Leo [00:00:09]:
And we're back.

Gary [00:00:10]:
Yes, we are.

Leo [00:00:11]:
Surprisingly, after a lengthier than expected hiatus, folks that are on my other publications will know by now that come right around the beginning of Thanksgiving, just before Thanksgiving of my publications went on hard hiatus and Ask Leo took kind of an interesting turn. But the bottom line is, the lesson that I learned is that gravity always wins. You cannot argue with gravity. And I tried to argue and I lost. I took a hard fall and ended up in the hospital for a week and have been recovering from that ever since. The big physical thing that. That describes this the best, I think, for people is that I now have three vertebrae that are fused together in my neck. And that's basically what caused the, you know, the ne.

Leo [00:01:07]:
The necessity of basically stepping away from a lot of different things for the last two months. Actually. It's just. Let's see, today is Tuesday, so I believe it is exactly eight weeks since the original fall. And what we were chatting about just before hitting the record button is that, yes, this is the ultimate ain't it cool I'm here, which after the fall was not necessarily a given. And the fact that I am in as good shape as I am in terms of my recovery, in terms of mental ability, physical ability, my ability to continue to now get back into the swing of things, I'm incredibly grateful for that. And it is indeed very, very cool. What I thought was interesting, like I said for my two other publications, not all news is bad, and seven takeaways, those just went immediately on a hard hiatus.

Leo [00:02:03]:
I had a hiatus notice up on those guys. Like the moment that I could do anything from the hospital, I threw up those hiatus notices. But what was very cool about Ask Leo is that my staff, Connie, Mark, Mary Beth, they like stepped up in such a way that in announcing what had happened this in this week's newsletter, I had people that didn't even realize that I was away, which is actually pretty cool, as you know, for a publication such as ours. Yes, I could have taken Ask Leo on hiatus, but there would have been a surprisingly high cost. Google rankings would have gone down. YouTube visibility would have gone down. The moment I pick up. What would have happened is that by going silent for two months, YouTube would probably start deprioritizing my videos and I would get fewer, fewer videos for viewers for the existing videos, as well as then having to pick up that audience again with any new videos videos when I came back and like I said, my staff just sort of quietly stepped in there.

Leo [00:03:24]:
It was kind of cool. One of them, Connie, actually, who Also, full disclosure, does the editing on this podcast. She actually suggested a technique for being able to produce, quote, unquote, new content while I was gone that mirrored exactly what I was about to suggest. So it was awesome. I'm incredibly grateful for them for stepping up and doing that. And like I said, we're back. As of this week, literally all of the publications are back on their regular schedule. I'm back doing my thing.

Leo [00:04:02]:
There's only one last thing that I need to ramp up again once I get slightly more. More time, and that's. I've had to stop progress on one of the courses that I was developing, but that'll pick up here real soon, too. But yeah, like I said, gravity sucks. And I have. I have learned to watch. Watch my step. The original problem was that I was carrying an oversized laundry basket down some uneven steps and I lost my footing.

Leo [00:04:36]:
It just one foot went the wrong way and I took a hard step and bounce or a hard fall and bounced into something that. That then obviously did some bad things to my neck. I now claim that laundry baskets give me ptsd.

Gary [00:04:51]:
Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. Definitely can't touch those anymore. Yeah, doctor said.

Leo [00:04:57]:
Yep, yep. So anyway, and the other thing, you, Gary, could probably see it over my shoulder there. Yes, I have. I've been wearing a neck brace for the past seven weeks. And one of the things that freed me to come back to the podcast, come back to my own videos and so forth, is the fact that I'm now two days, three days without the. Without the neck brace, which is now sitting on top of my scanner, being warned by my. Being warned by my stuffed opus. He's now in the neck.

Leo [00:05:29]:
He's now in a neck bracelet.

Gary [00:05:31]:
Cool.

Leo [00:05:32]:
So one of the things that I ended up doing when you were young and you got sick, like, you know, stay at. Stay, stay at home from school kind of sick.

Gary [00:05:43]:
Right.

Leo [00:05:44]:
Did your parents ever, like, I don't know, reward you in a sense that they would give you a present to try and, you know, make it all better or whatever?

Gary [00:05:53]:
Definitely, yeah. Yeah. There's a little something, you know, to ease the suffering, to make it make such a bad experience. Yep.

Leo [00:06:00]:
So I had that same reaction. I needed to do something for myself. So as we sit here, we're actually using a completely new PC that is optimized. It's actually designed and optimized for video editing using DaVinci Resolve. But what that really means is it's got an AMD Threadripper 24 core processor, got 128 gigabytes of RAM. It's got an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 which is I think their current highest end video card. It's a beefy machine and it's my reward to myself for having survived all this. So that's one of the other things I've been doing.

Leo [00:06:54]:
Didn't need to get rid of the neck brace to do it, but I've been setting up this machine and getting all the usual software installed, hold on and all, and all that kind of stuff that's been kind of fun. And then on the advice of a friend who also does a lot of editing in DaVinci Resolve, he suggests that I pick up what they call a speed editor. It is a. Essentially it's a separate dedicated keyboard that is full of a. A scrolling dial and a bunch of dedicated keys specifically designed for. Yeah, what you're showing me is the, I guess an Apple version of it. Those keys are all programmable, right?

Gary [00:07:35]:
Yeah, this isn't. I'm holding up what is the very cheap VSD device. 50 bucks on Amazon, not Apple at all. Yeah, you've got, you've got a bigger, beefier one with a dial and everything. They make a bigger, beefier version of this. But yes, these are lcd, which is actually an LCD display underneath this.

Leo [00:07:59]:
Right.

Gary [00:07:59]:
And the different squares shine through. So it is a total of 15 buttons and then there's like three buttons here at the bottom. I don't know if you can see those. And you program what you want them to do and you make them into keyboard shortcuts.

