Leo [00:00:24]:
Congratulations. We hit a milestone. Yes, a very geeky milestone. We're no longer an eight bit podcast.

Gary [00:00:32]:
Exactly. Episode one, 000-0000.

Leo [00:00:37]:
I did not take the time to double check the number of zeros you put into the notes. But yes, episode number 256, which for the geekier among us means it's episode 100 in hexadecimal, which. Which of course is, you know, the number system that we live in.

Gary [00:00:58]:
Yep. Well, or at least our computers live in it. And.

Leo [00:01:03]:
Oh, no, I've spent way too much time in Hexadecimal over the years for sure. Although interestingly enough, my very, very, very first job interview, too many years ago, they had me do. They sat me down and said, here, do some hexadecimal math. And as it turns out, I had gotten to that point in my education because it was just out of college without having done hexadecimal. So I just sort of completely floundered. The mainframe we were using at the time was all in octal, of all things.

Gary [00:01:38]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:01:39]:
And I just started to fiddle around with this new 8080 processor that had just come to market. But anyway, that, like I said, that was back in the day. Now, you know, my life, my brain thinks in, in Hexadecimal. I got two computers over the last couple of months, two new computers, and I just, I wanted to chat about them briefly because while they're not cutting edge, breaking news kind of stuff, they are things that were sort of, well, new to me. I finally had reasons to use them. And that's just mini PCs. Now, by mini PCs, I mean, these devices are like rec, you know, little boxes. They're like 4 inches by 4 inches by 2 inches with nothing more than a bunch of holes into which you plug things and, you know, a button you push to turn it on.

Leo [00:02:41]:
I know that. You know, obviously Mac mini's been around for a long time, several years, and I suspect that these PC equivalents have been around for some time as well, but they are now getting to a point where they are very commonplace, very affordable. I was shocked at how affordable these were for the. The amount of horsepower I was getting in there. The downside, of course, is that unlike a traditional desktop PC, you know, you can't necessarily open the box and start throwing in expansion cards and multiple different disk drives and, you know, the kinds of things that I've been doing to my main desktop PC, you know, I definitely have added multiple things to it over the five years of its life. But even so, these little guys, you know, they have M2 SSD slots, so you can put in relatively decent sized and decent speed hard disk equivalents. They have some limited amount of RAM upgradability and they come with a pretty decent processor. I think the one that I, I got two of the same model and I believe it's got a, an AMD 12 core.

Leo [00:03:57]:
I think it is maybe more for what I'm doing in my case, what I was doing. And I've actually got an article that'll be coming out in a couple of weeks for Ask Leo that goes into this in a little bit more detail. But what I ended up doing was I have a machine in my basement that I consider my pseudo nas. You know, it's, it's not a NAS in the traditional sense, but it is a bunch of storage that's attached to my network. So I will go ahead and call it my, my NAS wannabe. And all it was was a PC. In this case it was an older HP PC that I had repurposed to which I have 11 external drives connected. And I decided to replace that older HP because it's, it was getting tired.

Leo [00:04:42]:
It's been around for a long, long time. I ended up replacing it with one of these little mini PCs, which basically boiled down to unplug the monitor, the keyboard, the mouse, and the external drives, replace the box, plug everything back in again, and off you go. Now in my case it was a little less than off you go because the box comes with Windows 11 Pro Pre installed, but that's not what I use. I ended up installing Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Linux Server Edition, which is what I had on the hp. And now I've got this really nifty, pretty snappy little box down in my basement that's handling all these external hard drives. It's actually pretty darned cool. And I'm kind of surprised that I didn't do it sooner. The other one that I replaced is I had a, a backup laptop and in fact it's actually sitting here on my desk.

Leo [00:05:38]:
Even though the, the podcast viewers or viewers listeners won't be able to see it. It's basically an exact replica of my, the laptop that I travel with. And I have been using it, as I call it Scanner Central here. I have three scanners on the desk behind me. I've got a document scanner, a flatbed scanner, and then a slide slash negative scanner. And I just had all three of those connected up to this laptop and using it with remote desktop. Then to manage things. It was basically, it had Dropbox installed.

Leo [00:06:19]:
So whenever I scan something, bits showed up in Dropbox and got distributed to all the computers that I needed them on. And it dawned on me that, you know, that's not really a great use for a laptop, but it's a perfect use for one of these little mini PCs. So I ended up doing the same thing. I ended up replacing the laptop with one of these mini PCs, connected up my scanners to it, installed all the appropriate software. This time I did let it install the default Windows 11 Pro. And once again, now I've got this nifty new quieter, slightly more responsive since it's, you know, three or four years newer than the laptop machine. Anyway, I just thought it was a nifty idea. I mean, it's kind of weird considering how long you and I have been in the industry to think of we've got a fully functioning, very capable PC that is actually somewhat smaller than the size of my hand.

