Keeping up with technology is a challenge but we are tackling the good stuff. What do you do with all those photos on your phone? How do I keep track of all these passwords? Is there an app for that? Let's raise our glass (not glasses) and get off the sidelines...get in the game..and maybe learn a 'hack' or two. Technology expert - let me say, guru, John Sand is with us and sharing some tips to get us through the craziness of ever-changing technology and give us a couple of things we can pull out of our back pocket when we have visitors over the holidays. That 'aha' moment for all to witness. Ladies, we've got this!
John Sand is an all around expert and happy to help you with you technology issues. He can be reached at: john@ctcomputerassociates.com
Keeping up with technology is a challenge but we are tackling the good stuff. What do you do with all those photos on your phone? How do I keep track of all these passwords? Is there an app for that? Let's raise our glass (not glasses) and get off the sidelines...get in the game..and maybe learn a 'hack' or two. Technology expert - let me say, guru, John Sand is with us and sharing some tips to get us through the craziness of ever-changing technology and give us a couple of things we can pull out of our back pocket when we have visitors over the holidays. That 'aha' moment for all to witness. Ladies, we've got this!
John Sand is an all around expert and happy to help you with you technology issues. He can be reached at: john@ctcomputerassociates.com
Mm. Hey there, I'm Amy. And welcome to the podcast fearlessly facing 50 this podcast is about conversations and connections and my mission is to encourage women over 40 to live their best life. You know what, ladies, we haven't peaked yet and we are just getting started. So if you're ready for some real talk with real people and real conversations about what really matters, you have found the right place. I'm ready. Are you ready? Let's get started. Let's get real.
Speaker 2:[inaudible]
Speaker 1:Hey there, I'm Amy and welcome to fearlessly facing 50 that just rolls off my tongue. I think I'm probably saying it in my sleep. My husband can probably attest to that, but it is so great having you here and having you in the community of fearlessly facing 50 it's been amazing. And what it has shown me with your comments and your feedback and your questions and your stories is that this really matters. This is a topic that's important to people. It's a time in our life where we're living forward, taking on new challenges and going all in. So it's awesome. So keep it coming. I, I'd love to hear from all of you ways you can do that are by going to my website fearlessly facing fifty.com and you can go to the tab that says blog right in the upper left hand corner. There's a spot there that says subscribe. You just type in your email and send it off. Believe me, you're not going to be getting a tremendous amount of emails from me or I don't put you on a list, anything like that. It's just simply a way to get updates. You can get my recent podcast, you can find out about events and giveaways. You will also can follow me on Instagram at fearlessly facing 50 or you can join the Facebook page, which is a great community of people that's growing every day and it's all about sharing insight, sharing stories. It's awesome. So high fives and hugs all around to you because I couldn't do this without you. I'm not giving in. I'm forging ahead and today we are talking about something that I'm just going to start off by saying there are no silly questions and no stupid questions about technology. Technology is crazy and it is changing all the time. And as women at our age, we can get left on the sidelines and we don't want to do that. So today we're digging in to some of the questions that I had and that I've gotten from you and we're going to answer them. John sand is here and he's an expert. He has been incredible to me. I actually posted in local Facebook group, I need help with something. He got back to me right away. He came over, we sat down, we went over everything and he has taught me so much. So I really wanted him to be on the show and I'm excited to share his wisdom with you. He's, he's really an incredible young man. So before we get into that, I want you to think about this. Are you technologically savvy in our world? Technology is everywhere. If you own a Peloton bike. Yep. Technology at its best. Think about these latest and greatest cars, the Teslas and all these crazy new cars and how technology has changed. You know, a few years back it was an upgrade, a big upgrade to get a navigation system and now I don't even think people get those anymore because they're using apps like Google maps or ways. I'm a huge waste follower. I'm in the car a lot. I'm going all these different places. I have ways on all the time and I have learned to never override it. I don't know about you, but I always follow ways. So technology is leading me. It's pretty crazy. How can we keep our technology skills current?