Leo [00:08:13]:
This keyboard is specifically from the folks at Blackmagic who create Da Vinci DaVinci song this. They do tons of hardware. I mean they do a lot of incredibly high end hardware. This is probably the lowest end keyboard they have. And he suggested that, you know, you just plug it in literally. And all of a sudden these keys on this keyboard do the functions that you might be doing with multiple keystrokes and multiple manipulations if you're just using the regular Windows. Anyway, so I've been playing with that as well with what, what video editing I've done since then, which hasn't been a lot. But when I get, when I go back to completing the course, which is Linux for everyone, I will be using this a lot to, you know, to see if I can't be more effective and more efficient at creating videos.

Leo [00:09:03]:
But yeah, that was my present to myself and so far I've been having fun with it. It is way, way, way overkill for everything else. That I'm doing. I mean, I don't need 24 cores to write an editor to write an article. But heck, I don't really even need 24 cores and 128 gigabytes of RAM to write an article while I've got a virtual machine or two running on the side because there's just so much headroom in this machine. But I'm really looking forward to better performance in Resolve because on the old machine, Resolve was starting to get a little pokey.

Gary [00:09:42]:
Yeah, that sounds pretty cool. I know I'm enjoying my little device thing. Mine's the cheapest thing you could get. And it was basically just a. Because it was so cheap, that's why I bought it. It was like. Because I have keyboard shortcuts and I actually have a MIDI keyboard that has all sorts of dials and buttons. It's a little harder for me to.

Gary [00:10:01]:
But it's the Akai MPK mini, which is very popular Mac and PC. Little mini keyboard for musicians. But you could also map anything you want to the keys. D could be like break the timeline in your video editor. You do whatever you want. You've got dials that you could use. I actually did that for a while. I got this because I was looking for one where I could just have extra buttons.

Gary [00:10:28]:
And I wanted to be able to put my own labels on the buttons. I couldn't figure out from the Description of this $50 device how you made the labels until it dawned on me after looking at it again and again and again that it's like, oh, it's an LCD screen under there. You don't make labels. Those aren't labels. And I was like, 50 bucks. There's an LCD screen underneath buttons, you know, instant by now. And. And it's okay.

Gary [00:10:54]:
They have one with little dials. I really like the one you showed, you know, the black magic one. And it. And it really gets. Gets me going and thinking that maybe I need to look into that. I use a screenflow to do my editing. But a lot of these devices, I don't know the one you have, but a lot of them do have. Screenflow is just big enough that a lot of them come with custom sets of.

Gary [00:11:16]:
You know, you could just switch to ScreenFlow and then you have all these controls. You don't have to program it yourself. There's that. Or maybe perhaps even, you know, I have edited previously in final cut pro. DaVinci resolve is something I've also thought about. Maybe I should be trying it every year or so to See if there's something in there because it certainly is very popular right now.

Leo [00:11:37]:
The thing that got me into DaVinci Resolve, I did do most of my video editing using Camtasia of all things. In fact, I believe that's what Connie is currently using when she edits the Ask Leo videos is mostly Camtasia. And it's fine. It's great for exactly what we're doing. Screen capture and then just throwing some call outs on top and you know, other kinds of things.

Gary [00:12:00]:
Sure.

Leo [00:12:02]:
The, the issue that I have with Camtasia is that it's a subscription. The issue that I have with Adobe Premiere, which one is one of the other options that I had, I had the Adobe Creative Cloud, the full thing for a long time. That too was a subscription. I did Final Cut for a while, but that was on my Mac and I switched over to back to my PC some years ago. DaVinci Resolve. It's like there's a free version which is incredibly powerful and then there's a one time purchase version, DaVinci Studio and it's one time again. It's the traditional model where you pay for it once and you own it and you do what you need to do with it again. I'm just finding that incredibly lucrative and it is incredibly powerful.

Leo [00:12:52]:
There is way, way, way more stuff that you could do with this tool than I will ever use. But I'm learning small little tricks and things and having fun with it, which is kind of sort of what matters the most.

Gary [00:13:04]:
Yeah, that's actually an excellent segue into Go for it. My topic. Last week, or was it two weeks ago, Apple announced something pretty big. A big change in its software strategy. Biggest change in a few years. The Apple Creator Studio.

Leo [00:13:24]:
Right.

Gary [00:13:25]:
So Apple has a ton of software they make in addition to, you know, the hardware and the operating system and all of that. And traditionally Apple's either had software that's been like, this is free and we make this so you'll buy our hardware.

Leo [00:13:39]:
Right.

Gary [00:13:39]:
Or we, yeah, we have to charge for this because this is not, you know, like Final Cut Pro is a really good example of like we can't make this free. If you want free, there's Imovie Final Cut Pro. That's professional stuff. It's 300 bucks one time and all that. But they changed it. They're going to change it. This actually launches January 28th and it's called Apple Creator Studio. And what they've done is they said we're going to have a software bundle.

Gary [00:14:04]:
Now it's going to be subscription, and it's just going to be one. We're not going to create a bunch of different ones or a bunch of different variations. There's just Apple Creator Studio or not Apple Creator studio. And it's 13 bucks a month is what they're starting it at. And there's an annual one, you can pay two and you save over that. And it includes subscriptions of some of their expensive stuff. So right off the bat, like, the thing that you might get that really seems attractive is Final Cut Pro, the $300 software that's part of it. So you don't have to spend 300 bucks up front anymore.

Gary [00:14:37]:
You could spend $13 a month or $129 a year, and you got Final Cut Pro. Student pricing is really cheap. It's three bucks a month. So I think like 30 bucks a year. So, yeah, if you're a student, you're like, oh, I really want to use, like, final cut pro, 30 bucks get you it. Which is pretty good, considering so many students I know are already forced to kind of buy the Microsoft Office student pricing, which I think is like 99 bucks a year or something like that. So 30 bucks. And now they have the video editor that they want to work with.

