Leo [00:00:23]:
So this week I wanted to start with just a couple of quickies on Microsoft Windows. What I just told my newsletter folks with the newsletter that came out today is that I typically don't do breaking news, but this one kind of surprised me and a lot of people. Microsoft very quietly changed a deadline. You're aware of the Windows 10 ESU, right? Extended service, extended security updates, right? Yes. Windows 10's end of life was supposed to be last October. And then they said, well, you can sign up for the ESU and it'll be this October. What they quietly did was they changed the last digit of the year that it expires. It used to expire in 2026.

Leo [00:01:12]:
It now expires in 2027. So basically they've extended the extended security updates for another year for Windows 10. There's, of course, lots of speculation on why they might do such a thing. But the fact is, if you're using Windows 10 and you were a little concerned about the end of support date coming up in October, you've got another year then. The other one was that in Windows 11 land, we're starting to hear rumblings of Windows 1126H2. What windows move to, what Microsoft moved to, for quote, unquote, major Windows updates is a yearly cycle that we're doing half yearly with Windows 10, which is why there's an H2, because there used to be H1s, but now with Windows 11, there's only H2s. The speculations that it'll be out for real in September. Once again, there's lots of speculation as to what it may or may not contain.

Leo [00:02:10]:
But at least there are starting to be rumblings of it showing up. And I suspect that the Windows Insider folks are probably going to start seeing builds of that within the next month or two. Be interesting to see what they do. And if they actually stick to their. I don't even want to call it a promise. They made some statements to the effect that they were going to try and focus on fixing some of the many concerns that people have had about Windows 11 from a feature standpoint where features went away to a stability standpoint to who knows, whatever else. So we'll see if they actually end up giving 26H2 a little bit more of a consumer focus rather than trying to shovel in every new feature they can think of. So that's the.

Leo [00:02:57]:
Like I said, that's a quickie Windows update I thought people would be interested in hearing about.

Gary [00:03:02]:
Yeah. In the Apple world, there's been a bit of. Bit of Controversy over what Apple did last week, which was to increase prices. Apple almost never does this because they basically come up with new models all the time. So instead of actually increasing the price of an existing model, if they feel things are getting more expensive or whatever, they simply make the next model match the price that they really want. So, like, this year's MacBook Air may be 999, and then a new MacBook Air comes out and it's 1099. You know, that kind of thing. So to change the price of a product, the same product, just they change the number, is really rare for Apple to do it.

Gary [00:03:47]:
I can't even think of a time when they've done it. I'm sure if you go back to the 90s, maybe the 80s, I know they dropped prices definitely. There's plenty of times when that's happened in the 80s and 90s, particularly when the models sometimes were out for a little while, they change the prices and drop them. But raising them is unusual. And the reason they did it is the reason everybody expected them to do it. It's the RAM shortage. Right. The whole idea is that supposedly AI server farms are really RAM hungry.

Gary [00:04:18]:
They want to buy all these machines that have all this memory in them, and all of the memory chip makers are being bought out of all their supplies and they can't keep up. So it's the same RAM that's used in computers and other devices and that's increasing costs. And there have been tons of other companies that have increased costs first, including not just computers, but for things like Steam Deck and other types of devices that use lots of memory.

Leo [00:04:45]:
Anything that uses ram?

Gary [00:04:46]:
Yeah, anything that uses ram. And Apple warned everybody they were going to do this. Tim Cook put out a thing like two weeks in advance in an interview saying, yeah, we're probably going to have to raise prices. That's coming up. Right. Which is interesting because, you know, it's good because they didn't just spring it on anybody. Nobody can claim that they sprung it on anybody because he said it, he was going to do it. But it also gave people chance, a chance to buy things if they really wanted to.

Leo [00:05:12]:
I was wondering about that.

Gary [00:05:13]:
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, a lot of tons of people, you know, I, you know, heard from, even myself afterwards said, oh, I wish I would have bought yesterday. It's like, well, he did actually give us a chance. I mean, it was an unusual situation. And then it's like, are they really going to raise prices? Because they haven't ever done this before, so. But it Turns out, yeah, and he was giving you, giving us all a chance to buy stuff. But anyway, they, the prices went up like the Neo, the lowest priced machine,

Leo [00:05:40]:
that went up 100 bucks, which is significant, right?