Speaker 2:[inaudible]
Speaker 1:I'm thinking back to college in the 80s and 90 you know we had to go to a computer lab. Of course I had my brother typewriter in my dorm that I would type all my papers on. Got that as a graduation gift and then we would have to take a class on programming and we would go into this computer lab. It's kind of dark. It was usually in the basement of a building and you would walk in and you would be learning basic BAS. I see. Then think about those first computer games that came out. I remember that game pong. I'm sure our kids will be saying, Oh, pong yet? No, that one, no pong. The game where the little things moved up and down on the sides and you hit this ball back and forth. And the degrees of difficulty were simply if it was faster technology. And what about Atari? We probably all had one of those. So when I was reaching researching, I came across this. Now let's remember, there are no silly questions and no stupid questions about technology. A woman in her mid forties walked in to the Apple store and she said to the sales clerk, hi, I would like to get the new iPhone, the gentleman working at the genius bar. Such sure, what would you like? 32 GB or one 28 GB. She sat there for a minute and she said, um, how many pictures is that? Yeah. Now I'm not telling this story to belittle the fact or, or to make this woman sound like, wow, you know, she should have known that. I mean I know what 32 and one 28 GB is, you know, let's not judge, but let's think about that. I mean, what do we use our phones for? Let's be honest here. Women pictures, we take a whole lot of pictures.
Speaker 2:[inaudible]
Speaker 1:I read a really good article I wanted to share with you. It was a recent Pew research survey. Pew. It found that American's understanding of technology varies greatly depending on the topic and wait for it your age. The data was collected from about 5,000 participants and I wanted to share a couple of the results. 49% didn't know what browsing does and what it is. 28% could identify an example of two factor authentication. Okay, I can barely say that word. What the heck is that anyway? I know John's going to answer it for us, but it is something that comes up on my phone from time to time that I need to continue setting up, so we're going to dig into that. Unsurprisingly, young adults scored higher than adults on all the questions. 18 to 30 year olds answered seven out of 10 correctly compared to those 40 and over answered three correctly. Okay enough statistics because we don't know who the participants were, their level of knowledge going into the test, any of that. And we don't grade anything on this podcast. We're all way past that. This podcast is about living forward, not looking back. So what this information does indicate is that we need to learn more to stay current and how do we do that? So I'm going to turn it over now to John and I really hope that you walk away with a few pearls from this show on technology. Here we go. Well, I am so excited to get started today. As I sat in my preview, I am sitting here with someone that I truly admire and I have to say has been a huge lifesaver for me. So when I started this adventure, um, like I've said in other things, I jump in with both feet. I can in ball off. I don't care where the splashes go, I'm going to figure it out. So John has been with on this process now. And one thing he said when he came over and got me all ready to go on my podcast and talking to me, you know, at a, at a pace that I could understand, which I so appreciate, uh, I said, he said, I said to do websites and he said, yeah, I do. He does everything. So I said, that's awesome, but I want to do it with you. So I want to learn along the way. So what I love about John and I encourage you for people that you know, you can get somebody to do everything for you, right? I mean, let's be honest, but let's talk about lifetime learning. There it is right there. You want to figure these things out. You want to stay current. So we're going to jump into this. So, John, welcome. I'm so glad you're here and because of you, we're this far on our podcasts. So, um, I have gotten questions and like I said, the preview, there is no stupid question. There's no silly question. John is addressing everything that came my way and my own personal questions. So we're just gonna fire away and start. So here we go. One of the questions I got was do we always have to do the updates on our phones? Now? I think this person might've had an iPhone, so I don't know if it's the same for, you know, um, Samsung's, that type of thing. But what happens if we don't? And then the second part of that question is about the apps. Now I know this morning I woke up, I know I updated my apps yesterday, but there happens to be a little eight next to it again. So walk us through that process.
