Chit Chat Across the Pond

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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

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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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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.

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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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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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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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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/....

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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. 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.

[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

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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:

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).
Make sure that you have Wifi calling set up on your home account (this is important for when you arrive in country)
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).
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.
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

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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

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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.

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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

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CATP #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

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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

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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

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In Programming By Stealth, we've completed our series on the jq language and now Bart Busschots brings us a two-part miniseries about the YAML data format. He takes us through the history of data formats we've "enjoyed" such as fixed-width text files, Comma Separated Value files, through to JSON and XML. All of them had their place in history but also had their downsides. YAML promises to be human-readable (yay) and computer-readable (also yay.)

Once we're bought into how YAML is the data format of our dreams, Bart explains that there are only two kinds of data, scalar,s and collections, and that collections can be sequences or mapping and all of these data types go into a document. Luckily this is all of the jargon we'll have to learn and there are useful synonyms from other languages (e.g. sequences are really just arrays).

I found this lesson enjoyable and not too hard on my little brain so I suspect you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_06_22

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It was actually bittersweet for Bart and me this week as he taught the final installment in our series of Programming By Stealth about jq. As Bart says partway through our recording, he thought this would just be a few episodes but it took 13 episodes to go through everything Bart thought was fun about this deceptively simple programming language.

This final installment in the jq series covers querying nested data structures with the recurse command. One of the really fun parts of the episode is when he teaches us how to dramatically simplify our code, a concept that's often called syntactic sugar. We get to do if statements for the first time, where I wondered why he didn't let us have them earlier! I was cross with him for holding out on us with try-catch too because it would have made our coding so much easier. But that was the real theme of this installment – we had to learn the way everything works before learning the shortcuts.

In the finale, he gives us a few of what he calls "honourable mentions" – little tidbits that came in handy at times.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_06_07

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

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In this penultimate jq episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart introduces us to three new ways to process arrays and dictionaries without exploding them first. I know that sounds crazy – we've always exploded our arrays first. He teaches us how to use the reduce operator which lets us take an entire array or dictionary and reduce it down to one thing. The map function lets us process every element in an array (or or values in a dictionary) and return a new array. Finally, map\_values lets us apply a function against all of the values in a dictionary (or an array).

It was a bitter sweet ending to the primary series on jq for Bart, but next time he'll do the epilogue where he'll introduce us to some rarely needed but still very useful things you can do with jq.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_05_25

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart explains why jq is uniquely designed not to need variables (most of the time) and then explains how to use them in the few instances when there's no other way. It's really a fairly straightforward lesson as Bart sets up some clear examples and solves them with some simple variables. It's one of my favorite episodes because the problem is clear and the solutions are clear. It really shows off how clean jq is as a language.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_05_11

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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

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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!

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In our previous episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots taught us how to create lookup tables with jq from JSON data using the from\_entries command. Just when we have that conquered, this time he teaches us how to do the exact opposite – disassemble lookup tables. I think this was a really fun lesson because taking data apart, reassembling it the way you want and then putting it back together again is a great way to really understand what we're doing with jq. I got much more comfortable as I started to recognize the patterns in what Bart was doing. We also get to play with a new data set, the Have I Been Pwned data gathered by Troy Hunt.

If you're a data nerd, and really who amongst us isn't, you'll love this episode too.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots as usual works through his solution to the challenge from last time, and as usual I learn a lot more about how to use jq to solve problems. He takes a bit of a detour to explain a fun email we got from Jill of Kent in which she explained the vast number of headaches you'll run into when trying to alphabetize names no matter the language.

Then we buckle down and learn about how to make tradeoffs between speed and efficiency of resources, and how jq lookups can help us. Bart also helps us understand _when_ lookups can help us with querying JSON files.

This episode is more of a lecture, which is fine because he's introducing a new concept and explaining some philosophy. You won't hear me breaking into the conversation very much but it's only because I'm not confused! Don't worry, when we get into the final example you'll hear me get confused! Bart explains it about 3 or 4 times and when you hear why your co-host here was confused, it's kind of ironic.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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Bart Busschots is back to teach us how to alter arrays and dictionaries in JSON files using jq. Bart went through his challenge solution on cleaning up the Nobel Prize database and I learned a lot from it. Maybe he'd already taught all of it to us before but I sure wouldn't have been able to put the pieces together.

For the new content, we learned how to alter arrays. We mastered sorting and reversing, how to add and remove elements, how to deduplicate the values within, and how to flatten even nested arrays. From there we learned how to manipulate dictionaries by adding and removing keys.

It's a very focused lesson that continues to show how powerful the jq language is. I think my favorite part though was when Bart made an existential philosophy observation when he said "Everything exists with the value of null."

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart continues to expand our knowledge on how to use jq to query and manipulate JSON files. We learn how to use mathematical operators on data in our JSON files along with fun functions like floor and absolute value. I even contributed some to the learning by showing examples of how ceil (for ceiling), floor, and round produce curiously different results when operating on negative decimal numbers.

We move onto learning about both plain assignment and update assignment. It seems like a small deal but the ability to set a parameter using the plain assignment = vs the ability to update a value using |= is is actually huge and has lots of subtleties.

I think one of my favorite parts was when Bart took us back to our JavaScript lessons and reminded us of how weird it is on one concept but how jq is much more in line with modern programming languages. I felt like a seasoned programmer because I knew the history of what we'd learned. Finally we learned how you can actually divide strings. I know, weird, right? Ok, that's enough spoilers.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_02_17

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

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In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us how to use jq as a programming language. Before we get into the new stuff, Bart takes us through his solution to the challenge, and I have to say I was pretty chuffed when he said my solution to the extra credit portion was more elegant than his. To be fair, it took a buddy programming session with him for me to get the _first_ part of the challenge figured out.

When we got into the programming language part of the lesson, there were so many times that I said, "I needed this last week!" I think finding out these options are available after understanding the problems they solve was fantastic.

We learned how to run jq filters from files, which means no more looking at our filters all on one line - we can put line feeds and indents into our filters to make them more readable. We can even add comments. Bart tells us about a couple of handy plugins for VS Code to give us syntax highlighting which will be swell.

My favorite thing I learned was how to add debugging to our filters. This one is a life changer. We explore a few functions for exploring data filters that will make life easier. We wrap up with an introduction to jq variables, which the developers of jq really don't want you to use unless absolutely necessary.

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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

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In this very meaty episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us how to build data structures using jq with JSON files. We're not just querying existing data, we're rebuilding the data the way we want to see it. We learn how to build strings with interpolation, which I find is a very odd word to describe the process. It's really like concatenation in Excel, but maybe that's just me.

We build arrays using jq, and even convert between strings and arrays with the split and join commands. We build dictionaries in a syntax that is simple and elegant. We also build dictionaries from strings using capture with Regular Expressions.

We learn not to do string formatting and escaping using @ – for example @csv can automatically create comma-separated values data for us and @uri can escape characters for us in a URL we build using jq.

Like I said, it's a meaty episode but Bart and I both enjoyed the lesson quite a bit.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. And just in case I forgot to mention it earlier, remember that we now have transcripts with chapter breaks. This means you can jump pretty easily to a topic to reread exactly how Bart explained something. You even get a time stamp of when he talked on that subject, allowing you to easily skim to the portion of the audio you want to rehear for clarification. All thanks to the magic of Auphonic. Ok, it's not magic, but it _feels_ like magic!

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2024_01_20

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Two weeks ago, Bart Busschots and I recorded a Programming By Stealth episode covering more queries using the jq language on our JSON files. We spent so much time working through the challenges from the previous installment that we only made it halfway through his tutorial shownotes. So this week we're back with the second half of that episode, Programming By Stealth 158B.

Before we got started learning, I alerted the audience to a significant enhancement to the material we create for this show.

I use a service called Auphonic to do a lot of things with the audio file when we're done recording, including leveling the audio, adding metadata to it, converting it to an MP3, and FTPing it to the server for the listeners to download. Auphonic has recently added AI-generated transcripts which we've had for a while with Programming By Stealth.

The NosillaCast has chapter marks you can use to jump to content in the audio file, but Chit Chat Across the Pond has never had that. Auphonic now adds auto-generated chapters based on the content in the audio file. These chapter marks are in the transcript, which allows you to jump to the text of where we cover a specific topic.

Not only that, these auto-generated chapters are in the audio file so in your podcatcher you can now jump to different sections instead of having to scroll through to find something Bart explained.