Gary [00:05:44]:
That's like what, 600 to $700 for the base model. Yeah, like a MacBook Pro that it cost maybe two grand. That went up like 300 bucks. Oh wow. Other machines went up, you know, you know, $100, $200. But if you went, if you actually configure a machine with lots of ram, then of course that, you know it was going to be a much bigger jump.

Leo [00:06:04]:
Of course.

Gary [00:06:06]:
And yeah, people, of course people are like complaining about it. Interesting thing is, is that I said lots of other people doing it. Hours after Apple announced it and the news cycle was filled with articles about Apple raising prices, Microsoft increased the price of the Xbox by $100 and that

Leo [00:06:26]:
kind of went under the radar.

Gary [00:06:27]:
The timing was brilliant because all of the news, the tech news companies had already just played their cards with. Here's our article about it. People are commenting and all this stuff and then Microsoft does it. I guess a lot of companies are like, do we want to have two articles today about RAM price increases? I think one was enough. This was the bigger story and we took care of it. And then Microsoft just went under the radar. You could almost see people at Microsoft being like, yeah, rumor is my insider info is they're going to do it any day now. So let's get our price increase ready and as soon as they do theirs, wait a couple hours and do ours.

Gary [00:07:06]:
And I mean, and if so, then you know, good for them for, for doing that. But you know, yeah, so the price increases and yeah, people are complaining about them. People are like, you know, calling Apple greedy. Like, you know, the corporation isn't supposed to be making a profit. That's you know, even saying, oh, look at Apple's record high profits. You know, they could have not done this. And it's like, well, they have record high profits for a reason because they don't, you know, just give away machines or say, well, we'll just lose money on the MacBook Neo for the next few months, that kind of thing. So, so yeah, so that's, you know, what people are up, up in arms about.

Gary [00:07:46]:
And yeah, just part of dealing, dealing with stuff. The interesting thing is is that two different people commented in different places that it's, they were interested in getting a MacBook Neo or something similar or MacBook Air or something, but not now that the price increases have Gone through. And I asked, okay, so at 7, because $700 is the one I recommend everybody get, or the old $700, now it's $800. I said, so it's $700. It was a good deal. At $800, you're not getting it. And, you know, both times people responded yes. I was like, okay, I mean, fair enough.

Gary [00:08:27]:
But that's. To me, it's like, you know, I mean, there isn't a 700. That model is not $700 anymore. You can't get it for $700. It's just not there. If you want it, it's $800. So you decide. And if you decide you don't want it, then that's fine, I guess.

Leo [00:08:42]:
But my question is a little different. I mean, if you're getting a new laptop, do you really think that other manufacturers aren't raising their prices due to the RAM shortage? That you'll get a better deal somewhere else? I don't think so.

Gary [00:08:56]:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, this is an

Leo [00:08:58]:
industry problem, not an Apple problem.

Gary [00:09:01]:
I mean, it's certainly possible that somebody was weighing MacBook Neo versus somebody else's laptop, and they were really close trying to figure it out. And this price difference is like, okay, well, that settles it for me. But, yeah, I mean, it is what it is. It's, you know, Apple increased the prices. Apple had price increases, and they decided to increase theirs accordingly.

Leo [00:09:26]:
So what I think is interesting, this goes off into the. The realm of pure speculation about the future. The RAM manufacturers are presumably, hopefully ramping up capacity, Right. So that they can basically create more RAM faster because of the increased demand. But what we're also seeing is that a lot of the increased demand is, I'll call it speculative based on AI data centers. And a number of the. The number of AI data centers that are planned has been decreasing over the course of the last, I'll say, 12 months, both because of, I'll call it over ambitiousness at the start, as well as just pushback from the populace about, you know, we don't want data centers in our backyard. We'd write, you know, all this kind of stuff.

Leo [00:10:26]:
So I'm wondering if at some point in, oh, I don't know, a year, maybe two, there'll be a glut of ram and a lot of these prices might end up coming down. Like I said, pure speculation. Right. But it is one of those things that I could see happening.

