Chit Chat Across the Pond

I'm on a roll with scientists on Chit Chat Across the Pond. This week my guest is Professor Jason Briner from the University of Buffalo. Dr. Briner joins us to tell us tales of adventure as he and his team go to Greenland to study the polar ice sheet. I never thought of geology as a sexy, exciting field of science, but after learning about Dr. Briner's work and the incredible importance of that wo...

Have you always figured that astrophysics was a subject beyond your grasp? In this week's Chit Chat Across the Pond, Nobel Prize-winning Dr. Andrea Ghez from UCLA joins me to explain how she and her team proved there is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy and she does it in _human friendly_ terms! In 2020 she became only the fourth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Physi...

This week our guest is Bart Busschots but this is not a Programming By Stealth episode, it's a Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite. At least within my personal definition of Lite! Bart joined the show this week to talk about visionOS, the new operating system that will power the Vision Pro headset Apple announced at their World Wide Developer's Conference. We talked about how we can see the future now...

This week our guest is your favorite psychological scientist, Dr. Maryanne Garry of the University of Waikato in New Zealand and garrylab.com Dr. Garry and four of her colleagues published a paper recently in the Royal Society Open Science called "Trivially informative semantic context inflates people's confidence they can perform a highly complex skill" . The experiments built on previous studies...

Adam Engst of TidBITS joins me on Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite to talk about the changes Apple made recently to the File Provider Extension. These changes had a fairly significant effect on how cloud storage providers like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box work with macOS. Whether you realize it or not, you've very likely been upgraded to new versions of these services. While the new File...

In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Rod Simmons of the SMR Podcast and BBQ and Tech joins me to talk about password managers. After the recent breaches and more importantly breaches of trust from LastPass, Rod migrated over to 1Password and changed all 400 of his passwords. We talk through what LastPass did wrong, and what Rod appreciates about 1Password and misses about Last...

In this final Chit Chat Across the Pond of the year, Bart Busschots joins us to talk about what verification really means, how you know a website is what it says it is, and how verification is accomplished and then explains how Twitter and Mastodon do their respective verification. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2022_12_17 This episode also has full shownotes at CCATP #756 — Ba...

On this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, we're joined by developer Casey Liss of the Accidental Tech Podcast and creator of the iOS apps MaskerAid and Peek-a-View . I asked Casey to come on the show to talk about automation. In particular, we talked about Unnecessary or overly-complex automations, automations that mysteriously run but we can't remember how or why they're running,...

This week our guest on Chit Chat Across the Pond is Nic of Nic’s HomePod Repair . You might remember the article about Steve’s amazing experience with Nic repairing our big-girl HomePod a month or so ago. It wasn’t just that some guy repaired our HomePod, it was how he did it and how he broadcast live video of the repair as it was happening that made it even more interesting. I wanted to know more...

WiFi Generations In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, I asked Dave Hamilton of the Mac Geek Gab to come on to talk to us about mesh routers and why we might care about WiFi 6E. In order to get to that though, I asked him to lay out some groundwork. Remember when we used to talk about 802.11a then b then g then n and ac. All of us geeks memorized the speed of those different IE...

This week our guest on Chit Chat Across the Pond is Bart Busschots with a talk that's part Security Bits, part Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite. Bart has been asked to speak at a Mac User's Group on the subject of security and he worked up a presentation on the subject. His goal in the presentation is to provide listeners with a better understanding of the types of threats that are out there and wha...

This week I'm pleased to introduce you to Darcy Hegarty on Chit Chat Across the Pond. Darcy is a fellow screencaster for Don McAllister's ScreenCastsOnline and I'm really impressed with the videos he creates. They're tight, they tell a coherent story, and he even starts with the problem to be solved! I started chatting with him about his process and discovered that he's only been doing this for a...

This week our guest is Dan Moren (https://dmoren.com/). Dan is the author of the Galactic Cold War series of sci-fi espionage capers, a former senior editor at Macworld, a writer for Six Colors and TidBITS amongst other publications, and a prolific podcaster as co-host of Clockwise and The Rebound. But I did not have him on the show to talk about any of that. Dan is a very recent father and I want...

