Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: So years ago, I had a karate master who was a person that I was training with.
Every so often, you know, throughout the year, we'd go meet this guy. A whole bunch of people in my particular discipline would get together at some random place. I think one of the last times I saw him was at a beach in Oregon. And we would. We'd all show up at this place. We'd have karate training for about a week. It was a great thing. He was an older Japanese gentleman who. Who, oddly enough, lived in Vienna, Austria. So when he was speaking with you, he'd have this. This combination of English, German, and Japanese all kind of rolled together. But the biggest thing about what I wanted to tell you about is, though, is, like, about halfway through the training, you'd be about. We're out, about to fall over, and I think he was looking at you and looking at it all and say, okay, they're about done for. And he would announce, short brick. And that's what we just did last week, y'all. We had to have a short break.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: A short break.
See, I knew you would get it back there. I knew you would.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Brought it up. Brought it full circle. That's what we did.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Right around. You know, it's honestly funny. As you started with the karate, I started hearing songs from Kill Bill in the background in my head song.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: So that's how it goes. So, anyway, we are back. We are back from our short break, and we're ready to get going with the latest episode of Care Tech and Tips. So I'm Barry Johnson. This is my friend Bobby Clark.
So how's it going, Bobby?
[00:01:41] Speaker B: It's going all right, man. We went on that little trip that I talked about. We went to the. The alt or the atl?
[00:01:49] Speaker A: The atl. There you go.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: And I'm still tired. I'm tired from my vacation. I need a vacation from the vacation. But ye. Yeah, it's all good. And then we've got a sad note this week. I'm actually going to a funeral service from a family member, and I'm having to take mom with us. And, man, that checklist that we all have in our heads, if you've done this before, about what things you need to have and what things you need to make sure you bring and what things you don't need to bring, like the keys for the car that you. That mom's car that you don't need so you won't lose them in making, you know, when you're. When you're there. So, you know, all kinds of stuff like that. So my head swimming old stuff on the ideas like that. I know that hopefully that can be a common place for some people.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. It's something everybody's got to think about. You know, when you're.
When your loved ones can't drive anymore and you're the transportation to something like that. I mean, one, I know they, they rely on you for, like, for, for transport, but they'd rely on you for emotional support too, at the same time. They do. They do good to be able to do that.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: I don't know what you remember when you were traveling, when you were with your family, but when we had to travel, it was an event. It was planned meticulously down to sandwiches at the rest stop to where are we stopping, how long we're going, what time we get up to, how fast we should drive to make it on time, to be at certain places at certain times. So I get nostalgic when I get back in a car like that. And I realize how lucky we are that we don't have to pull out a map and read it and understand what the next exit is to take. These are things that people who are under 35 will probably look at that, look at us and go, what are you talking about? What kind of map?
[00:03:28] Speaker A: I can remember traveling kind of cross across the state multiple times, and I would go just go routes that somebody told me this is the way you go. You go and you turn here and you go here. And I had a relative picture in my head of where the big interstates were. And I think, okay, I know I'm north of this, of this interstate, and I'm kind of west of this one. Eventually I'm going to run into this thing. So I always kind of had a general idea where I was, but I didn't know most of the time. And I look back at, you know, right out of college, gosh, 1990 or so, my brother and I got in the. Got in a truck in South Carolina and drove it to New Mexico.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Well, that was an adventure.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: And drove it back. We didn't, we didn't have a cell phone. We didn't have a gps. We had. We did have a road atlas. That was pretty cool. We kind of.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: I was about to say, did you have a road atlas? Because we would go through and then, you know, depending on how old the rail atlas was, sometimes the roads were changed and that would be a surprise. And then how to navigate on a rail atlas when you had a traffic jam and had to get off the Interstate. That was adventurous too.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: So at that point, wasn't it?