Gary [00:15:08]:
Logic's the next biggest one there, which also was a big standalone that's for, like, music creation stuff. Then there's a bunch of little ones in there that are support apps for those, like Compressor to create different video formats from Final Cut Pro Motion, which is like their motion creates, like Adobe After Effects. You can create, like, motion graphics for Final Cut Pro. And there's Mainstage, which is like running concerts and presentations and stuff live. They throw all that stuff in too, then, because they're doing one thing. They also said, okay, here's the deal. So there's pages, numbers, and Keynote, which is their Office suite, which has been free forever. It's going to continue to be free, but you get extra stuff when you have the Apple Creator Studio.

Gary [00:15:57]:
The extra stuff really isn't much. What it comes down to for most of the stuff is they're creating a, what they call a content hub. In other words, you get clip art, right? So you get your Adobe stock, basically, or, you know, whatever. And it's going to be kind of like there's going to be that, but there's going to be an AI element to it as well. So in other words, you'd be able to say, oh, I want a beach background for this slide in my keynote presentation, and it'll Be like, here's a beach background. And then you say, oh, can you make it at sunset? And it will then use AI to be like, oh, here's that. I'm going to change it to sunset. So it's kind of a combination of like assets and AI to let you create images and stuff.

Gary [00:16:44]:
That's what you'll get. That will help you with pages, numbers and Keynote in addition to what you get for free. So that's causing a lot of people to call it freemium because the freemium model is that there's a free version like DaVinci that we just talked about. DaVinci Resolve has the free version, has the Pro version. So it's freemium. Right. You can use the free one. It's not a trial.

Gary [00:17:08]:
It's like you can use it for stuff and then you have the Pro level one you have to pay for. It's kind of like freemium. Some people are calling it freemium, but it really is. It's like 100% of what you've got now is still under the free tier. There's just going to be new stuff that'll be introduced that will be under this. You're part of this subscription kind of thing. And for the most part the subscription stuff, if you let the subscription lapse, you don't lose anything like I'd imagine. I don't know how it works with DaVinci Resolve Pro, but like if you're working in a, you know, and you have a bunch of Pro level stuff in there, like if you let the subscription go and you try to use DaVinci Resolve Free, I don't know exactly how it works, but I know certainly for things like Adobe like Adobe photoshop and photoshop LE, like it's not going to work.

Leo [00:18:01]:
DaVinci is a bad example because the Pro, they call it their studio. It's a one time purchase. It's not right.

Gary [00:18:08]:
That's true. That is a bad example.

Leo [00:18:10]:
Yeah. But Adobe is a great example because I actually went through this. I had the Creative Suite.

Gary [00:18:16]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:18:17]:
For several years I did a lot of work with Photoshop and then I let that lapse and then I didn't have, I did not have Photoshop, which meant all these PSD files. While I could read them in other applications, it was never exact. Right.

Gary [00:18:33]:
Yeah. You're missing the filter, you're missing that layer thing that it was doing. It looks like they're trying to avoid that with Pages, numbers and Keynote. The things you do are like add this image. There's a little numbers thing where it can kind of like figure some stuff out for you. But once you've done that, if you then open that document up in the regular version a year later, it's not going to be missing anything. You won't be able to add another image or whatever because you don't have that. But it's not like it's going to pull that out.

Gary [00:19:03]:
So I think that's good that they're doing it that way that you know. But it's also a little confusing for people and I'm hoping it doesn't drive people away saying, well, I can't afford the Pro Pages so I'm not going to use Pages. And they'll overlook the fact that Pages itself is like, no, you don't need for probably you don't need it at all. Right, just use the regular Pages version. So there's that and they are also. There will be like multiple versions of some of these things. Oh, also I should note that the Final Cut Pro and Logic and those other little apps like Presser and stuff that I mentioned, you'll still be able to buy those as single like one time payments, right? But you won't have like that content Hub part. And there might be some other little AI tools that are in some of them.

Gary [00:19:48]:
A lot of this is tied to AI, so which makes sense because you're using server stuff when you do AI. Like if you get the standalone version of Logic or Final Cut Pro now for the most part you could disconnect from the Internet and just work. Whereas like a lot of these things are adding in there you would have to connect to their, you know, their AI servers for it to figure some stuff out. So it makes sense that there's like a fee for that because you're using their resources. Anyway, it's interesting and we really need to wait to see like get our hands on these apps, see how it actually is to see what's going on. One great thing though, what is super positive thing is Apple bought an app last year named Pixelmator Pro. Actually they bought Pixelmator Team, which was the company that makes Pixelmator Pro and PhotoMator 2 apps for the Mac. And I had adopted Pixelmator Pro as my main graphics app.

Gary [00:20:40]:
Even though I have Photoshop, I still use pixelmator Pro for just about everything. Apple acquired the company, but they didn't, didn't do anything with the apps, just acquired the company. They still were made by pixelmator Team and you still bought them as one time purchases and There were some minor updates since Apple bought it, but there was still the question, what are they going to do? Because Apple sometimes will say, we're taking these three features and we're going to put them in another app and the original app's dead. Or other times they do create something like Final Cut Pro, that existed before Apple. So did Logic, so did a bunch of other stuff. So what were they going to do with pixelmator Pro? And the answer is that pixelmator Pro was part of this creative suite, now the Creative Studio, so. So we have our answer. It's staying pixelmator Pro.

Gary [00:21:25]:
It is now, like, officialized, legitimized inside of everything alongside these other apps as part of this creator studio, which is great news. If you love the app and you were worried, like, oh, no, what are they going to do with it? What are they going to do? It's like, no, they just gave a big signal that for the foreseeable future, it's an app. And now it's listed alongside all the other app labs that been around for decades. That's great. The PhotoMator app, which I don't use, there's still a little bit of question with that. There's a footnote saying that photomator is still going to be available, so at least they acknowledge that people would be wondering about it. But I don't quite know what's going to happen with that. I'm just happy that pixelmator Pro will continue to be pixelmator Pro and that, you know, I'm actually excited to get my hands on the new version of it because it looks like through some of the screenshots, they've been updating the interface to make it fit in better with all the other Apple apps without actually changing the features, which I think is a great way to do it.

