The EFTM podcast – Antenna Woes and accountability!

Keeping each other Accountable, Marilynne is back, and so are other callers with their feedback!

Plus Digital TV issues for Abdul And Rodney might be the perfect candidate for the Pocket AI – perhaps?

Be part of the show via SMS 0477 657 657

Full AI generated transcript below

[00:00:03]  VOICE OVER: The EFTM Podcast. Talkback Technology. Got a question about tech? Trev’s here to help. Not sure what to buy? Ask Trev. Australia’s number one talkback technology podcast.

[00:00:15]  Trevor Long: I was gobsmacked. I spoke to you on the Tuesday. Thursday afternoon, there’s this lovely courier man at me back door with a parcel for me.

[00:00:24]  VOICE OVER: All I know is within 24 hours, mate, you had it sorted after 5 weeks of hell, raising hell. Mate, I can’t I can’t thank you enough. Join the conversation. Head to eftm.com and click Ask Trev. Helping Australians with tech questions for over 15 years, the EFTM podcast with Trevor Long.

[00:00:45]  Trevor Long: Real Australians with real questions every week.

[00:00:51]  VOICE OVER: You can text Trev now thanks to Vodafone on 0477 657 657.

[00:01:09]  Trevor Long: Thank you for listening. Great to have your company live from China. No, not really. I’m recording the week before I go to China, but I am in China right now with Geely, the auto group, looking at the Beijing Motor Show and also some of the safety centers. So just, I guess, prove how much effort they’re putting into things like that, as you would hope from a large car market like China now. So follow me on socials if you want to see that stuff now. @trevorlong on TikTok, @trevorlongau on Instagram. I assume I’m doing some work while I’m over there and posting. I don’t know, we’ll soon see. But yeah, that’s how you can follow what I’m up to, and I’d love you to follow me at any time. I’ve also got little communities going on, on Instagram and TikTok. Only a few hundred people, but it’s kind of a nice little way to get kind of direct messages from me. So on Instagram, if you go to my profile, you’ll see there’s kind of a Threads link as well as what looks like two conversation bubbles and says Trevor Long. And when you go in there, it’s just got links and different things that I’ve sent. So, um, yeah, you can, uh, you can— it’s kind of like a DM situation. Or if you prefer, there’s a WhatsApp channel you can, um, you can, uh, send— you can jump in the channel there and get those messages. Uh, and also on, uh, on TikTok. There’s a, uh, I don’t know what they call it on TikTok. Let me look it up right now. Um, Trevor Long Tech Plus. So if you go to my profile, uh, Trevor Long, and down before the, all the videos and things, there’s a thing that says Trevor Long Tech. Again, it looks like two conversation bubbles. So you can join there, and there’s sometimes some polls or messages and things there. It’s just another way of communicating as well as the videos and things that are going on. But, uh, yeah. Bit of fun. Easy, easy, easy. Yeah, big, big week last week, another big week this week, and all the details are up at eftm.com. If you want to follow along, you can, yeah, you can do that. We’d love to have your company. Install the EFTM app on your iPhone, install the widget, even on Android now the widgets are beautiful. It’s big, but you’ll see the latest story there. You can scroll through them as well. And of course on the phone, on the app, you can also win prizes each and every week on the EFTM app. So we’ve got everything for you. I mean, it’s a community. We’ve got your covered. We’ve got you covered, folks. If you have any interest in cars or tech or lifestyle, we got you covered. Obviously we focus a bit more on tech here, but on the EFTM podcast, but happy to talk anything with you at all. So feel free to get in touch at any point you like. 0477 657 657. Thanks to Vodafone, you can send a text and that’ll come straight through to us. Producer Rob will line you up, we’ll have a chat on the show next time I record. WhatsApp is the same deal, so we’d love to hear from you whatever mechanism you choose to get in touch. Just Just do it, folks. Just get in touch.

[00:04:02]  VOICE OVER: Helping Australians with tech questions for over 15 years, the EFTM podcast with Trevor Long.

[00:04:07]  Trevor Long: Great to have your company and happy to help wherever I can. 0477 657 657. If you want to get in touch, send me a text or a WhatsApp. Rienna is on the line. G’day, how are you doing?

[00:04:20]  Rienna: Not too bad, thanks, Trevor. Yourself?

[00:04:22]  Trevor Long: Really good. What can I do for you?

[00:04:24]  Rienna: I just inquiring about a photo stick. I’ve seen things along the lines that you can randomly put into any device to download all your old photos.

[00:04:32]  Trevor Long: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:33]  Rienna: And it’s something that’s just mythical, doesn’t exist.

[00:04:36]  Trevor Long: You’ve seen these ads on like Facebook and Instagram. Yeah, I saw that, haven’t you? Yes.

[00:04:40]  Rienna: They’re looking for legitimate source.

[00:04:42]  Trevor Long: Yeah, rubbish, basically. Look, it is a genuine product which works not bad, maybe on a Windows computer, but in reality, no, they’re not great. I’ve tried a couple and the one that literally the Photo Stick brand had a little USB-C one, tried it for a while, but it just wasn’t finding everything. And in the end I was manually moving my photos around. So what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Where are your photos now?