Gary [00:10:45]:
No, definitely. I know. I feel. I mean, I did actually do some research looking into articles on Are the RAM RAM manufacturers trying to do better? And, and they are, they are trying to ramp up production which will probably mean there'll be this generation of like 20, 26 era RAM where a lot is produced.

Leo [00:11:05]:
Right.

Gary [00:11:06]:
The demand for data centers goes back down and then there's this like oh, a ton of this era of RAM that's available for devices and stuff. Meanwhile, it is hurting smaller companies even worse. There are companies that produce gadgets where they, they sell, their numbers are like in the hundreds or thousands of how much they sell for very specific uses that finding that they can't make orders for their size, you know, for the amount that they need from the big brand companies. So they have to buy secondhand like you know, from some, you know, more like retail rather than wholesale almost for their. Or they can't get it at all, which is, you know, a problem. But then it could, that could reverse again in a year. We could have, you know, it could be cheap to buy small lots of RAM and then we could see a bunch of new gadgets because RAM is so cheap. So anyway, just something to keep, you know, keep our eyes on.

Leo [00:12:02]:
All I can say is that I'm glad. So I bought a new desktop machine at the beginning of the year and I put in much more RAM than I need.

Gary [00:12:11]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:12:12]:
Because as you know the need always expands to meet or exceed the amount of available RAM eventually. But I'm glad that I'm set for a while because it would be quite, quite pricey to do the upgrade now for sure.

Gary [00:12:26]:
Right. Another interesting story I've been looking at this week is just an increase in stories on something called click fix attacks. Have you ever heard of Qlik Fix?

Leo [00:12:38]:
I've heard of them. And as while reading up what you linked to, I realized that the Windows version of this has been around forever. It's been around for a long time.

Gary [00:12:48]:
Yeah, they've been around for a long time. They got a lot more attention starting about last year and then a little bit more attention now particularly because they've been spotted more in the Mac world. Whereas before the interesting thing was the way it works is that it was very Windows oriented thing. So Mac users would get something that wouldn't even make sense because it just assumed they were using Windows. And now these open up PowerShell.

Leo [00:13:11]:
What?

Gary [00:13:11]:
Yeah. So the way Qlik fix attacks work is interesting. Instead of being tricked into downloading and installing something or granting somebody access or something like that, you're simply tricked into copying some text that you can't see.

Leo [00:13:30]:
Right.

Gary [00:13:31]:
Going into an app like Terminal on the Mac.

Leo [00:13:34]:
Right.

Gary [00:13:35]:
And pasting that command in and pressing return. In other words, just executing the code that somebody else wants you to execute, which could include just about anything and could, you know, and most of the time, they take the form of captchas,

Leo [00:13:53]:
which is fascinating, but. Okay.

Gary [00:13:55]:
Yeah, it's fascinating because we're used to seeing CAPTCHAs identify the photos with fire hydrants in them or identify the photos with motorcycles or the letters. The letters. You see? And this one is basically, it says, to prove you're human, do a command C switch, you know, launch the app called Terminal, or, you know, command shell and Windows, and do a command V and press return. And this will confirm that you're human?

Leo [00:14:33]:
Among other things. No.

Gary [00:14:36]:
Is that even real? And here's the interesting thing. The first time I heard about this, which was probably last year, I thought it was a joke. I saw somebody post one to social media, and I thought this was basically a joke showing, like, what is the most obvious way to try to trick somebody into it that anybody should get? And when they posted it, I was like, well, that's definitely not real. That's meant to make people like you and me have a little laugh. Like, oh, yeah, okay, that would be like. But it's definitely real, and it's definitely in the Mac world now. And matter of fact, it's so much in the Mac world that Apple implemented a security patch recently where if you copy text and try to paste text into Terminal and it identifies that the text was copied, say, from a web browser or from an email message or from the Messages app, it will analyze it and give you a warning message. Oh, this looks dangerous.