The chapter marks are not perfect, and we have no intention of editing them, but it should give you an easier way to find what you want to re-listen to or re-read. While Bart has spectacular tutorial shownotes, the transcript gives you the full flavor of the conversation we have while Bart is teaching me.

Now back to this week's show! In this week's episode, Bart explains two powerful commands for searching JSON files with jq, the contains and inside functions. In this context, he goes through testing for containment with strings, arrays, dictionaries and he tells us about default containment. Then he explains how the inside function does essentially the opposite of testing for containment. Finally, he shows us how to use regular expressions with the test function to get as granular as we like with our jq filters.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_12_30

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

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In Programming By Stealth this week, Bart Busschots and I start off by going through the challenges from our previous installment. Remember how I said I was really digging jq and querying JSON files because at heart I'm a data nerd? Well, I failed completely at accomplishing the homework. It was not for lack of trying though - I worked about 4 hours on just the first challenge. Because of a fundamental building block that wasn't properly in place in my brain, I was never going to succeed.

That means that this episode is almost half about the challenges and Bart carefully re-explaining the pieces he'd taught us in the previous installment. We both agree that it's good work because if I was lost, there's a reasonable chance that one other student was as well.

Because of my questions, we cut the episode in half, so the shownotes are complete but the second half will be explained in PBS 158B which we'll record in a couple of weeks.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_12_20

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

Join the Conversation:* allison@podfeet.com * podfeet.com/slack

Support the Show:* Patreon Donation * PayPal one-time donation * Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle * Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts

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CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

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In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots continues his instruction on learning more about how to use the jq language to query JSON files. We get into the thick of it as Bart teaches us three important jq concepts: filter chaining, operators, and functions.

To get there we learn about the literal values in JSON and jq and how only null and false are false. Armed with that, Bart explains the not function and once we put those concepts together, this ridiculous command will make perfect sense:

jq -n 'true and true | not' # false

I got such a kick out of that when I first read it in the shownotes earlier this week that I posted my enjoyment of it on Mastodon, and one of the actual developers of jq commented that he was excited to learn we were covering jq in Programming By Stealth!

The any and all functions are nearly as silly sounding but are equally useful. By the end of the episode, we can successfully query the Nobel Prize JSON file to show us all of the prizes won by anyone with the surname "Curie".

We even have three fun challenges at the end of this episode.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_12_09

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

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In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Jason Howell, podcaster and producer for the TWiT network, and musician joins me to talk about what it's like to use an Android phone with a Mac. I live in an Apple-centric bubble, so I am very curious about how he works with these two operating systems.

We talk about his origin story on the Mac and his Android hardware of choice. We talk a lot about how he manages his photos, and what messaging is like in this mixed blue-bubble/green-bubble environment.

Jason is great fun and introspective and we had an absolute blast chatting. If you'd like to find everything Jason does, go to raygun.fun - it rhymes _and_ it's fun (as Jason pointed out).

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_12_04

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After the last episode of Programming By Stealth where Bart gave us an intro to jq and the problems it can solve, this week we start to get our feet wet by learning how to extract data from JSON files. We learn how to descend into dictionaries and arrays, and how to slice arrays. Learn how jq will output sarcasm about "Bart Busschots" if you don't learn how to ask it for raw output. We even learn how to extract data from multiple files at once and how to extract multiple values from our JSON files. Finally, we learn about exploding arrays and how to suppress errors.

I think I really love data manipulation because I loved this episode.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_11_25

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

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After our annual break from Programming By Stealth that happens at an unknown time for an unknown length every single year, Bart and I are back with a new episode of Programming By Stealth. Bart introduces us to a language called jq _and_ a terminal command called jq which together are used to help query JSON files, see "pretty versions of them, and also to manipulate them.

We don't learn a lot of commands but Bart walks us through a few examples to help illustrate why we care, or shall I say, "the problem to be solved"? I'm sold on the idea having just mucked about in a config files for homebridge this week.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_11_18

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

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One of the great joys of Mastodon is that I’m meeting new people with a cross-section of interests that overlap with my own. By following hashtags like #programming and #technology and #knitting and #crocheting, I can find fellow nerds who are also into the crafts I enjoy.

I discovered this week's guest, Angela Preston through these hashtags. She’s a knitter and she created a website by hand that explains how she built a font for knitting at sites.google.com/.... The best part is she created the font with an open source tool called FontStruct at fontstruct.com.

The conversation bounces back and forth between explaining what knitting is, how traditional text-based patterns are written, how diagram-based knitting works, and then flipping over to how a font is created in FontStruct. Angela is fun and interesting and I think you'll really enjoy the conversation even if you're not a programmer or a knitter.

Angela's font is called Kauri Knits, where Kauri is a name from the book series "Dancing Gods" by Jack L Chalker. (It's also the Māori name for a cool tree in New Zealand.)

If people want to follow Angela on Mastodon, you find her at @AngelaPreston@toot.site.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_11_06

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After a long hiatus for which I have no excuse, Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite is back with a fabulous interview with Adam Engst, publisher of the long-running Internet-based email newsletter, TidBITS. Adam's been on the show a few times and he's always a delight.

This episode focussed on an article he published in TidBits entitled, iPhone Recommendations for Senior Citizens.

My audience knows that I’m an advocate for the accessibility of technology in all forms, and they also know that I bristle at the suggestion that people past a certain age aren’t good at technology. If you throw in gender along with that, such as a phrase I hear all too often, “It’s so easy your mother could use it”, the top of my head blows off.

I read Adam's article with a desire to learn any tips he could provide to making the iPhone more accessible to seniors _and_ at the same time I was ready to jump down his throat if you implied that elderly people can’t be technically competent. I was delighted to find that he pushed none of my hot buttons and gave terrific advice. In our conversation we talk about how to approach senior citizens on what their needs are, and to understand where their limitations might be. Do they lave low vision? Arthritis? Cognitive issues? Dry fingers?

We talk about the pros and cons of Face ID vs. Touch ID as it relates to the different challenges each person might be facing. Adam even gives some cool suggestions on how to rearrange their home screen on the iPhone including a Shortcut he created that might make communicating with just a few people easier.

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Bart Busschots joins us for Programming By Stealth with the final installment of our miniseries on Bash. He explains a few new concepts, but the real value of this installment and especially his fabulous tutorial shownotes is that he compiles a lot of info into some tables for us to use as reference for the future. As with all good programming, Bart is scratching his own itch - he wanted a single place to go to know which brackets mean which and which ones do you have to cuddle vs. not cuddle. He also wanted a table of the order in which Bash processes the seven distinct expansions.

We're closing out Bash but Bart has a new miniseries on the horizon to look forward to.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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In Programming By Stealth, we've come to the end of our journey with Bash. I'll be sad to have it complete because as I tell Bart in this episode, I've really enjoyed it. Next time he will do a final bow-tying episode where he brings everything we learned together in one set of notes as a handy reference guide.

In this episode, he explains how functions work in Bash, and after about the 12th time he repeated it, I understand that functions we create in Bash work just like built-in functions such as ls or cat.

After walking us through some easy-to-follow scripts to illustrate this and show us the syntax, we go into a harder concept: scope. We learn that Bash does scope differently from pretty much every other language, and so he teaches us how to avoid spooky action at a distance because of this different way of dealing with scope. Protecting ourselves isn't actually hard but it is very important to understand why we need to do this.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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In Programming By Stealth 152A Bart and I decided to hold off on the middle of the lesson he'd written up. That middle bit where he said to "put a pin in it" was about the use of xargs. I'm really glad we did skip it in the last installment. It's a pretty useful concept and deserved a lot more attention than it would have if we'd tried to cram it into that episode. The other good news is that Bart learned a bit more about _how_ xargs does its magic, so he is better able to explain it, and he updated the shownotes with a lot more detail and a great worked example.

As a teaser, the big problem xargs was designed to solve is that there are times when we want the data from the standard input stream (STDIN) to be passed to another command as one or more arguments.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_07_08

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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 work to climate science, my view of geology has been turned upside down.

Dr. Briner is serious and funny and engaging and fascinating and I really enjoyed talking to him on the show. I'm really glad we got to know Dr. Briner on our trip to Antarctica where he was one of the brilliant scientists lecturing on the university alumni trip.

You can find photos and videos from Dr. Briner's very recent research trip to Greenland at www.glyfac.buffalo.edu/.... Might be fun to follow along with the images while listening to him describe the work.

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I don't always make the time to pre-read the shownotes for Programming By Stealth but I never regret when I do make the time. That was especially true this week. In this installment, Bart Busschots takes us through his solution to the challenge from PBS 151, which was to print a "pretty" multiplication table using the printf command.