[00:05:10]  Rienna: Oh, I’ve got about, you know, 7 or 8 different old phones and I don’t know what’s transferred to new phones along the way and various things. And I thought I’d try to do a bit of a cleanup and get them all in one spot. Android or iPhone solution?

[00:05:24]  Trevor Long: Android. So, and they all work still? You can charge them all and get them going again?

[00:05:28]  Rienna: I believe I would be able to, yes.

[00:05:29]  Trevor Long: Wow. Why have you got so many phones you’re holding on to?

[00:05:31]  Rienna: They just kind of live in the cupboard. Get a new one, put those in the cupboard.

[00:05:35]  Trevor Long: All right, well, let’s, let’s do the right thing here. Let’s set a task for, you know, let’s call it May and June. So let’s, by June 30, let’s solve this problem, right? Because then on June 30, you can donate those phones to Mobile Muster and have them recycled and, you know, move on. Keep one old phone because you never know when your current phone dies or breaks or whatever. But let’s Well, let’s put the rest not in landfill, but recycle them probably, right? But in the meantime, before you do that, we’ve gotta get those photos off. So the good thing is, I reckon your solution is best placed in Google Photos.

[00:06:06]  Rienna: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:07]  Trevor Long: Google Photos is probably already installed on most of those phones. So power them all up, get ’em all on your Wi-Fi, make sure they’re all still logged into your Google account, and do an app update to make sure that you’ve got the latest version of Google Photos. In Google Photos, so I’m using an Android phone right now. If I open up Google Photos in the top right-hand corner, there’s like your profile pic. Yeah, so it’s your, your, your personal profile. So showing what account you’re logged into. Once you’re in there, you, you choose, I mean, a backup. It’ll either say it’s backed up or it’s backing up or it’s not selected to back up. So you need to, you need to set it to back up all these photos and what it’ll do and it won’t take too long, like we’re talking a day or two. So I’ve given you 2 months, you should be able to get it done. It’ll start sending all those photos up into the cloud. Now the good thing is, because they’re all Android phones, because you’ll use Google Photos on all of them, it will essentially synchronize also between them all. So what’ll end up happening is they’ll all have all the photos, including your current phone. So you’ll do this on your current phone as well. And you’ll— You’ll then be able to check. And so one of the, one of the things before you do all this is just go into each phone and see if there’s a photo that you can kind of recognize from each one that you’ll go, well, if that one’s in the system, then I know we’re backed up properly. That’s, it’s kind of your, your failsafe to make sure that that phone is properly backed up. But once you turn on Google Photos and you enable that backup, it says to you, you know, like 2,000 left to go or 1,000 left to go or 2 left or whatever it might be. And so it’ll say backup complete. Like if I open mine now and I took some photos this morning, it says backup complete, big green tick, done. And it’s the smartest, safest, easiest way to go. It’s a great system for searching and sorting photos. You’ll never look back. It’s so good. Google Photos is amazing.

[00:08:05]  Rienna: Sounds like I’ve got something to do for the next couple of months.

[00:08:07]  Trevor Long: I don’t think it’ll take a couple of months now that I think about it. You’ve just got to, you’ve really just got to dedicate yourself to go, you know what? And do it on a rainy weekend. When it’s a rainy weekend, just pull all those phones out, set them on charge. An hour later, they’re all charged. Turn them all on, set them on Wi-Fi. It’s not, it’s not actually going to take too long at all. And then just leave them charged so that they can do the upload, and they just need to be connected to Wi-Fi to do the upload. That’s all.

[00:08:31]  Rienna: Sounds great.

[00:08:32]  Trevor Long: Wonderful. Enjoy.

[00:08:34]  Rienna: Thanks very much.

[00:08:34]  Trevor Long: No worries. Thanks for getting in touch. Cheers. If you’ve got a tech question, get in touch with me. 0477 657657. I did have someone reach out. I apologize. I I don’t have the text in front of me, but I remember, see, I see all the text messages. I just don’t directly reply to them. Producer Rob does that to keep it, you know, organized. And it may have been an app message, who knows. But I saw a message saying, why do you always talk about Google Photos? Apple’s Photos is just as good. It also recognizes faces and things and yada, yada, yada. Yeah, it does. I don’t think it does as good a job. Now I use an iPhone 40, 50% of the year. And when I open the Photos app on iPhone and I go to People, it doesn’t recognize anywhere near as many people as what my Google Photos does. Um, it, it doesn’t find people as well as Google Photos does. I just— I’m telling you from my experience Google Photos is phenomenal when it comes to, uh, to actually finding things in photos, etc. It’s, it’s really, really good. Apple’s good, don’t get me wrong, it’s great. And you can now search contextually for random things, you know, like a car or a boat or whatever. But I think you can search far better for things on Google Photos. So yeah, that’s just my personal experience. And that’s not as— that’s not as an Android fanboy, that’s someone who would prefer to be platform agnostic, which is why I’m able to switch so easily from iPhone to Android at any time of the year because I know that— so I took a photo yesterday, I posted it last week, it was actually because this show is coming out later, but I took a photo of a Benson Hedges Ford Sierra from the Australian Touring Car Championship and it was Tony Longhurst and Thomas Mazera. I got this cool model car and I posted it on on Instagram. Now I’m looking at that photo. I took it on my— the Oppo Find N6, right? And if I now open up my iPhone and look at my settings, it’s now like, okay, I’m not fully backed up. But then I open up and I can see— I can see the photo I took this morning at Channel 9, as well as yesterday when I picked up the car, as well as the Benson and Hedges Tony Longhurst car. So I’m seeing it in Google Photos on the iPhone because it’s like that single source of truth. It’s— that’s where I’m really looking into the cloud. And I think that’s the challenge for people, is you think about your photos being on a device. You’re better off thinking of your photos as being in the cloud and your device as a window into the cloud. Someone could come and smash all my phones And all I gotta do is go to any computer or get any phone, log on to Google Photos, and I can see all my photos. That’s, that’s the backup and redundancy that you want for something as important as photos.