Gary [00:22:24]:
It's like, here's the same thing. We've updated everything to make it fit in, and now we'll go and add features later. We won't try to mix it. So I can't wait to get my hands on that and start playing around with the new version of pixelmator Pro. It's a full, like, it's pretty good Photoshop competitor, not full Photoshop. Right? Because Adobe always has, like a million buttons and a million functions and all this stuff, you know, like Word, Microsoft Word's always going to be bigger than Mac Pages, Apple Pages, Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop is always going to be bigger than pixelmator Pro. But for most things that most people do, even professionals like myself that actually have to produce graphics for thumbnails and all that.

Gary [00:23:06]:
Pixelmator Pro does all the things I need.

Leo [00:23:09]:
It'll be really interesting to see where Apple lands, say in a year or two on the subscription model because as you've been describing this, I'm looking at a number of parallels in the past. For example, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, it's a subscription model, but it was a slow transition to that. You can still buy Microsoft Office one off, but I challenge you to find it on their website. Right. Because they're pushing the subscription model so hard. And I'm just sort of wondering where somebody like Apple is going to show up in a couple years after they've experienced this for a while. Similarly, with the discussion about pixelmator, there's another photo editing software that I was using for some time while I wasn't using Photoshop, called Affinity.

Gary [00:24:03]:
Yes. I don't know if you've heard of it.

Leo [00:24:04]:
Of course they got purchased by Canva.

Gary [00:24:08]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:24:09]:
Which is a subscription model. And I use Canva probably daily these days for just making my thumbnails and some of the images that I end up using. But they, not only did they purchase Affinity, they went real quiet about it for probably a better part of a year. And then all of a sudden they announced the new version of Affinity, which was free. Yeah, just free for everybody, whether you're a Canva customer or not. And I thought that was an interesting model to see where they're taking potential customers. Are they using it as a way to get them into Canva? Might be a great way to do it. Or do they have something else planned? There's just a whole lot of stuff happening in this space, especially with respect to subscription models, trying to encourage them, trying to make them lucrative and trying to push back on the people that say never, never to subscriptions.

Leo [00:25:07]:
Years ago I was one of those people and now I have more subscriptions that I can count on two hands. I mean, it's just, it's kind of scary.

Gary [00:25:14]:
Yeah, no, exactly. And I don't mind it because, you know, both of us have been doing this long enough to know that the one time purchase thing is kind of a lie. Right. You've got a new version comes out and now you've got an either you have to buy it outright or there's an upgrade cost. Right. And you've got tons of software that I could think of that I used, including the Adobe stuff before they made a subscription where there was almost an annual cost of just I need to upgrade to the Newest version and subscription, just basically it made it number one. So that that was kind of like a cost I saw coming. Instead of like one day being like, guess what, there's the new version out today.

Gary [00:25:55]:
You're spending 400 buc. You know, you just knew that, okay, it's a monthly cost or an annual cost or whatever. And the other thing is, I know as a software developer and from knowing lots of software developers, it also frees them up on the other side. Because there was so much pressure under the old model to say, okay, we're on version seven, we're coming out with version eight. We need to put stuff in there that the marketing department can push, right? Forget what the users want, forget what we actually should put in there to make the product better. It's all about what the marketing department wants so they can sell the new version. When you go to subscription, that changes. It's not completely gone, right.

Gary [00:26:37]:
But they can actually spend a lot more time saying, okay, we need to, like, there is no next. The next version isn't the next version. It's everybody's paying subscription. We're just continuing to work on it. So if the priority is to fix some bugs or, or to update some part of it to make it more modern or to satisfy customer demand, we can do that under the subscription model. So I think that's good. And also for developers, especially small companies, but even big companies, a lot of times the development teams are small companies inside the big company, they get paid just like everybody else for their job. And the subscription model provides a steady income for either the department or the whole company.

Gary [00:27:20]:
In case of a small company, which means it provides paychecks. In the game developer industry, that was the worst. The game developer industry was horrible. You'd have a studio that would get a contract with a publisher to produce a big game. They would staff up, hire like 100 people, then they would produce the game and they'd fire 90 people. And then 10 people would maintain the game until they got their next thing. And it made it really hard to make a living as a developer, you know, a game developer. And that it was a big deal under subscription model for things like graphics stuff like we're talking about, it's a little bit easier for them to say, this is our staff, everybody's permanent.

Gary [00:28:01]:
As long as we keep the software good and all that cool. Then there's free software and free stuff, which I want to mention, because this could easily fall under a ain't it cool? But I'll say, like, as usually I do like a book for that. But I've been playing in the last few weeks with something really cool called Strudel. I don't know if you've ever heard of Strudel or Tidal.

Leo [00:28:29]:
Not until this morning. I've heard of Tidal, the music streaming service. Right.

Gary [00:28:34]:
So, yeah, the music streaming service and Tidal, the software engineering project. Different. So what Strudel is. Strudel is just a layer built on top of this thing called Tidal, which is basically music creation software. And traditionally. Not traditionally, but for the last couple decades, music creation software. It's very visual. You're adding little blocks or notes to, you know, and clicking buttons and turning dials and making, like, cool music.

Gary [00:28:59]:
What Strudel is, is it allows you to make music by coding. So you actually produce lines of code that say something like, play these three notes and repeat them, you know, in the little code blocks. And then you could say, okay, adjust the volume of that. Add a little randomness. You know, you could add, like, functions onto that and then have another line of. And say, play these drum beats in this order, but actually randomize these two and change this one and every fourth time through, do it this way instead, and you can actually code music. And for somebody who is a coder and loves music, this is great because using some of the music creation software, when I can't play guitar, I've never had the ability to play guitar or anything. I could play keyboards a little bit, and I certainly can't play drums or whatever.

