Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, There we go.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: All right. Hey, we're back.
[00:00:02] Speaker A: We are back. It's true. We took a little week off last week. It was not exactly planned, but it happened anyway. Life. Life happens sometimes.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: And sometimes it gets in the way sometimes.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: So. So what have you been up to? Have you got any.
Got any care tech or tips that you want to talk about this week?
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Well, I was reminded about something that we've talked about past about, you know, spam phone calls. But there are other kinds of calls that you can get. Okay. And my mom reminded me of this because things were going off. We wonder what is going on. Her FaceTime's going on for no reason. I realized the same set of parameters you have for spam calls, you have for spam facetime you have for spam text. And so there are ways to turn that off. So made a little list. Thought I would tell remind you a little bit how to do that. So blocking unknown callers is I think we talked about before, but just to review it real quick, it's four steps to it. You go into settings, you download and tap on phone. You do a tap, silence unknown callers. It's a tog. And then there's. You just make sure it's turned on and that's done.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: But you can do the same thing with text senders. And so you go into not phone, you go into messages. And there is a similar tag there that says filter unknown messages and allows you not to get them unless they're in your contacts.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: That's cool.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Make sure you do that. So, and then FaceTime calls are the same way. So you go into. But note to do that, you have to make sure you go into the FaceTime app settings and do the same toggle. So that toggle exists on each one. And the way to find it is kind of an easy way since you don't. If you say unknown callers, it'll only show you one tail. Dunn senders will show you. But if you say find unknown, you'll.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Find all three interesting. Okay. All right.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: So that way you can turn them all off, make sure they don't bother you in any way. And I don't know if you noticed, Barry, but I'm getting a lot more unknown. Solicit spam text messages.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: Yep, me too. Me too. I'm getting a lot of those things and they're all random things. You know, there are a lot of the same kind of phishing sort of things like the ones where you've seen supposedly have not paid your toll when you went through a toll booth area.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: We went through the toll one in the spam section we did a while back.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: I see that a lot too. But I also see just the. Hello.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: And trying to engage you and then to get you involved in wines. And then also you might get something that acts like a person you do know and then eventually get you to ask for gift cards.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Yep, there you go. But my dad got something like that this past week and yeah, he was. He was bright enough to. To not engage, but.
And tell me what had happened. It was something like that. It was. It was some odd thing that. That just kind of smelled fishy and you. And you could tell.
But he.
He's getting better about that, about seeing these kinds of things and think to call me before he did.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: My mom's doing the same thing. She's. She's getting better about it too. And you know, if you're in a dad who has selective assist, you get less of them, but you have to deal still managing with the remnants of them. If they leave messages or voicemails, gotta clean them up. So. Yeah. You know, so I wanted to make sure. Because that happened to me. I realized really there are other places. So just to kind of remind people that there are other ways for this stuff to happen. And, you know, spammers are like water. They find a leak somewhere.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Yeah. That they will. The FaceTime thing is a new thing for me. I didn't realize we were. There were spam facetimes.
Honestly, those seem a little more egregious to me because, you know, you don't want your face out there these days if you. If you're. Well, if you're not a YouTuber or podcaster. Yeah.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: What it is is people calling your other devices, but they show up at FaceTime as voice calls, so it's not. But it also, if you have an iPad, which doesn't have the phone app on it, the only way to block those calls is to go into FaceTime and block those calls.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Oh, I see what you're saying then. Yeah. Yep. I run into that sometimes too, where I do have things blocked on my phone, but they do show up on my Mac or on my iPad. So. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Especially if you have your iPad ph phone linked together so you can get phone calls on those devices.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: The only way to block them is to go into the FaceTime app and make sure you block.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: That's. That's a genius idea. Huh. Cool. Learn something every day. That's one Thing.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: I thought so, too.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: I love about doing this.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Yeah. That's why I'm getting these calls. Yeah. Because I have a lot.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: So, y' all, if you're learning this, this is great. We're learning it too, all at the same time. So, you know, whatever we can do to kind of spread the news. This is good.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And I made the notes. We'll format something and put it into the show notes so people can go through those things. It's not hard to too. Just remember, the big thing is search for unknown and you'll get all three of them.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Well, cool. Cool. Well, that's great. Well, gosh, I've had some interesting, interesting things from my dad this week. I'm really surprised. He. He called me the other day and he said, is there any way that you can help me set up a grocery list on my. On my phone? And I'm. First, I'm blown away that he wants to do that. And second, I'm like, I can't tell you how long I've waited for you to ask me this question. You know, finally.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: One list. Does he want a list?