[00:11:52]  VOICE OVER: You’re listening to the EFTM podcast.

[00:11:56]  Trevor Long: Great to have your company. Get in touch, 0477 657 657. Deeksey, I’ll let you speak that time, mate. Sorry about earlier. Taking your calls. If you’ve got a tech question, send me a text or or WhatsApp, 0477 657657. Marilynne’s on the line.

[00:12:08]  Marilynne: G’day, Marilynne.

[00:12:09]  Trevor Long: Hello, Trev. How are you? Very well. We spoke a little while ago. You’re an accountability coach. You had questions. You had a website to build. I’m keeping you accountable now. Where are you at? It’s been a month or more.

[00:12:22]  Marilynne: Yes, the website is live. Ready to go.

[00:12:25]  Trevor Long: Wow. You’ve done it.

[00:12:26]  Marilynne: Yes, it’s up.

[00:12:28]  Trevor Long: What’s it called?

[00:12:29]  Marilynne: Beunstoppable.com.au.

[00:12:31]  Trevor Long: Beunstoppable.com.au. There it is. Be Unstoppable with Marilynne. So accountability is what you do and you’ve held yourself accountable. Was it tough?

[00:12:43]  Marilynne: It was a learning experience. I’ve got to say that building websites is not my thing. So then I decided to outsource it.

[00:12:50]  Trevor Long: No, well, why not? Like, do you know what I say? I say this to my wife all the time. That’s not my skill. Pay someone. Like, like, what are we doing here? Why am I trying to learn to do something that I’m too old to learn? So like, I’m sure in 15 years, 20 years, if I retire, I’ll be like, oh, I might learn how to make wood things or something, whatever. But yeah, right now I’m doing okay and I can afford to pay a plumber to come and fix the toilet or whatever it might be, you know? So if it’s not your skill, look, it’s a funny thing because I get this a lot in talkback. You have people who go, I’ve got a problem and how do I fix it? I’m like, you know what, just call Geeks 2 U. They come to your house and they fix it for you and you pay them. But then they’re like, oh, and then I say to them, So if your water was leaking from your shower onto the floor, would you just, you know, hope that someone will do it for free over the phone? No, you’ll call a plumber. It’s what you do. Yeah. So what’s the goal now? Is that something that you can share then to grow the business and obviously try and get more clients?

[00:13:51]  Marilynne: Absolutely. So I’ve got the website, I’ve got my Facebook business page, Instagram. I’m building my LinkedIn profile literally today. This morning I’ve been working on it.

[00:13:51]  Rienna: Clients?

[00:14:00]  Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:14:01]  Marilynne: So yeah, getting, getting the word out there.

[00:14:03]  Trevor Long: Are you thinking about paying for Meta Verified because of all the dramas that have existed in recent months with Meta accounts, Instagram or Facebook, being shut off and kicked off for, you know, breaching terms which people don’t know what they’ve done, but it costs them business because they’re the only way to really assure yourself is to be paying Meta Verified. Do you worry about that? Do you think about that?

[00:14:28]  Marilynne: I do, and I am verified, but not the paid subscription. Yeah, but I have been verified. Verified by them, but I’m umming and ahhing about doing the paid bit.

[00:14:39]  Trevor Long: I think the thing to— look, if you’re not going to buy Meta Verified, which is, you know, I’m paying, what, $40 a month or something? Yeah, it’s about that. Then you need to go— you need to do two things. You need to be super strong on security. So you need to make sure that you have enabled every level of security, not just a two-factor authentication, but using an Authy app or something like that. So two-factor authentication fully. I would make sure that you, if you’ve got a free a friend or a business partner or a partner in life or someone who can help you, who’s super trusted, not just a close friend, make them an administrator of your Facebook page as well. So that if something happens to your personal account, you can still get into the business page. That’s a good thing to do. And then the other thing is just be really neutral about the things you’re posting. So there can be no questions about whether or not you’re breaching any of their weird terms and conditions and those kind of things. So I’m sure you’ll be fine on that account, it’s the small risk. But it feels like also the good thing is with a website, your social media doesn’t become the sole input to your business. So if Meta and Facebook, if Instagram, Facebook didn’t exist or stopped working tomorrow, you could still rely on Google search and things like that to hopefully people find your business. ‘Cause I mean, I didn’t check this, but How much accountability coaching is there out there?

