⏰ Past the deadline

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Welcome to your Sunday, {{first_name | friend}}. Somewhere in Middle-earth, an accountant dropped a calculator into Mount Doom. Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power didn’t cost “TV money.” It cost “are we sure this isn’t a space program?” money.

💍 How much did the first season of The Rings of Power cost to produce? A) $90 million, B) $200 million, C) $465 million or D) Roughly one Scrooge McDuck money vault. Take your guess. The answer is waiting at the bottom like Gollum with a receipt.

🔒 Stop guessing your own passwords: How many times have you tried three different logins, only to get locked out? Total waste of time. I use NordPass to create strong passwords and autofill them instantly. I remember one master password. It handles the rest. Get 52% off a 2-year plan. That’s only $1.43 a month.* — Kim

🤯 WOW! Magnetic tape lasts 10 to 30 years. Your 1994 wedding video is 32. And the last VCR ever built rolled off the line in 2016, which means the machines are disappearing faster than the tapes.

The Short Version: Buy a used VCR on eBay ($50 to $80) and a capture box ($45 to $110). Cables in, USB out, press play and record. Do the irreplaceable tapes first.

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

Somewhere in your house there’s a box. It contains video of your wedding. Baby’s first steps. Dad in that hideous sweater, waving at the camera.

Those tapes are dying in that box. Not someday. Now.

Magnetic tape was built to last 10 to 30 years, according to the people who studied it for a living. VHS peaked in the late ’80s and ’90s. Do the math on your shelf. The binder holding the tape’s magnetic particles pulls moisture out of the air and breaks down, so the tape sheds its own recording as it plays. Archivists call it “sticky shed.”

Here’s the twist nobody expects. A UNESCO-backed project set a rescue deadline of roughly 2025, and not because the tapes all failed at once. It’s because all the players went obsolete at the same time. The last VCR ever manufactured rolled off the line in July 2016. Every working machine left is at least a decade old, and nobody’s making parts.

We are past the deadline. Be kind, rewind. While there’s still something left to rewind.

Want somebody else to preserve your videocassettes? iMemories costs $29.99 or more a tape. Legacybox fall to roughly $20 each. Walgreens starts near $34.99. Easy, but it adds up fast if you have 40 tapes.

Doing it yourself is cheaper. Buy two things to work with your computer’s USB port and free storage.

1. A VCR. Copy and paste this into the eBay search bar: “VCR VHS 4-head hi-fi tested working.” “Tested working” filters out the junk, and 4-head hi-fi models give you the best picture and sound. Expect $50 to $80. Btw, when you’re done with the VCR, you can sell it on eBay to someone else.

2. A capture device. The $110 Portta VHS-to-digital converter is my pick and includes the red, white and yellow cables. This cheaper option runs about $45. The difference? It needs a PC and software like QuickTime to record, while the Portta works by itself.

Take the colored cables from the back of the VCR into the capture box, USB into the computer, press play, press record. Transfers run in real time, so a two-hour tape takes two hours. Make it a weekend project with a kid who has never seen a tape rewind.

Save every file in two places, a hard drive and the cloud. I use and recommend Carbonite.* Do the irreplaceable ones first. The ’96 Olympics can wait.

Bad joke time: A man’s yelling at the TV, “Run, idiot, run!” His wife asks, “Watching a horror movie?” “No,” he says. “It’s our wedding tape.” So save it while you can.

📩 Send this to someone who has a closet shelf full of tapes “they’re going to make digital someday.”

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(Starts at 29:03) A viewer’s dog has been a very, very bad boy. So he used AI to write a tune about it. And it’s pretty catchy. And funny.

Listen on Komando.com →

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🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

⚕️ Not your doctor: OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health because you, me and the world are asking 300 million health questions weekly. I'd bet 200 million of them start with “is it normal that?” The idea? Connect Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, One Medical and more, then ask ChatGPT to help make sense of your health data, records, habits and questions in one place. It’s information, not diagnosis or treatment, so check in with professionals. 

Facebook’s garage sale: Meta’s giving Marketplace its own little command center called Seller, a free stand-alone app for people who list stuff like it’s paying for the mortgage. It has listing tools, a dashboard, buyer inbox, analytics and AI that scans your item and fills in details. Meta takes no cut, just sells ads. With 420 million items hitting Marketplace monthly, they’re sitting on a data gold mine. 

Don’t buy a Mac now: Get ready, buying a Mac is going to feel like applying for a mortgage with a keyboard. Apple’s Mac overhaul (paywall link) starts this fall and goes into 2027, with 11 models in the pipe: M6 MacBook Pros, the first new iMacs in two years, Airs, minis, Studios and OLED touch-screen Pros. No info on exact specs yet, but you can blame AI demand for higher prices. Mac minis and Studios are so hot some orders won’t ship for at least three months. Apple’s fall motto: If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. Twice.