Speaker 3:All right, so that little number that you're seeing next to the apps, that's actually not updates, that's notifications. How many pending things that you have to do in that app.
Speaker 1:Bingo. See, didn't know that. Perfect.
Speaker 3:So like when you see that will number next to your inbox saying how many unread messages you have are on Facebook. And I'll show you how many unread notifications you have are correct whatsoever. Um, updating the apps is always a good idea. I mean these patch security holes that exist in the apps, they patch issues where, you know, maybe crashes when you're doing a specific thing. These updates are released by the manufacturers and by the app developers so that the app will run better. So, you know, it's kind of a pain but it's worth doing. What I would say is just hit the app update button in the app store. Just do that right before you go to bed and let it do it overnight, you know, less hassle.
Speaker 1:Okay. That makes perfect sense. So we'll, we'll that also, because now we're in this whole thing of Apple watches and Fitbits and all this. So, so if, if you have an iPhone and you do the update, does it go ahead and update the watch as well?
Speaker 3:Well, sometimes the apps, if you update the app on the iPhone and the watch is connected to that iPhone, it will update the watch app as well. Perfect. Um, if you're doing a watch, a West software update, and I believe the same is true for the same sung gear line, you have to specifically go into your watch app and update the device itself. Okay? That's
Speaker 1:the answer. Is that perfect? Now when you do one of those updates, what if you don't have wifi access? Like what if you're on vacation and it's flashing, you know, do an update. Do you have to be connected to wifi? Should you, you know,
Speaker 3:if you don't have unlimited data, I would recommend B being connected to wifi. And even then most of unlimited data plans get throttled after a certain amount of usage. So you don't want to waste that on apps when you could be like binge watching Netflix.
Speaker 1:There you go. There you go. When we know how to do that, well what am I talking about? Netflix. We'll see. Um, all right, let's talk about pictures because I probably have 5,000 pictures or more on my phone. So what's your best advice with pictures? Cause these questions, I probably got a half a dozen of these. Now keep in mind that we are that generation, probably your mom, actually John, um, that has a cute photo book of you with all these pictures plastered in it. So we were the generation of, you know, handheld photos. So what are we supposed to do with all this?
Speaker 3:So whether you're on an iPhone or an Android device, I recommend downloading the Google photos app. So Google photos is really cool. It's an app where you, it'll, um, constantly back up and store all of your photos at a slightly reduced quality, completely free, you know, so it's, and for unlimited photos, it's a great deal. And it also uses Google's machine learning algorithms so it learns what's in your pictures. It can learn your different pets and identify them by which pet they are. So if you want to see, Oh, I have this cat, I want to see just pictures of that. It don't let you do that. Really it can even identify like things that are inside of the picture. So if you search headphones and I'll look through all of your pictures and find a picture of headphones, that's crazy. Yeah, it's a crazy amount of learning. So,
Speaker 1:okay, so that's a Google app that we can just download on the app store.
Speaker 3:Yup. As long as you have a Gmail or Google account, you just sign in, set it up and it'll backup all your photos. The best part about that though is there's a little button in there that says free up space. So once it's backed up a photo, it'll actually delete it locally off your phone. So you free up a bunch of storage on your phone as well.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's incredible. Okay. Right there. That's, that's, we said we were going to get some pearls to take away. That's a big one. Uh wow. Okay, great. So we got that. So for our pictures, now let's talk about passwords because I know even when you came into my office and I said, Oh, I got everything written down and I taped everything up. He's like, Hey me, all your passwords are right there for anybody to see. Okay. I don't think our generation thinks about this one. We can't remember our passwords. So should we change them? How often should we change them? When that prompt comes up on the screen. When you go to Amazon for example, I'm on it all the time. Do you, do you just save the passwords? You don't have to put it in every time. All right. Walk us through, give us, give us the, give us the date
Speaker 3:or password. Security is a super important principle and I feel like some older folks might need to learn a little bit more about it. Passwords are essential in our modern lives and there's a couple like good tips and tricks for like staying safe with them. I recommend that you avoid something called password reuse. That's when you use the same password or style of password over and over again because if, if, if someone with malicious intent gets one of those passwords, they really do have a password to all of your accounts that share that kind of style. You want to limit their access as much as possible. Okay. Interesting.