Leo [00:07:24]:
And you know, I have recollection of, of carrying around the 20 pound luggable PCs back in the day and you know, that kind of thing. So I just thought it was kind of interesting, kind of fun. I had fun installing and in getting these things. The one thing, the one problem, if you want to call it that, that I ran into is of course my laptop for the scanning PC. The laptop has its own screen, so I had to come up with a replacement for that. And that turned out to be again, this is not something that I'm looking at every day. It's just something that's sitting in a, literally in a drawer behind me. But it needed a piece, a screen of some sort since you can't do absolutely everything via remote.

Leo [00:08:10]:
So I just got this inexpensive, it's technically considered a portable monitor. It's not very large. I think it's like 12 inches or something like that. And it's got an HDMI cable and a USB C cable for power and that's it. And you just plug them both in and poof, you've got a fully functioning PC. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting. I know that like I said, Mac Minis have been around for a while and a lot of people are pretty jazzed about them. I just wanted to remind folks that, hey, you know what, this is happening over on the PC.

Gary [00:08:43]:
Sure.

Leo [00:08:43]:
And the ones I got were actually ended up being kind of lower end because I wasn't really going for horsepower for these guys. There's some pretty powerful ones as well, you know, more, you know, more beefier CPUs, more RAM, more disk, that kind of stuff.

Gary [00:08:57]:
Yeah, the. You know, it's funny you should mention this because the big rumor today happens to be, and in a week people forget about this, is that Apple may next year release a low cost MacBook again. They used to have a low cost MacBook years ago. It really wasn't that low of a cost and they kind of got rid of it. To simplify the line, suggest the MacBook Air MacBook Pro. But there's been some rumors floating around for about a year or more that they'll bring back the MacBook and then a new article today saying that, yeah, that's going to happen next year. It's going to be a low cost Mac MacBook model. Don't know if they'll just call it MacBook or MacBook SE or something else.

Gary [00:09:40]:
The interesting thing is since Apple switched to their own processors, they have two lines of processors or system on the chips. One of them is primarily used in the iPhones, the A series currently at the A18 or something like that for the iPhone. Then there's the M series for the Mac, but they're not really that fundamentally different. And in fact the iPads, some of them run off of the A processors and some of them run off of the M processors. Same operating system, very similar hardware in many of those cases, except they swapped out the chip. So it's long been thought, and nobody's doubting it, that a Mac could be released with an A chip in it. An A chip is lower power, well, lower power and I mean power consumption, not necessarily. And lower heat, you know, won't run the battery down, that kind of thing, but is pretty highly capable.

Gary [00:10:39]:
You know, especially there's the new one on my new iPhone model, the 17 Pro Max has cooling, these cooling chambers inside of it and stuff. So it could actually run at a higher clock speed because it has better cooling designed for that. So the idea is, oh, there could be a cheaper Mac if they stuck one of these A processors in there as there are in say the iPad mini, which runs the same operating system as the iPad Pro, which runs on an M processor. So it's clear that they could adapt any of their operating systems to run on any of these processors. And it would be interesting if there was like a 599 MacBook which, you know, they would have to throw like the cheapest screen on it, maybe the case would have to be made of cheaper material, that kind of thing. Get back to that. I would love, you know, just Just want to speculate wildly because especially the, the iPad now is. With some of the new stuff in the latest version of the iPad OS you can do Windows, move Windows around and it look, it looks and starts to feel a lot like Mac OS now for the, the first time.

Gary [00:11:48]:
So things are really getting blurred. So I would love to see them blurred more like I would love to see. Since my new iPad, I have an iPad Pro. It has an M processor in it like a Mac, but it's running, it's running iPad OS and the. Actually that's wrong. I didn't buy that iPad, but the iPad Pro does. I bought the iPad Air, which is different, but they run the same operating system. Technically you should be able to run Mac OS on it and then actually have a Mac operating system on the iPad with a touchscreen or.

Gary [00:12:28]:
I would love it if they would just stop having us get processors like all over the place. Like, why not have a device that allows you to take your iPhone and use its processor, especially the new ones, since we know they're so powerful, use it as the processor for a Mac. So you know, you put your iPhone into Mac mode and it basically just connects up and just is used as like the central, you know, hardware.

Leo [00:13:03]:
For, for some reason I have this vision of a Mac mini with an iPhone sized slot.

Gary [00:13:11]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo [00:13:12]:
And you just put in the phone.

Gary [00:13:14]:
Or just, I mean, for like some sort of portable thing. You know, it's the kind of thing where you know, the, you'd have to add to it. Obviously there's the keyboard, the trackpad and the screen. But then also maybe, you know, you could do storage. I mean, the iPhone goes up to a lot of storage too. It's just that it's expensive at that point. You're not talking about a cheap device. Right, right.