[00:16:06]  Marilynne: Not much. Not much. It’s a fairly new niche kind of thing. You can find them around. There’s a few face-to-face people, but lots of online. But it’s not— it’s the structure I use of like a weekly short check-in. I have not found anywhere.

[00:16:27]  Trevor Long: I feel like LinkedIn’s your best growth opportunity because if you dedicate, I don’t know, twice a week, an hour of your day to, you know, essentially giving away some of your secrets, right? So what you’re doing is you’re rather than— and my biggest pet peeve on LinkedIn is people that have, it’s like clickbait. It’s like they want to tell you everything, but then it’s like you got to do this thing to get that. No, no.

[00:16:51]  Trevor Long: It’s either stories from clients who said, I achieved this because of this, or it’s little words of motivation that are the words that need to be And I said this recently, I was talking about how I’ve been mucking around with AI a lot and I’ve been using a thing called Claude, which is a different type of AI to ChatGPT. And I said to it, I said, my biggest challenge in my life slash business is there’s no one here. I’m in this office, 50, 100 square meter space, 50 upstairs, 50 down. And it’s great, it’s a man cave. There’s no one here. I can watch anything on television, I can do any work I want, but there’s no one saying, hey, have you written that article yet? Or whatever. And I said this to ChatGPT or Claude and it said, “Oh, well let’s do a daily check-in 3 times a day, morning, noon, and night.” I went, “Oh, great idea.” And we created this great system. The problem is it doesn’t check in on me. I’ve gotta check in on myself. And so I used it for the first 2 days and since then, do you think I’ve asked it?

[00:16:51]  Rienna: Yeah.

[00:17:51]  Simon: Not once.

[00:17:51]  Marilynne: Yeah, no.

[00:17:52]  Trevor Long: And it’s not smart enough. So even though I’ve asked it all these other questions and ideas and got it to do these presentations and slides for me, it hasn’t gone, “And by the way, how you going with that review?” So it’s not even smart enough to do that for me.

[00:18:06]  Trevor Long: So I think you play into that as well. AI or any form of to-do list apart from at best a push notification, which we all ignore. Mm-hmm. How is any of those things keeping you accountable? And that’s why you need someone like you on your side so that every week you have that accountability conversation and boom, you’re off and right off to the races, as they say. Well, good on you for getting it done. And good luck growing the business from there. That point.

[00:18:06]  Marilynne: Yeah.

[00:18:35]  Marilynne: Wonderful. Thank you very much.

[00:18:36]  Trevor Long: Good on you. Great to catch up. Cheers.

[00:18:38]  Marilynne: Thanks, Trev.

[00:18:39]  Trevor Long: Take care. No worries at all. Excellent. Yeah, not bad. Not hard. Very manageable and something that everyone can do. So there you go. You might just find some solace in your own accountability coach, folks.

[00:18:54]  VOICE OVER: Tech, cars, lifestyle. This is the EFTM podcast with Trevor Long.

[00:19:00]  Trevor Long: Deeksey, I’ll let you speak that time, mate. Sorry about earlier. Taking your calls. If you’ve got a tech question, send me a text or or WhatsApp, 0477 657657. Rodney’s on the line. G’day, Rodney.

[00:19:11]  Rodney: G’day, Trevor, how are you?

[00:19:12]  Trevor Long: Mate, really good. What can I do for you?

[00:19:14]  Rodney: Mate, I work as a manager in a big company and, you know, fair-aged person and I run around with, you know, 3 notebooks and 2 diaries at a time picking up whatever I can when I go to meetings. I have read Followji before and looked at those digital notepads, but I’m just trying to find, you know, as things change now, what’s better ones, you know, that I can write on that automatically puts it to text. That type of thing, or an app. I bought an iPad thinking, okay, that’ll do, and use Notes, but it’s just not working the way I think it should.

[00:19:42]  Trevor Long: I gotta tell you, um, I, I think I should just send you this thing because I bought— well, last week I had on the show a guy talking about this cool thing he bought called Pocket AI, and I don’t know what I spent on it, $200 or something, and it arrived and it’s so cool. It’s a great little idea. It, uh, it can clip onto the back of your phone or you can just hold it in your pocket and then it will record anything you put into it, including meetings. I don’t have meetings. And I just, mate, in a week, I just haven’t pulled it out of my pocket. And I thought about it. My biggest thought was I pull it out of my pocket and just make a note and say, “Hello, remind me to do this.” But my challenge is it’s not then automatically integrating with any other system that I use. It won’t automatically email that. I’ve gotta physically go into the phone and open up the Pocket app and then do stuff. ‘Cause for you, you’re already in that space where you’re trying to replicate a process. And actually a voice recording, that slash transcription is the ultimate solution because you just put it on the table and say, I’m just obviously I’m recording this just for my own note-taking. You probably say that to be polite. But the idea is, mate, this thing sits in every meeting with you, phone call or meeting, and listens and then provides you with a transcript which you can then act upon. Now I haven’t tested enough to know whether or not it gives you you action points out of transcripts. But even if it just is a pure transcript, feed that into ChatGPT and say, from this meeting, can you summarize action points per person, or something like that, right? There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be harnessing the power of voice recording, voice transcription, and AI to change your life. Like, yeah, you’ve just described to me the perfect place where AI lives. And yeah, you know, think about it in real terms. AI in that sense replaces the old PA or executive assistant. And what this Pocket AI replaces is the old dictaphone. Do you remember people used to sit there? And I remember when I worked with Alan Jones, he would just sit and dictate letters and memos, and then someone else in the other office, Brian, he would sit there and listen to them and type them. This cuts out that middleman. And look, we’re not crying over that because I don’t think people are growing up to wanting to be PAs and EAs anymore. Those roles are very much diminishing. And now an EA is more likely a diary manager more than anything else, trying to juggle the life of a CEO rather than take notes and transcribe things. So back in the day, 30 years ago, you’d get an EA to come to every meeting with you. Today, Pocket AI. I think that’s what you need. I really, really do.

