Chit Chat Across the Pond

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Chit Chat Across the Pond

Allison Sheridan

A technology podcast interviewing interesting people.

49 minutes 26 seconds

CCATP #811 — Adam Engst on Measuring AI Transcription Accuracy

This week, Adam Engst joins us to talk about some work he did to try to measure the accuracy of several different AI models in creating audio transcriptions. He let me help him with some of the transcriptions so I was invested in his findings. We'll learn about ways to measure accuracy, including Word Error Rate aka WER. You can read Adam's article where he describes in detail the process he followed and the rather unsatisfying results at [tidbits.com/...](https://tidbits.com/2025/02/28/comparing-audio-transcription-in-notes-audio-hijack-and-macwhisper/).

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_03_23

23 March 2025, 3:15 pm
51 minutes 47 seconds

CCATP #810 — Steve Mallard on Evolution of Music Tech
You know I’m not a music person, but I’ve invited Steve Mallard onto the show to talk about a topic he’s quite passionate about - the evolution of music tech. He is not an expert in this field, he just finds the history fascinating. Steve will take us back to the first acoustic guitars, and explain why electric guitars needed to be invented. He'll talk a little bit about the early effects that could be added with vacuum tube amps and how the invention of the transistor revolutionized the music industry. Things accelerate after that up to where digital signal processing began allowing new music effects and replication of tone became possible. At the end, we get into a bit of a debate on whether this democratization of music creation has ruined music.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_03_04
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4 March 2025, 10:17 pm
58 minutes 25 seconds

CCATP #809 — Adam Engst on Writing with an Editor and Grammarly
This week, the delightful Adam Engst of TidBITS joins us to talk about how he learned to write so well, what it's like having an editor, and then moves into how he uses the AI tool Grammarly to improve his writing. It's great fun as always and convinced me to pay for one month of Grammarly to see if it will make me as awesome of a writer as Adam.

You can read all the details of his use of Grammarly in his article entitled ["Why Grammarly Beats Apple’s Writing Tools for Serious Writers" on tidbits.com](https://tidbits.com/2025/01/30/why-grammarly-beats-apples-writing-tools-for-serious-writers/)
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11 February 2025, 8:44 pm
54 minutes 38 seconds

CCATP #808 — Jason Snell on The Magic Behind the Six Colors Charts
If you’ve been on the Internet before, and you’ve heard of a little fruit company called Apple, then you’ve probably seen Jason Snell's famous Six Colors charts on Apple earnings. In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, we don't talk about earnings, we talk about the magic behind how he creates his famous charts. It's full of nerdy fun like how he decides when to use a serape chart vs. a bar chart, how he calculates a rolling average, how he gets the data for the charts, and how he gets the charts from Apple Numbers into his website. His joy at finding people who want to talk about the nerd side of this is evident in his enthusiasm.

* Apple Q1 Earnings charts on Six Colors including video of Jason Snell and Dan Moren discussing what the numbers mean.
* How Jason automated creating the blog posts from Numbers: Chart Party at sixcolors.com.
* Jason's podcasts: The Incomparable, Upgrade, and other appearances
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6 February 2025, 10:42 pm
55 minutes 54 seconds

CCATP #807 — Adam Engst on Bootable Backups Bug in macOS Sequoia
Adam Engst of TidBITS joins us to talk about a bug in macOS Sequoia 15.2 that affected a low-level system tool called Apple System Restore or ASR. This tool is the path for developers of backup tools to create true bootable backups, and the bug makes it now impossible to create bootable backups. We talk about the different viewpoints of the developers of Superduper!, Carbon Copy Cloner, and Chronosyc regarding the future of bootable backups. Then Adam talks about whether we really _need_ bootable backups anymore. We then segue into a survey Adam conducted on backup strategies with TidBITS readers and he discusses the relative merits of the different strategies. Join the Conversation:
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14 January 2025, 10:06 pm
52 minutes 58 seconds

CCATP #806 — Andrea Jones-Rooy on Being a Data Scientist
Andrea Jones-Rooy is a data scientist, a standup comedian, _and_ a circus performer. Andrea delves into the realms of data science, its significance, and how it is often misunderstood in mainstream narratives. Andrea begins by reflecting on their journey to becoming a data scientist.

Andrea was a professor of data science at NYU Center for Data Science and they taught an undergraduate course called "Data Science for Everyone". The cool thing is you can watch Andrea teach the same material for free in a video series of the same name: Data Science for Everyone on YouTube.

I watched all 20 episodes, and I have to tell you it was fascinating. I may have gushed just a little bit about how awesome it was.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_01_10
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11 January 2025, 12:56 am
37 minutes 3 seconds

CCATP #805 – Bart Busschots On What Does a Cybersecurity Specialist Do?
In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart talks about his job as a cybersecurity specialist. We get a bit silly in our early part of the chat, the reasons for which will become obvious when you listen to the beginning but he successfully gives a flavor of what "a day in the life" is like for him.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_12_29
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29 December 2024, 11:26 pm
24 minutes 40 seconds

CCATP #804 — Pat Dengler on an Elaborate Scam Involving "Amazon", the "FBI", "Lawyers", and More
Certified Apple Consultant Pat Dengler joins me to tell the harrowing story of how her neighbor was seconds away from being scammed out of $30,000. In an elaborate web of lies with multiple people involved, she was connected supposedly to Amazon, the FBI, lawyers, and more, and every single person gave their IDs and return phone numbers. Pat saved her literally in the nick of time.