Gary [00:13:34]:
So maybe you do something where the, this, I don't know, this dock station has its own kind of, you know, hard drive or SSD in it. But anyway, it's just a lot of weird, interesting possibilities and there's also rumor that we're going to get the first, you know, in about two years, the first touch screen Mac possibly. I thought they might finally. They've been saying that for a long time. But a lot of interesting, odd possibilities as the processors, like the mobile ones just become so much more powerful.

Leo [00:14:11]:
I kind of sort of expect that there will always be a need for a division in processors for no other reason than power consumption.

Gary [00:14:20]:
Right, right. Yeah.

Leo [00:14:21]:
The architecture of the processor, I mean, if you're trying to save power you make a different set of hardware trade offs than you do if you're trying to go full bore in a desktop or whatever kind of PC.

Gary [00:14:32]:
Yeah, Apple's really blurred that a bit a lot with this because they're building these things to go into these MacBook Airs.

Leo [00:14:39]:
Right.

Gary [00:14:39]:
And the iPads. Right. And yeah, it's the kind of thing where I think they. Yeah, I think they really. It's not as clear cut on the Apple side and part of it is because they're throwing these really powerful processors into these iPhones. Right. They're not cheaping out on that. And there's a lot that these iPhones do.

Gary [00:15:00]:
Like the AR stuff where it's like 3D models rendered in real time with the camera and all of that. That's using some pretty powerful stuff in the processor and that's making it kind of an equivalent to what a Mac was very recently. I mean actually even Macs now, you know, if you get the lowest end, the standard, you know, like an M4 processor, just base model, and you compare that to what's in the iPhone Pro. I mean, I don't know if there's going to be too much of a difference in terms of the power between those.

Leo [00:15:34]:
What I keep wondering, given what you've just said about how the operating system on each. I don't want to say it's irrelevant, but it's very similar. You know, you can put either operating system on either cpu. Why not just merge them?

Gary [00:15:54]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:15:54]:
Have an Apple OS that is the same OS on both on all the devices. It seems like, you know, they're about 80% there anyway.

Gary [00:16:07]:
I think they actually are there. It's just that they branch them off later on. Like I think the way, I don't think they. They think of it this way or. And we probably shouldn't but I mean there is like a core Apple OS. Each of the OSS, iPad OS, iOS, Mac OS, WatchOS, TV OS and Vision OS. All of those branch. There's lots of shared code between all of those.

Gary [00:16:33]:
There are people that work on things that go into all of those operating systems. I think there is that shared code base and there is that thing. But instead of giving say the iPhone everything the Mac has, it's kind of stripped down to only what the iPhone needs, plus some things that only the iPhone needs. And then the Mac gets only what the Mac needs, not the phone stuff, plus some stuff that only the Mac needs. It's kind of all. But that's kind of taken care of at a higher level. At Apple code repositories and such, where they've got all that, I think they probably got that. The fact that they've allowed themselves to branch out to so many operating systems I think shows that they really got that down.

Gary [00:17:24]:
That's probably all part of the magic that's behind the curtain going on.

Leo [00:17:27]:
I'm sure that they've got the logistics.

Gary [00:17:30]:
They really have figured that out and they're not like repeating. Well, I know for new apps, a lot of new apps, you'll suddenly lose a couple of minor little features on the Mac app, like, oh, it doesn't do this anymore, it doesn't do that, but it does all this new stuff that's the same stuff that's on the iPhone and it kind of acts and behaves a little different. What's happened there is a whole bunch of cod was standardized between the two of them and that's what's happening a lot. And they prefer to do that with the newer stuff, like the newer stuff like the journal app and Freeform and things like that. People complain that they don't behave like old school Mac apps in a lot of ways. But on the bright side, if you go from that app on the iPhone or iPad to the Mac app, it's very much the same kind of thing. Yeah, I think that that's helping. But it could lead to some interesting hardware stuff if, you know, Apple and these other companies, you know, want to do it too.

Gary [00:18:27]:
I mean, Nvidia certainly has all these processors now being used in different ways on different machines. Everything from these PCs to other types of devices and stuff. And yeah, it's just, it's just going to be, you know, companies taking the risk on a new type of device. We're seeing it, I think, in the, the eyewear kind of stuff. A lot of companies coming out with totally different kinds of glasses.

Leo [00:18:58]:
Right.

Gary [00:18:58]:
That do different things. Matter of fact, I went down a rabbit hole the other week just thinking it's like, oh, you know, I see the, you know, meta was coming out with something new and there was like a new rumor for some other company. And I thought, well, what, what else is available? Because somebody mentioned something I never heard of and I found articles that are like, you know, eight smart glasses you can buy now. And some of them were pretty cheap and I was amazed at like the range. Like some of them had cameras, some didn't. Some of them put stuff like in your vision and some didn't, you know, and there was all these different things. These things did. And that's part of the experimentation.

Gary [00:19:35]:
It's like, clearly companies want to create the killer piece of eyewear and they're using all. Every one of them has got some sort of processor in it, some sort of memory in it, some sort of cool micro battery going on in there and all this. And they're all trying new things. And I'm sure that Microsoft and Google and Apple have labs just filled with dozens of different weird prototypes that they just have sitting around experimenting on constantly and trying to figure out what they could do. So that's probably where everybody thinks is going to be next as some sort of eyewear.