Gary [00:15:39]:
Are you sure you want to paste this in Terminal? So they kind of patched it by giving this warning message. And the result is that, of course, Terminal isn't the only place where you can run scripts on a Mac, because Macs are highly customizable. For instance, for a long time, there's something called the Script Editor, where you can create AppleScript or local JavaScript, little apps. And there are others, too, because Shortcuts, Automator, they could all be used for this. But it is really interesting. And it just goes to show that, you know, when people worry about these really complex hacks, you know, things that use, like, really high technology, and to try to trick you into installing something or somehow eavesdropping on you or, you know, man in the middle attacks, all sorts of stuff like that, that. It's like those take a lot of effort, and these don't because it's really. It's about.

Gary [00:16:29]:
It's not about targeting you. It's about targeting, you know, a million people and hoping they get 100.

Leo [00:16:36]:
I was gonna say. Yeah, it's a. It's a numbers game for them. You're right. It's funny because we, we do spend a lot of time talking about the different ways that, you know, hackers can hack and attackers can attack. But in reality, you know, so much of what's actually successful are these really simple ways that they come along and fool you. Yeah, looked it up. And indeed, I've got one of my Tip of the Days captchas never use Start Run, which is the moral equivalent of doing this in Windows.

Leo [00:17:13]:
I've got a link in the Show Notes, but it's for my Tip of the Day subscribers. But yeah, this one actually dates back to the beginning of last year and at that point they were just using Start Run to make things happen. The description I saw in the article that you link to talks about using the alternate command, the alternate start menu, and hitting things like PowerShell. But yeah, the problem, of course, is when you paste stuff in, you can do anything, which is like the definition of malware.

Gary [00:17:48]:
Yeah. And yeah, so it's. People often forget how easy it is to fall for one of these because so many people look at them. Like when you read an article about the Click Fix attacks or you listen, you're listening right now, it seems really obvious and you may think, well, there may be a hundred out of a million people that don't know about this and will fall for it. But that's not really why people are falling for these. The real reason is because of this. It's a situation that you're in. Like an example I like to give is if you get a message that seems to come from the postal service or FedEx or something saying something about a package, you're going to look at it and say, oh, yeah, this is fake or whatever.

Gary [00:18:36]:
But if you happen to be expecting a package right then, like today, you're going to be much more likely to think it's real. If you just were on the phone with your bank about something and five minutes later you get an email that's pretending to be from your bank, you're going to think that it's probably real because you were just talking to somebody at your bank, just dealing with the situation. Well, you don't know is that email was sent to a million people and you just happen to have been one of the people that was just Talking to your bank. And this happens all the time. Add go over days, weeks, months, years. And occasionally there'll be a few coincidences where, yeah, you get that, you know, oh, your package is delayed. Click here to confirm your identity or you know, there's a problem with your bank, please click here to confirm something. And it just happens to.

Gary [00:19:27]:
It's happened to me where I've seen it and I've been like, well, that's. This looks like spam. But it's weird that I was just dealing with something with this company.

Leo [00:19:37]:
I had exactly the same scenario, I think it was like two weeks ago where, yeah, of course, you know, we get packages from fedex all the time. And sure enough, there was this spam that talked about, you know, problems delivering your package or some silly thing like that. And normally I dismiss them out of hand because they're obviously spam. Fortunately, all I did, all it really meant in this case was that I spent an extra two seconds, Right. Looking at it and thinking about it, making sure that it was spam before I just dismissed it out of hand.

Gary [00:20:08]:
Right. So all the people that say, oh, I wouldn't be dumb enough to fall for this, it's like, yeah, but there's. There are situations where your guard is down. It's not that you would normally recognize this as a scam. It's just that in a situation and especially if there's an urgency, if you're upset, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah.

Leo [00:20:31]:
And we're all so used to and frustrated by captchas. The fact that one would be this bizarre is not something that raise any eyebrows anymore. Because captchas have been getting bizarre.

Gary [00:20:46]:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And speaking of like that, I mean, yeah, you can use AI to, To, you know, help you figure out if something is a scam.

Leo [00:20:59]:
Yeah. This is which. Thank you for the segue. So in. In this week's today in AI Because I think it's. It is kind of interesting to. To talk about ways that AI can be genuinely useful. I have over the past couple of weeks been flooded for ads for back relief products.