[00:05:17] Speaker A: No, he don't want.
Yep. So I helped him out. I made him a grocery list in Apple reminders. And Apple reminders is pretty good about. You can create a list and then you can designate it as a grocery or shopping list. And it acts a little bit different, but gives you kind of a. Kind of a bit of help with things. As you put things on your list, it'll categorize them and you can kind of.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Isn't it cool?
[00:05:38] Speaker A: Oh, it's very cool.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Wait, so. So don't just make one a blank list. Use the grocery list they have because it really helps it.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: It's very cool. You can actually move things when. When you. When you get something it doesn't know. You can actually go into the. The icon that says information and you can create a new category and put that in there so you can extend it.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. And it's nice. And, you know, we're. We're geeks. We're going to do this kind of stuff with it. But one of the things that I love, too, is being able to rearrange the categories so that they fit the way I go through my grocery store. So. So you. You kind.
Next section, you happen to be in that part of the grocery store, and then you can just go start checking things off your list. But anyway, what I thought when my dad asked me that, I was like, one, I could tell him all about reminders and all the things you can do with that. And I'm like, no, Barry, don't do all that. Make it simple. So what I did was I. I created a shortcut, an iOS shortcut, and I saved it to his home screen. And all it does, it's a nice little green icon with a grocery cart on it. When he clicks that, it opens reminders directly. His grocery list. And I mean dead simple. And today I walked through it with him and. And showed him how to put in. He put in things on his list and that, you know, you could. And I always. I set a setting that said, don't have it. Show the ones that you've already checked. So the idea being that once he's done a week or two of this going to the grocery store, he shouldn't have to type too much stuff into it again. He can go back and just use the ones that he's checked off the list and uncheck them and he's good to go again. So that was pretty cool.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: That will remove. That will hide them and toggle them. So you can choose Mine Disappear.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: Yep, mine disappear too.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: But if you start typing them, it'll say, oh, yeah, you mean 2% milk. So it'll find them easily. The other thing is, did you know that Siri has an integration to it?
[00:07:29] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: You can actually say, hey, slow mo, go ahead and add this to my grocery list.
Have multiple grocery lists. Like if you have one for your dad and one for you, it says you have two. Which one?
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Oh, that's cool. I didn't know it would differentiate. That's nice. Yeah, I use that thing with. We're saying, hey, Shlomo, add this to my. To my grocery list all the time. Because. Because usually I just. I'm in a hurry. I want to. I'm thinking about the thing. I want to get it on there in a hurry. So he's pretty good about. He's not great about using Siri. I think I could get him a little closer to that. But in the list, I did show him how to put things. Put things on there by voice, like just being. Being able to hit the microphone and just say it and hit, return, hit, say it, hit.
He got used to that fairly quickly. He's not great with typing on the phone, so this helps him a lot that he can do it by voice. But overall, I think he's going to have a good time with that again. I love it, too. And my wife and I share one. We share a grocery list, and that way we can, you know, put things on and off.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: So what I do, I share one with my wife. What you could do, you can share his with yourself. That way you see what he wants. Yeah, you could buy it for him.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: That's a good point, too. That's a very good point. Matter of fact, I had a thought today. I should. I should have shared that with me while I had his phone in my hand, But I didn't do it today. Next time I'll do that. So that was one thing. Another thing he called me about this week on this phone, and this was an odd one. I haven't seen this before, but he called me. He said, you know, I have my phone on my nightstand, and every once in a while during the night, it'll. It'll, you know, I'll get a notification and it'll light up and I'll look over and see what time it is. He said, but I couldn't. I couldn't see the time. It was really, really faint. And I'm like, okay, what in the world is that? My first thought was he has accidentally done something with the. With the lock screen, you know, like with. With. When you can modify and customize and things like that. But I thought, well, I've never seen him do that. I don't think he's ever done that before. So today, finally got up to go see him, and I said, let me see your phone. Let's see what's going on with it. I said, show me what you mean. And I looked at it. Sure enough, the time on the. On the lock screen was really, really faint. If you touched the screen, it would come up and it would be normally bright. And I tried multiple things. I tried changing the brightness on it. I tried making it bolder. Still same. And then I did a little Google Fu and finally found that this is happening to several people. And you just have to stop. Like, just reboot the phone. Literally hard reboot the phone, comes back up. Took care of the problem. I don't know. It's a weird little bug, but it's out there. If you have to run into it, that'll get you out of it.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: So, yeah, I use a stand in the nightstand mode on my phone. Yeah, the one that actually has the magnet on it.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: True.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: If you don't, you have to buy one of those magnets. And I think I showed this before, but I'll show it again. It's one of these little things. Oh, yeah.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: A little magnet ring. Nice, nice.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: So that'll make it compatible with it. But it's, it's really cool that it actually, when notices that you're here, it has proximity in it and if you're not moving, it'll go into low light mode. That's what I thought it was when you first told me about the problem.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: And then if it sees a moment, a movement, it goes into bright mode. Cool.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Cool. So it's something, some little bug in there similar to that, probably using some kind of that proximity thing too. But it's just, just the edge case. And I don't know about you with your, with, with your, with your mom or. But my loved ones can find the edge cases faster than anybody.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: Magnet.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: Like a magnet, if there's going to.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: Be an exception or an edge case, they're going to find it. So, you know, just be prepared.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: You know, there's a, there's a web, a YouTube and I both love that talks about esoteric little things like that.