[00:22:35]  Rodney: 100%. I mean, some days I can go to 5 or 6 meetings and like I say, but there’s gaps between them. So I get back to my office, do something, where do I put that notepad, grab something else, go off there, then I get lost. So it sounds like the go. I think details would be great.

[00:22:50]  Trevor Long: I think it’s perfect. If you Google Pocket AI, you’ll see it very quickly. I feel like it’s a very Simple investment, potentially tax deduction, but speak to your accountant. I’d send you mine, but I’m away for 2 weeks, so you wouldn’t even see it for a while. But if you don’t get one in the next couple of weeks, text me and I’ll see if I can send you mine. But yeah, the simplicity of it is, you know, it’s only got one button on it, one switch on it, which is either a call or a normal. So normal is what you want. And I think you just push and hold the button and go, this is my 9:00 AM meeting. And it also has your diary, ’cause I keep getting popups on my phone from the app app saying, you know, this meeting is in 3 minutes and what are you going to do about it? Like it says to me here, like this app Pocket says to me, good morning, Tuesday moves fast, keep Pocket on you, 26 meetings today. And then it says 55 minutes ago, start recording because record talkback callers are starting soon. So it literally just reminds you to start it.

[00:23:48]  Rodney: Yeah, that’s pretty good.

[00:23:51]  Trevor Long: So, mate, I think you’re all in on it.

[00:23:53]  Rodney: Super handy. Well, thanks, Trev.

[00:23:54]  Trevor Long: All right, buddy, good luck. And your life could change and you’ll have to report back on it, okay?

[00:24:00]  Rodney: I will do. Thanks, Trevor.

[00:24:01]  Trevor Long: No worries, buddy. Thanks for getting in touch. See you, mate. Yeah, I mean, I think, I feel like it was Wayne or someone like that last week, but it was an excellent insight. It just isn’t for me. Solid impulse for me, but because I don’t do meetings, I don’t know that it’s for me. And like when I do transcriptions there of interviews, so I’m interviewing Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO this week, it’s gonna be recorded on camera. There’ll be an audio file, I can just ingest that and have it transcribed, it’s easy. So, you know, yeah, I don’t think I have enough meetings to justify Pocket AI. But my God, Rodney, perfect, perfect. Feet.

[00:24:44]  VOICE OVER: This is the EFTM podcast.

[00:24:50]  Trevor Long: Taking your calls. If you’ve got a tech question, send me a text 0477657657, or you can download the EFTM app. Abdul’s on the line. G’day, Abdul.

[00:25:01]  Abdul: Good day, how are you?

[00:25:03]  Trevor Long: Very well, how can I help you?

[00:25:05]  Abdul: Okay, I think I explained my problem because, you know, I called I have got a little bit problem with, you know, the Channel 7. Sometimes when I put the TV on, on Channel 7, the screen is crushing.

[00:25:22]  Trevor Long: Ah, yes.

[00:25:23]  Abdul: Picture cut out, then the screen is turning green. It looks like starting, but it’s stopping again.

[00:25:31]  Trevor Long: Yes. So what you have is a reception issue. The signal is coming The signal is not strong enough for your television. So digital TV does that, it does that flaky kind of pixelated, and then it goes green, it comes and goes. So are you in a house or a unit?

[00:25:51]  Abdul: House.

[00:25:52]  Trevor Long: Okay, so what you need is an antenna person to come around and test the power and direction of your antenna. Okay, so Mr. Antenna is a big franchise, um, they might be in your local area, and what they will do is they will test the antenna, and they will tell you whether they can just put a little booster on it or whether you need a new antenna. Because what happens is the, the reception changes over time. New buildings are built, new mobile towers, a whole range of different things happen, and it— what was fine is no longer fine. But it’s a very simple thing to test, and you, you can ask them to come at any time and they’ll be able to do a test for you about how strong your digital TV reception is.

[00:26:38]  Simon: Okay.

[00:26:39]  Trevor Long: All right, so Mr. Antenna is my recommendation. All right.

[00:26:43]  Abdul: Okay, thank you very much for that.

[00:26:45]  Trevor Long: All right, Abdul, good luck with that.

[00:26:47]  Abdul: Thank you, bye.