Leo [00:20:15]:
I struggle with eyewear mostly because. Well, two reasons. One, most of them are so ugly. I mean, they have to be because of the amount of hardware that is being included in the frame, right?

Gary [00:20:33]:
Oh, yeah.

Leo [00:20:34]:
I mean, you know, I'm sitting here wearing essentially wire frames at all.

Gary [00:20:38]:
Yeah, yeah. When I put on my reading glasses, I prefer the thicker frames.

Leo [00:20:42]:
Right. But even those are thinner than, you know, most of the, of the, of the eyewear, you know, glasses that, you know, folks like Meta are doing. So, yeah, there's that, and that's purely aesthetics. And I suppose when everybody's doing it, that'll be the style. But the thing that bothers me the most is the recording aspect of it, the privacy implications. And I don't. It goes both ways, right? The. There was a news story that broke, I think, last week or the week before where somebody had figured out how to turn off the light that is on when your Meta glasses are recording so you can record without it being clear that you're recording.

Leo [00:21:30]:
And of course, it was immediately misused going into places and recording things that shouldn't be recorded. So there's that aspect of it. But the converse is true too, right? If you. If you're doing the right thing and you're using that light to indicate that you're recording, everybody around you is going to, like, walk away or shut up or. Or severely censor themselves. I mean, I know that there are uses, but I'm just not convinced that it's necessarily going to be a great mainstream thing for some time.

Gary [00:22:07]:
Yeah, I mean, there are so many weird, like, disconnected things that they can do because there's that recording aspect and I could see the use for that. Especially somebody who likes to walk and hike.

Leo [00:22:20]:
Oh, absolutely. Hiking is what came to mind for me too.

Gary [00:22:22]:
Yeah, yeah. There's in so much use for that, except that I don't expect the cameras to ever be very good compared to, like, other cameras. I went, you know, when I went on my trip this year to Africa, one of the things I did was I, you know, went on hike in the mountains for gorillas, right? We went and we. We were able to go and find some gorillas and the, you know, and. And it's. That was amazing. It was the only time I ever used a GoPro like device. And I had thrown this thing because it's so tiny.

Gary [00:22:58]:
I threw it into my bag thinking, oh, I might use this, you know, And I. When I went on that hike, I thought, oh, this is a once in a lifetime thing. I had figured out a way to clip it to the. My baseball caps, like, bill. So it wasn't any weird special. Like it was in the middle of my head or something. I just clipped it to the bill of my cap and just turned it on. And I just turned it on and let it run the entire time.

Gary [00:23:23]:
So in addition to, like, experiencing it and getting some good photos, I came back and I was like, I have the whole thing captured. And it didn't fail. It totally captured an hour of really crappy footage. And part of it was because it was not a GoPro, right? It wasn't a 400 or $500 GoPro. It was a $60 GoPro knockoff, right? And the. You could tell the quality was not good. First when you looked at the footage, it looked okay. Like, was like, oh, this is.

Gary [00:23:59]:
I mean, it's 4K. It's like, oh, yeah, it's real 4K. And I'm getting it. But just, you know, frame rate, how it dealt with light, how it dealt with movement, you know, in the frame, especially because it's attached to me, so there's constant movement as I'm moving my head around. It just. I was. Look at. Looking at some of the video I took with my iPhone and looking at the video I took with this thing.

Gary [00:24:23]:
There's no comparison. And basically ended up with an hour's worth of useless footage of something amazing, right? It's like gorillas are all around me, yet it's still. Somehow the footage ended up being that bad that it's like there's nothing useful. And then the cameras in these glasses are going to be even smaller and even lower quality than this. So the idea of going on an amazing hike to, like, up the canyon, and it's like, I'll record this with my glasses. It's like, oh, no, just don't do that. Take some nice photos. Take a minute of video here, minute video there.

Gary [00:24:58]:
Much better option. But that Being said, it still have its uses. And the other uses that are like totally disconnected with that are things like actually having something in your vision.

Leo [00:25:09]:
Yes. Oh yeah, absolutely. Or up to heads up.

Gary [00:25:14]:
And I think there's the full on, like. Yeah. Being able to put anything in the glasses, like a full augmented reality experience. But also there's the overhead display kind of thing where it's not like that at all. It's low resolution, perhaps even monochrome, but just some information. Little alarms, messages, a clock, a timer, you're on a hike. Just how far have I gone? How far do I have left to go? What's the next little thing? A little arrow points to the left and says 0.5 miles to the left. The tiniest bit of information compared to no information is really kind of powerful.