Gary [00:29:55]:
So having the ability to code and then actually think music in my head, code on the screen and just type, be typing characters and stuff is great. And it's so much fun to play with. It's incredible. Some of the stuff, like, I've seen some things, like there's an example out there that's the entire theme to Stranger Things. The entire theme to Stranger things is about 10 lines of code. Like, it looks incredibly small. And then you're like, well, that can't be it. That has to be.

Gary [00:30:24]:
And you play it. You're like, oh, that's it. So, yeah, you've got really cool stuff. Lots of. You just go to Strudel cc, we'll have a link and you could start playing around. There's like, documentation and stuff and there's examples. Plus, if you go to YouTube, there are people that have. Basically you can like live stream yourself doing this.

Gary [00:30:45]:
So if you get good at it. Because the way it works with the code is you start. You start the. You say, here's like the Drums I want to use. And then you start playing and then it plays this loop of drums. You can then say, oh, I'm going to add a baseline while it's actually still looping. Then you update it and then it picks up and adds the baseline. You don't have to stop and run.

Gary [00:31:09]:
It's like if your coding project was live updated, live compiling while you're playing the game or using the app. There are people that do that online on YouTube and I'll link to one of those videos too. And it's really fun to watch somebody write code. And as they write the code, they're actually showing you exactly what they're doing. It's like open source music, right? You know, you could see, you could actually just copy what they're doing, paste it into strudel cc. It's just a website where you can work with it and then you get exactly what it is that they're doing. There's no difference. There's no like, oh, they're better at it than me.

Gary [00:31:44]:
Or they have a better instrument and speaker system. No, none of that. You've got the same stuff that they do and it's really cool and fun to play with.

Leo [00:31:53]:
It's funny because one of the things I keep wanting to do is just generate my own. I guess in the, in the radio business they'd call them stingers or bumpers or that kind of stuff. This seems like a great way to, to just be able to do that. I've got that Akai keyboard with that being the intent and I have no talent.

Gary [00:32:19]:
But.

Leo [00:32:19]:
Yeah, but coding, it definitely gives it a different flavor.

Gary [00:32:24]:
It does.

Leo [00:32:25]:
Where I actually stand a chance. So.

Gary [00:32:27]:
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So it's a lot of fun to play with. So other stuff I wanted to talk about. Let's see. Well, yeah, I'll just. We can't not mention AI, right? I mean, that's kind of traditional.

Leo [00:32:41]:
For a few years we got this far without mentioning it.

Gary [00:32:43]:
Yeah, I know. So I'll stop that right here. And yeah, there's. We talk a lot about the downside of AI is stuff like deep fakes. When we talk about deep fakes, the thing that pops into everybody's mind is famous person talking, saying something they never said or never would say or never would say. Or even just a variation just to make you think. And then. So that's like the obvious thing, but the real.

Gary [00:33:15]:
Well, another real danger is more subtle. When there's something that doesn't necessarily involve like a famous person or whatever, it's Just a piece of video footage that looks like it could be real. And it. It's not like that. The example I want to give involves the. The murder of Renee Goode in Minnesota. And there's a piece of video that was produced that pretends to show the ice, or actually was a border agent in front of her car showing that, oh, look, see, she was going to hit him. Thing is, it's fake, right? We have tons of video from this.

Gary [00:34:03]:
Right. Of different angles. It never happened. Matter of fact, if you. You shouldn't. But if you ever saw this faked video, right away you, oh, their car and there's the guard and all that. But then if you look closely and compare it to the others, it's like, oh, no, there's stuff in this that's not even there. It's like, different, Right.

Gary [00:34:21]:
So it's obviously faked, but somebody reading the headline, like, of a social media post, right? And then. And then seeing it's like, oh, she was going to hit the border patrol agent. And if they're. And there's video proof, and then you look at the video, they may not immediately identify it as an AI fake because it's not a person talking, saying something they shouldn't. It looks like grainy video, you know, captured footage from the scene, and it's not trying to show anything bizarre. Right. There's nothing, you know, weird happening. It's just a few seconds of a car and, you know, people around.

Leo [00:35:00]:
It's. It's frustrating because, well, two things. One, people who are already too inclined to believe that narrative won't care that it's fake, or they won't take the time to investigate whether or not it's fake. And the other is that, in a sense, we got lucky here in that there was so. There were. There were so many videos from multiple different sources.

Gary [00:35:31]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:35:32]:
That made it easy to essentially debunk this one fake video in so many cases. We don't have that luxury. We don't have multiple different independent videos to play with. We've got maybe one or two. And then it becomes, okay, is it this video or is it that video? How do you know right now there are opportunities or there are ways to take a look at a video and say, yes, there are characteristics of that video that make it either clearly AI generated or at least probably AI generated. But as you and I know, and what we've been worried about for a long time now is that this technology is only getting better and those kind of telltales are very slowly disappearing and Regardless, they take someone with time and intent to actually examine them. Whereas if all you're looking for is a quick, visceral reaction, you're not looking at that kind of stuff.

Gary [00:36:37]:
Yeah, exactly. And yeah, so I'd say, you know, be careful now because. Not because they're getting better. Like you say, they are going to keep getting better, but they're getting more subtle.

Leo [00:36:48]:
Yep.

Gary [00:36:49]:
Right. This video didn't try to go way out there to make it an obvious fake. It just was subtle about it. And yeah, I'd love to see a scientific study. Like, there were people that believed it just because it's. Just because it said there was. Like, there were people that would have believed it just by saying that in the article and not showing any video. There would be people that believed it if the video link went to a Rick roll.