Leo [00:21:23]:
It could very well be something to do with the fact that I've been diagnosed with stenosis, you know, in the lower back region. So, yeah, you know, there's pain. And those kind of products are all of a sudden kind of interesting to me. Apparently the ad networks got the message and decided that I needed to see lots and lots and lots and lots of ads for back related treatments and products. So there was a specific one that I looked at That I saw and I decided to try something. I asked Claude, is this real? The actual question I asked it was, let's see, where did it go? There it is. I linked the product and I asked, does it actually help? And I got back, you know, in as is so often the case with AI, I got back like eight paragraphs worth of information. But the bottom line was, is it was a very well researched diagnosis of whether or not this product was something unique and new, it had a chance of actually helping me, or whether it was something that was, you know, yep, it was a product and it's a product that does things.

Leo [00:22:48]:
But the claims are probably overstated, the pricing is probably overstated, the urgency is probably overstated. There are very, you know, there are lots and lots of similar products that are interesting at like a half to a quarter the price. Normally you'll find them on Amazon. The claims that it makes are, you know, at, in their absolute sense aren't real. But yeah, you know, there you can get some temporary relief but not the, the permanent relief that it tries to claim. And I asked at the end, it said, you know, do you want me to pull up a few of the equivalent commodity versions so that you can see the price gap? And I said, oh sure, show me some of those. And it gave me a long list of things that I can find on, on Amazon and other locations and like I said, usually at a third to the quarter the price. The reason I mention that is not to, you know, start talking about back relief products because that's just, you know, the nature of my life as it is these days.

Leo [00:23:57]:
But I just found this a surprisingly effective use of AI because I think one of the things that a lot of people don't carry into these discussions is a good sense of skepticism. And it's wonderful to have something like Claude do the research and be skeptical for you. So it was very valuable information. I'm not buying one of these products. I'm not even buying one of the alternatives because it's not really giving me what I'm looking for. Yeah, well, I highly recommend, you know, if you're ever curious about a thing you're looking at, go ahead and ask your local AI to do the research for you and you'll find you may find interesting stuff. And again, I'm not saying that AI is going to be always right, always, all the time, but it gave me a lot of stuff to think about and a lot of places to look in this case, because Claude does a good job of citing its sources. But but yeah, that was a very, very useful use of AI that actually benefited me quite a bit.

Gary [00:24:55]:
I actually did something similar with. Oh, well, yeah, just on the back relief product kind of stuff. I think I mentioned before I like last year I read a book about Mark Twain and one of the things Mark Twain did a lot in his life was see a lot of quack do doctors, you know, because that was quite the thing if you had some money in the late 19th, early 20th century was to go see doctors that had cures for all sorts of things and his family had tons of ailments and they were always going to different places where doctors claimed to be able to do stuff. And they were usually like, they were usually things that didn't really help you at all, sometimes did a lot of harm. Medicines we don't use today because they're basically just poisons. But the writer didn't really explain any of these because probably they realized their limits. They were not going to get into medical stuff. They were just going to recount Mark Twain's life.

Gary [00:25:52]:
So I use ChatGPT to tell me like what was this? And it would say, oh, it's, it's basically the poison known as this today. And they put for two decades doctors used to give it to people claiming he cured something. And in one case everything seemed to work like he went to one quack doctor and it helped him and his family immensely and there didn't seem to be a downside. So I put that doctor's name in there into ChatGPT, this from like 1910 or something like that, and was like, why was Mark Twain's family helped by this doctor? And basically, and, and it was smart enough to say basically what this doctor advocated at the time was not use any of those poison medicines, but just to go to the countryside, eat well, drink a lot of water and do exercise. So he basically was teach all of his methods, didn't introduce any poisons and if you were taking all these other cures and you stopped, you were probably going to feel better. Plus, the exercises that he recommended are basically physical therapy, what we would call physical therapy today. So it wasn't like the doctor had really, you know, knew what to do, just that by chance this one doctor had actually basically a do no harm kind of thing. So anyway, and, and the book didn't explain it, but chatgpt as a little augmentation to the book kind of explained it and it wasn't the thing I really need to check on like, oh, is that true? Because with the claims that chat TPD were making that staying hydrated and getting some exercise and not eating poison.

Gary [00:27:34]:
Yeah, okay. Yeah, I buy it.