Being Bart, he didn't just make the columns line up nicely, he took it up a notch and added ASCII characters that build a nice border and corners around his table.

The reason I said it was good I pre-read the shownotes is that while nearly everything he explains in this lesson was a reuse of things he's taught us before, the commands are so dense in Bash that it was particularly hard to read and comprehend. We had also taken 4 weeks between lessons which made it even harder to remember.

Because I told Bart ahead of time that I was going to be stopping him to ask lots of questions, we decided to skip the one main topic he had planned to explain - xargs. This means that the next installment will start with xargs as Programming By Stealth 152B using the same shownotes. I'm really glad we did it this way because instead of you having to listen to a confused and thus frustrated Allison, the lesson flows well with me having time to ask the right questions.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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ave 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 Physics.

Steve and I were lucky enough to become friends with Andrea on our circumnavigation around Iceland and also on our trip to Antarctica. To be perfectly honest, we signed up for Antarctica _because_ we knew Andrea was going to be lecturing.

Since this was such a momentous interview, we have audio _and_ video embedded of the interview with Dr. Ghez. Many thanks to Steve for putting the video together.

If you'd like to learn more about Andrea and her team's work, and to see photos and video animations of their discoveries, follow the link to the UCLA Galactic Center Group.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_06_22

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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 in spatial computing as a big shift.

Bart tells us about what he learned about visionOS from the Platforms State of the Union, as well as two sessions: Principles of Spatial Design and Design for Spatial Input. He gave us links to the chapterized videos so you can jump right to the parts he talks about if you like.

As a bonus, my granddaughter Siena made her debut appearance on Chit Chat Across the Pond (she's an old hand at coming on the live show). It was a bit of a surprise and she didn't stay long but she did want to say hi. I made it a chapter mark just for fun!

Keynote - jump to the Vision Pro chapter:

developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/101/

Platforms State of the Union:

developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/102/

Principles of spatial design:

developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10072/

Design for spatial input:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10073/

Join the Conversation: * allison@podfeet.com * podfeet.com/slack

Support the Show: * Patreon Donation * PayPal one-time donation * Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle * Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts

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This week's Programming By Stealth wasn't a heavy lift but I managed to get confused a couple of times anyway so expect lots of questions from me in this one. Bart started the show by telling us about a clever tip from listener Jill of Kent about how to detect when the Terminal talking to and from STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR. Then we learn about how to use the printf command to make nicely formatted output. I especially liked that part because I love me some organized output.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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When Bart and I recorded PBS 150 on Bash Script Terminal Plumbing, neither of us was happy with it. I got very confused in the middle, and Bart decided that his original strategy might have been flawed in which he assumed everyone had heard Taming the Terminal and remembered everything taught more than 4 years ago. He completely rewrote the shownotes and we re-recorded the entire episode. It was ever so much more fun and I really understood what he was teaching this time through. He also realized after we recorded that there was a bit of information he hadn't taught us which was crucial to being able to complete the challenge he had set for us. If you understood PBS 150 the first time through and want to jump right to the new part, I put a chapter mark in the audio file that will take you to where he explains /dev/tty.

We're proud to have done this because we are both of the same mind that we need to stay committed to the quality of what we're creating here, both for the current listeners and the future learners.

Bart and I took a few minutes upfront to high-five each other for 150 episodes of the Programming By Stealth Podcast. Then we quickly got to work.

Back in the Taming the Terminal podcast (at ttt.bartificer.net/..., Bart taught us about stream redirection, or what he likes to call Terminal Plumbing. This was a long time ago and many folks may not have listened to that great series. Bart takes us through it again but from the perspective of writing Bash scripts that can do everything we can do in the Terminal. We learn about Standard Input (STDIN), Standard Output (STDOUT), and Standard Error (STDERR). We also learn how to bifurcate STDOUT and STDERR to produce desired results. He walks us through how to use the symbols >, <, and our friend the pipe | to redirect output from commands and files. I did get stuck for quite a while in a few spots here and there. Bart continues to try to convince me that if I'm confused, at least one other learner is as well, so hopefully making Bart find different ways to explain these things to help me will help you.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Join our Slack to talk to other Programming By Stealth learners by going to podfeet.com/slack.

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Bart and I took a few minutes upfront to high-five each other for 150 episodes of the Programming By Stealth Podcast. Then we quickly got to work.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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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 which demonstrated that people have highly inflated beliefs of their capabilities doing highly complex tasks for which they are entirely unqualified. In particular, a high percentage of people have high confidence that they could land a commercial plane with no help from the tower. In this study, they tested whether watching a short, trivially informative video of two pilots landing a plane would influence that confidence level.

As always with Dr. Garry, you'll learn a lot, you'll laugh along with us, and your dreams will be crushed as only she can.

If you want to listen to more interviews with Dr. Garry, check out these episodes of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite:

CCATP #727 – Dr. Maryanne Garry on How Everything You Remember is Wrong
CCATP #629 - Dr. Garry on Study of Language Skills vs Numeracy In Learning to Program
CCATP #576 - Dr. Maryanne Garry on Grammar Pet Peeves
CCATP #554 - Dr. Maryanne Garry on Persuasion with Facts and Data
CCATP #510 - Dr. Maryanne Garry on Many Memory Questions
CCATP #452 Dr. Garry Asks "Compared to What?"
CCATP #441 Dr. Maryanne Garry on Cognitive Biases, Learning and Aging

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In this rather mind-bendy episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes into the weird world of POSIX special variables and options. He refers to some of them as being like handling nuclear power, at one point he suggests mind-altering drugs must have been involved in the design, and he even compares one of our newly learned tools to a chainsaw.

He powered us through amidst my many interruptions with questions to where we can now write shell scripts that take flags and optional arguments using getopts. The final form of the syntax is very readable but knowing the reasons behind each bit is crucially important.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_04_15

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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 Provider Extension improves several things about our interface with these cloud storage providers, there are also some serious "gotchas" that may affect you.

For example, before talking to Adam, I didn't realize that the change caused us to have local copies of our entire Google Drive and anything added there isn't being synced to the could. Being Adam, he's written an extremely well-researched and well-explained article on tidbits.com/... where you can follow along with our conversation.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_04_13

During the conversation, Adam referenced a couple of other articles:

Adam's TidBITS article from February 2022 predicting these problems: Cloud Storage Forecast Unsettled, with Possible Storms - TidBITS
LucidLink is a better alternative for people who used to use Dropbox as a cloud service provider for huge, shared video files LucidLink Offers Streaming Vision of Cloud-Based Storage
Adam and I said at the end of the conversation that the next time we'd talk it would be about doing clean installs of macOS. He sent me this link where he talks about three levels of clean installs: Level 2 Clean Install of Ventura Solves Deep-Rooted Problems

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This week's Programming By Stealth is a great lesson on how no matter how long you've been coding, you'll still get caught out from time to time and think that the universe makes no sense. When Bart was working on the challenge from PBS 147, he ran into a bizarre situation for many hours. He eventually figured out what was going on, but it changed this installment into a walk down what went wrong, what he learned, and gave him the opportunity to teach us even more about shell scripting.

The entire installment is all about the solutions to the challenge from PBS 147 so you might want to take a shot at it yourself before listening to or reading this week's installment.

Before we get started, I also explained how we now have a terrific way to share our work on the challenges, through a GitHub Organization called pbs-students. I wrote it up in the article entitled Introducing the Programming By Stealth Student Organization in GitHub

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_03_25

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

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In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart walks us through how to create, add to, and extract from arrays using Bash. It's a very light episode, which I manage to drag out longer by making him slow down and dig into the syntax used for arrays. It's not just me being dense (this time), there are squirrely brackets, square brackets, single quotes, double quotes, and the good old octothorp thrown in for some extra fun.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Join the Conversation:* allison@podfeet.com * 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.
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As Bart continues our education in shell scripting, he explains the simplicity of looping. He explains the four types of loops: while, until, for, and select, along with the simple syntax of do/done within a loop. He walks us through a lot of examples that illustrate how each one of these loops work. He ends by giving us a challenge, because teacher's pet Allison asked for homework last time.

Enjoy this episode along with Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_03_04

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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 LastPass. I found it a really interesting conversation about UI design, trust, and what makes an app feel right.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_03_01

Rod mentioned Okta’s annual report on business tools: okta.com/...

LastPass’s final report: blog.lastpass.com/...

1Password forum on merging accounts into a family: 1password.community/...