Speaker 1:So do you make up crazy passwords? How do you, how do you remember that? Is there an app for that?
Speaker 3:Isn't that for that? There's a couple, actually there's a, there's three that are pretty generally Mac recommended, uh, last password Dashlane and my personal favorite, which is one password. And you say those again? Uh, last password, last password dash lane. Dash lane, one word. Yeah, one word dash lane and one password with the number one. And then password, cause you only have to remember one password. Perfect and funny. So they, they'll help you generate secure passwords for all of your accounts and then it'll let you save them in a list that's encrypted. So you have it on the phone, you have it on the computer. When you're ready to sign it to something, you just push the button and it's going to fill in your password information and one password and last password act actually check on the dark web and a bunch of other sketchy places to see if your passwords have been compromised. And if they have, they'll actually tell you this password needs to be updated.
Speaker 1:Oh that's amazing. Yeah. Okay. Well that right there. Another Pearl. So let's just go back to Amazon just because I use it a lot. When these sites say save your password, do you just click the X and not worry about it or what do you do?
Speaker 3:So that, that really depends on what kind of device you're using. If you're using a personal computer that only you are as accessing or you're using a phone that only you access, it's fine to save the password. It's just going to store it locally on the phone or the computer. Right. I would recommend if you're on a public computer or a machine that you share with other people, I would not save that password.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Perfect. Yeah, it makes sense. I do think you're right about that with older generation and we're not that old. Um, it's a lot of memorizing it really. It is. It's a lot of memorizing, a lot of keeping it straight. I mean, you got the iTunes password, you got Netflix pass. I mean there's just a million. So anyway. Alright, let's, let's talk about the next question here. If you don't have much service on your phone and it seems like things aren't sending, okay, they're stuck sending things. This happens to me a lot. What do you do? And I did read about the hack that says you can turn your airplane mode on and off. So what did we do in that situation? Right. Usually
Speaker 3:what we're seeing is either our wireless or radio, that's our wifi radio isn't working right and it's not able to connect perfectly or our cellular radio is not working or it's not able to connect properly. When we're turning the airplane mode on and off, it's actually telling these radios shut completely off and reconnect. So that's like that same, you know, if it doesn't work, restart it kind of idea. Yeah, that usually fixes it. If you're still experiencing problems, you're probably having an issue with either your cable internet provider or your wireless carrier where they're not delivering either the speeds they advertise or there's something wrong in that like chain of connection where your router might not be working or your modem might not be working. So you know, you can cycle airplane mode and see how that works. But also pay attention if it's specific to a location where your, where you're in a certain part of your house and it's not working right or you're in a different town and it doesn't work right, that's gonna help you zero in on what the issue really is. And I also recommend people turn on wifi calling. If you have a phone made in the last three or four years, you have wifi calling, wifi calling, Whoa fi will five left. You know, so if you have Verizon, sprint, T-Mobile or a at T and T, yeah, that's anywhere. And you have a modern iPhone or Samsung or any of the Android phones. There's a setting in there called wifi calling and it'll allow you to make your calls and send your text over wifi. So if your cellular connection is spotty cause you're in the basement, you know, crafting or whatever you're doing and you can't text or call out, there's your answer, it's going to make it do it over wifi.
Speaker 1:Okay, perfect. Wow, great. Okay. That's another thing to check the box there. Alright, now this question came in from somebody. Um, and I, I had no idea. So this is interesting. How do we access our accessibility to make Bette better for people with either dyslexia or auditory processing issues, vision or hearing problems?