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Yeah, that was interesting.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: So welcome to Travel Tech and Tips with Bobby.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: That's where we're at. But yeah, I think that's, that's good that you're doing that and I hope you, you get some enjoyment out of the nostalgia part, but that, you know, to kind of offset the, the sad occasion.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: At some point you go to more funerals than you do weddings and you know, it's just the turn of life, I guess. But.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Yeah, it is.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: But you know, some of this is sad, you know, and the person we are, we're going to eulogize, you know, she lived a long life but, but it's, it's, it's interesting to have to go through that checklist again and how it's changed over the years now. The roles have definitely reversed. When we were, when I was much younger, I would travel back to Orangeburg to travel with family, to go to reunions and things like that. And it's a very different world now. So yeah, that's okay.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: It's inevitable, I guess.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Life is change.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: That's true.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Change is life.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: True. You know what else is inevitable? Taxes.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: So as they say, death and taxes, it's just the way it is. And, and I've been on an adventure the last few weeks. I was helping my dad do some tax prep and, and I say, when I say helping my dad do some tax prep, I'm you know, basically doing his taxes for him.
But I've got it to the point where everything's on the spreadsheet that his accountant's gonna need and I have backup for all the things that are on the spreadsheet. And I have handed it off to him for him to go take it to the accountant and hang out with him. So I think that's actually gonna work out.
It's just that time of the year, just like time of life it is.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: And you know what? I've had to do the same thing for my loved ones. My father in law is being now has two capable women handling his finances. He likes to think he's like you and then they're the VPs of finance. It's a little bit of the other way around, but that's okay. And then for mom, I've done the same thing too. And so I have conversations now. I now am intimately involved with her tax preparer and her stockbroker and all the things that go along with that. So at some point you have to get involved in that kind of thing if you, especially if you're dealing with people with diminished capacity and so. Yeah, gotta deal with that stuff.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:06:44] Speaker B: And you know, when you're older, around their age, you're complicated. It ain't, it ain't just like going to a, to doing the easy form.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: No, absolutely.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: You got a lot of things going on so you got to be prepared for that. Yep. A lot of 1090s and annuities and insurance policies and income statements and things like that. And so this is not the thing to wait until the 14th of April and say oops, I need to go because it's going to be way harder. And if you are at that point, guess what, you can get an extension and you talk somebody.
[00:07:14] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. You know, and my dad's got it, my dad's a minister so he's got this self employment thing going on and there's always a big question about what he can write off and what he can't write off. And it seems to change from year to year for self employment. He's, he often will tell me about what he wishes that could be, could be written off. But it's not allowed anymore.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: That's part of the discussion. Of course I'm too old to be paying taxes. Okay, well you know, I don't know about that. But yeah, yeah. Do you have to go through that kind of stuff too? And you know what, you got to be prepared to do those kind of things and let people and reassure people because they usually have some idea of what they done but not exactly sure how to apply it in today's world. And you know, we could, we could talk about. I know you had some good tips in previous shows about using AI to go through some of the instruction sets to go with text forms so that you understand them a little bit. And I think those are really cool things to do. Maybe you want to repeat that a little bit so that people know it. But yeah, I thought it was a really cool idea.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Yeah, just to repeat a little bit. If you're having trouble understanding understanding the instructions for tax forms, it's easy enough to get PDFs of those tax forms online and you can easily upload as PDFs to your AI of choice. Right. Mine right now is Chat GPT. You can upload those PDFs and say hey, could you read these instructions for me and simplify it or here are my instructions. I have a question about number seven here. I don't understand what this means. Could you help me? It's really, the AI is really good about taking that and sussing it out for you and kind of making it a little bit more simple if you need to.
[00:08:49] Speaker B: So two things to know about that is those are public forms, and they are available for free. You should never pay for them.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: And so the AASH has pretty good access to those public forms because they're government forms. Right. Nobody. Nobody's hoarding tax information all that much. And then the other thing to say right off the bat is that we are not tax accountants. And so therefore, if you have real complicated questions, you need to go ask somebody who has some knowledge about it. But we are giving you hints to get toward that, so.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: That's right. Exactly. Always trust, but verify. That's a good way to say that. That's right. So, you know, it was cool, though. While we were working on the tax stuff, my dad and I sat together and we worked. We went through all the, all the sections that we knew we were going to have to have answers for and work through that. But while we're sitting there at the kitchen table doing all that, we're all. We inevitably got off to talking about food. And when my mom was al, she was. She was the cook and she did most of the. Most of the food prep in the house. And over the last year or two, my dad has had to learn, and he's learned a lot of stuff.