Gary [00:25:55]:
So I see glasses that just did that. It didn't even do it on their own, but all they did was receive a tiny bit of information from my phone. An app on my phone via Bluetooth that says display this. Display these characters, you know, at the, in the upper right hand corner or whatever, could be like really extremely useful and maybe wouldn't require there to be super thick frames with a battery.

Leo [00:26:18]:
And when you think about it as a kind of like, I guess it's what one of the many of the watches, if not the original watches, they weren't necessarily standalone. They were always designed to be paired with a phone. If your glasses are designed to be paired with a phone, then you can offload a lot of the hardware. So the glasses could be basically, you know, a quote unquote projector onto your, onto your glasses, a receiver and a battery. It just basically becomes a remote display.

Gary [00:26:52]:
Yeah. And then you could add to that a microphone, which those could be extremely tiny. And then you could give commands and you could add a tiny button. Because right now we're used to, With AirPods, those of us that have AirPods, we're used to actually the motion of just tapping on one of them. So tapping on the side of the glasses at a certain spot and then saying something or even tapping in a combination of something like two taps does this, you know, tap back, tap forward, does something, you know, could be just enough input to actually make something really useful without having to go overboard and say, you know, high resolution, full color augmented reality display, camera, you know, stereo sound, blah, blah, blah. You know, I mean, all this stuff like you don't have to go that far to make something useful. It kind of reminds me of how like the early PDAs, you know, there were all these assistants that were really complex handheld devices that did cool stuff. And Apple made the most complex.

Gary [00:27:53]:
The Newton.

Leo [00:27:54]:
Yes, I remember the Newton.

Gary [00:27:56]:
The Palm Pilot was the winner for the short time that those things dominated because it was simple and small. It just was a black and white screen. It kept it really small, kept the battery life really good. It just did the basics. It didn't even recognize your handwriting. You had to learn how to handwrite in a special way to actually write something on it. But it kind of worked for the five years that those made money for companies or didn't make money. Palm was pretty much the winner.

Gary [00:28:30]:
I think the same thing could be true possibly for a few years with smart glasses. Some company that comes out with like, here's a simple thing, it's not flashy, but it, it gets the job. It gives value for what it, you know, 99 bucks and you get this value out of it.

Leo [00:28:45]:
I do want to circle back briefly to the camera because my theory on the camera is that it'll get better. Yeah, cameras have been, I don't think we've seen the best pinhole camera, if you want to call it that that is possible yet. And I suspect that as those improvements are made, they're going to show up in glasses and Maybe even your $50 GoPro knockoff so that we'll end up with much better.

Gary [00:29:17]:
Maybe. But notice how like the, the, the latest cameras that are good with photos, like I'm holding up my iPhone pro.

Leo [00:29:24]:
Right.

Gary [00:29:24]:
The cameras are better.

Leo [00:29:26]:
Oh, they'll always be better. It's bigger. It's not so much that you're trying to replace your iPhone.

Gary [00:29:34]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:29:34]:
It's that you're trying to come up with this other use case that isn't currently covered with anything sufficient.

Gary [00:29:41]:
Right. But I'm saying that the, that the makers of the cameras are making them better by making them bigger, more optics. So the idea of like getting one that works well on glasses and just like is right off in the corner next to your eye. It's not serving that because they need somebody else to be saying we need to make them smaller and better at the same time. And it's not happening right now because the money is let make them better even if it means making them bigger.

Leo [00:30:11]:
Right.

Gary [00:30:12]:
And so I don't know, we'll, we'll see. I'm not, I, I, I think there is something in, in glasses, I think there will eventually be something. But what those feature that, what the right feature set is which company comes out with it breaks new ground and stuff going to have to see.

Leo [00:30:31]:
I just wanted the frames to look better.

Gary [00:30:33]:
Yeah, no, definitely. And that's definitely got to happen. So here's a topic that we. I think we talked about this already recently, but I actually found a name for this. So this is something that I noticed about six months ago. Started to happen with people who were asking me questions or leaving comments, either on my videos or on other places where people talk about technology. I didn't notice it before. There's a name for it.

Gary [00:31:07]:
It's called false consensus effect. Basically, what it comes down to, this version of it is somebody has a problem and they frame the problem or announce the problem in that something is wrong with the product for everybody. For instance, they'll say that the clock in the menu bar is broken in the latest version of macOS. They go directly there. It's not working for them. Therefore everybody must be experiencing the same problem. And it's a problem with the operating system for everybody. I started just.

Gary [00:31:50]:
I guess maybe it was always there, but not enough for me to notice. Then about six months ago, it started happening more and more to the point now where it's daily. I'm just seeing it everywhere. People complaining about their false consensus.

Leo [00:32:05]:
You're just. You just mentioned.

Gary [00:32:06]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, really seeing it everywhere. The. But the idea being that instead of doing the kind of. The logical, you know, critical thinking of thinking, okay, there's a problem having a problem. So is it just me or is it happening for everybody? People immediately skip that part and just assume it happens for everybody. And it's not that they're. It's not that they are kind of like pronouncing it like, oh, I've seen this, therefore everybody must have it. It's just that assumption they make.