Speaker 3:On most phones, there's a menu in your sentence app that's titled accessibility. It's going to allow you to toggle the different color settings, narrate what's on the screen, change the size of the text and the buttons. Uh, on windows devices. You can find those settings either in the control panel on anything prior to windows 10 or in the little gear icon in the start menu in windows 10 and on max, you can find it in the accessibility tab under the preferences page.
Speaker 1:So that extent. Okay. Accessibility to have. Now I think I've used that to make my font bigger. I think a lot of us that are at that age where we might have some cheaters or something, we make it so big that you know, people can read it three blocks over.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I make my stuff bigger because I can't see it. I, you know, I carry a huge phone and I'm basically blind anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there you go. So, all right, so that's a great, great question and great answer. Um, let's talk about our privacy settings. Um, what is this whole, and it, it, I, I talked about it in my intro to factor authentication. What is that?
Speaker 3:Okay, so I go a little crazy for security mostly because I use my devices for work and some of my clients require high security cause they medical records or like other privileged information. So I need to keep it safe for them. I recommend that if you're on a phone or on the computer, Ian stolen ad blocker, that's going to limit what data gets shared to social media networks or ad networks that are looking to track. You know, a good rule of thumb when you're using a product or service is that if it's free or it's really cheap, your actually the product, your data is the product. So you want, you want to pay attention to what's requesting your information. If you download Google apps on the phone, it requires a Google maps rather, it'll request your location. And that's reasonable because it's going to give you GPS information, but you download an app for your printer and it also wants your location information. That's a little sketchy. Right? Why does your printer need to know where you are at all times? Very true. On iOS 13 on the new iPhones, it's actually going to start tracking what apps are using your location even when you're not using them. And it's going to tell you, you know, Yelp tracked your location 30 times in the past week. Do you want to turn that off? Wow. Yeah. So very important to privacy and security. Oh absolutely. And we, I just don't, I don't think about that. Yeah. So most of the time this data is sold to third party advertisers. I mean we're still seeing it with the whole Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal where they were selling all that data off of Facebook. Right. And turn in users into a product, you know, so just pay attention to what you share and limit what you share online and on the phone. You know, they don't need to know everything. You use a fake name once in a while.
Speaker 1:Huh? There you go. You know it's funny because I remember that Instagram app or that app that came up, people were putting on an Instagram how you could make your face look older and all of that. Yeah. And then they were saying, no, you shouldn't do that. And then there's a lot of people that if they're on Facebook, especially our age, you know, people are on Facebook and they have those quizzes that come up in Buzzfeed or something. Yeah. Why are you sharing that information? Exactly. So there you go. We shouldn't do this because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not. After you go to factories,
Speaker 3:then occasion, that's like a pretty cool concept. It takes a little bit of learning, but it's kind of nice. So instead of requiring one factor authentication where you just type in a password and that's your one factor to verify who you are. Two factor makes you do two things. So you type in your password and then it's going to either like send you a code to an app or text you a code on your phone and then you're going to type that code in. So it's going to ensure that you're really that person. It's two ways of verifying who you are. You know your password and you have your phone on you,
Speaker 1:right? So you have that code to enter. Oh, that happens all the time. And that's part of setting up a new phone now, right? You have to do that.
Speaker 3:Uh, yeah. If you're signing into an existing iOS account and you have other devices, yeah, you need to do two factor authentication. Apple requires it. Google is in the process of making everybody use it, you know, and it's not something to be scared of. It's a little bit of a learning curve, but it's worth it for the security.
Speaker 1:Okay. How about, this is a question I got. We'll be going to doctor's offices and it says sign onto the wifi or you go to Starbucks. Do you always use that wifi?