You know, the guy from Britain. So I don't know if we should give a plug or not, but, but anyway, he does a really good job of finding those things. So I have to go back and listen to that so I can find that the esoteric kind of race cases like that. But yeah, the other thing to keep in mind, and you both know this of being a tech, most time the answer is one, turn the phone off and on, turn the device off and on. And two, are you updated?
[00:11:32] Speaker A: Yep. This will fix a lot of ills right there. And, and, and too.
Yeah, most people get this and some people don't though. But my dad, I have to remind him every time that just clicking the button on the side does not turn your phone off. That just turns the screen off.
And to really turn it off on his phone, it's, you know, hold the up button, the up volume and the lock button at the same time for a few seconds and it'll pop up and say, do you want to turn your phone off? So yeah, I have to remind him of that one because he doesn't do it very often. So, you know, it's just one of those things. Got to do it every once in a while.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I used to do myself. I used to have something every month where I just showed.
[00:12:09] Speaker A: Oh, that's smart, that's smart. Just to just do it.
Now that reminded me of one other thing. And while we're on techie things and talking about neat things around shortcuts, I wrote a shortcut this week with Apple Shortcuts to do something neat on my iPad. I use My iPad a lot, but some, but I do it in spurts. There'll be, there'll be times where I'll use it, you know, for three days in a row and I'm working on it and I'm doing a lot and then I might not use it again for a week. But there's something about some of the apps that I use on my iPad. They do a lot of stuff in the background and I, sometimes I forget to turn those to get rid of those apps while, while I'm not using it. And it will suck the battery down every time. So I wrote myself a tiny little automation and shortcut that when the power drops, the battery drops below certain percentage. I think I have it at 50% right now. It will send me a text and say, dude, charge your iPad. And that, that has been really, really handy because I'll, I'll be working on it in the den or something. I'll leave it on a coffee table and I'll forget it's there because I haven't needed it for a little while. And when I come back, if I don't do that, dude, if I don't go charge it, then it'll be dead the next time I pick it up. So this is kind of nice. It reminds me from time to time when it needs to, to, to, to recharge it, but also puts it in, puts it in low power mode at the same time that it's.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: Oh, that's kind of nice too. So for me, what I do every night, and this is not really good for your battery life, but I do it anyway is every night. My iPad is a standing clock somewhere.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:43] Speaker B: So I have a cord on my kitchen table that I, that I put it on and I always make sure it's charged every time I go out of town. I do this too to my wife's sugar aunt. She's like, what are you doing? I said set up all my charges. I get all my charges, right? So I have this iPad app I bought. It's alarm clock. It's really simple and it does the old style green LED lights for the clock and the date and then throw some news stuff at the bottom. And I've actually done it for my mom too because it makes my iPad, it makes her, you know, she always asks things like what time is it? What day is it? She has this really old school sliding rule kind of thing that she has for it. But the, the clock does it for too, so something very good.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Oh, that's cool.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: Yeah, that, so that Cures. My iPad is always charged because I always put it on there to see what time it is. Right. So when I'm not using it.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Good deal. Yeah.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Now you got to be careful because if you do that too much, you can have cause battery drain. But the iPad software usually is pretty good about buying that. So it will actually reserve charge until it needs it. So that's one of the things the new operating system does for Macs and iPads, is it? If it sees you doing one of those steady things on it, it'll. It'll say, well, I'm turn off charge and let you drain down until you get to a point and drain back up.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: So it does what we used to have to do manually.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: Takes care of that kind of thing. You said traveling when you're getting your charger set up. Yeah, I'd do that too. I actually have a dedicated set of chargers just for traveling so I don't end up like me too. Robbing my desk in my office from them. And that's the first thing I do when I get in.