Gary [00:32:36]:
And it doesn't even occur to them that it could just be a problem with their setup, with their settings, with their. With their particular piece of hardware. It's not. It's not something you generally see elsewhere. Like, you wouldn't, for instance, get in your car one day and your car is making a weird noise and say, oh, all of the 2019 Toyota 4 runners have this problem. It's like, no, you would immediately assume there's something wrong with my car, right? But what you're seeing in technology all over the place, across all different devices and different apps and everything, even seeing it with websites and everything like that, is immediately there's a problem. It's got to be with everybody. When is the company going to fix this for all of us? Then a Lot of people chiming in.

Gary [00:33:24]:
What do you mean, all of us? It's not happening for us. It's happening for you. Maybe you shouldn't sit back and wait for the company to fix it, because the company may not even know that it's happening to you specifically. You need to figure it out.

Leo [00:33:40]:
Unwarranted generalization. Yeah, yeah. It's. It's obviously. I see that kind of thing all the same way. What cracks me up is even if it's nothing broken, it's just something they don't like.

Gary [00:33:56]:
Yeah, sometimes. Yeah.

Leo [00:33:58]:
I don't like the windows 11 start menu, therefore everybody hates the windows 11 starts men start menu, which is not the case. Right. I'm here to tell you there are people that actually like Windows 11 and actually like the Windows 11 Start menu, or at least tolerate it without hating it, as other people do for whatever reason. I'm not saying that they shouldn't. It's just that what they shouldn't do is generalize. Where I see this a lot are when there is a. How do I want to put it? A misunderstanding or a misconception about a particular feature, especially if that feature is even borderline controversial. Obviously.

Leo [00:34:56]:
I have a specific example. There's a feature in Windows, I think it's now in Windows 11, called recall. And what it is designed as is the way they promoted it originally, is that Recall will take periodic screenshots of your screen and save them so that you can then ask AI questions about what you've been doing or, you know, basically essentially recall all the stuff that you forget, because Lord knows we forget. What was I doing 10 minutes ago? Right. Recall is supposedly a solution for that. Now, right away, of course, you get the conspiracy theorists who say Microsoft is screenshotting everything and they're sending it up to their servers and they're running AI on it, and they're doing all this stuff with my data that I didn't give them permission to. So it doesn't matter now that Recall, as it turns out, it's off by default. It's local to your machine.

Leo [00:36:06]:
It's encrypted. So it's only on. It's only doing things if you want it to, and it is not sending your data anywhere. But no, that doesn't matter. Almost every day I end up when I'm talking about, you know, like, Windows 10, Windows 11 comparisons, what's good or bad about Windows 11. I keep coming up with people who say, but Recall does this horribly invasive thing. Or they'll just say, Windows 11 does this horribly invasive thing because there's this feature. Oh, I forgot to mention the feature also only works on certain PCs because it requires that the PC have the copilot plus hardware specifications.

Leo [00:36:49]:
So it actually has. I don't know if it's a neural processor or what, but it's got AI capability built in. So the bottom line there is that, you know, great. There's this feature that nobody understands that everybody says, everybody knows that Windows 11 is doing this thing. Not only are you wrong, but no, it's not. So yes, people like to overgeneralize, as I said, and they're definitely more than willing to do that when they think there is some kind of a nefarious intent behind whatever's going on. Conspiracy theorists love that kind of stuff.

Gary [00:37:27]:
Yep, Yep, indeed.

Leo [00:37:30]:
So you mentioned an interesting word a while ago. The word was weight. I forget the exact context, but it basically said has, you know, when the person was having a problem with his clock, he was going to wait for Apple to fix it.

Gary [00:37:50]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:37:53]:
My. I ran into this literally this morning. I had someone report a problem that he was having with a specific Windows 11 feature and I duplicated his problem. It appears to me that a recent update broke something in Windows 11. Not unheard of. It happens. So my most common advice in situations like that, wait. Just wait for the next update cycle.

Leo [00:38:31]:
It may not be happening to everybody, but if you could get some kind of. Of. Of sense that the problem really did happen as a result of an update, and it's not just you, then there's a pretty good chance, I'll give it an 80% chance that the next update cycle, this particular problem will be solved. The reason I mention it at all is because, and I'm sure you see this as well, I have seen people waste so much time and energy researching and finding solutions that don't work or cause more problems or have nothing to do with it. Whereas if it's something that they could just live with for a month, say until the next update cycle, they wouldn't waste any time at all. It would just solve fix itself.

Gary [00:39:27]:
Yeah. The key is, like you said, they've confirmed that it's happening for others.

Leo [00:39:34]:
Yes.