📱 TikTok gets tuition: Picture a high schooler explaining to her parents that TikTok is the capstone. That’s basically ASU’s new content creation major, where students learn to build an audience, market themselves and measure what works. They still take math and history, because society has limits. ASU isn’t alone either. Syracuse, UTSA and the University of Florida all offer influencer, creator economy or social media-focused programs. I got my computer science degree at ASU. Same campus, considerably fewer ring lights.

Americans received 52 billion robocalls last year. Your phone can screen unknown callers for free. Plus, Kimberly used my AI tip to restore an old photo of her grandparents. Brought the whole family to happy tears.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Google Docs can turn thousands of words into a quick audio summary, so you get the gist without the reading marathon. Click Tools > Audio > Listen to document summary. Don’t see it? Join Workspace Experiments and refresh. I share more tricks like this in my free Splash of AI newsletter every Thursday.

📞 Be honest with yourself: Your phone bill is on autopay, and you haven’t looked at it since 2019. If you’re over 50 and paying more than $100 a month, stop wasting money. Get one line for $35 a month. Make the switch today, and get an additional $50 off. See how much you can save now.*

Android Auto, decluttered: Why scroll past 15 apps when you only use three? On your phone, open Android Auto > Display > Customize Launcher and turn off anything you never touch. Then in Settings, tap Change Layout to place media or navigation closer to the driver. Fewer icons, quicker taps and less fumbling at red lights.

🌐 Your favorite site, one tap away: Visit the same website every day? Maybe komando.com? 😏 Add it to your iPhone’s Home Screen like an app. In Safari, open the site, hit the Share button, scroll down and choose Add to Home Screen. Rename it if you like, tap Add, and the icon appears instantly.

🦟 Don’t fall for the buzz: That mosquito repellent app blasting sounds bugs supposedly hate? Study after study says it does nothing. Same for ultrasonic plug-ins. What works: a Thermacell spatial repellent for about $36 throws an invisible 20-foot force field around your patio. No spray, no smell.

📝 A step up from Notepad: Windows Notepad works for plain text, while Microsoft Word can be more than you need. Free Notepad++ sits nicely between them. Keep multiple documents open in tabs, find and replace words in long files, or bookmark sections for later. Coders use it, too, but don’t let that scare you.

We’ve come a long way since discovering fire makes meat taste better. 

Germany’s Circus CA-1 is an AI robotic-powered glass box the size of a small bathroom that stores 36 ingredients, cooks on induction, plates the food and even runs its own dishwasher. It’s already cranking out one hot meal every 30 seconds inside a Düsseldorf grocery store, with about an hour of human help a day. It can do 800 meals in a day. Wow!

It cooks, plates and cleans up. Basically the coworker who actually does the job. Great for restaurant margins. Rough news for the prep cook, line cook and dishwasher. This AI kitchen really knows how to raise the steaks.

Check it out.

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🎓 What you learned today: Your VHS memories are racing the clock, Facebook Marketplace sellers get their own stand-alone app, colleges offer influencer majors, mosquito-repellent apps are wishful thinking with a speaker, and a tiny robot kitchen can cook hundreds of meals a day and clean up after itself. Not bad for one email. Tomorrow, I’ll break down how to spot if someone is recording you using smart glasses and what the law says about being recorded without your knowledge. 

🌅 Sunday listening: Click to listen to my latest show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Ease into the week with something useful.

💰 The answer: C) About $465 million. The Scrooge McDuck vault was also an acceptable answer. That’s roughly $58 million per episode, crowning it the most expensive TV show in history. 

Here’s the part that drops jaws. Amazon paid another $250 million for the rights, but that quarter-billion only bought the appendices, the notes crammed at the BACK of Tolkien’s books. Not the main story. Not The Hobbit. The footnotes. 

All in, Season 1 topped $700 million, and the full five-season run is expected to reach $1 billion. For that kind of money, I assume every sword was forged by hand, every cape was moisturized and every orc came with free Prime shipping.

Spending a fortune on Middle-earth is just a force of Hobbit.

🔒 All-in-one password manager: Normally, when you log in, you bounce between apps for your password and a one-time code, right? Well, NordPass has an Authenticator feature that handles both. It stores your password and generates the one-time security code in the same app. Learn more here.* 

Drop a rating below and leave a comment if you like. I do read them all.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, WOLFBOX, Circus Group

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