This story aired as part of the NosillaCast on December 1st, 2024 but I made it a standalone episode so folks can point directly to it to help raise awareness.

If you need a Certified Apple Consultant, Pat can be contacted at pat@denglerconsulting.com.
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22 December 2024, 12:38 am
50 minutes 26 seconds

CCATP #803 Adam Engst on Obituary Scams Triggering iPhone Security Warnings
Adam Engst of TidBITS back again to talk about an unusual and clever scam experienced by one of his TidBITS readers. It involved fake obituaries triggering iPhone security warnings triggering App Store downloads. You can find Adam's written article on the topic at [tidbits.com/...](https://tidbits.com/2024/12/06/beware-obituary-scam-sites-and-fake-iphone-security-warnings/).
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10 December 2024, 9:53 pm
51 minutes 37 seconds

CCATP #802 – Adam Engst on Invasive Location Tracking and Tips On How to Manage

In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst and I discussed his October 24th article entitled [Exposé Reveals Ongoing Smartphone Location Tracking Threats](https://tidbits.com/2024/10/23/expose-reveals-ongoing-smartphone-location-tracking-threats/). He explained how much easier it is now for your precise location to be determined because of your online activity, in spite of the safeguards Apple has instituted in an attempt to anonymize your data. Adam gives chilling examples of what's possible today.

Adam doesn't leave us with doom and gloom though, he arms us with some tools to fight this tracking as best we can in his article, [Protect Yourself Against Location Tracking Abuses](https://tidbits.com/2024/10/27/protect-yourself-against-location-tracking-abuses/).

[audio mp3="https://media.blubrry.com/nosillacast/traffic.libsyn.com/nosillacast/CCATP_2024_11_12.mp3"]

mp3 download

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_11_12

14 November 2024, 11:46 pm
42 minutes 14 seconds

CCATP #801 – Sam King of GigSky & How to Use a US Phone Number Using WiFi Calling with a Foreign eSIM

I had the pleasure of interviewing Sam King, chief revenue officer for eSIM provider GigSky. As an unwritten policy, I don’t generally interview people who sell products or services, but since it’s my own guideline, I can color outside the lines when I want to, and this is one of those times.

We do a fair bit of international travel, and I have always chosen my eSIM by going to esimDB and choosing the best combination of data and length of time of my stay for the price. On our last two trips, GigSky met our needs the best. But I didn't understand something pretty fundamental about choosing an eSIM provider.

Sam explained that most eSIM providers are simply resellers. That matters because if there are any network or installation issues, these companies have no way of fixing the problem and lack any accountability.

It turns out there are only a handful of eSIM companies (including GigSky) that are network operators who supply their own US-based eSIMs. He went on to explain that network operators actually can fix network problems, including automatically moving you to a different local provider with that same eSIM. I highly encourage you to listen to the interview to understand the subtleties of Sam's explanation.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_11_03

During our conversation, we started talking about how eSIMs are generally just data, and the various ways to maintain your own cell number while on travel. You may not care about making phone calls, but you may need to receive SMS messages to log into certain services, such as banks. This very problem happened to Steve on our trip to Africa when everyone was using WhatsApp but he hadn't installed it on his iPhone yet. He had to receive an SMS to authenticate but he didn't have his home cell number enabled for fear of getting huge roaming charges from AT&T.

And that's when Sam told me about an interesting hack that he says will allow you to use your US phone number with your data eSIM for SMS and WiFi calling.

Disclaimer: I have not tested this process, so this is exactly as written by Sam to you. I definitely plan on trying it before our next international travel.

Sam's process:

1. Purchase a data plan from an eSIM data provider (like GigSky :)) Make sure your eSIM from your preferred provider is installed and the plan activated before you take off from home (this is my night before my flight routine).
2. Make sure that you have Wifi calling set up on your home account (this is important for when you arrive in country)
3. Before you leave, tell your home operator customer service that you want international roaming turned off. For this, you have to contact customer service and tell them that you do NOT want to get an offer for their roaming service while you are overseas, that you want a zero % chance that you will get charged for roaming. If you do this, your home operator SIM will not attach to a network when you land in overseas (and that's a good thing).
4. As you're taxing to the gate in your destination country - turn on your eSIM in cellular settings and set "Cellular Data" to GigSky (or whichever provider you chose) and set the "Default Voice Line" to your home network.
5. Because you are overseas AND your home SIM is 1) Configured for WiFi calling &2) has no connection outside of the US, iOS will try to fall back on the WiFi calling feature.

It turns out that a cellular connection over the eSIM works exactly the same way! So you'll see in the status screen (what you see when you swipe up on an iPhone) Top SIM: GigSky LTE & Bottom SIM: Home Operator e.g. Verizon using cellular data. For all intents and purposes you can continue to use your phone as if you were in the USA...

Verizon treats it as WiFi calling from a billing standpoint; you can send SMS, make voice calls, get your voicemail, etc. at no additional cost because Verizon thinks you're at home using WiFi calling even though you're in Europe!

Calls to European numbers are still long-distance for Verizon so you might want to get a Google Voice number to make calls within Europe but that is a fairly small incremental cost.

Below is what your phone will look like when it is set up correctly:

How Your Phone Will Look with Sean's Strategy

3 November 2024, 6:30 pm
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