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Bart continues his miniseries on shell scripting by teaching us conditionals in the shell. In order to explain why conditionals are a bit odd in shell scripting, Bart first walks us through how it was originally done and then shows us the evolution to a much better method. It's still weird, and many things are opposite of what you'd expect (like 4 is actually > 10), but he gets us there in the end. I was most excited to finally learn what fi means, which shows up in shell scripting and I'd seen before in AppleScript.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_02_18

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This week our guest is Bart Busschots with Programming By Stealth 144. When last we recorded, Bart started teaching us the basics of shell scripting using Bash. We learned how to collect terminal commands into a reusable shell script, but we didn't learn how to accept any kind of input.

In this installment, we learn how to take inputs either from the execution of the command or from user input and how variable names are created for the different ways of receiving input. We also learn about Exit Codes, which are really error codes, and how they can be used in boolean logic.

This knowledge will come into play when we learn next time about how to do conditionals and loops. It's a short episode, and as Bart says, "not a heavy lift."

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_02_04

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In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots starts building out one more tool in our toolbox: shell scripts. Bart starts with the basics explaining how to tell our little scripts which shell to run using the shebang line, the structure of shell scripts, commenting, assigning, and using variables, and how to write strings without having to escape every space and unusual character.

Throughout the installment, Bart refers back to things we learned in Taming the Terminal podcast and tutorial. If you haven't listened to or read this series, you can download the book Helma helped us to produce using the Apple Books Store, or access it in a beautiful HTML version at ttt.bartificer.net/..., both of which have the audio of the podcast embedded within. You can find even more formats at podfeet.com/tttbook.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_01_07

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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 — Bart Busschots on the Meaning of Verification and Twitter/Mastodon Implementations

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In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart officially kicks off the XKPasswdJS project. This is what we've all been waiting for! As I said to Bart at the end of our recording, we're no longer fixing to make a plan, we _have_ a plan. The shownotes for this episode point to the README file for the GitHub project.

Bart explains n the podcast that we'll have a project skeleton phase where Bart will define the code that has to be ported from Perl to JavaScript, and he'll build the guidelines that will help us work as a team of contributors. This means things like a style guide, automated scripts to build the project, and configuration files for the tooling.

He has a vision that we'll work on the direct port next, with no enhancements and I tried to get him to take a dollar bet on whether that goal will be achieved, but he didn't fall for it. After that, we'll go into maintenance mode.

It's a fun episode because we're finally moving forward after learning all of the tools we'll need to make the project a success!

You can find Bart's shownotes that point to the README at pbs.bartificer.net.

I'm having a bit of trouble with the transcripts but by the time you read this, you _might_ be able to read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2022_12_10

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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, automations we're really proud of, and darn it, these just make me happy automations.

You can find Casey on Mastodon @CaseyLiss@mastodon.social, and on Micro.blog at .

View an unedited transcript of this podcast auto-generated by Auphonic Speech Recognition Engine using Whisper by OpenAI (Beta).: CCATP_2022_12_08

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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 about how Nic got into doing this and how he creates his videos so I asked him to come on to talk about it. I expected to have a fun, nerdy conversation, and that definitely happened, but what I didn't expect was to find a very kind, thoughtful person who exudes good karma. Whether you care about HomePod repairs or not, I'm sure you'll find this a delightful conversation.

View an unedited transcript of this podcast auto-generated by Auphonic Speech Recognition Engine using Whisper by OpenAI (Beta): CCATP_2022_12_04

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In the last installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart taught us all about UML class diagrams for documenting the structure of our code. In this installment, Bart teaches us how to use the ASCII diagramming tool Mermaid to make our class diagrams. The advantage of Mermaid over a graphical tool to make our diagrams is that we'll be able to use Git to do version control for them. I think the most important part of this installment was when we learned that we shouldn't ever cuddle the mermaid.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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Bart and I are back from summer vacation to kick back into gear on Programming By Stealth. As you may remember, we've been learning all of the tools we'll need to rewrite, test, and document Bart's password generation library xkpasswd from perl to JavaScript. In order to start the rewrite, we need to understand the structure of the code we're going to write, and instead of writing up a long text requirements document, we're going to use a standard software diagramming language called UML Diagrams. In particular, we're going to be using UML Class Diagrams.

Bart will probably do most of the diagramming himself as he dusts off decades-old code but we need to learn how to read UML Class Diagrams ourselves, so it will be another tool in our toolbelt.

Most podcasts would stick to everyday examples, but not here at the Podfeet Podcasts. Instead, Bart will teach us some Particle Physics along the way and you get that for free with this installment of Programming By Stealth.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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WiFi GenerationsIn 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 IEEE standards. And then one day the numbering scheme changed completely. I asked Dave to explain what happened and what the new numbers mean. From there Dave refreshed our memory on how mesh routers work, and how backhaul is the communication between the mesh access points.

It took some work keeping the numbers and terminology straight but by the time we were done he had explained why WiFi 6E on the backhaul matters, even though we very likely don't have any WiFi 6E devices.

You can find Dave Hamilton on Twitter @davehamilton and @macgeekgab and on Mastodon at @davehamilton@podcastindex.social.

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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 what the motivations of the threat actors are.

There's a call to action in this talk by Bart. He wants to know if _you_ think the information he presents will be valuable to a Mac User Group. I (mostly) kept my opinions to myself because we want to hear from you. The best way to provide this feedback is to use our Podfeet Slack at podfeet.com/slack, or you can Tweet Bart at @bbusschots, or you can make a comment on the blog post for this episode.

The slide deck presentation for Bart's talk can be viewed at busschotsh-my.sharepoint.com/...

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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 short while. I also found out that he has a far different process for creating his screencasts than I do, so I asked him on the show so he could teach me how he does it and you get to learn along with me.

You can find connect with Darcy by emailing him at darcyh@oceanfire.studio and follow him on Twitter at @sensible_of

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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 wanted to talk about the latest and greatest in baby tech.

You can find everything you need to know about Dan Moren at dmoren.com/... including links to the Galactic Cold War Series. You can follow him online @dmoren.

If you want to buy his books at an independent bookstore, he suggests indiebound.org to find them.

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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-peeping level of detail about the resulting images from this new device. But that's not at all what he really wanted to talk about. Whether you consider yourself a "real" photographer or just someone who likes to take pictures, I think you'll find this introspective discussion heartfelt and memorable.

You can find Antonio online in the following places:

Follow Antonio’s work at amrosario.com
Podcast - Street Shots Photography Podcast streetshots.photography/...
Vero: amrosario - vero.co/amrosario
Twitter @amrosario
iPhone 14 Pro Max RAW images by Antonio
Images shot using Fococ app (using portrait mode)

Antonio talked about a video on the Three Blind Men and an Elephant channel

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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 the rules of who and which devices and networks are allowed to have access to what data and for how long. That part sounds like the heavy lifting to me! Bart then explains how the fun part is then using the rules that have been developed to implement these rules using technology.

Bart's explanation of how the technology works is a bit specific to Microsoft's products but the concepts he explains are definitely applicable to any vendor's solution. Detailed shownotes are available at www.podfeet.com/...

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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 SoundSource which is probably their application with the broadest appeal to people. We talk through design decisions including both making Audio Hijack completely accessible to visually-impaired users, and making it easier for all of us to understand.

Audio Hijack 1.0 InterfaceI ask Paul the burning question on everyone's mind, where the heck did the name Rogue Amoeba come from?

This is not an ad for Rogue Amoeba, but I'm afraid I _do_ gush quite a bit because I'm such a giant fan of everything they do. I spend time talking about how amazing their support staff is (I bother them a _lot_) which prompts Paul to explain the structure of the company and why it works so well.

We talking about their pricing model in contrast with the companies that are adopting subscription pricing.

And finally, I ask Paul when they are going to make the multi-track editor of my dreams.

We had a blast recording together and swapping stories. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as we did. A very rare 20% off sale is going on right now for all Rogue Amoeba products, so check it out at macaudio.com/...

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In the past few episodes of Programming By Stealth, Bart has been walking us through worked examples to demonstrate how to roll up a web app using Webpack. These worked examples have been contrived to show how to perform the task.

This week in a Tidbit episode, Bart walks us through how he tried using the skills he's been teaching us to roll up his this-ti.me web app. It's a real-world test of the technologies and it allowed him to describe some of the pitfalls he fell into (though they were few and far between). It also gave him a chance to exercise the Webpack documentation, which happily turned out to be very good.