Gary [00:37:16]:
Right, right. Because they wouldn't have clicked on the link. They would have just thought, oh, there's video proof. No need for me to watch it.

Leo [00:37:23]:
Right.

Gary [00:37:24]:
You know, and then, of course, you go to the next level. People that actually watched it and then saw it and didn't seem to think to check. You know, it's gotten to the point now where I actually subscribe to Snopes's newsletter, email newsletter. I never used to. I used to go to Snopes all the time for fact checking, but I would do it on demand at this point. I was doing it so often for different news stories and things that I just said. Yeah, just subscribe into the newsletter and just tell. Send me all your new articles just so I can check every, like, you know, just because every new one you post is something I'm interested in seeing, which is how I discovered this particular item.

Gary [00:38:01]:
So I encourage people because it really. It's kind of a protection against it. Subscribe to something like the Snopes, you know, newsletter and just see every new thing they post. Not everything they post, first of all, not everything they post is this was false. Sometimes it's true. Right. And by reading about it, you get to see what they're doing to verify that. And a lot of times it's inconclusive.

Gary [00:38:28]:
But reading about why it's inconclusive is fascinating because they'll actually go and say, look, we've got like tons of proof that this is fake, but we wanted to hear from the source, like, the person involved, because they would be the definitive one to say, this happened to me. This didn't happen to me yet. We have not heard back. And just reading through that really kind of gives you A sense of like, these are the questions I should be asking.

Leo [00:38:53]:
Right.

Gary [00:38:53]:
The questions that Snopes asks to try to verify these things I should be asking all the time when I'm reading stuff. So anyway, I encourage people, maybe that's the real message here, is to subscribe to the Snopes newsletter. I'll try to get the link to that.

Leo [00:39:08]:
I would love for that to be the message here. But you know that there are individuals who believe Snopes itself is completely biased and itself fake, that Snopes is only promoting a specific agenda. I believe that they're more objective than that. But you're going to hear from people who immediately dismiss the evidence simply because it came from Snopes.

Gary [00:39:40]:
Sure. And yeah. And I would hope that some of them would at least take a look because one of the things Snope does that's really good is they link to their sources. They don't just say, we heard this from this person. They'll actually link to various different sources. And if you read the stuff. Yeah. You'll find that no matter what your political leanings are, if they find something to be true or false, they will say it's true or false no matter which direction it goes.

Leo [00:40:11]:
Right? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Gary [00:40:12]:
So anyway, that's important. Yeah, I found a link there and I'll include that.

Leo [00:40:16]:
One of the comments I get on my. I've got an article about how I'm no longer using Google search and I get comments on the video all the time that says, well, I stopped using Google search because they're clearly left biased. And then I also get comments that say I stopped using Google search because they're clearly right biased.

Gary [00:40:35]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:40:36]:
So I mean, yeah, people in a lot of, a lot of times people see what they want to see and if it doesn't agree with their preconceived notions, then it not, they must be wrong.

Gary [00:40:49]:
Yeah. This isn't new. I went to journalism school from 92 to 94. And one of the things we learned when we were talking about media bias, Right. Way back then, just before the Internet, was that, you know, the, the professor in this, in this particular lesson showed us how. I believe it was. I may be wrong, but I believe it was NBC News was. Here are some articles by the.

Gary [00:41:17]:
At that time, what was right wing media saying how NBC News is left biased because of their journalists. And it showed. Here are the journalists and here's the things showing that they're left biased. Then there was an article from a left side media thing saying NBC News is Biased towards the right. And here are the reasons. And it talked about how it was owned, I believe at the time by General Electric. A huge like, you know, government subcontractor, weapons, you know, all that stuff. And that their corporate ownership was pushing their news to the right.

Gary [00:41:54]:
And it was like two different sources talking about about the same thing in two completely different ways pointing in opposite directions.

Leo [00:42:00]:
Yep.

Gary [00:42:00]:
So yeah, that was like 1993 around that.

Leo [00:42:03]:
It's still happening everywhere.

Gary [00:42:06]:
Yeah. One on a positive note to end our stories for this, I had a cool experience during our hiatus here. I was on a trip to Hawaii. I went to Kauai and did some great hiking and stuff like that there. And one of those hikes was totally away from any mobile connection, only one, which is incredible to think that, you know, all during all these hikes and nowadays it was like, yeah, even out in wilderness a lot of times, oh look, I got three bars, you know. But one of those hikes was on the north part of the island and it was, you're warned that there's no connection and all that stuff. So you go out there, nothing. Right.

Gary [00:42:47]:
And so I was there on a beach, is halfway through, down the trail and I brought my phone out to take some pictures and I of course noticed at the top it said it had the little satellite symbol. So in other words, no mobile connection, no WI fi. It showed the satellite signal and I remembered, oh, that's right, the satellite stuff now for Apple, for iPhones is not just for emergencies anymore. You could actually send and receive text messages, just normal non emergency ones using satellites. They're saying that eventually you have to pay for it, but for now it's still free. Right? Sure enough, I saw it said sos. It had a little satellite and then an SOS symbol as well saying I could use both. And as I'm looking at it, I got a text message from my wife.

Gary [00:43:36]:
I was like, oh, it really works. And then I sent a text message to her and then I got to use it. It's interesting because there's more involved. It actually will go and say things like next satellite in range in six minutes. Oh, and you'll be like, oh, okay. And you could write a text message and then it'll stay and then it will say satellite in range and it will actually show you graphic and tell you to turn your phone, point it to the left and then you point it to the left and it'll give you like a little green, like it's connected kind of thing. And then the cool thing is the little globe underneath actually, like, I was like, why are there dots on the globe? Oh, that's not dots. That's the Hawaiian Islands.