Antonio Rosario bills himself as a full-time unemployed photographer, part-time semi-employed videographer and photography instructor, and a volunteer bimonthly podcaster. He sent out a tweet in which he said, "Dear podcasters: Will someone PLEASE interview me about the #iPhone 14 ProMax?!" I expected that Antonio wanted to come on and have a discussion about the new phone's specs and a pixel-peep...

In this "Lite" episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart Busschots teaches us about a relatively new concept in IT security called Zero Trust. He explains how the old ways of simply securing the perimeter of your organization are no longer enough. You simply can't trust that inside your network you're safe from bad actors. The solution has three principles that guide organizations in developing t...

Rogue Amoeba is celebrating 20 years in Mac software development this month and in honor of that accomplishment, I asked CEO Paul Kafasis to come on Chit Chat Across the Pond to take us on a walk down memory lane. We start by talking about Audio Hijack 1.0, and talk about the 266MHz PowerPC they used to develop the product. We talk about the problems that Rogue Amoeba's software solves, including...

Tom Merritt of the Daily Tech News Show joins me on Chit Chat Across the Pond to talk about a recent study published by Sweden’s biggest car magazine, ViBilägare. The study timed drivers in how long it took them to perform a set of proscribed functions in a variety of cars with touchscreens and one vehicle without any touchscreen at all. While Tom and I agree that the study is flawed in a lot of w...

This is another crossover episode - it's an interview Bart Busschots did with me for his Let's Talk Photography podcast at [lets-talk.ie/...](https://lets-talk.ie/) about the conversion I made ages ago to a mirrorless camera. He asked me on because it looks like DSLRs are winding down and he's contemplating making the jump soon. It's a fun conversation where I also confess that I've lost the touch...

A few years ago, when the SMR podcast hosts took over the NosillaCast while I was on vacation, Tom Merritt of the Daily Tech News Show called it "The Crossover Event of the Summer." Since then, the SMR hosts Rod, Chris, and Robb have all been on DTNS. Then Tom had Bodie Grimm of the Kilowatt podcast on his show, so Bodie and I got to be friends, and the crossovers just keep on coming. In this year...

Mark Pouley, the photographer behind Twin Lakes Image s lives in a home that is in an urban area, but on a long, private road that hasn’t been fed by fiber or cable. He and his wife also bought a vacation home in the far Northeast corner of the state of Washington where there’s very little infrastructure and not even reliable cell service. He needed to find service that would meet his tech geek ne...

In this week's Chit Chat Across the Pond, I interview author Molly DeFrank on her book "Digital Detox: The Two-Week Tech Reset for Kids" along with Lindsay Tondee who put Molly's advice to the test with her son Forbes. As a geek, you'll probably think this is crazy talk, but I promise you it's a fun conversation and Molly's practical steps in her book might just be what you need if your kids turn...

In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, I'm joined by long-time NosillaCastaway Seamus Lavery. Seamus started posting photos of his black lab Quaid to the live chatroom, and then explained that he’s a “puppy raiser” for Guiding Eyes for the Blind. He agreed to come on the show to tell us what it’s like to be a puppy raiser, what his responsibilities are, what he’s supposed to teach Qu...

Recently Tom Merritt and Sarah Lane of DTNS fame hosted what they called a Solar Round Table . The guests were NosillaCast Live Producer Steve Sheridan, an engineer working at AES Solar named Joe Briney, and Boeing 777 captain Brian Hoffman. I tell you that whole story because when Steve got off the phone, he started telling me all about Brian’s huge projects to use solar on his farm. Steve was so...

This week our guest is Bart Busschots. This week we're going to do something a little different; we're doing an "Ask Me Anything (About Security)". I sent out the request for questions to our Slack community ( ), to Twitter, to a few user groups of which I am a member, and Steve posted it to our Facebook group. With the exception of one question which I sent to him ahead of time, Bart answered all...

In yet another crossover episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bodie Grimm of the Kilowatt Podcast joins me to talk about EVs. But this isn't just any EV, we get to talk to Chris Ashley of the SMR Podcast and BBQ and Tech about his brand new Ford F150 Lightning EV. We catch Chris on the very delivery day of his new hotness, and he's one of the first people to actually get the F150 Lightning. Chris...