Yep. I have a go bag for chargers and they get set up first thing in the hotel room.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Wow. So think about some other things. You know, in the past few weeks, I've. You guys have all been very kind to listen to some of my Internet way Internet fails and. And aggravations with cell phone signals and all that kind of stuff. And much as I hate to say this, and I don't want to say it out loud too much, but I think I might have some of it solved. It's. It's kind of bizarre, but the. I won't go into all the details about what I was having wrong with my phones, but I'll just break down and say that the. That the call quality in my house was terrible on my cel.
And to add a piece of context for you, in case you hadn't heard, listen to the earlier episodes, I also have AT&T cellular Internet in my house. I have a 5G AT&T air gateway. And what had happened was that the AT&T air was interfering with my cell phone signals when it was. I don't know why it was doing it for this particular place, but where I have it sitting up on a high shelf in my office, I did not a massively high shelf, but it was reasonably high about. I don't know, close to maybe face height. For me, it's something about that position and something about the things around it caused it to interfere with our cell signals. When I picked it up and I moved it to the far corner of the house up on a high, high shelf like, like above my head. High. Everything got to be fine.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Well, placement is everything.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: Placement is everything is pertine. It's perfectly fine. Hadn't had any trouble at all since then. So what are you going to do? I mean.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: Well, that reminds me of some of the stories I used to hear from our network guy that we used to work with about him placing WI fi on campus. And it was some kind of magic act to get it in the right place where the wrong from waveforms were right. There wasn't a concrete block blocking signal or something like that. So I remember very vividly him going through all the pain it would take to figure out what that was.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: So it's related to that. I mean, radio frequency engineering is voodoo in my opinion. And this, this seemed to take care of it.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: So I'm glad you got that figured out because I know it was really aggravating.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: So it really was annoying me to no end. And then everything was peachy until this past week something else happened is the cell tower that provides my Internet and my phone connectivity died. It died earlier this week. And the reason I could see what happened with it was that all of a sudden the cellular Internet got really, really slow.
I'm usually in 200 plus megabits down and maybe anywhere around 50 to 60 megabits up. And that's normal for me. All of a sudden it went to 7 megabits down and like less than 1 up. And we could figure out what's going on with it. And I noticed it was happening to the phones too. And then I would put it. I would turn off WI fi and check it and it was really, really bad and started asking around the neighborhood and everybody else was having problems with this thing too for about, I don't know, some. I reported it to AT&T. I think several other people did too. And then within about, I don't know what, 24 hours, maybe 36 hours, I think they had rebooted the tower or done something to the tower and came back up and everything was pg.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Probably electrical storm maybe, maybe something like.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: That might have been. Yeah, I don't know what had happened to it, but I, I'm lucky enough to have. Since I rely on Internet for my business, I have a backup, you know, so I, I have a T mobile backup. So I went and got it and hooked it up and it worked fine because they use completely different towers and they're in different directions. So that, that has been good now.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: So there's three things in this story that I want to bring out. First thing is that's true in this area, but what you're going to see eventually, I think the I know places have unified towers now. If you go to Charlotte, there's this huge tower outside of Haiti, Fire. When you drive downtown, it's got all these things on it that. So there are a lot of places now that are doing things like putting up a tower that's municipal and saying you want to get on, you pay this for rural areas that we qualify.
The communication companies had to do it all. So you'll see a tower per guy. We're probably more likely as time goes on, you're going to see more of the unified towers come into existence. So that thing that happened to you will probably be much more of a problem for everybody and get fixed faster.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: The other thing you said that I want to get to is the megabit and a megabyte. There is a difference. And so if you're reading these things, and we should. I'll get to that last one, which is there's a way for you to check your down connectivity to see, hey, I'm having an issue. So if you do it once and you know you're in the 200 because obviously Barry has done that, then if it changes, you know something's up, you can give somebody a notification. So there is a difference between megabit and megabyte. There are eight bits in a byte.