Gary [00:39:34]:
Which means they didn't fall victim to my thing and assume that it's happening to everybody. Yes, they actually took the time. But I mean that is, that is like, I guess like the toolkit. Like if I was to put together a kind of a flowchart or toolkit for if you've got a problem, like one of the things would Be is figure out if this is you or other people. If it's other people, see what other people saying about it. Because it might be as simple as a ton of people saying flip the switch, you know, that kind of thing. And. But yeah, one of the branches off of that flowchart is it's happening to a lot of other people.

Gary [00:40:07]:
Seems to be a widespread problem. Then wait, as you said, wait for the next update, wait for it to be fixed because you're not going to be able to fix it, you know, or if like a middle ground for that is see if there's a solution people talk about now. And if not, wait, that's the frustrating part. Next week.

Leo [00:40:25]:
That's the frustrating part for the person who was, who I was hearing from because I, in a sense he kind of sort of did confirm that it was happening to other people because he had found like half a dozen different solutions where I'm using air quotes on the word solutions. And he had tried them and tried them and tried them and none of them worked. Right. And honestly, I mean, I don't, I don't want to necessarily say that it's not an important feature, but it definitely feels like a feature that someone could live without for a month. Right?

Gary [00:41:02]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:41:02]:
And if you're in that kind of a situation, then yeah, just wait. It's okay.

Gary [00:41:07]:
I get that. And I think, I think you have to think critically about the difference between other people are having this problem and widespread problem. Right. Because for, it's certainly true for Mac, so it must be even more true for Windows. Millions of people out there, Right. If you're having any kind, describe the weird problem you've got. If you go searching, you will definitely find somebody else that has that same problem. They may actually not even have the same problem.

Gary [00:41:34]:
They may just be describing their problem wrong and you're describing your problem wrong. And they seem close enough. But I get that a lot where somebody will say I'm having this issue. And I say I don't see it like it does. It's not happening for me. And they said, well, I see lots of other people reporting this online. I'm like, oh, okay, let me look into it. And I can't find other people talking about it.

Gary [00:41:56]:
Or I find one discussion that's like with three people talking about it somewhere. And I'm like, okay, if this was really widespread, it would not be one discussion at Apple site with three people talking about it. What's your definition of lots, dozens and hundreds of people? And it would be all over all, you know, all of this. So you have to think critically about that too. And then realize the squeaky wheel thing, which I know we've talked about, is, you know, if there's feature A and feature A isn't working for you and you notice four other people saying it's not working for them, you can't go and say, well, the only people talking about this are people saying it's not working. Because people don't generally like go online and say, I thought I would take time out of my day to post that I'm using this new feature and it works fine. Thank you for reading my post. Nobody does that, you know, so it's always the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Leo [00:42:50]:
The other one that, that I think a lot of people have a hard time conceptualizing is that I have no idea how many Macs are out there, but I know that there were numbers last year that Microsoft. There's a billion Microsoft Windows installations out there. Say, I think it's probably more, but there's a billion. Okay, great. That means that if a hundred thousand people have a problem, that is point one percent.

Gary [00:43:15]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:43:16]:
Is that enough?

Gary [00:43:18]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:43:19]:
And I'm not even saying yes or no. Right. Because of course it's going to involve. Depend on the context and all that kind of stuff. But I think a lot of people don't understand sometimes just how big a lot needs to be for it to actually not just necessarily get the attention of companies like Microsoft or Apple or Google or whomever, but how big it needs to be for them to be able to take the risk of fixing whatever it is that needs to be fixed.

Gary [00:43:49]:
Yeah, no, exactly. There's a lot of. A lot of that goes on. And you know, a lot of people with first person syndrome too, you know, where they're. Or main character syndrome, you know? You know what I mean?

Leo [00:43:59]:
Where it's all about them.

Gary [00:44:00]:
Yeah, well, it's just. But it's just like, you know, I'm having this little problem with using my technology and this is like a big deal that everybody needs to stop what they're doing and we need to all figure this out. It's like, yeah, sometimes it's not like that, but. Yeah.

Leo [00:44:17]:
Alrighty. So apparently this is a lukewarm week.

Gary [00:44:24]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:44:25]:
We don't have a lot for Ain't It Cool, but I do have an Ain't It Lukewarm? Have you been watching the Witcher?

Gary [00:44:32]:
Yes, and I am just one episode into this new season.

Leo [00:44:35]:
Oh, okay.

Gary [00:44:36]:
Well, with the new Witcher.

Leo [00:44:38]:
Yeah. So hopefully I won't be spoiling anything to you. We finished the season last night and to be clear, I enjoyed it. Right. But there's always a big but the I was less than enthused with it, certainly compared to previous seasons. Now everybody is jumping on the fact that it's a new actor playing the witcher as being the problem. I didn't have that problem.

Gary [00:45:09]:
Yeah, I don't have a problem either.

