to get for your Mac. Now 30 free apps to get for your Mac. The free apps I load on every Mac, this whole thing of like free apps to get. And I looked at them and I'd be like, wait a minute, that's not a free app in the list.

Gary [00:49:00]:
Oh, they have 11, but they say they're 10 free apps. Oh, I see. That's their, that's their pitch. Right, right. They're going to give you 10 free ones and they're also going to say this other one is also worth it even though it's a, a few bucks. Or some of these apps are, they're free, but it's just trial version or it's just like the light version. And so I looked over them. I couldn't really find one that honestly just by looking at the description and a quick little preview of it I could say was like somebody wasn't getting paid for something, you know, so yeah, I get it.

Gary [00:49:33]:
Be cynical. Definitely be cynical on the one hand. On the other hand, notice that when those other people are shilling something, they either tell you most, in most cases they will tell you you're supposed to. Yeah, you're supposed to, or they simply will not claim to not. Right. You know, and pay attention when the, like the two of us and other good players out there go and say I am not getting paid for this.

Leo [00:50:00]:
Right.

Gary [00:50:01]:
That we're not, we're not going to lie to you outright about stuff like that.

Leo [00:50:05]:
It's funny, I, so I got two things. One is I, I generally recommend a specific backup program and what I tell people. There's actually a page, my affiliate disclosure page that talks about, I don't seek out affiliate relationships in order to promote a product. I choose products and then I might see if they have an affiliate relationship that I could, you know, get some, get some revenue from. My number one backup program recommendation. Hasn't had an affiliate program. I've asked them for an affiliate program because I promote them so much. It's like, nope, nope.

Leo [00:50:41]:
So I'm still doing it for free. The one that absolutely cracks me up is that as you can imagine, I talk a lot about Microsoft products. Yeah. And I have been accused of being a Microsoft shill. Right. Basically, as. As you might. The one that cracks me up the most is a video where I'm actually recommending that you have the option to not do what Microsoft wants you to do.

Leo [00:51:15]:
You could not Upgrade to Windows 11. You could run Windows 10 forever. You could switch to Linux. You could do all this kind of stuff. That's all counter to Microsoft's agenda. And yet that's where I'm a Microsoft shill. I just don't understand what they're getting out of it that points them in that direction.

Gary [00:51:36]:
Yep.

Leo [00:51:36]:
Anyway, so one of the places where we did have an overflow of interesting stuff is the Ain't it Cool section.

Gary [00:51:44]:
Yes. And I don't have anything because there's no point you're giving an overflow. And I see you added one thing at the end that I don't know about, but the first four things you're going to talk about. I, I love those four things.

Leo [00:51:58]:
Last one is what we'll talk about when I get there. There's a clear reason that you, you probably aren't familiar with. Anyway. The last thing I, I mentioned in this segment last, last episode a month ago was the Hail Mary project. I've since finished that audiobook and I just have to say it is so good. Not just the story, but, but the actual performance of the audiobook narrator. They did some things in there that were unusual, that just really worked. And as a story, it did not end anywhere near where I expected it to end, which is, again, I say that in a good way.

Leo [00:52:43]:
You know, I really, I felt like I walked away with closure, just not the closure I was expecting. So I loved that book. So what I decided to do then was my next audiobook was going to be Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I probably read 40 or 50 years ago, right back when it was originally. And the narrator is Stephen Fry, who is himself a great comedian, a great actor, and he's really good at doing voice work. One of the things that always gets me about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is that it's been an ever present concept in technology since the day I started from the mainframes that I started using originally to some of the other things all along the way. There have been references, there have been quotes, there have been things that have all come from Hitchhiker's Guide and it's subsequent. So it was interesting to listen to the story remembering the parts that I remembered, being reminded of the parts that I had forgotten. That's been a.

Leo [00:53:56]:
And that's also one that I finished actually just a few days ago, listening to on the TV side. We got sucked into severance. We started an episode, kind of scratched our head, committed to another episode, which is how these things tend to go.

Gary [00:54:15]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:54:15]:
And then it was, okay, dang it, now we gotta see what happens. So we did both seasons over the course of a couple weeks. And like I said in the notes here, it's. It's weird, but it is oddly compelling. It's. It's a very interesting premise and there were some surprising philosophical and moral issues that popped up from the premise. So looking forward to season three of that when it comes out. I don't.

Leo [00:54:49]:
I don't think that has a date yet.

Gary [00:54:51]:
Right. Yeah.