Leo [00:27:38]:
Yep. In, in kind of fun stuff with chat with Claude again. In this case, 20 to the 72nd. Does that have any meaning? Well, you're probably seeing the notes, so you already know what the meaning is. If you. I'm writing an article on password length and in fact it'll be, I'll be linking to it later in the show. But one of the things that comes up is, you know, how long should a password be? And part of the math that I end up doing is, okay, if you've got upper and lowercase characters and you've got special characters and you've got digits, then basically you have 72 possible characters that can go in any single spot in a password. And if Your password is 20 characters in length, as I typically use myself, then you're looking at 20 to the 72nd possible different variations on a password.

Leo [00:28:42]:
In other words, if you're going to as a hacker try all passwords that fit all 20 character passwords, you would be trying 20 to the 72nd different passwords. Well, how big a number is that? How. What does that mean? That's, that's, you know, kind of unimaginable. Yeah. And normally what I ask search engines, you know, give me 20 to the 72nd, they give it to me in scientific notation, right? So it's, you know, 14 times 10 to the something or others, which I suppose is useful, but it's not that useful for people that haven't gone, say, through an engineering course who don't understand scientific notation or engineering notation. Fortunately, the search engine I happened to use, its first result said, oh yeah, it's this. And it gave me a 38 digit number, which is great. It's exactly what I was looking for because it makes 20 to the 72nd much more, I don't know, viscerally understandable because you can see just how big a number it really is.

Leo [00:29:45]:
Then it dawned on me, what, what are the names for that? How do you, how do you read that? Right? And that's where I asked Claude. I said, okay, Claude, you know, since, you know, a million is one followed by six zeros and a billion is one followed by seven zeros. What's the ilion translation of this number? And it did again, a wonderful analysis. It's fun. So for the record, 20 to the 72nd and our, our captioning sl transcript software is going to have fun with this is 14 undecilian 16 deillion 833 nonillion 949 octillion 999 sept 999 sextillion 673 quintillion 980 quadrillion 3627-525759-85664. I did not know any of those names. Yeah, but, but Claude was more than happy to tell me what it is and, and let me read it off to you. So again, for random esoteric, I wonder what kind of questions.

Leo [00:31:17]:
It's actually kind of fun. And yeah, I incorporated that into my, my article on password length.

Gary [00:31:24]:
Well, yeah, I love those learning like the weird vocabulary like that. Knowing what. I guess 11 groups of 0 of 3 zeros would be classified as. Wow, so cool. One last item here that I found fascinating. There was an article in 404 Media that was basically about something that you and I, you know, have talked about over the years. You know, a lot of people sell products online and a lot of those products are about how to sell products or how, you know, basically people saying, I'm rich, let me sell you a course or a book on how I became rich, which always leaves you scratching your head. It's like, well, if you're rich, why are you, Aren't you, why don't you just enjoy your money? You know, why do you need to sell this ten dollar course or fifty course or whatever.

Gary [00:32:20]:
And of course the reason is in most cases they don't. They're not rich. They need, they need to sell it because they got bills to pay. What I found fascinating in the article is just one point is that when a lot of these videos are posted online because they're posted like on Instagram, TikTok and all that, like, here's how, here's all this money I made. They like to show dashboards. Like, I'll see them for instance, when I'm looking for like YouTube techniques. There'll be people that'll say, I make a lot of money on YouTube. And then they show a dashboard that looks like a YouTube dashboard and it shows them earning a lot ofmoney on YouTube.

Gary [00:32:56]:
Apparently there are whole apps or basically web apps that fake all of those. They fake the YouTube ones. They fake ones with Stripe, which is a big online, you know, money processor. They fake them for Instagram. All these other ways that people claim that they make tons of money. You can go in and pay for apps that will provide fake visuals for you so you can make it look like you make a million dollars on Instagram by just simply going to this thing and saying, I want it to look like I make a million dollars, and it puts a bunch of numbers and it looks like a real Instagram earnings page or whatever. And I thought that was fascinating, that there's a whole industry basically based on fake, you know, stats and dashboards showing fake numbers so that you could try to prove that you are successful in some way.