Leo [00:45:11]:
Hemsworth was doing a fine fact, a better than expected job of replicating the look and some of the mannerisms of the original Witcher. Now, my problem has been the story just doesn't seem as compelling this season. I mean, there's interesting stuff going on, don't get me wrong. But it just didn't move me in the way that or engage me in the way that previous seasons did. So I'll be interested to hear your reflection on that aspect of it when you finally finish it. The one thing I will tell you is that there is supposedly a season five and that indeed season four ends in a way that you desperately want there to be a season five to. To answer all the questions that it leaves open. Yep.

Leo [00:46:02]:
But anyway, so that's my, my Ain't it lukewarm for this week.

Gary [00:46:06]:
Okay. And we could skip right into the self promotion since I really haven't read anything new this last week or watched anything new.

Leo [00:46:15]:
What have you been doing with yourself anyway?

Gary [00:46:18]:
Yeah, really? Well, you know, because it's not always cool. Sometimes it's lukewarm, sometimes it's less than lukewarm. And sometimes you could really enjoy something, but it's not necessarily something you would think to recommend to other people.

Leo [00:46:31]:
Sure.

Gary [00:46:31]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:46:32]:
By the way, I did finish the. That. What is it? The Night in Lonesome October book.

Gary [00:46:36]:
Oh, yes.

Leo [00:46:37]:
Yeah, I actually read that one a day throughout October.

Gary [00:46:40]:
Oh, excellent.

Leo [00:46:41]:
Finished it. Halloween.

Gary [00:46:43]:
Talk about an author, Rogers Lasni, in this case, going out on top. His last book.

Leo [00:46:48]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:46:49]:
And he wrote, I think, probably one of his best as the last thing he wrote.

Leo [00:46:55]:
It was fun.

Gary [00:46:56]:
Interesting. Looking at our blatant self promotion, I had an interesting kind of hit with a video that I thought was just going to be a dud. It was just a good idea. I do videos. Sometimes a good idea. It might help a few people and I do it because I'm interested in it. But a lot of people like this video. It's called quickly check a website without using your browser.

Gary [00:47:18]:
The idea being that, yeah, the Mac browser Safari has a little web app thing where you could say, hey, take this website make it into a web app. And it's like a little app that relies on the browser framework and just shows you that site. I talk about that. But there's also other ways. Like for instance, you can basically bring up in a little quick look window a webpage. It'll render the URL right there. You know, things like that. So there are ways to view a webpage that are kind of, you know, without launching your browser, which means it's not adding to the history.

Gary [00:47:54]:
It's, you know, it's not interesting. Yeah, it's that. So and sometimes you want that because it's like for instance, you may have a place you go to to check weather and if you have severe weather in your area, you might be just checking that all day, you know, and it might be interesting to have this little button you press and a tiny little window shows up that it gives you the webpage for that or if there's something else that's important in your area for I did like my example is like stream Runway rates which if you're rafting or you're fishing, it's probably important. And instead of having to web browser, go to a tab, go to find the bookmark, just have something that just shows you that data right there. I guess a lot of other people found that kind of useful too. Being able to quickly view web content without a browser.

Leo [00:48:40]:
Interesting. Very cool. The article I'm going to point out is still yet another way to install Windows 11 with only a local account. We talked about, I think some of this briefly a couple of weeks ago. Microsoft is pushing very, very, very hard to insist that when you set up Windows 11 you attach a Microsoft account to it. And there have been tricks and workarounds and random things that you can do in the past to basically force it to sidestep that requirement and allow you to set it up using only a traditional local account, like we did for decades before. So still, yet still another way to install Windows 11 with only a local account. It's askleo.com 185914 it's a stupid simple approach.

Leo [00:49:36]:
It's a little time consuming, but it's really simple. And while I don't, while I do expect many of the other workarounds and tricks to get whack a mole into non existence, I'd be surprised if this did, or if it did anytime soon. Anyway, I got an interesting series of comments to that YouTube video. I had several people tell me that other channels had gotten strikes against them for violating terms of service. Or YouTube terms and conditions for posting essentially similar information. So it seemed like somebody, maybe Microsoft, who knows, is going around and not just playing Whack a mole with the actual workarounds, but playing Whack a mole with the videos that talk about the various workarounds. So far, I have not received such a notice. I would be kind of surprised if I did, since this technique doesn't really rely on.

Leo [00:50:45]:
On anything underhanded. But if it happens, I will report back because it's. It would be surprising and yet also somewhat telling if for any reason this particular technique got cited for some kind of violation.

Gary [00:51:05]:
Interesting. Yeah, I'm not quite sure, like, what sort of violation they would claim it was.

Leo [00:51:12]:
Yeah, yeah, it's like I said, it's super simple. Other things are, you know, like if you do this magic keystroke at this magic time, then you can do magic instructions. Okay, great. I get that maybe you're not supposed to know about that kind of stuff, but that's not what I'm doing. Anyway. Well, I think that does it for yet another week. As always, thank you everyone for listening, and we will see you here again very, very soon. Take care, everyone.

Leo [00:51:38]:
Bye. Bye.

Gary [00:51:39]:
Bye.