And one thing that I've found fascinating is he's learned to kind of change it up. It's not just what he used. He was used to with her, and he's trying different things now. He asked me the other day about if there were different ways that he could do some of the vegetables because, you know, he just been used to what my mom, dad and I taught. I've been teaching him how to steam vegetables, how to use a sous vide one to. To do different meats in different ways than he's never had never done before. How to do baked potatoes and sweet potatoes in the crock pot, as opposed to heating up the oven and heating up the house with that. And it's. It's been kind of fun, just kind of comparing, pairing notes with recipes. And I'm learning some things from him, he's learned some things from me. And we're, we're both changing a little bit. So I guess that's a good thing.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: That's kind of cool because then you can vary recipes on it for. Well, and, you know, I know you use AI to do some of that I can do something AI to kind of help you with proportion. You know, taking recipes for one and making it for three or four or five. And so, you know, some cool stuff you can do now.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: So absolutely. It seems like we may have talked about this before, but there it seems like I saw a chrome plugin that would look at a recipe site and give you the actual recipe. You know how it is with most recipe sites these days. You get into your. You want to talk about pork chops and then you'll get the history of pork and swine for at least, you know, seven paragraphs before you ever get around to the fact that you can actually make these pork chops. And here's a recipe to do that and I can't remember the name of it. One day I'll have to find it and we'll point it out on here. But it was a, it was a neat plug in that would get through all the crust and just give you the recipe. So that's another kind of AI you can do reader.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: You can do the reader mode on your webpage too. And it gets rid of some of that stuff too.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: So it does help a lot. Yeah. So yeah, I don't need to know that.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: Yeah, there's always what you got to pay for these things, I guess. And so ads are part of it. Yeah, we're not big time enough that answer in our part yet, but you know, there will be some of these days.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: You never know. We might get to that point where we got enough traffic that do we want to do that? Oh, speaking of traffic and speaking of listeners, we got a nice question from a listener on Blue Sky. It's a person go that goes by the handle Long Term Caregiver. So it's at Ultracaregiving BlueSky Social. Ask us if we might do a segment on selecting the best robot vacuum. And I think that's a fantastic idea. I really, really appreciate you reaching out to us Long Term Caregiver. And we will throw that one on the list for a later episode. We'll get it out there for you.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: There is a really cool site and we'll find it. I know that that compares a lot of ones like that and gives you some good tips.
So I'll make sure I find it and put it in the show notes. If you're looking for a personal recommendation, I use the shark. I'm very happy with it.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: I'm a shark guy. I love the shark.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: Yeah, they love the shark too. And because it has an ability for you to use your iPhone to program, schedule it. So the one thing you learn about robot vacuum cleaners is they're nice, but they're loud. And so you don't want to really do them when you're here. So you want to schedule times when they're not here and make that happen. So, yeah, there's very good selections out there. So we'll work on it. I promise you we'll come back.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Cool. That's great. So, speaking of tech things, I think you were going to talk to us a little bit about the newest iPhone that's come out within the last week or two.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: Yes. So everybody's hot about the iPhone. And for those of you who have caregivers, you're probably looking at it the way I'm looking at it. So the E is not normally a brand I would select, but for my mother, for my care, for ones that I'm caring for, perhaps because it's one of the ones that has newer features guaranteed to it, but does cost less. Now, I won't say it costs that it's cheap. It's certainly not cheap for phones out there. And if you're in the Android world, you can find lots of good phones that are in the 3 to $400 range. And if that's. If Android is your flavor, you have plenty to choose from. But if iPhone is the thing you want to stay with, then the big old question I have for a lot of things is, do I go iPhone 16e or 16?
And there's a $200 difference. So there are a couple things to be aware of when you do that kind of thing.
First of all, there are some missing elements from this iPhone that may or may not matter to you. One, MagSafe does matter to me, because it's the kind of thing that lets you put. For instance, I have a camera that's mounted on my laptop now that uses MagSafe. I have a clock stand that I use for nightstand mode. If you don't have MagSafe, those things will charge, but guess what? They fall off the stand. But you can solve that problem. You can buy a case for an iPhone 6e that puts MagSafe back. And you can actually buy a piece of hardware, probably on Amazon, that sticks to your phone, that gives you the MagSafe circle that'll let you put it directly on the phone. So there's some options there, but they're going to cost you extra money. You know, something less than 80 bucks to get either the case or the attachment to add to it. So keep that in Mind. There's also a couple of things about the phone itself. It does have enough capability to run Apple intelligence, which is rolling out over slowly over the next few months. But there are some things about the actual camera and the way the phone is set up for some of the features. Like there's a camera button that's not on this phone. There's. It's a. It is a capable camera, 48 megapixels. But it doesn't have every lens, it doesn't have every view. So if you're interested in keeping that then maybe if you feel like you've done enough to get there, you might want to consider going to the $200 level for the iPhone 16 that gives you all those features and has Magsafe as well. So just something to consider.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: The nice thing about the S16E that is a feature is it has longer battery Life than the iPhone 16, about four hours worth.