[00:26:48]  Trevor Long: Thank you. Um, see, the challenge is a lot of people say this, oh, it was working fine, you know, a month ago, but what happens is, um, it really, it really changes, uh, environmentally, you know. A big tree might have grown finally, uh, but a big building, a big set of apartments, you know, there’s a lot of things that can be built in your area which make that signal bounce differently, especially if you’re living on the fringes of reception. So that’s probably all it is. Not an easy fix, uh, sorry, it can be a very easy fix, um, but it’s certainly going to cost money because you’ll need either a booster, a new antenna, or new antenna cable.

[00:27:27]  VOICE OVER: You’re listening to the EFTM Podcast. You can text Trev now thanks to Vodafone on 0477 657 657.

[00:27:41]  Trevor Long: Lovely to have your company. If you’ve got a question, get in touch, 0477 657 657. Phil’s on the line. G’day, Phil.

[00:27:49]  Phil: G’day, Trevor.

[00:27:50]  Trevor Long: Mate, what can I do for you? We spoke last month, didn’t we? It’s like producer Rob’s on the follow-up path. You were looking for a dash cam, is that correct?

[00:28:00]  Phil: Exactly.

[00:28:00]  Simon: Exactly.

[00:28:01]  Trevor Long: Very specific though.

[00:28:02]  Phil: Yeah, exactly.

[00:28:03]  Marilynne: Yeah.

[00:28:04]  Phil: Rob’s quite diligent, isn’t he? He keeps on.

[00:28:06]  Trevor Long: I know he’s keeping me honest, mate. Keep me honest. Don’t say anything nice though. Jesus, he gets a massive head.

[00:28:11]  Phil: You might have to increase his pay.

[00:28:12]  Trevor Long: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Drop off. All right, Phil. Now, what was the specifics of your need? Because we were not talking anything basic or obvious. You were tending towards something quite specialized. What was the need there?

[00:28:25]  Phil: All I have, yeah, an iLoad van which has barn doors at the back. So no vision through the rear vision mirror through the middle, even if you can see through the, you know, the, the, the sec, the cargo section. And so I thought, okay, combine the two, get a rear view camera because I needed a rear vision camera so that you don’t keep backing into things in a van. You need that vision behind.

[00:28:48]  Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:28:48]  Phil: And why they didn’t fit one into this particular model, I don’t know, but they didn’t. So yeah, looking for a dash cam. I was looking to replace the rear vision mirror, but—

[00:28:59]  Trevor Long: Oh, that’s right. You wanted the real holus bolus situation.

[00:29:02]  Phil: Yeah, just so that it fitted the bill. So you looked at the WolfBox 900 Pro, which when we talked about it, you and I sort of shared the opinion that this sort of looked a bit too good. Yeah. Why hadn’t we heard about it before and all this sort of thing? So I was very, very surprised. This unit, free fast shipping, starting from the delivery, got free fast shipping.

[00:29:28]  Trevor Long: That’s good.

[00:29:30]  Phil: I think it arrived in 2 days, 3 days.

[00:29:32]  Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:29:33]  Phil: Yeah, something like that.

[00:29:33]  Trevor Long: Yep.

[00:29:35]  Phil: And each, there were 3 boxes involved. The main unit, which is like a 12-inch rear vision mirror, came in one box and those were all individually packed also in there. Bubble wrap packing, you know, to protect them.

[00:29:51]  Phil: So then I opened up the bubble wrap packing and what was inside was, you know, extremely professionally boxed unit. You know, everything looked exactly how it should. Now, everything was Styrofoamed or the equivalent of Styrofoam in that black sort of stuff that goes around it. Where’d you get it from?

[00:29:51]  Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:30:09]  Trevor Long: Was it Amazon in the end or was there another retailer involved?

[00:30:12]  Phil: No, it came direct from WolfBox’s site.

[00:30:14]  Trevor Long: Oh, you see, you bought it through WolfBox’s site. Yeah, directly.

[00:30:17]  Phil: Directly? Yeah, yeah, directly. They had an offer on which I went on again and had a look at it afterwards. And I think they always have an offer on, but you get $20 or $30 off and you know, that sort of thing, which is fine. Yeah, totally. Never knock $20 or $30 back.

[00:30:32]  VOICE OVER: Of course, of course.

[00:30:34]  Phil: So a couple of days later I got it. Then a couple of days after that I got an email from WolfBox sort of saying, was I happy with everything? So, you know, their follow-up was really good there. And then got it installed. I didn’t have time to install it. I just got so much going on at the moment. And so I got an installer to install it and he installed quite a number of units and he just commented to me, he said, where’d you, you know, where’d you get that? You know, the bloody, you know, the how good the image was and all that sort of.

[00:31:04]  Simon: Right.

[00:31:05]  VOICE OVER: Yeah.

[00:31:06]  Phil: So he was, he was impressed with it as well.

[00:31:08]  Trevor Long: And that’s a, that’s a big call, mate, for someone that sees a lot of them.

[00:31:12]  Phil: Yeah.

[00:31:12]  Trevor Long: And so did he, did he just do the electrical install or did he help you set up the app or like?