Speaker 3:Oh, I do not. I do not trust public wifi
Speaker 1:safe. Okay. You're in a hotel and all of a sudden it says use the wifi.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So generally if you see a wifi access point and it's unsecured, yep. You can't trust it. In fact, if you didn't plug it in, you really can't trust it because you have no idea who's sniffing on that traffic. Or sometimes hackers do what's called a drive by, or they'll literally post up little public wifi access points in their car and they'll intercept all the traffic that goes through them. Wow. Yeah. This is one of the biggest sources of identity theft, especially in big municipality, something to pay attention to. So when you're on your home wifi, secure that with a password so you're sure no one else is using it, you know, and encrypt your traffic if you feel like it that these are settings that you can access in your routers settings, you know, there's always instructions on the bottom of how to access that and don't trust guest networks.
Speaker 1:Right. Okay. So when you have people over, say you have a, I have a house full of boys, 16 year old boys and they all say, Hey Mr. Schmidt, what is the password?
Speaker 3:Yeah, don't give it to them. Interesting. Yeah. So most modern routers you can log in to them and create a separate guest network and that's going to be isolated from your main network. They won't have a password but they can get in and get on the internet but they can't touch any of your local networks. And that's something we can do. That's something you can do. You just sign into your router. Yeah. If you have a router provided by your cable company or your DSL company, they will be able to help you through that on the phone. Otherwise you can look at the make and model of your router and check on the tech support page. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. Guess networks.
Speaker 1:Yes. Networks. Okay. Cause I get that question all the time. Um, I think we kind of touched on this, but there might be some more you can add. Um, how can the listeners that are right now, how do they stay safe online?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I, I had a couple like little tips, don't reuse the same password. Use one credit card for your online transactions, just one. And only use it for online. Monitor your statements and that way you know what's being spent, what isn't being spent. And if your card got compromised, and I'd recommend just calling your credit card company and say you lost it every year. Get a new card number so that those recurring subscriptions that you might not be aware of aren't getting charged to you. Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 1:You use one card. I mean, it sounds so simple when you say it and it actually, when you're sitting here five feet from me, it's like, really? Why didn't I think of that? But you don't think of that. You don't. And you just go through your routine and you just fake. I mean, this has been incredible. So, all right, I'm to rapid fire. Um, some questions. Do you hear that I got from people? Um, do we have to close all those tabs on our phones because it makes things run slower. Is that true?
Speaker 3:So some phones, yes. Some phones, no. If you're on an iPhone, generally having multiple tabs open isn't going to slow it down. But having multiple apps open will okay. If you feel comfortable with it, just closing before you go to bed. That's, that's good rule of thumb. That way they're there when you use them during the day and the next day you're ready to start fresh.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's perfect. All right, here's a great question and I have this one myself. How to cancel those subscriptions to apps that we might have purchased. Where do we, where do we do that?
Speaker 3:So in the app store you have to click on the picture of you on the iPhone app store, there's a little picture you or your icon in the top right and then you're going to go to manage my subscriptions. And then on Android, I believe it's the same process. You go into the menu on the left hand side and go into settings and my subscriptions, although don't quote me on that because I don't use an Android phone. Right. Or you could just also request a new credit card. It's almost easier. It's right in your set. But yeah, I mean otherwise they just keep billing you. Yeah, they do. It's a great question. Um, here's a question. How do you get to your iPhone camera quickly? Yeah. So on the iPhone, if you, uh, open up your lock screen, actually in the bottom right hand corner there's always a little camera button and you just press and hold on that it's going to open up the camera right away. That's on every, any model, any of the newer iPhones run an iOS 12 or newer. Wow. Are the camera's really that great on these new ones? Oh yeah, they are. Yeah. I bought the pro max launch day and I actually sold my DSLR cause I don't use it that much anymore. I still have my medium format camera. But you know, I was able to say I have the iPhone with me at all times. I can take this slight loss and picture quality to be able to have a good camera with me at all times. Interesting. Okay. Good to know. Um, how do we turn, do