Leo [00:33:50]:
My takeaway from that article was the. The one that surprised me was that you can rent an. A. A private jet interior.

Gary [00:33:58]:
Oh, yeah, yeah. That was a big part of the article. Yeah.

Leo [00:34:01]:
It's not a private jet. It's literally like a sound stage or a studio somewhere where you could just rent it by the hour to record your oh, look at me, I'm on my private jet video. And the other. The. The thing that I'm. You know, as soon as you say fake dashboards, I immediately jump to vibe coding. These days, I'm not sure you necessarily need to use, you know, somebody else's web app. You could easily, I think, vibe code something that looks like a wonderful dashboard showing how successful you are.

Leo [00:34:33]:
So, yeah, the. The opportunities to be deceived and the opportunities to deceive are increasing probably almost exponentially.

Gary [00:34:47]:
Yeah, indeed. So old, old techniques like selling, selling, selling have new aspects to them, like fake dashboards or you're making it look like you're in a private jet, that kind of thing. I mean, I think the business of making it look like you're in a private jet is probably going to go away as. As soon as. Well, even now, AI imaging will be good enough. Like, why go and pay 65 bucks for an hour inside of a set that looks like you're in a private jet when you can just go and ask Google Gemini to generate an image

Leo [00:35:24]:
for you that looks like you're in private jet Back.

Gary [00:35:28]:
Video. Yeah.

Leo [00:35:30]:
Easy.

Gary [00:35:31]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:35:32]:
All righty. Let's see what else was cool this week. So you mentioned dungeon crawler Carl a couple of weeks ago.

Gary [00:35:40]:
Yes. And we welcome you to the cult.

Leo [00:35:42]:
Yeah. Thank you. It's interesting. I read the first book and I set it aside, and then I sent you an article about the fact that the author actually is a local guy to me.

Gary [00:35:53]:
Yep.

Leo [00:35:54]:
He lives out here in the Seattle area. And. Okay, fine. I'll dive into the second book. And now I'm midway through the third book. And, you know, it's. It's. Yes, the.

Leo [00:36:05]:
It's. It's set in. However, I also have read some. I'll call them negative reviews, people who just. For whom it doesn't click. Yeah, and I can absolutely understand why, because even reading the first book, my initial thought was, well, this seems like kind of a niche audience. And that niche audience, of course, are gamers. As I mentioned, I think last week I've been, you know, playing around in World of Warcraft again after a bit of a hiatus.

Leo [00:36:43]:
And so many of what go. So much of what goes on in Dungeon Crawler Carl kind of sort of assumes at least a passing familiarity with massively multiplayer online games. And if that's not your thing, then I can absolutely understand, you know, just not being as captivated by these books as other people might be. But like I said, of course, you know, I'm. I'm knee deep in World of Warcraft. I'm in the process of leveling my third character to maximum level. So yes, all of the references, all of the nuances, they make total sense to me. But I could certainly see people who don't get that, who aren't interested in that, not necessarily enjoying these books.

Leo [00:37:30]:
So, yep, I'm going to go ahead and second, the Dungeon Crawler Carl Pool this. And with that caveat that, yeah, you know, if you're not a gamer, this may not be for you.

Gary [00:37:41]:
Yeah, I mean, I, and I even think it's a little bit beyond games. It's more of a geek culture kind of thing because he has plenty of geek culture references in the books. He also references different kinds of games. Like, for instance, I'm on the sixth book now and it is dealing with a type of game I never enjoyed, which is the card trading games. Oh, you know, Pokemon Magic, the Gathering, that kind of thing. So, you know, which he hadn't. You know, in other books it's different kinds of things. It's actually the book.

Gary [00:38:13]:
There's even a genre that the book is in called lit rpg. And so there are other lit RPG books out there. And then in the third book you're in right now, you're experiencing the particular flavor of deakness, which is trains. And it gets really deep. So much so that there is a preface to the book from the author saying, look, if you're not into trains, don't just enjoy the characters and what they're doing and don't try to figure out the train stuff, which I advice I took. I was. As soon as I saw Complex, the train stuff got, I started ignoring them, trying to figure out which line connected with which other line and how they looped and. And I was like, okay, the author said I don't need to pay attention to that, so I didn't.