[00:15:54] Speaker A: Oh really?
[00:15:54] Speaker B: So because it has a bigger battery in it and some of the features have been taken out that they maximized on the battery. So if you are the one person. If your loved one keeps the phone out and doesn't charge it, you'll have four more hours of use on it. And that's something to keep in mind.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good thing. The E does have a say. What the E stands for is that for economy.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: They have not. There are lots of people guessing about it. Education and expensive. You know, that's one of the meme.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: That kind of stuff. But no, there's no. There's no. It used to be called the SE which was special edition. I'm not sure what the E stands for here.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: I gotcha. And this one's the one that's really replacing one of the last ones in the lineup that have.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: Yeah. The C. Really? The third edition se, they now put a number with it which makes me think that they're going to have an E version of this. Maybe it's called maybe the E stands for economy.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Yeah, maybe.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: So that, that tells you that they're going to have a low cost one as part of the makeup. So it does have more memory than usually. The SE comes with 16 megabits gigabits of memory. And that's a good thing. That's what you need for Apple intelligence.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: There are some things about it that are really nice. And it has the latest processor.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: That's good. That's good. If they bumped up the storage any is the. What's the low end storage.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: They did if that hits 256 minimum.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: Really, that's great. I guess you need that space to put AI models on, I suppose.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So LLMs learning language learning models require memory and require the processor, so. Yeah, that's true.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: So Bobby, when should people start to think about upgrading say one of their loved ones phones?
[00:17:33] Speaker B: I'm an old fashioned guy in this. I think that especially if you have someone with diminished capacity, you want to minimize change as much as possible. So this is certainly not the person that you need to upgrade the phone every year on. That's probably too often for too little of benefit. I think when you have to start looking at phones is when they. They don't work anymore.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: If there's a broken phone you're talking about, then obviously you need to fix that phone. But it doesn't mean you have to buy a new one to do that. But you certainly need to correct that. You know, people using phones that don't work or have limited capability, like cracking a glass, probably not a good idea for your loved one.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: So replace that when your phone is out of warranty, out of supported elements. And this can be tricky. As a matter of fact, there's some notes on this I want to kind of pull toward it and then we'll throw this chart into the show notes a little bit. Even if you're when. I know we started off talking iPhone here but. But there are things that you ought to do for any operating system that it gets to a point where it's too late. So if you're running Windows xp, it's time update because it's really necessary for you to do that. Why? Because operating systems have risk associated with them and lots of security updates. And if you're that old on os, you're not getting any updates anymore.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: And they're not making any updates anymore. They're not looking for any updates anymore. And so you want to make sure that on your phone and on your computer, you know, 15 years is too long, it's time to get something else. And so just to give you a quick kind of view of that again, this chart is going to be on our show notes so you can look at it. We've got a chart that basically tells you like when's the latest version for Windows, which is Windows 11 by the way.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: And the oldest supported System is Windows 10, not Windows 8, not Windows 7, not XP, you know, certainly not. We can go back Windows Millennium. Oh my God. You need to update immediately. So usually that kind of support is 10 years, 5 years mainstream and 5 years extended. And when you get past that point, it's time to upgrade your system. Now you might want to upgrade your system with a new os, but honestly for Windows, the thing to do about a Windows machine is buy a new Windows machine, which will come with the latest. The end of Support for Windows 10 was October 14, 2025. So it's actually coming up soon that even 10 is too old. So understand that. Yeah, right now the latest version is Android 15 that came out last year. The oldest version right now is Android 12L, that's 2022. They usually only give three years of support, five years with security updates. So once you get past a phone, an Android phone that's five years old, you need to do something, usually either upgrade or buy a new phone with a new operating system in it. And right now the ended date for the oldest Aorus is actually this month. It's actually 2025. So the Android 12 phone will be out of service the end of this month, this March.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Something I've noticed with some older Android phones. I had played around with that after a certain point too. Not only can you not get security updates, but you may not even be able to connect to Internet websites at that point because the.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: This is true.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: The cryptography is so old that it won't allow you to do that. So that, that's.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: And getting to sites. So more and more sites actually requ you to have browsers that can understand the encrypted versions of their website. And so yeah, you can run into that issue. So you may see things that actually go beyond these dates for macOS. Right now the macOS is available. It's Akoia. Came out in 2024. The oldest supported version is Ventura, which came out in 2022. Usually gives you three years of updates for macOS and they're expecting to support Ventura out to 2025. Now I will tell you that Mac OS and Apple has had a reputation for doing security updates that are far beyond that. So I have a.