not disturb on our phone? Okay. So on Android and on iPhone do not disturb icons. A little moon, people get so confused by this. I don't know why it's a moon because that makes no sense. But you can go into your notification shade or you're setting shade on the iPhone and just click on the little moon and it's going to turn on do not disturb. I believe it's the same icon in Android. You know, I've had that moon come up on texts before. Yeah. And so that means the conversation has been set to do not disturb. So you don't get notified on it. Really? How does that happen? A, you swipe right on it. I believe it's something I did. It wasn't on their end. They're not trying to not talk to me. Yeah, of course. If you swipe right and hit that little purple high torts thing, it'll sleep the conversation. Interesting. All right. Um, what exactly is the virus? You've got to break it down for us in very simple terms. Yeah. So viruses, malware, it's all sorta the same concept, but basically someone with malicious intentions is either trying to make money off of you or just be a pain in the ass and destroy your computer. So most of them are in it for the money. So most viruses and malware today are designed so they will somehow be profiting off of you, whether that's selling your data, whether that's loading up advertisements that redirect to their ads on the computer so that you're seeing their ads and they're making money off that ad revenue. Or if they encrypt your whole desk and make you pay a fee to recover all your data. So it's just general software that's designed to either be a nuisance or make money for them and it's all malicious. That's what it is. Okay, nice. How can you tell, um, the email that you get is spam. All right. So we actually had an issue with that. It was a text to John about 11:00 PM. Yeah. So when you're looking at those emails, you want to check in the address bar, who it's from, and then look at the after the at symbol. If that domain mattress, the company that you're actually trying to get mail from. Nope. Describe domain. So the, the app part of the app, the website part of it where it's like@paypal.com you want to make sure that if you're getting an email from PayPal, it actually says@paypal.com not Baroo blah blah blah. Some nonsense.com which you did. Interesting. So just delete them. Do you Mark them as spam? Do you just delete, delete them,
Speaker 1:just delete them. Um, here's a question from someone that said they need to restart their, do they have to restart their router frequently or they feel like they need to, I guess because everything's running slower, you're supposed to do that.
Speaker 3:Uh, you shouldn't have to. I mean that will fix it temporarily, but you should not have to do that. It sounds like the routers probably having an issue if it's rented from you by your cable company or your internet provider, call them. And and requests that it gets swapped out if you still keep having that recurrent issue and might be time to like buy an after market router, which I recommend people do anyway because your cable company charges you like probably 10 to$20 a month to rent their routers and a good router that'll last you a couple of years. It's like 50 to$60. Really? That's what they're going to ask you. So how often should you, I mean I think I'm in the market for a new router, so when it starts getting slow, when it starts getting, so most of them support new wireless standards like AC and AIX or the new wireless standards that you are looking out for and new routers today and in five years when something else new comes out, that's when you're gonna want to switch your route.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's great to know. I, you know, you, you kinda think you have a rotor and you keep it forever. Um, what about five G? What is five G?
Speaker 3:So five G is an interesting concept. Basically they're the kid. The cell phone companies are going to reform the existing four G LTE space, but what is 4g? So what I mean, what does that mean? It's just a wireless radio technology. It's a way of providing data and voice services over S piece of radio spectrum. And where did we start? I mean, was it one G a long time ago? Yeah, it was. It was. We originally had GSM and CDMA and lights. Really? I was definitely born then. We really started with that like 97 right around my birthday. No, so GSM and CDMA were sort of the base technologies and we rolled into one X R T T and EVD O, which were all of these first-generation mobile network technologies. Really the first time you can access the internet on a device. I don't know if you remember having a Blackberry in 2002 2003 it worked, but it was all boys slow. Yeah. You know, I got my first people that still have them. I got my first Blackberry when I was six then. Oh boy. Oh boy. Yeah. I miss it still up until last year. I still carried a Blackberry all there the best. No. So then we moved into the third generation bubble networks. That push really happened 2004 to 2007 yeah, three G. sometimes you'll see if you have Verizon or sprint, your phone will fall back to 3g once in awhile when you run out of LTE, when you're not in fourth G LTE,
Speaker 1:throw that one out to the kids at Thanksgiving.