Gary [00:44:15]:
It's actually showing me a map of, like, where I am on the globe and that the satellite is now passing above me. And anyway, I was able to send a few text messages back and forth. It's slow sometimes I lost connection and it took a few minutes, but it was really cool. And I actually have a trip later this year, planned to go rafting on the Grand Canyon. And that will definitely be out of range. And in the past, I would have gotten a Garmin satellite kind of. Right. And paid a bunch for it and paid a bunch for service, all so that I could just stay in touch and say good night, I hope you had a good day.

Gary [00:44:54]:
To my wife. Right. Because any emergency, and then there's like, I'm not gonna be alone. I'm gonna be with like a group and stuff. Any emergency, other people can take care of that. I just want to not be away two weeks and not have any news of what's going on at home. But now I don't really need to do that. I mean, I may end up with one night where I can't do it.

Gary [00:45:13]:
I may end up with another day where it's easy. But I know that from this example, occasionally I'll just be able to send a satellite message, a text message from my iPhone. No additional cost, no additional hardware.

Leo [00:45:26]:
So what I thought was funny is that I don't know if it was last week or the week before, there was a major outage amongst many of the mobile providers. Actually, I don't even. I never did hear what actually ended up causing it. But it's a software bug, was it? Yeah, probably. Probably DNS. It's always DNS, right? They. And what was. What it manifested for a lot of people is that all of a sudden all they had on their phone was that little symbol for the satellite and the SOS indicator that they had no coverage, but they could still do something.

Leo [00:46:02]:
I thought that was. Was pretty interesting. More and more phones have that. I honestly don't know if mine does. Someday I suppose I'll find out. But it was kind of interesting that a lot of people were exposed to this feature accidentally.

Gary [00:46:19]:
Yeah, exactly. A lot of people were like. Because the sos, they were. I don't know what that means. Sos. Is there an emergency going on or whatever. It was great. If you.

Gary [00:46:27]:
If you are somebody who's behind that feature for either, you know, Apple or Samsung or whoever else has was like, wow, that morning did more for publicity for our feature that we've been slaving away at for years than all of the marketing that has been done for it. So that was wonderful.

Leo [00:46:45]:
Pretty funny.

Gary [00:46:46]:
But anyway, yeah, all righty.

Leo [00:46:48]:
So well then, let's transition right into some the old formal Ain't it Cool. This is probably the most boring Ain't it Cool I've had ever. But I'm bringing it up because it was key. It was a tool that I kept going back to over and over again while I was in the hospital, while I've been in recovery. And that is simply Google Recorder. It's a voice recorder. I think it may only be available on Pixel phones, but what it is, it is literally a voice recorder with real time speech to text. Now, I had a lot of, I did a lot of experimenting with speech to text, different tools, different scenarios, using my phone, my laptop, etc, and I kept coming back to Google Recorder mostly because it was the, I want to say most accurate, but that's the wrong way to put it.

Leo [00:47:48]:
I'll put it say it was the least inaccurate and it didn't require me to have my glasses on. So, like, you're lying in the hospital in the middle of the night trying to sleep. You spend a lot of time in the hospital trying to sleep and you know, you come up with something, you have an idea, you have something you don't want to forget. If I could find my phone, which was literally on the nightstand next to me, then I could find the thing to push and have it record just a few words or a sentence or an idea or whatever. Then when I was next at my laptop or my desktop or wherever, there's the text that I could just use to do whatever. Anyway, I just ended up relying on that tool so much that I just thought it was worthy of mention. Voice recorder tools, voice note tools in general are well worth investing in, at least getting some familiarity with and understanding which one works best for you. And for me, that was Google Recorder on my Pixel 9 phone.

Gary [00:48:51]:
Cool. My Ain't It Cool is kind of my traditional go to, which is a book. So I one day, a month and a half ago, I was between books and I said, I just need to listen to an audiobook, go to sleep. And I looked at my wish list and I saw a book there. I was like, well, I don't really want to listen to this, but I guarantee it'll make me fall asleep. And so I got it. And then it ended up being Way more interesting than I thought. It's the book just called Mark Twain because it's a biography of Mark Twain by Ron Chernow.

Gary [00:49:27]:
And it is a long, long, so many hours book. I am still not done. I'm still.

Leo [00:49:34]:
Four hours.

Gary [00:49:34]:
It's so detailed into Mark Twain's life. I've never read anything of Mark Twain's other than obligatory books read in like, you know, middle school or whenever they sign them to you. Never had any interest in Mark Twain, never thought anything about Mark Twain. And I ended up being fascinated by him and this book. And there's a lot of cool stuff in there, even for modern stuff he wrote. He didn't just write books and stuff. He was like one of those people that journaled diaries and letters so much. You think today we're going to have like, leave behind a lot of stuff with all of our text messages and emails and stuff.

Gary [00:50:15]:
We have nothing on Mark Twain and his family and all the people he knew. So much stuff that they. So this book is, I'd say, more than 50% his own words or other people's words from journals and diaries and things like that. And letters, tons of letters back and forth because obviously there was no other real recording or any other evidence. So tons of stuff. And it's just fascinating. He was a brilliant writer, a very interesting philosopher and a horrible businessman and very gullible and moody and all this stuff. I mean, he lost.

Gary [00:50:51]:
He basically made lots of money by writing and lost all that money by investing in like the stupidest things over and over and over again. So, yeah, it's fascinating. I don't even know why it's like, I can't quite pinpoint why it's fascinating. And you learn a lot about history, about other things going on in the world. And if there's a famous writer that lived during that time, they come into play at some point because Mark Twain became so famous that there wasn't a person from Charles Dickens to Kipling to whoever that he did not end up running into. Because he was pretty much like one of the biggest celebrities you see. He was like a. A list celebrity before Hollywood.

Leo [00:51:35]:
So one of the things. So I, I ended up canceling my Audible subscription last year mostly because I wasn't keeping up. Right. Yeah, you get a credit every month and I just wasn't listening that much. But one of the things I did at the end to use up the last couple of credits, was get grab some audiobooks that I knew would be interesting at some point. One of them is the Mark Twain complete collection, all 12 novels, complete short stories, travel writing, essays, chapters from my autobiography, 280 Hours of Audible.