Something that's older than Venturi, I'm not even sure. And I still get updates, especially on the browser and support. But eventually you have to start worrying about that too. It's usually around the 10 year mark that you have to worry about.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Yep. What about iOS?
[00:21:52] Speaker B: So my mother has a machine that's 2015 and it's getting close to that date. So I'm thinking about what I'm going to do about that.
Obviously we're in iOS 13, I think.
Sorry, not 1318 and 18 is 184 right now. It came out in 2024 last year. The oldest support one is 16 and they usually give two to three years of OS updates and four to five years of security updates.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. That's great.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: So the iOS 16 will be in good standing until September 2024. So we're going to put this chart up for you to look at. There's some more notes below it to kind of give you more detail about it too, that we'll show too. But it's really important to start thinking about this kind of stuff, especially if you're dealing with loved ones who have a computer that's a.
Yeah, for sure.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Oh, can I, Can I throw in something there about one thing I've noticed about Windows, if you, especially if you're, if you or your loved one has an older Windows machine, they're probably used to the way their files are laid out on their hard drive now. So they may have a folder on the C drive where they keep all their documents and that. Or, you know, it may have some folder structure that they've laid out themselves. Something that I noticed is when I had a friend who went from Windows, I don't know, Windows 8 or Windows 10 device, and went up to Windows 11 is one of the things that's, that's by default now is that your files are stored in a spot that gets, that gets backed up to. What do they call. There's OneDrive in Windows, right, what the name of it is? Yeah, it auto. It automatically gets updated there. So things might not be where you're used to them. They're. They're still on your computer. They're. They're backed up into the cloud automatically. It just might not be exactly where you're used to seeing them. So that's something to be on the. On the lookout for. They're going to move things around on you a little bit. But don't worry, it's fairly easy to get used to. And honestly, it's easier just to roll with it than to try to fit it back into your old paradigm of where exactly you wanted them on your hard drive. Don't fight it, just go with it. That's my opinion, anyway.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: You want it to be as standard as possible. So if you get help, people know how to help you.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: I would say to you that one of the nice tricks I've learned about finding files from people's computer is that there is a recent folder Windows and Mac, that if they've saved it in the right places and usually they do. Most time your loved ones don't know enough to get around things, then you should be able to find the most recently saved documents in that folder, even if there are somewhere else. So use that trick if you have to, to find things. Yeah, I did exclude one OS that I know is fairly popular that has some, some new issues around it too, and that's Chrome os. Oh yeah, so. So a lot of people have been using Chrome os, laptops and things like that for their loved ones because they're simple and they are, they're great. But guess what? They don't last forever either. And they have 10 years of updates built into them. There is actually something in Chrome OS that you should be aware of. It's called an aue and AUE stands for I'm actually going to pull it up here to make sure I get it right. Auto Update policy page and what it is. The AOE date actually tells you how long they will update that version. It's actually hard coded into the device for Chrome os and if you're aware of it, you'll know that if you have usually 10 years, you can find the date. And if that machine is older than that date, you really should be updating that machine to something else.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: Because if it's 10 years old, you're not getting any updates. And Barry and I know that running a web browser of any type, even if it's Chrome OS without proper updates, is the recipe for a disaster. So a 10 year old Chromebook is too old.
[00:25:47] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: Either upgrade that Chrome OS or upgrade the hardware.