There's no heavy lifting in this episode and no work to do to follow along. Instead, sit back and relax while you listen to Bart give advice on how to approach this task in your own code.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

[audio mp3="https://media.blubrry.com/nosillacast/traffic.libsyn.com/nosillacast/CCATP_2022_09_17.mp3"]

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In our last installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart started teaching us how to bundle an app/website using our bundler of choice, Webpack. The app/website he's creating for us is very simplified but is intended to allow us to exercise every one of the kinds of things we'd want to bundle. This week we finish all of the tools he wanted to teach us to bundle.

In PBS 138, after explaining to us why we would want to do this, and initializing things, he taught us to import a pure JavaScript library with jQuery as an example, and a pure CSS library with basic Bootstrap as the example.

In this week's show, we learn how to install and use Mustache for templating in a Webpack world. The process is quite a bit different from how we originally learned to implement Mustache in Programming By Stealth.

Then we learn how Bootstrap 5 now lets us import just what we need (instead of all of Bootstrap). We need some fancy icons so Bart teaches us about Bootstrap icons which he now favors for free icons over Font Awesome. Our web app wouldn't be complete if we didn't have a fun font, so we learn to import free web fonts from Fontsource all with Webpack.

Like the first half of the Webpack worked example, Bart's process of doing repetitive actions but for different reasons definitely helped cement the concepts for me.

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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 ways, we differ on how it is flawed, which makes for a lively discussion. We talk about the merits and demerits of touchscreens and even throw CarPlay under the bus while praising its virtues.

If you want to find all of Tom's work, you can go to tommerritt.com/.... He also encourages you to check out his newest podcast called A Word with Tom Merritt where he talks with people about how they think using one word as the start of the conversation.

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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/... 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.

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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

Thanks, Bodie for letting us have this interview for Chit Chat Across the Pond!

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We're back in the saddle after a summer of "PBS Adjacent" installments. Our last real PBS was learning how to use Webpack to bundle a JavaScript library for sharing with the world. That was cool, but a lot of us want to use Webpack to bundle a web app we've written ourselves to include all of the libraries we're using. We also want to have an easier way to reduce dependency on having an Internet connection. We also want an easier way to keep our bundle of libraries up to date. In this installment, Bart teaches us how to do all that with NPM and Webpack. I really enjoyed this episode because he used a worked example to show us how it all works, rather than talking only about the theory. The repetitive steps for each library really helped me to understand the process.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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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.

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I'm about to go on vacation where I suspect I'll have little to no Internet to play with. It would be really cool if I could use any downtime (like on the 11-hour plane flight) to do some programming. Unfortunately, our code is often filled with references to content delivery networks to get needed libraries like jQuery and Bootstrap. While on my walk on Friday I was mentally preparing a post for our PBS Slack community to ask them how I can modify my code so that it doesn't require the Internet to function.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw Bart's topic for this week's Programming By Stealth - it's all about how to do exactly what I wanted. He covers how to prepare your computer for departure, how it's important to clone any repos you might want to reference, and most importantly how to localize your dependencies and then what to undo when you return home.

It was exactly everything I needed to know and I hope it helps you too whenever you disconnect from the Net but still want to play with your code.

You can read Bart's fabulous shownotes for this installment at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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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

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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

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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 know that it's actually possible to do this yourself and to learn about how Brian gives back to his community. Steve and I had a great time talking to Brian and learning from him and I know you will too. Don't forget to go listen to the DTNS Solar Panel Panel too!

Follow the link to the blog post to see photos of some of the panels and structures Brian built on his farm.

Join the Conversation: * allison@podfeet.com * podfeet.com/slack

Support the Show: * Patreon Donation * PayPal one-time donation * Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle * Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts

Referral Links:

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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.

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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 heated _and_ cooled seats. Bodie and Chris talk about how to remote start the car (which was a baffling subject for a California-bred woman). We even discuss whether Chris will fit in the frunk (aka Front Trunk).

It's a fun and informative conversation I know you'll enjoy. And be sure to check out Kilowatt, SMR, and BBQ and Tech Podcasts to have even more fun with these awesome gentlemen.

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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/...

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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.

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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 enjoy hearing about FIDO and why passkeys rock.

Find out more about the FIDO Alliance at fidoalliance.org/...

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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 embedded inside the NosillaCast episode #473. I've always wanted to be able to point people directly to this interview and I couldn't because it didn't even have a chapter mark to jump to in the audio.

Not only is it a fabulous interview and one where she mocks me at every turn, and I want new listeners to hear it, but even if you have heard it, it's delightful to listen to again. I asked Maryanne to listen and see whether she'd want to rerecord because of changes in the last 8 years and she said that it's great just like it is.

In the beginning I say that she works at the University of Victoria in Wellington, New Zealand. She has since then she has moved her research lab and teaches at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand.

Links she mentions:

Tale of Two Microphones from Chris Breen at Macworld
Steven Colbert in a segment entitled "Who's Honoring Me Now" calls out her paper where she sites his term Truthiness
Book referenced - Picking Cotton (on Amazon)
Doctored photo research with Kim Wade: http://m.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24286258
Wrongful Convictions: innocenceproject.org
Overexposed? Camera Phones Could Be Washing Out Our Memories:

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/22/314592247/overexposed-camera-phones-could-be-washing-out-our-memories

Other interesting reading - People with Easier to Pronounce Names Promote Truthiness of Claims: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0088671

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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

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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

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We have one more thing to learn as we gear up to actually start writing modern code for Bart's HSXKPasswd tool. The last piece of our tool kit is a bundler. In this installment Bart teaches what problems bundlers solve, and he explains why he chose the bundler Webpack for our project. After learning about Webpack, Bart takes us through a worked example, bundling the Joiner module we've been working on through this part of the series. When we're done, we'll have an ES6 bundle and a Universal Module Defnition (UMD) bundle to cover both modern and more legacy needs. In the episode you'll hear me say that the exercise hit errors, and after the show we diagnosed the problem and fixed the shownotes so have no worries about that!

You can, as always, find Bart's fabulous show note tutorial for this installment at pbs.bartificer.net/...It's Showtime

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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 before recording, Bodie let us order a Waymo self-driving car to take us to Trader Joe's, so of course we had to talk about how crazy it was to be in a moving car with no driver in the car.

Steve and I are considering getting batteries to go with our solar system, and Bodie knows a lot about this subject, so I try to get him to interpret the crazy language we were given on how to deal with Tesla batteries during a power outage. He does not succeed at this task any better than we did.

Bodie is a fabulous guy - smart, knowledgeable, and with a subtle and yet goofy sense of humor that just tickles me. Be sure to check out the Kilowatt Podcast in your podcatcher of choice.

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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 Bits for 3 April 2022) starting to work its way through the European Commission and how Tom interprets the possible/probable ways the big companies might implement the changes demanded surrounding messaging. I tried to get Tom to say he was optimistic that we may one day soon have an integrated messaging service to rule them all but I wasn't quite successful.

You can keep up with everything Tom Merrit by signing up for Tom's newsletter at FreeTomNewsletter.com

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Over the past few months, podfeet.com went through a period of really poor performance. My site hadn't been snappy in the last few years with page loads of up to 6 seconds, but it hit a tipping point where it was taking in excess of 40 seconds for pages to load. William Reveal and Bart migrated the services behind podfeet.com that improved performance to where most pages load in less than a quarter of a second.

In this Programming By Stealth adjacent episode, Bart wanted to walk through the structure of what makes up a web server, what a web server does, what all of the components are, and then walk us through how these things have changed in the nearly 17 years podfeet.com has been around. As we continue our journey in Programming By Stealth we are moving from the client-side to the server-side, so this lesson is quite relevant to helping our fellow learners understand what's behind the next steps we'll be taking.

There's no homework in this episode but it's also challenging to keep the pieces straight in your head so get ready for a fun and instructive "Tidbit".

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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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.

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In this Programming By Stealth adjacent installment labeled Tidbits 3 of Y, Bart Busschots talks to us about the dangers of using other people's code in your code, and the danger of not using other people's code. He explains this seeming dichotomy and gives us ways to approach the problem taking a middle ground. He helps us think about how to choose whether to use other's code and whose code to use, and even how to ensure it's kept up to date with security patches. It's definitely a philosophical installment and it was triggered by a recent event where a developer maliciously broke his own code, impacting a lot of developers. It's actually sort of a success story of open source which I didn't expect.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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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.

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Bart Busschots taught us the basics of Jest last time for our Test Driven Development environment. This week we learn to group our tests using the describe() function in Jest. Grouping tests with describe does more than eliminate the need to comment our code, it also provides more useful output from our tests and scopes what happens inside.

