Chit Chat Across The Pond Lite

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 of editing RAW photos but I'm still very glad I brought my Olympus E-M5 Mark III to Iceland.

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's "Crossover Event of the Summer", Bodie Grimm interviews two gentlemen from a company called Orange Charger. Founder Nicholas Johnson and Product manager & Strategist Joseph Nagle talk to Bodie about their vision to bring affordable and convenient electric vehicle charging to multi-unit properties like apartments and condominiums. It's a fascinating discussion of what people think they need and want vs. what they actually need in a home charger. You can learn more about Orange Charger at [www.orangecharger.com](https://www.orangecharger.com/) Thanks, Bodie for letting us have this interview for Chit Chat

Mark Pouley, the photographer behind Twin Lakes Images 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 needs. In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Mark tells us about his experience with DSL service, and T-Mobile for home Internet, and why that lead him to pursue SpaceX’s new Starlink satellite service. He explains the process of acquisition, costs, installation, and the speeds he’s getting in his homes. Starlink is hot in the news right now, especially with their recent announcement that they’ll be providing this service to the recreational vehicle (RV) community.

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 into monsters when you take their screens away. Molly's book is available at: * Amazon * Barnes & Noble * Target You can find Molly at mollydefrank.com and you can follow Lindsay at twitter.com/idahomonkees. During the interview, Molly mentioned the Gabb "dumb" phone she bought her 12-year-old which you can find at gabbwireless.com/... We also talked about the Silverware Dance by Forbes and Molly asked for a GIF of it so you can all enjoy it. Silverware Dance by Forbes

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 Quaid, and the uphill road it is for Quaid to qualify to be a Service Dog for the blind. Bart is a Belgian living in the Republic of Ireland, while Seamus is a Northern Irishman who lived for 12 years in Belgium (now living in the Washington DC area). His accent is delightful and his story is fascinating. Links Seaumus mentions: * Guiding Eyes for The Blind * Pilots To The Rescue * Pilots to the Rescue delivering 3 Guiding Eyes Puppies * Trailer for Disney+'s series Pick of the Litter * Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History: The Dog Will See You Now * You can follow Seamus as @batfink2001 on Twitter

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 enthusiastic about these projects that he started barraging Brian with questions about his projects in email, so I suggested Brian come on Chit Chat and Steve help me co-host. You'll hear Brian explain how he and his wife planted literally more than 10,000 trees themselves, about how he grows the tilapia fish in the "pond" he built, and how creating that pond got him started getting into using solar to power his farm. He didn't just write a check and have someone come out and install solar, he bought the components but built everything himself. While you may not follow in Brian's footsteps, it's very cool to

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 of these on the fly while we were recording. For that reason, only the questions are available in the blog post, not the answers. In order to know his answers, you'll need to listen to the show. If you're hearing-impaired, and one of the questions is of particular interest to you, send me an email at and I'll try to reproduce Bart's answer for you.

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 put his $100 in the ring over a year ago, and bought the Lightning (in the Laredo trim) essentially sight unseen. He is besotted with the vehicle and from what he told us, we can see why. We start out with a big tease by talking about the work Chris had to do to be approved to install a charger at his townhouse, and what size battery he chose, but eventually we talk about what it feels like to drive with and without regenerative braking (also known as one-pedal driving), we talk about how well CarPlay works (it's over Bluetooth), what information is on the instrument panel, and a lot about the glory that is heate

In this Lite version of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart Busschots talks to us about he thinks about security. Rather than try to tell us with exacting precision what to do about a current threat, instead, he talks about how to be proactive, how to convince others to accept changes in the name of security, and how to increase your security by reducing your attack surface. It sounds like a grim and boring subject, but of course with Bart as our steward for the subject, it's filled with anecdotes and examples from real life. In addition to the podcast recording, he's given us a full blog post on the subject as well. CCATP #730 – Bart Busschots on Thinking About Security on podfeet.com/...

Our guest this week on Chit Chat Across the Pond is John Siracusa of the Accidental Tech Podcast, Reconcilable Differences, and Robot or Not. He’s also the developer of two interesting Mac apps: Front and Center and SwitchGlass. You can find his blog at Hypercritical.co. You can find him on Twitter @siracusa I've been a fan of John's for a long time but I never knew anything about his background, so I asked him to start at the beginning and explain where he came from. Next I ask him some questions about screen brightness and arrangement of windows that I've heard him talking about and always wanted to investigate his ideas further. Then we get into a super meaty discussion where he explains display technology from LCD to OLED to QD-OLED (or Quantum Dot OLED). John was as delightful as I'd hoped, as knowledgeable as I'd expected and I had a fantastic time with him.

Back in August of 2019, Bart Busschots told us about how someday in the future, we would be able be living a passwordless future because of something called FIDO, AKA Fast ID Online. Back then it was really only helping corporations but this week the FIDO Alliance made an announcement that shows real promise that the dream will be realized for normal humans. In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Bart gives us a human-friendly explanation of why FIDO is awesome, how it will work, why it works, and what problems it solves. He even breaks it down into who will have to do what for this to work, and the good news is that normal humans won't have to do anything at all. While this may sound like a super nerdy topic, and it does include a few brief ventures into private/public key cryptography, it's really a joyful discussion of a future without password breaches. When Bart and I stopped recording, I asked him, "Did you notice how much I was smiling during this recording?" I think you'll really en