[00:31:17]  Phil: No, he just did the electrical install. No, the app, the app was very straightforward. Yeah.

[00:31:21]  Abdul: Yeah.

[00:31:22]  Phil: Well, it connects through Wi-Fi. Through that, I don’t understand. I thought it’d be a Bluetooth connection, but it’s a—

[00:31:29]  Trevor Long: No, no, no. So Wi-Fi allows you to transmit far more data. So your phone makes a direct Wi-Fi connection to the, to the camera or the unit, and then it can You can download the videos much quicker that way, basically. Yeah.

[00:31:41]  Abdul: Yeah, yeah.

[00:31:42]  Phil: Well, it connected really quickly and the features in it are really, you know, quite amazing, you know. And as I said, the image is really, really clear. You know, I was driving at night. The night view was good. You can see, you can read the number plates front and, you know, from the front camera and the back camera and it alternates. But you can, you can have on the screen, like the rear vision mirror screen, you can show front view, you can show back view, you can show split view. So it does all of those sort of things. And it also, which I didn’t know and I haven’t tried yet, it does a bit of pan and tilt.

[00:32:20]  Simon: Right.

[00:32:22]  Phil: So if you swipe your finger up the screen, which I should have just tried a minute ago when I was driving, when you swipe your finger up the screen, it just sort of adjusts the level.

[00:32:30]  Trevor Long: Yeah, right. And when you’re doing the reverse, it’s working for you as a digital rear mirror now. So you’ve got a constant rear mirror digitally. And does it— is there any difference when you’re in reverse? Like, does it go into a different mode or that’s not programmed or—

[00:32:45]  Phil: Yeah, it does. It goes to a— it goes— it’s a wider view, right? No, wider view when you’re driving and then a lower view when you’re backing.

[00:32:53]  Trevor Long: So as soon as you put it into reverse from the same camera, there’s just one camera down the back. Yeah, really? That’s fascinating. Very smart.

[00:33:02]  Phil: It is. It’s one of those things where, you know, you read all the blurb and, you know, you look at all this and you think, oh, this is all too good to be true. But, you know, I’ve not found an issue at all. The only— if you’re going to nitpick, the only issue I can find is there’s a little— you can see a little reflection of the dash on the screen when you’re looking in the forward view.

[00:33:24]  Trevor Long: Yeah, right. Okay. Which I think, you know, you’ll find that with a lot of cameras, to be honest.

[00:33:30]  Phil: Yeah, I would think that is exactly right.

[00:33:32]  Trevor Long: The other thing you should do is you should definitely leave a review on their website. I will, because I mean, they’re obviously doing their best. They seem to have a lot of customers globally because I can just look at them and see they’re not all Australian. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, definitely you should leave them a review because that’s important for them to be able to grow that. And it’s a good— it’s like I’m looking at now going, I want one of those air dusters. I see these things on TikTok, these high-speed blowers that are handheld, like crazy. So I’m looking at that. They’ve got a car maintenance section on their website. I’m thinking, oh, I can get one of those.

[00:34:07]  Phil: Yeah, that’s my thoughts too, to look through and see what else they do. Because if they’re doing a good product, well, why not give them a bit of support?

[00:34:13]  Trevor Long: You know, like I washed the car the other week on the weekend. I took it. We were down in Young and it was covered in bugs, so I washed it. But I don’t carry a chamois with me. So it was, you know, covered in water droplets. And the idea is you can just kind of spray them off with air. Yeah. Just dust it off. Happy days. Well, that’s—

[00:34:29]  Phil: Yeah, I do that with an air hose. I do that exact thing with an air hose on my bikes. You know, when you wash a bike, you can never get in, so you just air hose it off and that works really quite well.

[00:34:39]  Trevor Long: Nice. Nice. Well, mate, good on you. Thanks for the review and great feedback on Wolf Box.

[00:34:45]  Phil: Yeah, no, it was really good. Thanks, Trevor.

[00:34:47]  Trevor Long: Great stuff. Safe travels. Yep.

[00:34:50]  Phil: Take care.

[00:34:50]  Trevor Long: Cheers, mate. Thank you, Phil. Yeah, we love hearing what happened and that’s why producer Rob is working hard to track people down after the fact so that we can see exactly what you ended up doing.

[00:35:02]  VOICE OVER: Tech, cars, lifestyle— this is the EFTM podcast with Trev Long. You can text Trev now thanks to Vodafone on 0477 657 657.

[00:35:16]  Trevor Long: Thank you so much for listening and, uh, thanks for being part of the show. Simon’s on the line today. Simon?

[00:35:21]  Simon: Yeah, hi, how are you?

[00:35:22]  Trevor Long: Hey, very well. Another follow-up for me today, uh, we spoke a while back about— you were talking about something called Loop earbuds. Earplugs. Remind me and the listeners what it was you were hoping to get from these. What was the concept? What was the problem you were trying to solve?

[00:35:37]  Simon: Well, the Loop Earplugs, I’ve got a bit of a hearing issue and I was trying to utilize one of their models. There are variable types. Quite frankly, I had the misconception that they were going to cut out certain sort of outer sounds or ambient sounds or whatever the terminology is.