As Bart describes it, we climb "Mount Jest" at one point as he explains how we can also loop our tests (instead of repeating code as we did last time) using describe.each()(). It's a little head bending with arrays of arrays and functions of functions but it sounds worse to describe than it actually is to read and create.

He then describes ways to run certain setup and tear down functions before and after our tests are run and why we might need to do that.

Finally, we get the last cool thing we'll need to understand about Jest, and that's how to use the .only and .skip modifiers on our tests so that we can focus on individual tests while we're chasing bugs.

For the first time in a long time, he even gives us an optional challenge to flex these new Jest muscles.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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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.

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In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart takes us down memory lane to 102 episodes ago when he first introduced us to the concept of test-driven development. He explains why back then he taught us how to use QUnit for our TDD work, and why it's no longer in favor with him. It's not just the advancements in technology like ES6, but it's also because QUnit makes it terribly hard to write tests and to interpret what you've written when you've been away from it for a while. He walks us through his criteria for picking a new TDD tool, and why he chose Jest for the job.

He then walks us through a worked example of how to write some simple tests on a module and of course, explains how Jest does its job running our tests. I liked it, even though my head hurt during a bit of it!

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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This episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond perfectly straddles the line between Programming By Stealth and Lite. While it's definitely a nerdy discussion topic, Bart Busschots is really just telling a story. He starts by explaining how he ended up a computer scientist essentially by accident, and tells us about a fantastic CS professor he had who inspired him through an assignment about a game called 8 Queens. He tells these stories as a way to explain that when I used the Terminal and egrep to help me solve the game Wordle a few weeks ago, it wasn't really cheating. I think whether you're a programmer or not, you'll enjoy hearing Bart explain why.

Bart's shownotes can be found at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots finishes firming up our foundation on a few more things before we meet Jest, which will be the Test Driven Development (TDD) environment we'll be learning next time.

He explains in some adorable examples involving a parrot (named Polly of course) how getters can be used to construct short but powerful syntaxes that seem quite counterintuitive at first glance. These are heavily used by Jest, and without learning about them, they would simply look like magic. He said some purists may see this syntax as an abuse of getters but it's a pretty slick method that yields very readable APIs.

The second thing he teaches us is that functions can actually return functions. That sounds like opening a hole in the space-time continuum but it's actually quite logical and useful as Bart explains the usefulness of this really well. No parrots involved, but lots of pancakes and waffles in his examples.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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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 Johnson.

Since he's a video guy, we decided to have him record the interview for his YouTube channel as well, so if you'd rather watch instead of listen you can do that. There are a few times in the conversation where he demonstrates a little bit of what he's describing so there is an advantage to watching the video. As always though, I made sure to keep adding color commentary to what I was watching so you won't miss anything in the audio.

You can connect with Alec and find all of his content at takeonetech.io

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes us through some review in order to prepare us to begin our journey into test driven development (TDD) with the tool Jest which he's chosen for our TDD. He clears up some confusion on the difference between npm install and npm ci, and then he gives us more guidance on when to use which JSDoc tags, especially when documenting plain objects. He gives us a refresher on the different ways of defining functions, and especially arrow functions which are heavily used by Jest. Jest also uses function chaining heavily so he reminds us of how that works as well.

Even if you remember all of this and had it all clear in your head (I most definitely did _not_) it's great to have all of this content in one post as reference.

The next installment will continue firming up our foundation with some new concepts that are heavily used by Jest.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net

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In this final Programming By Stealth and final Chit Chat Across the Pond for 2021, Bart teaches us how to manage our documentation in JSDoc. As any good programmer, he insists on automating as much as he possibly can. He starts by showing us each step that we have to do at the command line, and methodically puts together a JSDoc configuration file that runs scripts and helps create documentation directories, and installs plugins.

Even better he helps us to configure JSDoc so that it will alert us if we make a mistake in our inline or block tags, since JSDoc by default just ignores those mistakes. Finally we walk through three different themes for our documentation and we actually choose one for the XKPASSWD project and he shows us how we can even modify the theme. It all has to do with Bart preferring blue over purple.

It's great fun, and really gives us the tool we need now to get ready for the next step. You can follow along with Bart's fabulous tutorial show notes pbs.bartificer.net.

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Adam Engst, publisher of the long-running Internet-based email newsletter, TidBITS joins us on Chit Chat Across the Pond to talk about an article he wrote for TidBITS about the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking.

Adam starts our conversation by taking us into the WABAC machine to learn about Project Xanadu which was the vision of Ted Nelson to link all information bidirectionally. Working off that foundational vision he explains that a group of developers and tech visionaries have created the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking as a way to encourage the concept of linking as much information as we can within and between apps and operating systems. At the link to the Manifesto, you can learn more about the originators, the vision, and the technical requirements for making this work. Adam even gives us a call to action at the end if we'd like to see this future realized.

I told Adam at the end of the conversation that I knew it was a great talk because my cheeks hurt from smiling talking to him.

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This week's Chit Chat Across the Pond is another installment of Programming By Stealth with Bart Busschots. In our last installment, Bart explained why good documentation matters to ourselves and to other developers who want to use our code, and he also explained that using an automatic document generator like JSDoc could help make it easier for us to write good documentation and to keep it up to date more easily.

In this week's installment, he starts to show us how to actually write JSDoc comments in line with our code. He explains the different elements of JSDoc comments and demonstrates how his own doc comments evolve as he figures out what he's trying to do. I really enjoyed this installment and his example is perfect for us nerds.

I highly recommend you follow along in Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net

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In late October, Facebook announced that The Facebook Company was name to Meta. A little bit later, Mark Zuckerberg published a video where he described his vision of the future metaverse. I haven't been following this too closely but it seems to be turning into something I might want to understand. I asked Tom Merritt, host of Daily Tech News Show and many other fine shows, to come on Chit Chat to try to make sense of these two things for us.

We talk about what the name change for Facebook really means and what it probably doesn't mean (is it just like Google becoming part of Alphabet?) Then Tom explains the vision of what the metaverse is expected to be. I thought it was a fascinating explanation and I learned a lot from talking to Tom.

During the conversation, Tom references his show Know a Little More where he explains complex technical topics in a short form, deep dive format. He talks in Chit Chat about NFTs and Blockchain, but suggests listening to his episodes on those topics if you want to, well, know a little more.

If you'd like all to find of Tom's podcasts, and the books he's written, you can find all of his work at tommerritt.com.

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As we embark on our journey to create a JavaScript module for the strong, memorable password generating service XKPASSWD, Bart explains the importance of creating good documentation. That sounds super annoying and tedious, and it is, so Bart explains why a good documentation generator will be our friend. He outlines the two distinctly different users of our documentation: those of us who will be helping to create the code itself as part of the community project, but also for the people who will be users of our JavaScript module. Those users will be interested in how to take the module and embed it into a web page to generate passwords, or to create an Alfred scheme and more. These two different users will have different requirements, and yet our documentation generator can fill both needs without unnecessary extra work. This isn't the sexiest topic, but Bart does convince me that the tools will help us to have the rigor to do it and not let our human instincts take over and allow our documentation to get out of date.

You can find Bart's fabulous shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net

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Bart Busschots had a vision that certain things we would learn in Phase 2 of Programming By Stealth would be taught by guest lecturers. I thought he was bananas that this would work, but Helma Van der Linden, also known as Helma from the Netherlands stepped up to teach us about coding linters, and specifically ESLint.

In this installment she explains what linters are, and why they're useful. Even though she's not technically fond of them, she believes in linters because of what they can do for a coding team. Once she sells that idea, she walks us through how to install ESLint inside the development environment VSCode. From there she explains style guides, and shows us how to install and use the very popular airbnb style guide. She gives us tips on usage and even how to override the linter's demands.

I think it was incredibly courageous to fill Bart's shoes, and she did a fantastic job both in the podcast and in the detailed written show notes over at bartificer.net

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This week I'm pleased to have Chris Ashley and Rod Simmons on the Chit Chat Across the Pond. You may know them from the SMR Podcast they do with Robb Dunewood, or you may remember them from their frequent appearances on Chit Chat Across the Pond to talk tech.

They're joining me today to talk about their brand new podcast, BBQ and Tech. I've also asked Steve (the husband) to join us because he's really enjoying what the guys are teaching, while I'm just the beneficiary in the eating part.

This episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond hits on a lot of the high points of what Chris and Rod are teaching in BBQ and Tech. The difference between grilling and barbecuing (also known as smoking), some of the different options for getting started in barbecue, and how the tech angle comes into the show.

Chris and Rod have been friends since they were 5 years old and they've been barbecuing together for a very long time. This friendship makes listening to them talk about barbecue a real joy.