Gary [00:39:01]:
And I was just like, yeah, yeah, I just enjoy. The characters are doing things. They're interacting. There's action, and I'm not going to worry about figuring out what he's trying to say with these trains. And that's just in that one book. And then there's no real mention of trains after that. So, yeah, it's. Yeah, I'm on the sixth book now.

Gary [00:39:22]:
I'm in the middle of the sixth book. So, yeah, still enjoying it. I will talk about a TV show that's got a lot of attention, Widows Bay on Apple tv. And it's just a. It's a. Well, I think it's renewed for a second season, but the first season's pretty more or less standalone about a weird New England island that is cursed. And. And it's a very.

Gary [00:39:49]:
It's a, you know, supernatural horror kind of thing with humor. So there's humor in there and there's a lot of characters instead of following the trope of how they're supposed to act in a situation, sometimes not following the trope at all and just acting like maybe more like a real person would act. So anyway, it's good. It's like eight. Eight episodes. And they're probably, you know, two years from now, whatever. We'll get like a second season of it. And it's got a bunch of people you recognize.

Gary [00:40:19]:
And also the humor is very. A lot of people said it reminds him of Park, Parks and Rec.

Leo [00:40:25]:
Interesting.

Gary [00:40:26]:
Which isn't that interesting once you realize it's from one of the creators of Parks and Riley? So, yeah, it's a. Somebody. I even heard somebody describe. It's like, remember the creepy paintings that are in the town hall in Parks and Rec? Imagine if the show was that interesting. Yeah.

Leo [00:40:43]:
So I will admit that we tried Widow's Bay and we dropped it after a couple of episodes. It just was not our thing, which was kind of unfortunate. I mean, again, you know, different. Different strokes or different folks. I do want to point out, though, that the. The main character, the actor, Matthew Rise, we liked him a lot in the reboot of Perry Mason that ran, I want to say, a couple of years ago now, unfortunately, it got canceled and it was not the Perry Mason that you grew up with by any stretch, but it was a very interesting, you know, Perry Mason style murder mystery, etc. So I will say no. No to Widow's Bay, but yes to.

Leo [00:41:32]:
To the recent Perry Mason. If someone's Interested in that kind of stuff? Well, yeah. So the article I'm going to point point everybody at today is how long should a password be? It's askleo.com 4844 and it's one of those answers that keeps changing over time. Right. How long should a password be? The answer is always. You know, every time I revise the articles little bit longer used to be 8, then it was 12, then it was 16. But as I talked about earlier I do some, you know, examples of just how, how big those numbers really are and what kind of time frame a hacker is going to have to use to be able to, to hack your arbitrarily long, your arbitrary mix of characters at 20. So anyway.

Leo [00:42:18]:
Yep. How long should a password be?

Gary [00:42:20]:
Well, I'll push a video called Helping others with their Macs using screen sharing through Messages. A lot of people don't realize that Apple has its own proprietary imessage system and you could do it fully Internet based, you know, so you could message from Mac to Mac. If you're messaging with somebody, you can actually ask to share their screen or share yours, which, which makes it really useful for helping somebody out. You know, if you want to help a friend out, you want to help a parent or a child out with their Mac, you can, as long as you can start a, an imessage conversation which you may do all the time anyway. You can start a screen sharing session and then show them something, have something shown to you. That kind of deal makes it really easy to do tech support for families.

Leo [00:43:06]:
Does it allow for remote control or is it only.

Gary [00:43:09]:
Yes, you could do it either way. So you can, you know, you could be like well let me show you what I'm experiencing and all the other person could do is watch but then say oh I see where you're going wrong. Or you could say allow me to control your Mac and then you, you know, you can actually click and type and all that stuff.

Leo [00:43:27]:
Nice. Alrighty. Well I think that wraps us up for another week a little a bumpy ride. Folks will have noticed that Gary's voice changed.

Gary [00:43:39]:
Yeah, change microphones in the middle but

Leo [00:43:41]:
yep, microphones change Internet connections changed a whole bunch of stuff but hopefully we'll get that all ironed out for our next. As always, thank you for listening and we will see you here again real soon. Take care everyone. Bye bye bye.