Gary [00:52:11]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:52:12]:
So if I'm ever bored or maybe if I ever need to go to sleep, maybe that's where I go. I don't know. But that's a heck of a lot of audio. Yeah. Cracks me up that the, that the biography would be another thing that you would characterize as being, you know, incredibly long.

Gary [00:52:28]:
Well, yeah.

Leo [00:52:29]:
Complete works are also pretty.

Gary [00:52:30]:
Oh, yeah. And I'll probably end up picking that up just because now I'm interested to actually listen to some of his writing because of, you know, hearing about why, like, why these things, some of the, the things he wrote were important.

Leo [00:52:45]:
Right.

Gary [00:52:46]:
And, you know, what was different about them? What was so remarkable about Huckleberry Finn or Prince and the Pauper? Things like that that made him so famous that we kind of take for granted now that they wouldn't be extraordinary for a writer to write something like that today. But back then, the stuff he wrote very easily blew people's minds.

Leo [00:53:07]:
Anyway, let's see. Let's head on out with some blatant self promotion. The one I'm going to mention this week is an unexpected way videos can expose your locations. It's askleo.com 167448 When I say this, people immediately jump to metadata, exif data and static video or files. That kind of stuff. That's not what I'm talking about at all. There is an individual, he goes by the name of Jose Monkey. He posts on social media.

Leo [00:53:42]:
I found him on TikTok, but he's on TikTok, he's on YouTube, he's on a few other places. And what people do is they send him a video of where they're at with an on video request to be found to make it legit. And they'll just do like a360 of where they happen to be. And with seemingly no clues whatsoever in the video, he does an awesome job of saying, okay, here's where you were standing when you took this video on the planet. I mean, he's done this in hundreds of different countries by now. And he doesn't just tell you where you were. He shows you the process he used of how he actually identified this specific location, the clues that are available, the things he's learned to pay attention to using the OpenStreetMap database to be able to identify, like, you know, here's. Here's a Waffle House and here's a Dunkin Donuts.

Leo [00:54:44]:
Okay, that means they're close to each other. I can run a query against the OpenStreetMap database and find all the places where those two things are close to one another. Anyway, it's absolutely fascinating and it's a real education for people to understand how much information they are passively leaking when they share selfies and selfie videos anywhere on the planet. So it's all an unexpected way videos can expose your location. I strongly recommend that if you have the opportunity, have your kids spend some time looking at these Jose monkey videos, specifically with the idea not of how cool it is that he can do this, but how scary it is that he can do this.

Gary [00:55:32]:
Yeah, I, I actually, I saw one of his videos that was fascinating. It was his fit. He took his failures because he's not always able to do it. Right.

Leo [00:55:40]:
Right.

Gary [00:55:41]:
And, but he took his failures and said, okay, I'm not going to tell you exactly where this is, but I'm going to go through a bunch of my, the ones I couldn't figure out and just take a stab at my best guess. So instead of saying, I've, I know where you were. I'm going to be like, I think you're in Costa Rica, I think you're in Arkansas. And he's very often right, right. Or, you know, sometimes they'll say, it could be this place or it could be that place. So even if, like he couldn't pinpoint the exact location.

Leo [00:56:09]:
Right.

Gary [00:56:10]:
There's. It shows that there's still some information there.

Leo [00:56:13]:
Right.

Gary [00:56:13]:
You know about, you know that maybe not perfect, but you can still get it anyway, really cool. Watch his stuff. My video that I'm going to plug is called why AI Can't Recall Replace Tech Help yet, the S in parentheses. And it's basically I just do a bunch of things where I asked the ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude some basic tech questions and it gives me, then they give me wrong answers or they hallucinate things. Yeah. And you know, one of the interesting things that came up because, you know, when you do videos, you don't always think of everything. I got a few people saying, well, of course it gave you wrong answers because your prompts don't have enough information or your prompts were wrong. This is the way I would have phrased it.

Gary [00:56:58]:
I was like, no, no, no, I should have made it more clear. The prompt, I know the answers. I don't need to ask these. Right. And when I do ask for tech help, I am being very precise and asking them, giving lots of stuff. The prompts in the video are designed to be like the questions I get.

Leo [00:57:18]:
Exactly. Yep.

Gary [00:57:19]:
So this is like, okay, I'm role playing a regular person who has a good question, they ask it in a decent way.

Leo [00:57:28]:
Right.

Gary [00:57:29]:
But not the best way, and AI gives them something wrong as feedback. Then I also explained at the end how it's still, like, good that, well, you might get a wrong answer, but you get a wrong answer in five seconds and then you could ask again, or you can refine and all that. Whereas, like humans, you might, you know, might take three days to get a response on a forum or something like that. So, I mean, there's still good reasons to ask tech questions of AI and it's getting better, but there are still failures.

Leo [00:57:57]:
What I find fascinating is that if you have a little bit of knowledge in the problem space, getting wrong answers isn't quite as painful as it would be otherwise, because you can usually quickly identify them as being wrong. Like, I'm sure you do this. I will ask various AIs tech questions all the time, but I know enough to be able to sift the wheat from the chaff. One of the things that I have seen and learned about AI is that, if anything, it is training people to ask better questions. And that's actually an unanticipated but good side effect.

Gary [00:58:41]:
Yep. And getting them to think maybe more logically could be a little bit more thoroughly.

Leo [00:58:47]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinking is good.

Gary [00:58:49]:
It could be interesting. Cool.

Leo [00:58:51]:
Alrighty. Well, we're back. That should wrap us up for this week. As always, thank you for listening, being here, and we will see you again real soon. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Bye.

Gary [00:59:07]:
Bye.