[00:36:02]  Trevor Long: And did we end up working out, are we talking about the actual brand called Loop Earplugs or the style from another brand?

[00:36:10]  Simon: No, the brand is called Loop Earplugs. There’s about 6 different types of them that modulate sound. Ones you pop in when you go to bed, they seem to cut out variable sounds. Other ones that focus um, uh, hear, you know, a conversation.

[00:36:30]  Trevor Long: Which ones did you get?

[00:36:32]  Simon: Well, my partner bought 3 different types.

[00:36:34]  Trevor Long: Wow.

[00:36:35]  Simon: Yeah, they had like $100 for 3 different types or something. I, I, I use the one called Engage 2, and these are the ones that were designed to supposedly to focus on the conversation.

[00:36:49]  Trevor Long: Fewer distractions, more connection, they say. Keep speech clear. Is what they say.

[00:36:54]  Simon: Yeah, well, there you go. Well, that was the theory. I realized that because of my hearing issue, that they don’t assist at all. For persons with normal hearing, I suspect that they do what they say.

[00:37:10]  Trevor Long: Right.

[00:37:12]  Simon: But I had the misconception in my mind’s eye, if you know what I mean, that was good. Yeah, that I was having a conversation in a pub or around a dinner table, it would focus that conversation. My hearing’s too far gone, I think, for that. So I did use, I have been using the AirPods Pro 2s since I spoke to you last and rejigged those around a little bit for the benefit. However, the Loop earplugs, since I spoke to you and spoken to a few other people about them, I found out a couple of family members have been using them for quite some time. They pop them in when they go to shopping centers and that sort of thing. It cuts out a lot of that humdrum, if that’s the right word.

[00:38:04]  Trevor Long: Yes, the ambience, you know, the background noise.

[00:38:08]  Simon: So yes, I think there are benefits, but not when you’re as deaf as a post like me.

[00:38:13]  Trevor Long: And so you’ve gone back to the AirPods Pro 2, but you’ve done the hearing test again and reconfigured them. How are you finding them?

[00:38:19]  Simon: Again, in most— In some situations there are benefits, definitely, without a doubt. In other situations, it just makes my hearing more complex, let’s say. It’s hard to describe it really.

[00:38:41]  Trevor Long: Sure.

[00:38:42]  Simon: But yes, there are definitely benefits in certain situations, and I’d actively encourage people to use them as a cheaper alternative to enhance your hearing.

[00:38:53]  Trevor Long: Yeah, I mean, you know, a solid product. Proper hearing aids can be very, very expensive. And at some point, even Apple’s, you know, not claiming that they can, they can bring a hearing back at the worst level. So it’s a mild hearing, mild to moderate that they’re talking about. So if it gets to the edge of that and higher, then of course a medical hearing aid may be required. But just any benefit is a good benefit, I’m assuming. It’s— and I don’t have a hearing loss that I’m aware of, especially having done the Apple hearing test, but I think about it like my eyes, you know, and I lost my glasses for 12 hours on the weekend. It was I was like, I can barely read the screen on my phone. So anything’s better than nothing. And that would be the same with hearing.

[00:39:32]  Simon: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But you know, as far as the Loop earplugs go, I guess I wouldn’t discourage people from trying them. Yeah, because I have the experience of other people, it’s been quite positive. But not if you’re trying to enhance your actual hearing, they don’t work in that respect.

[00:39:50]  Trevor Long: So it sounds like they, from anecdotal advice and what we hear online, it sounds like they’re great for people with good hearing to maybe cut some of the ambience. But for people with a hearing challenge, you’re not going to get any positive effect from the Loop earbuds at this point. So there you go. Solid review, mate. You’ve nailed it.

[00:40:08]  Simon: All right, well done. Thanks very much.

[00:40:11]  Trevor Long: Good on you, mate. Thanks for reporting back, mate. I appreciate it.

[00:40:14]  Simon: All the best, cheers.

[00:40:15]  Trevor Long: Good on you. No worries at all. Yeah, I suspected that. That’s kind of what I suspected would happen. But you know what? We know now. We know now for sure.

[00:40:23]  VOICE OVER: Tech, cars, lifestyle. This is the EFTM Podcast with Trev Long. You can text Trev now thanks to Vodafone on 0477 657 657.

[00:40:38]  Trevor Long: Great to have your company. Thank you for listening all show, and let’s do it all again real soon because that’s what we do. We love talking to you about tech and we love hearing from you most importantly. So keep the, keep the texts coming in, keep the emails coming in, and just get in touch however you choose. And we’ll do it all again next week here on the EFTM Podcast. Shout out to producer Rob for pulling it all together. And to Claude, who’s doing just as good a job. I mean, it’s head to head, it’s neck and neck in terms of assistance that I’m getting. Neck and neck. That’s gonna really upset producer Rob, just so you know. Especially ’cause he put me onto Claude. So, I don’t know, what am I gonna say? Claude’s doing a great job. Buy Anthropic shares. That’s what I think. It’s doing a very good job. Chat next week, folks.

[00:41:28]  VOICE OVER: Join the conversation. Head to eftm.com and click Ask Trev.