One of my pet peeves is podcasters who air reruns. Today I am that podcaster but I think I can justify what I'm doing so bear with me here. On June 1st, 2014, Dr. Maryanne Garry made her debut appearance on Chit Chat Across the Pond. In this terrific interview, she explains her research and the research of others in the field of how memories are formed and retrieved. Every time Dr. Garry comes on as a self-proclaimed "Crusher of Dreams", these episodes seem to garner the most interest from the listeners. This seminal episode with Dr. Garry is the best of the best, and crushes every dream you have that your memory is flawless and it's everyone else who is misremembering. She explains the repressed memory fad that started in the 1990s, and how damaging this never scientifically-validated was to many people. She explains how she can actually induce false memories in people at an alarming rate. Now here's why I'm rerunning it. Eight years ago, Chit Chat Across the Pond was not a standalone podcast; it was

In this ~lite episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart Busschots explains why it's a good idea to have your an email address on your own domain. Then he digs deep into all of the different technologies involved in owning a domain, forwarding email, explains MX and NX records, and how to make sure you're never caught up in a spam scam. After digging deep, he then brings us up a level and explains the easy things you can do to have email forwarding that might protect you from some problems. I've worked my way through all of the technologies that Bart described, but I didn't understand a lot of it until Bart explained it in this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond. You'll find detailed shownotes of everything Bart describes at

This week our guest is Erin Carson, Senior Writer at CNET. She came on the show to talk to me about ear worms and the effect that TikTok is having on their prevalence. We go over the research she studied on earworms, finding out how long we've known about them, what goes on in our brains when we imagine music and why TikTok might be the perfect vehicle for getting them. We eventually go off the rails and enjoy a delightful conversation about music in her home town of Nashville. If you want to follow along with Erin's work, you can find her on cnet.com and you can follow her on Twitter @ErinCarson

While Steve and I were in Phoenix visiting Steve's sister, we made a trip out to meet the awesome Bodie Grimm, host of the Kilowatt podcast at 918digital.com. Bodie's show is all about electric vehicles, self driving, solar energy, and batteries. You can imagine that it would be impossible for a podcast to _not_ break out when two podcasters meet up like this. We decided to create this as a crossover episode that we would both post. I haven't listened to Bodie's intro yet, but I am willing to bet that he starts it with telling his audience they shouldn't listen on his show, they should subscribe to mine instead. That's just the kind of guy he is. I'm not that generous. Stay here, listen to it on my channel, but then you're allowed to go subscribe to the Kilowatt Podcast. In this episode Bodie and I talk about all kinds of things. I explain how weird it was for Steve and me to drive an internal combustion engine (ICE) car after two years of EV driving. But that wasn't the weirdest driving we did. Right befo

This week's guest on Chit Chat Across the Pond is Tom Merritt, host of the Daily Tech News Show, Cord Killers, Know a Little More, Sword and Laser and more podcasts than I can count. He's also a science fiction author with his book series Pilot X tommerrittbooks.com. I asked Tom to come on Chit Chat to help me "know a little more" (see what I did there?) about the past, present and future of messaging. We start by talking about the grand old days when on the computer we had interoperable messaging services, and later at least a way to aggregate the protocols so we could use one client to talk over different services. We covered SMS and the "new and improved" RCS from 2007 protocols when he explained the roles that carriers play in implementation. We talk about the green/blue bubble problem with splintered messages and how RCS might be able to help if Apple would implement it, and why they probably won't. Finally, we talk about the DMA (Digital Markets Act - see Bart's deep dive on this during Security Bi

Jill from the North Woods, host of the delightful and inspiring Start with Small Steps Podcast at smallstepspod.com decided a few years ago that she wanted to switch from Windows to the Mac. I was a bit of an enabler on this, so I've been watching her adventure with great interest. She recently made the final hard switchover and I thought it would be interesting to for you to hear her story. She'll talk about why she wanted to switch, how she tried to switch, challenges with hardware and software, and how she finally accomplished the switch.

If you're looking for a methodical walk through the Apple March Peek Event that discusses point-by-point every detail and spec that Apple presented, you will be sorely disappointed with this week's Chit Chat Across the Pond. Instead of being methodical, Adam Engst of TidBITS and I dive right into the middle and enjoy ourselves talking about what we enjoyed. We jump around, we tell anecdotes, we talk about how the landscape is changing for Apple and the industry. We do get into a spec here and there to add flavor to the discussion and we do talk about the products, but to call our conversation methodical and meticulous would be highly misleading. If you'd like to follow Adam's work, just head over to tidbits.com to read the longest-running Internet technology publication.

Cheyenne's EV6 SpaceshipIn this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Cheyenne Swenson joins us to tell us about her new electric vehicle – the Kia EV6. Cheyenne explains how she calls it a spaceship because it's got two 12-inch wide aspect ratio displays and because of how different it is to drive from any car she's ever owned. We talked about how she chose this particular EV and why she went electric in the first place. She explains the two screens and what information goes where and why, and also holds it over me that her car actually has dedicated dials for temperature and the radio. We talk about the backup cameras, how well the cruise control with lane steering works, and how weird the door handles are. Cheyenne is a joy to talk to as she's funny and well informed at the same time.

This week's guest on Chit Chat Across the Pond is the Wizard Alec Johnson. Alec is the host of the YouTube channel Take One Tech. He creates amazing how-to guides on tools such as Stream Deck, Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, Ecamm Live, and many basic features of the Mac operating systems. When I found his video tutorials, I started devouring them I was learning so much. I asked Alec if he’d come on the show to talk about _how_ he creates these amazing tutorials because they’re unique in the style and quality of the content. We talk about the gear he uses, and more importantly his software setup that allows him to create 30-minute video tutorials in _one take_. Even after learning how he automates with Keyboard Maestro and Stream Deck, I still believe he's a wizard that he can create such smooth video tutorials with relatively few mistakes, all in one take. Get this, in one take he has created 100 videos in 100 days! His next goal is 365 videos in 365 days. This is why I introduced him as the wizard Alec Johnso