There are eight bits in a byte. Mega adds the order of magnitude to it. So for, for, for wireless connectation, it is always in bits, it's never in bytes. So that's one of the things to watch out for. As you're reading and seeing things. If you see something with a router that says we are the megabits and you're like, well, what's wrong with the megabyte? No, megabytes are usually for storage and hard drives. Bits are for wireless connect.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: Good, good note.
Yeah, that's a really good note as a matter of fact. But the overall though, the thing though has really kind of gotten to me is that that's.
If you don't have another option, cellular Internet is awesome. But if you do have another option, you know, I can recommend that too. We've had one of the, one of the wireless, not the wireless. One of the Internet providers in the area has just recently reached out to me and said that, hey, we, we're going to have fiber available at your house soon. Would you like that? And I'm going to break down and do that and probably keep one of my cellular ones as a backup. But I'm going to, I think I'm going to go with, go with fiber when I get a chance to. The prices for the same speeds are about the same you can get, but you get the option of higher throughput and much higher download speeds and upload speeds. If you, if you feel the need for that with fiber, you're kind of stuck with whatever your towers are when you're in cellular mode. But, but yeah, it's been good so far.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: There's probably a show to talk about the streaming options available now, which have changed quite a bit over the last few years. Like DirecTV is not just an antenna thing anymore. So.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know too, that's the, that's a thing my wife and I were talking about how even when your Internet, Internet access is slow, streaming is still pretty good. And that goes a long way to show you what the, what the streaming services have done and the TVs and the boxes that you attach to your TVs, what the, what the software engineering has done for those things in that, you know, it knows that it can figure out that, oh, this Internet connection slow. I'm going to download a whole bunch of it first before I ever start playing so as to not disrupt the experience. And I think it's amazing how well.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: That really helps if you have inconsistent speeds on your networking. So often streamers can do that. The other thing is that the stream that usually is accomplished with a stream like that is a different kind of stream than say a phone call that requires a lot of back and forth and a quality of service to it. So your phone calls will usually suffer first, which has happened to you, and your streaming usually suffers last. And depending on what it is now, if it cuts off, nobody can get through a cutoff then ain't no way around that one. But there's a two part to the TCP IP thing and the TCP part can fail and a stream can actually set that up and still use a continuous stream. That's where it comes from actually, and not be interrupted where something else that has a little bit more back and forth will be. So, so you can have a situation where your streaming works, but you can't make a phone call. And that's one of the things to.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Talk on or probably for anything interactive like, you know, there, there's satellite Internet and I'm not talking about starlink. The new, the new, the new stuff. I'm talking about some of the old satellite Internet was great. If you were just doing streaming or if you were doing downloading things or just doing a little bit of web browsing and that kind of stuff, it was perfectly capable of that. But if you needed anything going, going both ways. So like gaming, especially gaming would.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: Gaming Legacy was terrible.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it was awesome.
[00:23:33] Speaker B: Drive Accents was not as good as phone calls. If you were doing Internet, phone calls were never as good. So yeah. Yes.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: It's not always about speed. It's about latency and it's about speed up and down as opposed to just down and stuff. Got to look out for.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: And you know, most connections don't. The speed going to you at the upstream, usually a lot faster than the stream going down. And so I know a lot of cable services will have great 200s in the upstream, 41 in the down. So if you're running a server on your home and expecting it to see the same performance, it may not. You maybe get something that does. So yeah, sounds like we need a connection one on this. On the show we could at some.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Point in time and you know, it's all about what you're trying to do with it more than, more than anything and what works out for, you know.
So we've kind of skewed geeky today and talked a lot about tech. But I don't know, I, there, I, you know, there's, there's things about, you know, there's some other kind of emotional sort of stuff too. I think I could talk about today a little bit if you're, you're into that or what about yourself.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I am. You know, but what we're just talking about is important because if you have to manage your, your loved ones streaming.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:24:54] Speaker B: That could get complicated.
It can, let me tell you. Oh, I got another one I gotta throw in. So I was telling you that we bought my mom a TV and it was an Amazon SM tv. So she uses. I'm going to have to say the word. I'm not giving them a plug. I just do. Explaining it because this is for those who have it. Spectrum is a very large provider and they usually have a Spectrum app that's on most of the types of TVs including Apple TV and Roku and all that stuff. But guess what is not on Amazon.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Oh my goodness.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: And so I have had a journey of life trying to figure out how to get a simple setup for mom with this Amazon TV to get to her Spectrum.