During the show we talked about the Meater 4-probe Bluetooth to WiFi range extension thermometers, so here's a BBQ and Tech Amazon Affiliate link so you can put it on your holiday wish list: amazon.com/...

MEATER Block | 4-Probe Premium Smart Meat Thermometer | Bluetooth to WiFi Range Extension | for The Oven, Grill, Kitchen, BBQ, Smoker, Rotisserie

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This installment of Programming By Stealth could probably have been two segments but all of us are itching to get moving quickly so we decided to power through. In the first part of the installment, Bart introduces us to JavaScript modules by giving us a bit of a history lesson on how they've evolved. If you're brand new to modules, this will be interesting but not essential. If you have history with them though, you'll definitely need to pay close attention to understand what's changed.

Then Bart gets into the details of how modules work. He explains how JavaScript modules export variables, functions, and classes and how there are named exports and default exports and how the syntax differs. What fun would learning about exports be if he didn't tell us how to import variables, functions and classes into our code for when we use these modules? We also learn about module specifiers to make it all go.

Finally, Bart takes us through three worked examples where he creates some JavaScript modules that exercise everything we just learned.

It's a long episode but as always, Bart's excellent show notes at pbs.bartificer.net

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Doc Rock joins me for a fantastic discussion on Chit Chat Across the Pond. I asked Doc on the show originally to come on and explain ProRes video to me, but Apple delighted us by dropping the new M1 Max Macs and M1 Pro Macs the same day we were scheduled to record.

We do spend a little bit of time talking about ProRes video where Doc explains what all those number people have been bandying about, like 4-4-4-4 and XQ. I really understood when he was done explaining to a video muggle like me.

Then we take the least linear path through the MacBook Pro announcements you can imagine. It was positively delightful as we dug into specific specs and what they mean and who should care all the time bouncing around between the different options. I loved every single minute of tis conversation.

You can find Doc Rock everywhere on the Internets @DocRock, especially his YouTube channel where he helps people learn to live stream like a boss. He'd also love it if you checked out his new audio podcast called Creator 50 where he encourage people of a more mature age learn to share their stories. You can find it at the link in the shownotes, or just search for Creator 50 in your podcatcher of choice.

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As we launch full steam into Phase 2 of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots introduces us to the Node Package Manager and Node itself. Unlike our mini-series within a series for Git and Chezmoi, Bart isn't going to do an exhaustive walk through NPM and Node. Instead he's going to teach use what we need as we go along. In order for that to make any sense at all, in this installment, he explain to us at a high level Node and NPM are, and what problems they solve.

This lesson isn't all theory though, we actually get to use Node and NPM to build a tiny, self-contained JavaScript app. I had great fun in this installment and Bart's always fabulous tutorial shownotes are particularly well-written this time. You can find them over at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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At episode 700! of Chit Chat Across the Pond we take Programming By Stealth into what Bart is calling Phase 2. We've learned a great deal about the client side of programming and we're now going to move to the server side of the web. As Bart described Phase 2, I realized that it's as though we've finished out undergraduate work in computer science, and we're entering graduate school.

That observation is not based on the concepts being harder, but rather because we are going to work as a collective to help our professor on a project that's near and dear to his heart. Bart created the fabulous web-based password creation tool at xkpasswd.net many years ago, in fact so long ago that it's on a very creaky set of tools that have been deprecated and the entire service will die if it doesn't move onto modern tools.

This will be a great excuse for us to learn to work on the new tools as Bart is forced to learn them and at the same time we will be enlisted to help him with the development of the new and improved xkpasswd.

I was really excited as I listened to Bart lay out the future of the next 100 or so episodes and everything we're going to learn. Whether you've been working alongside the rest of the listeners since Programming By Stealth 1, or whether you're a seasoned programmer who'd like to learn the new tools like Bootstrap 5 and PHP 8, I think you'll have great fun with the next phase of Programming By Stealth.

You can find Bart's strategic plan for Phase 2 laid out at bartificer.net

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In this final episode of Programming By Stealth before we launch into the back end of web development with PHP, Bart finishes his miniseries on Chezmoi to manage dot files. In this installment he teaches us how to effectively manage our dot files on multiple computers using templating to ensure that the correct settings end up on every computer.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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Bart has been really excited to teach this next installment of Programming By Stealth where we really dig into learning about Chezmoi templates, including learning functions and arguments, how to declare variables, looping over arrays, and learning the sprig utility functions to extend Chezmoi. I thought he was going to jump out of his chair he was so happy to teach pipelines which are a grand way of embedding function statements in a way that is very human-readable.

This is our penultimate installment on Chezmoi, where next time we'll be learning how to manage our dot files across multiple computers where not everything is the same between computers, but much of it is.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes to follow along at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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CCATP #697 for August 23, 2021, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. This week our guest is Bodie Grimm. Along with being a podcaster who specializes in the news about electric vehicles on his show the Kilowatt Podcast, Bodie is a firefighter and engineer on a ladder truck. He is in a unique position to answer some of my questions about fires in internal combustion vehicles. We also talked about the new investigation by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) into 11 reported accidents where Teslas ran into emergency vehicles.

Bodie is super knowledgeable and has a lot of experience that's relevant to our conversation, and he's an awful lot of fun.

You can find Bodie's Kilowatt podcast in your podcatcher of choice, and you can follow him on Twitter @918digital and you can email him at bodie@918digital.com.

During our conversation he mentioned the Emergency Field Guide available for download here: catalog.nfpa.org/...

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In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots continues his instruction on how to use the open source tool Chezmoi to manage our dot files, those hidden configuration files on our Macs. In this installment, Bart teaches us how nearly effortless it is to sync our Chezmoi-managed dot files up to a private repo on GitHub. Seriously, it's like 2 steps.

Bart then teaches us how Chezmoi supports templating. When Bart started to describe it, I said, "Oh! It's just like mail merge in Microsoft Office!" He laughed, and said he hoped I would say that.

With Chezmoi, let's say you have your email address in a bunch of your dot files, and you need to change it to a different address. If you use Chezmoi's templating feature, you can create one file with your email address and in every dot file you reference that address, and only have to change it in one place. Bart walks us through a couple of worked examples to help us see exactly how it works and get a little practice.

The next episode of Programming By Stealth will end this mini-series within a series, and if Bart's work manages to finally slow down to where he can get some good thinking time, we should start up learning about PHP shortly after that.

As always you can read along with Bart's spectacular tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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In our previous installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart introduced us to Chezmoi, an open source tool to help us manage dot files, those hidden configuration files that get created on our Macs. Configuration files contain information about how we like our Macs configured, including where to access our ssh keys and our preferred command line editor and more. If we move between computers it would be nice to have the same configuration, or if we do a clean install it would be great to be able to have these dot files in place on our newly-formatted machines.

He teased us last time though but just introducing us to Chezmoi and not letting us do much. In this installment he lets us take Chezmoi out for a spin. We edit an environment variable to set our preferred text editor, and then use Chezmoi to talk to Git to add and then commit those changes. Along with more changes and actions with Chezmoi, Bart works hard to cement the terminology of Chezmoi because without it, it's easy to not realize what Chezmoi is doing under the hood and it could cause problems in the future.

You can find the shownotes for this episode at pbs.bartificer.net/....

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This week our guest is Dr. Niki Ackermans. Dr. Ackermans is a Postdoctoral fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City. Her current work focuses on the anatomy and neuroscience of traumatic brain injury in head butting animals. She is also the science correspondent for the Daily Tech News Show, and hosted the Seniors in Tech series on DTNS, including interviewing NosillaCastaway Sandy Foster and me. She’s also the host of the podcast Stories Your Granny Never Told.

Niki tells us about her research doing MRIs on ox and sheep brains and studying CT scans of their skulls to determine the effect of head butting on their brains and whether they suffer the same kinds of concussions as humans. The hope is to try to help humans who suffer concussions, including football players and people in the service.

This sounds like a creepy topic but Niki is absolutely delightful as she describes her delight in her work and how much fun it is. She's entertaining and funny and brilliant. I learned so much and I smiled the whole time.

You can find her on Twitter at @ackermansnicole

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As we've become nerdier while learning from Bart, we had started to add hidden configuration files to our Macs and PCs. On the Mac, these configuration files hidden by default by putting a dot in front of them, and hence they are called dot files. Maybe you've stored your ssh keys, or in our Git series you created a user-level gitconfig file, or perhaps you've installed VS Code or Sourcetree which also add hidden configuration files.

