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/).

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

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

In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst of TidBITS joins us to join in the fun conversation about limiting your iPhone's charging to 80%. He wrote up an article entitled Does Limiting an iPhone’s Battery Charging to 80% Increase Lifespan? in which he references an article by Juli Clover of MacRumors. Juli used her iPhone 15 Pro Max for a solid year with charging set to a max of 80%.

Juli freely admits this was not a terribly scientific effort to determine whether it helps because there are far too many variables at play and not enough data points to form any conclusions. That doesn't stop me and Adam from pretending to do science with her results, Adam and my results charging normally, and even more anecdotal data collected by Nick Heer on Pixel Envy. I even threw around a pivot table I made with this "data" which is well known to turn anecdotes into scientifically derived proof. On top of that, I nerdily referenced Battery University that sheds a wee bit of light on the subject.

Before we kicked into that topic, we spent a few minutes revisiting our topic from last time, the annoying monthly popups to allow recording of your screen and microphone. Since we last talked, people have hacked the plist that contains the timing of the nagging, and Jordi Bruin has even written an app called Amnesia to help you hack it. I suggest this proves it's security theater if you can bypass it.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_10_02

Join the Conversation:

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Support the Show:

• Patreon Donation
• PayPal one-time donation
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• Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me
• Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me
• Backblaze - One free month for me and you
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• Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you.
• PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us
• CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

Adam Engst joins me again, this time to talk about the patently wrong decision by Apple to include repetitive permissions requests for screen recording in the macOS Sequoia beta. As he explains in his article on TidBITS.com entitled Apple Reduces Excessive Sequoia Permission Requests, Shifts to Monthly, changing from weekly permissions requests to monthly is 4 times less wrong, but still 12 times per year wrong.

We discuss the types of applications this will affect, from screenshot utilities like CleanShot, to menu bar modifiers like Bartender and Ice, as well as apps like Photoshop that simply use an eye dropper to let you choose colors outside of the app interface.

Adam has a no whining policy in his community, so this isn't just a big complaint conversation, he explains some ideas he has the Apple could implement which might give users the desired security protections without causing them permissions fatigue.

Even in this rather fist-shaking episode, Adam is a delight and we had a lot of fun chit chatting.

This week our guest is the venerable Adam Engst of TidBITS.

Adam wrote an article recently about his solar inverters that ended up being a story about troubleshooting. That inspired me last week to tell you our troubleshooting story about our home network. We thought it would be fun to go through Adam's story and pick out ideas for troubleshooting and where our own weaknesses are.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_08_06

CCATP #793 for July 9, 2024, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. In case you missed the announcement, Adam Engst of TidBITS is now a member of the Podfeet Podcasts family as a continuing contributor to Chit Chat Across the Pond.

In this week's episode, we talked about why Adam believes we need persistent calendar and reminder notifications. Adam is hyper-focused and when he's writing it's not uncommon for him to easily dismiss a notification of an upcoming event.

Articles referenced in the conversation:

* A Call to Alarms: Why We Need Persistent Calendar and Reminder Notifications.

* In Your Face Provides Persistent Notifications for Events and Tasks

* Just Due It: Persistent Notifications for Tasks - TidBITS

* CalAlarm app Adam is testing for iOS

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_07_09

Join the Conversation:

• [email protected]
• podfeet.com/slack

Support the Show:

• Patreon Donation
• PayPal one-time donation
• Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle
• Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts

Referral Links:

• Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me
• Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me
• Backblaze - One free month for me and you
• Setapp - One free month for me and you
• Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you.
• PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us
• CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

So ... I made a wee mistake this morning when I accidentally told the NosillaCast feed to move to the Chit Chat Across the Pond feed! I thought I fixed it right away, but then Louis Trapani told me that he was seeing all of the NosillaCast content slopped into Chit Chat Across the Pond! Evidently, the fix didn't "stick".

Overcast subscribers are fine because the RSS feed is ok, but Apple Podcasts subscribers may not ever get the NosillaCast again unless you resubscribe.