Leo [00:54:53]:
We also finished Resident Alien. Resident Alien was a great series with Tudyk.

Gary [00:55:02]:
I don't even know how to pronounce Alan Tudyk.

Leo [00:55:03]:
Yep, yep. And it ended sooner than they were hoping, but they did a nice job of wrapping it up nonetheless. So that was. It was actually a very touching finale. So we've enjoyed that. Now, back to the audiobook side of things. One of the things I decided to do was cancel my Audible subscription because I don't listen to enough audiobooks for really to make the subscription worthwhile. There are other places to get them.

Leo [00:55:35]:
But in order to do that before it auto renewed on me, I had to use my credits. So I went in and just started poking around and decided to look into a little bit of classic science fiction. What's playing in audible for me right now is the Science Fiction hall of Fame, Volume 1, 1929-1964. Basically, it's short stories and novellas picked by the, Excuse me, Science Fiction Writers association at the time in the mid to late 60s, as being, you know, the best of sci fi up until 64, 65. And the reason I mention it here is because I've read this book. I had this book again 50 years ago. It's a. It was a paperback.

Leo [00:56:26]:
It was, you know, I could even picture it. And there were subsequent volumes of it. This is volume one, obviously. And it just brings back good memories to me. The stories are from authors I know, authors I'd forgotten about, stories that I remembered, but I don't know where they came from. So anyway, the reason you probably haven't heard of it is because you're too young, Right?

Gary [00:56:48]:
Well, I've heard. I've heard of those kinds of books. I just.

Leo [00:56:52]:
This is a very specific.

Gary [00:56:54]:
Yeah, yeah. I don't have like, yeah, I've never, I've never really enjoyed the hall of Fame or anthology short story books. Oh, I'm not, I, I'm not a short, short story guy. Unless it's short stories by the same author, like collects their works or whatever. Like there's a very notable Heinlein collection, sure, but a lot of those stories tie into each other. There's also, of course, a very notable Ray Bradbury one where very specifically ties in. But the. But yeah, I just, it just, I don't know, the short story stuff.

Gary [00:57:34]:
I like short stories individually when they happen to show up, like, oh, here's an interesting short story here, you can read it at this website or it's whatever, but An Anthology of Short Stories. It's like, yeah, I've never really been into that.

Leo [00:57:50]:
Maybe. I mean, I, I enjoy it. And again, for me it's, it's probably extra appealing because it harkens back to when I first started reading sci fi, when I first got hooked. So anyway, self promotion. What you got, Gary?

Gary [00:58:09]:
Yeah, I'll just point to a video that was posted a few days ago. 10 Pro features to the Mac Finder. People are always putting down the Mac Finder. Well, I think this is typical of anything. It's like people, I hear people commenting that numbers isn't very good on the Mac or the Finder or whatever. And it's like, give me specifics. And the specifics usually are, oh, it does all of that. You just haven't taken the time to actually learn it.

Gary [00:58:37]:
You're still expecting all the keyboard shortcuts to be Windows or whatever. And the Mac Finder does actually have a lot of depth to. It does. In my experience, when people complain it doesn't do something, it does do that thing. You just have not.

Leo [00:58:50]:
Right.

Gary [00:58:51]:
You have not figured out how to do it yet because you're still thinking Windows. So anyway, I've got a video on that.

Leo [00:58:57]:
Those pesky Windows users.

Gary [00:58:58]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo [00:59:00]:
Okay. I'm going to point people at an interesting article that's gotten a little bit of feedback called why do we suddenly need AI? Somebody asked me that question, literally, why did. Why all of a sudden AI? And I took his question and I rewrote it. Why do we suddenly need the automobile written as if it's 120 years ago? Because a lot of the objections, a lot of the concerns, a lot of the prognostications that did and did not turn out to be true. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But if you, if you were to take a look at some of the new inventions along the time, you know, along humanity's timeline. They all start out the way we are at with AI. A lot of people think it's wonderful.

Leo [00:59:49]:
A lot of people think it's the devil, and the truth is somewhere in between. And we won't know for some time. So anyway, why do we suddenly need AI? It's askleo.com 183047 cool.

Gary [01:00:02]:
Sounds good.

Leo [01:00:03]:
You know what? If my clock is right, we're doing this at almost exactly an hour.

Gary [01:00:08]:
We are?

Leo [01:00:08]:
Of course we are. We haven't lost our touch. Yeah, I think that pretty much does us for that hour. Thanks as always, for listening, and we will see you here again very soon. Bye.

Gary [01:00:19]:
Bye. Bye.