Speaker 3:Oh. And it has an acronym that means nothing, which is longterm evolution. Basically saying that the network's gonna take a long time to develop. That's why they called it LTE.
Speaker 1:Okay. There you go. There you go.
Speaker 3:Um, so we're moving away from G to five G. what does that mean for me? Right. So they're going to do deploy it on a couple of different bands than we currently use. Right now, most cell phones operate are between 600 megahertz to 1900 megahertz. This is between VHF and UHF spectrum. That's like things that we would use in a walkie talkie. Oh, okay. Right. Normal radio is right in this area. 5g carriers are also going to start deploying on something called millimeter wave. So if you go to the airport and you go through the little body scanner where they were, they scan it. It's so close to radar that it's called millimeter wave. At work, the wave, the actual sign wave is a millimeter wide. Wow. So it's this very high frequency that doesn't last very far, but because it's so wide and it's unlicensed, it has the potential to be very, very fast. Wow. Yeah. Because my phone, I'll just switch. It'll, it'll say five G now. Yeah. So you have at T, and T, it's not really 5g, it's five G evolution. Remember that LTE longterm ever evolution. It's nonsense. It's just a marketing term. So I think 5g really only exists in Dallas, Boston, New York, couple other places right now. And it's very limited. Like if you walk inside of a building, you move two steps, you'll lose your connection. So we're still in our trial phase. But yeah, it has an interesting promise for the future because we'll be able to drop our cable companies once LTE is deployed. I mean once 5g excuse me, is deployed nationwide.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's incredible. Okay. Yeah, I noticed that and I read an article about it. Um, let's talk about, because a lot of us will book travel. Um, and we go to say Travelocity, then we open up, um, TripAdvisor, whatever, and we're Googling for flights. Why is it that you can go back the next day and the flights are, or you can go back two hours later and they're 20,$25 more.
Speaker 3:Oh. So part of that is the thing that we were talking about, which is the tracking. They actually track when you start researching flights and they Jack up the prices, is there a way to disconnect? Yeah. We put on an ad block ad block on ad blocking. Your browser is going to stop that from happening. And then the other half of that equation is just the flight prices and travel prices are so variable.
Speaker 1:They're so variable. Yeah. There are certain days you can book them and yeah. Yeah, we did it. We're, we're doing one on for travel, so we'll, we'll get into that.
Speaker 3:Oh, fun travel tip book. Everything on the same airline so you can abuse their perks program.
Speaker 1:Oh, there you go. There you go. See you already here first. There you go. Um, I think that's good. What else can you, what else can you tell us? Any other pearls? You know, like I said, I said to John, I said, well, you know, when the kids come home for Thanksgiving and we're all sitting the table, we can throw something out there. And we got a couple of pearls for sure. Yeah. Oh, you can horrify them and tell them you have a Snapchat. Oh yeah. That, that'll really scare them. Yeah. And if you had like a filter and all that, I know I talked a little bit about social media and I do feel like, I don't know what you feel with your parents and things, but I do feel like we need to jump in on this stuff because otherwise, you know, we're not current.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I, I mean, it's worth jumping into because it's a new experience and it's a new way of connecting with people, but also remember that it's never gonna replace real social interaction. So don't become one of those people that's addicted to Facebook. Because you know, some folks, they're new to it and they just go ham on it and no one wants to,
Speaker 1:and then they, you've spent two hours, you know, looking at nonsense and yeah, exactly. No one wants to see 20 posts a day of the same picture of your dog. Yeah, that's true. It's not that caved. I know. Exactly. Exactly. Well, John, this is awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, no problem. Um, John is here in Connecticut, but he can advise you anywhere in the country. Um, I will put his information up in a, in a little bio about him, um, and I will share him. Believe it or not, he is amazing. He's been a lifesaver for me and, uh, I am just so happy that our paths have crossed.
Speaker 2:Nice. Thank you so much. No problem.[inaudible].