I can't believe I did this on the day before my 1000th episode and I'm very sorry and sad! I sure hope you see this and you'll resubscribe and get all that NosillaCast goodness - especially the 1000th episode!

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_07_06

Well hello there, this is Alison Sheridan and I have a very special announcement for July 5th, 2024, to the Chit Chat Across the Pond light audience and the Programming By Stealth audience.

If you were subscribed to the Lite feed, you may have noticed that your Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite logo changed into the Chit Chat Across the Pond logo and that you see a whole pile of recent episodes that are all Programming By Stealth. As a Programming By Stealth learner, you won't have noticed a difference yet, but you also care about this.

I've decided to make some changes to the podcast, which I'm pretty sure will benefit everyone. There will be a full explanation of all of the changes in the NosillaCast on episode 1000, but let's talk about you first.

The first change is that we've stopped publishing Programming by Stealth as part of Chit Chat Across the Pond. If you want the Programming By Stealth content, then you'll need to subscribe to the standalone podcast that we've always had.

Since Programming By Stealth won't be in the regular Chit Chat Across the Pond feed, that means it IS the Lite feed.

I've done a fancy redirect thingy that folded the Lite audience into the "full fat" Chit Chat Across the Pond feed so you don't have to do a thing to get your regular Lite content. I will be publishing Lite episodes more often with a HUGE guest! If you want to read about the new guest and all of the changes and why, check out this post: Changes Coming to the Podcasts — All Good News!

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_07_05

In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Bart Busschots joins us to talk about weather apps. He's a serious weather nerd by necessity, living in Ireland and being an avid bike rider. As he walks through the apps he'll explain which ones fall down on privacy, which ones have good apps for everything from the watch to iOS to the Mac. He'll even go through how he uses different widgets to help him decide how much rain gear to wear.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_04_26

Join the Conversation:

• [email protected]
• podfeet.com/slack

Support the Show:

• Patreon Donation
• PayPal one-time donation
• Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle
• Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts

Referral Links:

• Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me
• Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me
• Backblaze - One free month for me and you
• Setapp - One free month for me and you
• Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you.
• PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us
• CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Bart Busschots joins us to talk Dyson vacuums. I know that doesn't sound too technical but you'd be surprised how advanced the tech is in the new devices. I share a few of my Dyson stories too and we both talk about our love for everything Dyson. Hide your pocketbooks before listening because all Dyson products are super expensive!

This week's Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite is a stretch to the word "Lite". I'd call it a crossover episode of Lite and Programming By Stealth. Helma van der Linden joins me to tell the story of how she has successfully started the new version of Bart's fabulous xkpasswd password generation service. xkpasswd.net was written in perl ages ago and depends on very old and outdated libraries. Bart spent many months teaching the Programming By Stealth students the tools we (and he) would need to port the code over to JavaScript. His plan all along was to have students help him make the new version of XKPASSWD a reality.

It turns out that Helma is an extraordinary student and has done most of the work to make it a minimal viable product, all without Bart's help. In this conversation, we'll talk about how she did this without getting _too_ nerdy. Some nerdy but not too nerdy.

If you'd like to give the very beta version of the new tool a try (without knowing any coding), check it out at bartificer.github.io/xkpasswd-js/. In a few days, Bart will have it up as the beta version of the _real_ xkpasswd at beta.xkpasswd.net. This beta version is not feature-complete, but it allows you to create 1-10 passwords that use the default preset from the original xkpasswd. You can't choose different presets, and you can't make customized passwords, but at least it does create long, strong, memorable, and typable passwords. And it's REALLY pretty!

We end with the call for others to come help work on the code. The GitHub repo is at github.com/bartificer/xkpasswd-js. If you have or create a GitHub account, you can contribute to the project. If you don't have programming skills but you have feature requests, it counts as contributing if you use the "issues" tab for the GitHub project to post your feature request.

Helma is great fun and we had a blast talking about what she's accomplished so I think you'll enjoy the conversation no matter how nerdy you might be.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_02_03