[00:25:52] Speaker A: Yep. And you know, there's another, there's even one more option too that there is. Google came out with a version of Chrome OS called Chrome OS Flex. It's a little fiddly to get to do this, but if you're, if you're, if you're a techy kind of person and want to give it a shot there, if you Google Chrome OS Flex, it'll take you to a place where you can see about downloading it and creating a boot disk for that. And what its point is is that it'll take old hardware like old Windows laptops or even old old MacBooks. And probably technically you could even take older Chromebooks and update it with Chrome OS Flex and it'll bring your old hardware kind of back from the dead and back in, back into being useful again. You're not going to get all the bells and whistles that you get on a new piece of hardware, but you know, if you're, if you're on a budget and you want to make that old hardware last even further, you can turn an old Windows box or old Mac Box MacBook into a Chrome OS Flex box and still get some utility out of it. Again, it's not for the faint of heart. If you're not, if you're not an uber techie, you may want to ask a friend who is to get you going with that or you know, or not do that is up to you. But it's another option that's out there.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's a certainly good option if you have an older Windows Mac machine and you want to turn it into something, it works really well. Just have to get a little past the tech pump on it. But I'll tell you, Chromebooks are cheap. They really are. Sometimes some of them are less than a hundred bucks. I see them out on clearance sales a lot. Again, if it's a three year old Chromebook, it's still good usually to about 10 years. And how you can tell there is a version Number for Chrome OS, the latest version is 115 and the oldest supported one is 110. So you can look at the versioning and see where you are and you might have to do something with something a little bit older. But Even if the AUA date is less than that 10 years item, you're probably okay.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Yep, for sure. You know it's, it's years ago. Bobby and I, we're, we were, well, we've been techies for a long time but we worked with universities and gosh, it's probably Maybe close to 20 years ago there was a, there was a movement out in the world called one laptop per child for per child. And it was this, this, you know, is a aspirational thing to be able to get a laptop to every child out there. And their goal was a hundred bucks to be able to get it under a hundred bucks. And that was, that was a long time ago and actually got, got to play with, with one back then and it was, it was pretty terrible. Be honest and truthful, but it just blows my mind what's available these days for under a hundred bucks to oh yeah, get stuff done. Gosh, even, you know, we haven't even talked about Kindle Fire, the Amazon tablets that are out there. They make a very, very serviceable little 7 inch tablet for like you can get older versions for around 35 bucks. The newer versions are maybe 70, 75 and they're great for web browsing, for checking Your email for watching movies, all those kinds of things. You can even do productivity things on them if you add a Bluetooth keyboard to them and a mouse. But, you know, there's, there's a, there's a wide variety of things out there that can help in a wide variety of budgets, for sure. It's just, I'm amazed what you can.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: I'm amazed that you can buy an iPad for under 300 bucks. And it's a very serviceable iPad. You know, there's a 299 iPad that I played with in the store today, and it's very serviceable.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: Very serviceable, very good. You know, speaking of that, I had a friend reach out to me the other day to ask me about whether or not he should buy a MacBook. And I said, well, what do you want to do with it? And, well, I don't know, I just kind of want to, you know, be able to get online and, you know, look, look at web, web websites and, you know, maybe type some email from time to time and do a few things, maybe watch some online, do some streaming and some things that, and maybe print something out occasionally. I'm like, dude, you don't need a laptop, you need an iPad. That's really what you need. And don't, don't wait, don't, don't spend money on a, on a laptop if you don't know or have a reason to use it. Go with something simpler and cleaner. And honestly, the tablets these days, whether you work it with a Chromebook tablet or an Android tablet or an iPad, are safer in that it's so much easier to get the updates put on those things. Absolutely. And it's so much harder to attack from a virus standpoint or a malware standpoint. And honestly, that's what most people need these days, I think, anyway.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree.
The world has simplified in a way that you should probably adjust to your needs.
Old codgers like Barry and I, we need hardcore laptops that cost thousands of dollars because we use all the features in them. We do a lot of things with them. But your four year old, no, yeah, you can get an Amazon pad or even a very cheap used iPad. Cheap used iPads are everywhere and they're lower than even the 299 we're talking about.
There's lots of ways to get that kind of thing, for sure.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: And you know, and honestly, if you've got a phone, if you just need to send emails and check text or even just write papers and things like that, you can get by very servicely with a service with a phone and a Bluetooth keyboard. It's amazing what you can get done.
[00:31:10] Speaker B: It's amazing what you can do.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: It really is.