I kept thinking there must be a way to side load this app. There must be a way to download some other app that will do it. And guess what?
[00:25:38] Speaker A: Use the cable box connection to.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Yes, the $65 Zumo, the one you can pay $5 a month for has the Amazon Spectrum app on it. And it's been, that's been the change. That's the thing.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:25:52] Speaker B: So another story to that. When I hooked her up I tried to figure it out. So I'll give her my account for Amazon prime, try to get on well connected to my other things. So guess what that does. That means she can hit a show and buy it. Go past the stream and you end up getting a bill for, you know, BET plus and History XR and whatever 85 worth of bills showed up on my bill the other day. I'm going to go back and realize I had to uncheck all that.
So be careful. Yeah, if she does it again I might have to set her up as the in the child mode so I can get permission. But wow. That was the thing. And I wouldn't have noticed if it were subtle and was just a 7.99. One might not have thought it, but no, it came in as 80 and I went for HBO twice.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: There's no shame or disrespect in putting it in child mode. None whatsoever. Yeah. I mean because it's just protecting you and protecting them from doing things that they don't, they don't, they're not sure that they're doing or don't mean to be doing and protecting your pocketbook at the same time.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: Watch your stuff. Watch your stuff.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: Oh yeah, but I've kind of done that with my dad's phone. I have a code on there that he doesn't know his, he doesn't know his iCloud user ID and password. And that's a good thing because he doesn't need to be accidentally downloading apps and cranking stuff up at that point. I shared my YouTube TV with him though he doesn't actually watch it because he's addicted to the way Spectrum works for him. In my case my dad's TV, he uses a Roku and, and it, he does YouTube and he does a few other little streaming things. The Roku's have a, have a kind of a built in app for whatever your cable box connection is and he still uses his old cable box so it plugs into the Roku. There's a, there's an app on the screen for A cable box. And then he uses his old remote to get to do spectrum. Because.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: Those remote, especially if they call you and you don't know the remote setup. I think we had another tip before that says, take a picture of that remote up and put it in your phone.
[00:27:54] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. Because it's just. All right, I'm gonna. I'm gonna try to be funny here for a little bit, but the thing is, is it blows my mind that a Roku remote might have nine buttons on the whole front of the thing. The Spectrum remote has 743 buttons on the front of that thing.
And it's me. It's like, how. How is that simpler than this tiny little remote remote?
[00:28:18] Speaker B: You want to know how? I'll tell you how now. Yep. That. That Roku remote requires multiple clicks to get things done.
[00:28:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess that's true. Yep. Yep.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: And then the spectrum remote, every button has one purpose, numbers. Turn the power on. It has. Sometimes has labels. So I found the same thing. I looked at the spectrum remote, said, there's no way this is more. Let's compliment. She said, you touch my remote and die.
The other one I gave her. I gave her the book, the Amazon button, which is. There's. There's 12 buttons on it, but it's multiple combinations, and there are no numbers and labels on it. It was a nightmare.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: So familiarity, I guess, more than anything. And what you're used to.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Look at the icon. And I'd go, okay, it's the one with the speaker on next to the X for mute. She goes, what's the speaker look like? You know, it's like. Is the kind of thing where the pitches don't help.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: Right? It's true. It's true. Yeah.
[00:29:16] Speaker B: So if you're listening, you know, Amazon. All right. I know you want to be simple. That circle in the circle does not help me. Does not help me. Try to explain that over the phone. It does not help me.
[00:29:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But we could do a whole episode on naming.
Yeah. Just remotes and naming things. Because it's hard for me to explain sometimes, like over the phone that you're speaking on and they're trying to do something with that phone.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Listen, if you want to get your blood pressure up, all you got to do is call a loved one up and explain to them how to change the channel. Just do it over the phone. If you want to do it one time, then you'll be on our side.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: You will, you will, you will. And you'll know what I'm talking about.
And you know, and that's a good segue to like one thing that I heard this bit of advice a few years ago. It was, it was. I think it had something to do with, with leadership and also it had something to do with weight loss. And I forgot what else was in there too. Or I think it was about habits. But it came right down to the phrase was. Is that self control is a finite resource.
And when, when I'm. When I'm dealing with my dad, I love him, he does a great job with all the stuff and he tries hard. But some days I just don't have any self control left. And it is, it's really hard when you get yourself in a position like that to, to.