[00:31:11] Speaker B: I'm involved in some efforts in different cities where they're trying to get connectivity to their citizens. And one of the things that came back from the studies we did was that most people connectivity isn't the issue, it's the device.
And so there are people doing homework, if you can believe it or not, on phones. And that paradigm, no matter how big the phone is, is never as good as a screen at 7 inch with a keyboard. It's the truth that improvement really needs to happen with people. Then the other thing that was really cool about that conversation was that one connection to the Internet does not service a family of four. And so you have to think about how do you get devices to people at the same time in the same usage. So think about that with your loved one too. For the most part, people we're probably talking about are one or two devices. Even if you add a watch to that, that's three.
But someone else, like a child growing up, they need more connectivity and they probably want it the same time you are. So, you know, making sure your wireless is right to handle that kind of thing is.
[00:32:19] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure, for sure. You know, the word there is connectivity and connection really it these. Yeah, I remember we were coming up computers were more about productivity, creating things, in our case, literal programming, that kind of thing. And nowadays I feel like phones and computers and tablets are more about connecting you to the world and connecting you to your loved ones, whether it's. Whether they're here or thousands of miles away.
Just one of those things, you know, it's.
[00:32:47] Speaker B: So let me give you a real world example of that. For those of you who are listening to us back in the day, running a spreadsheet, typing in a word processor, those were productivity things you did in the office. Those are actually low end network kinds of things. They don't take much networks, resources, you know what takes resources? Zoom calls.
[00:33:06] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:33:06] Speaker B: Watching Netflix, you know.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Asking your computer on, on whatever voice assistant you're using. Those are actually heavy duty kinds of things that require network connection back and forth to them. And it's not the same as what we had 15, 20 years ago where you had, you know, a modem connection. Everybody said modem, what is that? A modem connection where you could get by with some limited back and forth on networking and most of it was on your machine. These things require that so if you don't believe me, have your kids bring up their Netflix, do a voice call and then try to get a phone call at the same time. You'll find that bandwidth is really precious then.
[00:33:47] Speaker A: For sure.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: For sure.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: One other thing I wanted to point out to our listeners too is usually when you're listening to this, if you're listening to the podcast version, you'll. There's a section in your podcast, what's the word I'm looking for your podcast software, whatever you listen to this with, where you can look at show notes and there's a description of the, of the, of the episode and some details. We've started. Something recently is a little different. What we're going to have now is we're going to have some, some description there and then we're going to have a actual link there that will take you off to a webpage that has the show notes. It lets us put a little bit more detail and a little bit better formatting and just be able to get you more information about the things that we talk about. So you may notice something a little bit different. It may be a bitly address or it may be a Google address. Just we're not sure completely yet. But don't be afraid to click on that link, the one in our, in our descriptions, because that's going to take you to something useful. If you're listening to us on YouTube or watching us on YouTube, it's the same sort of thing. We'll have a link in the, in the description and it'll take you off to that same more rich resource for the, for the show notes for us. All right, well, Ms. Clark, do you have anything else for us today?
[00:35:01] Speaker B: No, I'm going to have something a little bit later that talks about sharing screens because I had an adventure with mom on that one. So I'm not ready to give the full details on that because I'm going to do a couple of things to see if they work. But yeah, I'll have some that'll be on next episode.
And as always, if you love what we're doing, you should go ahead and subscribe. Go ahead and write a review for us. Let us know how you're doing, how we're doing, and make sure that you grow the community because that, that is where we find all the answers. So go ahead, do it now. Why are you waiting? Hurry up.
[00:35:34] Speaker A: Is there a way that they can get there if, if they're maybe say, I don't know, say they're watching this on YouTube but they maybe want to get to see us on a pod or hear us on a podcast and said how can they do?
[00:35:44] Speaker B: Well, you can always go to your favorite podcast app because you go to Apple podcasts or if you go to lots of different ones, what's the one I'm thinking of? Spotify, of course. Then you can do that and you can always write us a review. You can subscribe to it if you're on YouTube. Go look at the bottom button right about here and then click on it. Make sure you hit subscribe up and make sure you go ahead and hit Notify too, because then they'll let you know when the next episode comes out. Okay.
[00:36:09] Speaker A: That sounds good. All right. Well, I think that's good for us today and we're going to get out of here and we will see you soon. So thanks, everybody.
[00:36:16] Speaker B: Thanks, everyone.