To help them with what they're trying to. To. To accomplish. To do it in a way without being aggravated about it. To do it in a way that you, you explain it simply but also not patronizingly, you know, not too simply. It just feels like a tightrope all the time. And I know you've experienced that too.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: Oh, it's. I reminded of the caregiver's first rule is take care of yourself and also give yourself a break. It's number two. And you got to find. You're right about to find that resources. You can be exhausted. Helping them when you're tired is not a good thing.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: Nope. Tired or hungry. Either one.
[00:31:12] Speaker B: Nor hungry. Yeah, go ahead and eat. Go ahead and sleep. Let's find out if it's emergency or have someone who can step in and make a better call. Because you know what the Zumo thing, one time she needed it to. My mom needed to turn on the television and I'm on the phone and I'm on the camera and I'm trying to describe to her what button it hit. And it's like 9 o' clock. And I go, just call the neighbor. Just call the neighbor. The neighbor can walk in. And she, she did it in 10 seconds, showed her the button and left. I would have been on the phone for another hour. You got to learn to use your tool, the right tool, the right time and have the right demeanor. And if you don't do that, you just go, you know, I think that things worse.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: Great advice, great advice. And it reminds me of this, this fella I used to work with years ago. We. I didn't work closely with him, but I was in some meetings with the guy and they. It was one of those situations where there was an argument, it was tense in the meeting and people were disagreeing about Things and this guy was sitting down at the end, and he was following it, and he somehow got pulled into the conversation, and he was like. He stood up and he said, you know, I appreciate that we all are having our own opinions on this, but I don't have the emotional stamina right now to deal with this, so I'll see you guys later. And I thought that was genius, and I so appreciate that he said it that way. It's like, that was. That was perfect. And sometimes I think you have to tell yourself that, like, hey, if you got the emotional stamina to deal with this right now, whether it's. It's talking about. Talking about what your remote's doing or talking about what's different on your phone that changed or whether you're talking about, I don't know, maybe. Maybe it's time for you not to be driving right now, or it might be time to be thinking about assisted living or, you know, talking about a new medication or any of a thousand things that a caregiver can go through through. Just, you know, ask yourself that question occasionally. Do I have the stamina to deal with this particular thing right now? And does this particular thing have to be done right now? Maybe this is not the time for it for you or them. So, you know, just thoughts.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I. I think so. The. The.
When you think through that and realize you got resources in your mind about how you handle this, checking to see if you. If you don't have the resources, don't make it worse.
[00:33:29] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: They'll make an argument so they get mad at you and don't talk to you for a week. And then they really needed to talk to you for a week. So, you know, stuff like that. It's.
Taking a step back is an option. Punt does work, and I think that.
[00:33:42] Speaker A: Even applies to, like, changes sometimes, too. Does the change need to happen? You know, is it. Is it. Do we need to change out the remotes at this point? She's used to that one. That's perfectly fine. In my case, like with my dad, it's like, I like to call it kind of hanging on to old expectations. There's plants around his house that, that he. He would like to maintain, but he doesn't maintain. But I end up maintaining because my mom liked that plant or, you know, there's things, like, around the house that he doesn't care a wit about, but my mom liked them, so he keeps them around the house, those kinds of things. And, you know, and I. He. He is. He's a less tidy person than I am. I'm a fairly tidy person. Then sometimes I think it doesn't matter. You know what?
And today the. The thought hit me. It's like, perhaps my standards are a little too high because it doesn't really matter. Go long term. It really doesn't.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: The perfectionist dilemma. Don't. Don't let the perfect get away. The good. That kind of.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: Yes. 100%. 100%. So, y' all, thank you for listening to us. This is a good. Lou. Like to say this all the time. This is. This is therapy for us as much as it is for you guys. Guys. So we hope we're helping, but we're helping us too. Yeah. And I think that's a good spot to. To end up today on. We're in about 40 minutes and looking pretty good. You got anything else you'd like to talk about?
[00:35:03] Speaker B: Everybody should make sure if you like what you heard, grow the community like and subscribe. Make sure you do that. Turn on notifications. So you know about us. Yes. We're a little erratic. We're not every week. But, you know, still. Go ahead and tell us you love us with a comment. Let us know. Let the world know that you like us.
[00:35:20] Speaker A: Something. Because we all need to hear it. That's right. All right, y' all, thank you so much for coming and spending some time with us today. And we'll be back soon. Take care.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Okay, Bye, y' all.