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart explains the problem to be solved of how we manage these configuration files if we use multiple computers or migrate to a new computer or do a nuke and pave. He lays the groundwork for why he loves the dot file manager called Chezmoi from chezmoi.io.

The installment is a bit of a tease because after learning why we want to have a dot file management tool and why Bart favors Chezmoi for the job, he only lets us install it and run two commands before he says, "And next time we'll start to use Chezmoi."

You can read along with Bart's tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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A few weeks ago I told Bart off the air that when he was done with his mini-series within a series all about the version control system Git, I'd like a few minutes with him offline so he could explain how to ignore files in Git. I knew there was a way to do it but he hadn't covered it so I assumed it was just something quick he could explain to me. His reaction surprised me, he said, "D'oh!" because he realized that this is a _very_ important part of using Git and that he would definitely dedicate an installment to it.

So this week Bart teaches us how to use .gitignore to tell Git _not_ to track changes to files and folders. He explains that there are files your computer or even your code editor may be creating that you don't want Git to track, and of course there all of the dummy test files we as humans create that would not be something we'd want to share with our co-workers or fellow open source contributors.

I was nervous about using git ignore because I understood it relied on patterns, and I thought that would mean something along the lines of using Regular Expressions, which are kind of daunting. I shouldn't have been worried, .gitignore patterns definitely don't require any heavy lifting.

I was really looking forward to this installment and it didn't disappoint.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Melissa Davis, aka TheMacMommy joins me to give us her tips for setting up an iPhone for a "Vintage User", in a dignified way. If you've ever heard Melissa on the Geekiest Show Ever podcast she does with Elisa Pacelli, you know she's a fantastic resource to the community. Her gentle voice and compassionate personality can help guide us in helping our vintage friends and family. She's got concrete, specific suggestions for how to configure the phone and how to listen to the person you're helping so you can ensure that the phone will bring them joy when you're done.

Mellisa actually wrote up all of these tips as a reference guide for after you listen, and the notes include even more suggestions that we didn't get to in the episode. Even if you don't need to help anyone with their phone right now, I am sure you'll enjoy listening to Melissa describe how she helps others.

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As promised, Bart takes us through the final step in our GitHub journey - learning how to contribute to an open source project. He explains three open source scenarios: using someone's code exactly as-is, using their code with a few customizations of your own, and finally the most interesting scenario, customizing the code and contributing your customizations back to the project.

When he gets to the final scenario, he gives us a way to practice these newly-acquired skills, and it's something he's wanted to do for a long time. He's created a gallery for all Programming By Stealth listeners to contribute their work they've done in the various challenges we've worked in Programming By Stealth. If you have your code from the challenges for Conway's Game of Life, the number guessing game, the currency converter, the currency grid, the world clock or the time sharing clock, we'd love to have you contribute to the PBS gallery to show off your work.

Bart explains that the GitHub Pages he's created will allow us to fork his code, make our own changes, and then create what's called a pull request to get them accepted into the official PBS Gallery at gallery.pbs.bartificer.net. I worked through the process for one of my projects and it was definitely a learning experience, which is the whole point of Programming By Stealth.

Bart's fantastic tutorial shownotes are availale at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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This week we have a very different episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite. On the awesome Kilowatt podcast (a show all about electric vehicles), host Bodie Grimm asked me and my husband Steve to be his guests on the show. You really shouldn't be listening to it here, you should go subscribe to the Kilowatt podcast instead and listen to it there, but he _insisted_ that we should share the love and he let me broadcast it for you here as well.

The Kilowatt Podcast is _not_ just about Teslas, it's about electric vehicles in general. You'll learn about all kinds of EVs from all different manufacturers. You'll get the latest news and breakthroughs in technologies in the EV space. I highly recommend subscribing to the Kilowatt Podcast if you're at all interested in electric vehicles.

Bodie asked us to come on the Kilowatt Podcast to talk about what we _don't_ like about our Teslas, the fiddly bits if you will. You know we love our Model 3 and Model Y but there are definitely things we wish were different. I know a lot of you out there are big fans of Steve so this is a rare opportunity to hear him in front of a microphone.

Steve and I had a blast recording with Bodie and we hope you'll enjoy it as well.

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us how to use a free service of GitHub called GitHub Pages. This service literally gives you free web hosting for the web apps we've learned to make in Programming By Stealth. Bart starts by explaining to us the difference between static and dynamic webpages, and web pages created by static site generators like Jekyll which generates GitHub Pages.

It's trivially easy to create a GitHub Page from an open GitHub repo (literally three clicks in the interface) but it's really important to understand what you're doing when you take advantage of this service. We'll learn what you can do and what you can't do and what you could do if you choose to dig deeper into the woods on how to use Jekyll to generate GitHub Pages.

I'm really excited to learn about GitHub Pages and how easy it is to host all of the web apps we've created in this series.

You can find the shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Mikah Sargent joins us to explain why he's so excited about what the new technology called Thread is going to bring to the Internet of Things, or IoT. You may know Mikah from the awesome show Clockwise with Dan Moren, or perhaps iOS Today with Rosemary Orchard or Smart Tech Today with Matthew Cassinelli on the TWiT network.

Mikah starts with the problem to be solved – slow Bluetooth devices vs. heavy WiFi devices and troublesome network connectivity. He explains how Thread will solve these problems, both at an overarching vision level as well as getting down into the nerdy bits of how Thread does its magic. We'll learn about sleepy Thread devices, Thread Border routers, and what it means when you see "Works with Matter."

If you want to follow Mikah online, you can go to chihuahua.coffee and find him on all social media @mikahsargent.

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In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us how to use GitHub as a public repository for our code, or for anything we write for that matter. He reviews whey he chose Github, and then we dig right in. He does explain the benefits of using SSH to access Github instead of HTTPS, and if you haven't set up SSH keys before or you're rusty on the topic, he includes links to our sibling show, Taming the Terminal where you can learn how to do it.

We create a new repo from scratch in Github on the web with a README file and a license, and then we get to use a command line version of Github called gh. With gh we pull the repo down from Github, we edit the files, we commit them locally, and push them back up to Github all from the command line. We then flip the tables and from the command line create another repo directly on Github, create some files, set them up to track and push and pull again to prove it's working.

It's surprisingly easy and simple. Bart teases us with the next episode where we'll learn how to create a website using Github pages, which will give us a nice place to host our web apps for free. You can follow along with Bart's fabulous shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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In previous installments of our Git miniseries within a series in Programming By Stealth, Bart taught us how to work in Git standalone on one computer, then how to work as one developer with multiple computers. In those installments he taught us the necessary commands and their importance in the Git scheme of things. In this installment he talks about how and where to work with a team in Git. We learn about the plethora of options from free to full enterprise-size Git-as-a-service, and why he'll be focusing on Github for the future. He explains how important it is to set up conventions for your team (before you start) for things like coding styles, development paradigm and more. There's no coding in this episode as it's more philosophical than other episodes.

You can find Bart's fabulous shownotes over at pbs.bartificer.net/pbs115.

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When Bart started this mini-series within a series on using Git for version control, he explained that our journey would be in three Phases. Phase 1 was the section where we learned about local repositories, and Phase two was dedicated to learning how to have multiple repositories just for ourselves. In this lesson, we finish up Phase 2 by learning how to push and pull changes from our imaginary desktop to our imaginary NAS to our imaginary laptop and back. I slowed down the class a few times with some confusion I had, but Bart always claims that my confusion often helps other people who might be hung up on the same thing. I enjoyed myself immensely, even when I was confused!

We are about to enter Phase 3 where we will learn how to collaborate with others. We'll be doing this collaboration using Github, because it's pretty much the defacto home for most open source projects. When you're done listening to PBS #115 and studying the shownotes, you might want to get yourself a Github account so you can be ready for the next lesson.

As always you can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes for this lesson at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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This week's guest is Christophe Zajek-Denek. Christophe worked as a TV producer while touring in a rock band, he’s a drummer, an actor and stuntman, a surfer, a journalist, a podcaster, and public speaker. He's also 4’4” tall and has a rare form of dwarfism. Christophe hosts an amazing podcast entitled "I'm Kind of a Big Deal" in which he interviews amazing little people doing really cool things. From actors to professional surfboarders, he learns about their lives, their professions and has a good laugh with every one. He's also done several shows describing the surgeries he's had to endure and how grateful he is to his parents for having them done.

We talked about how to stand when talking to little people, how people stare at little people, his surgeries, little people in acting, and pedal extenders so he can drive. We laughed a lot but the conversation gets deep and introspective as well. I had a blast and I think Christophe did too.

You can follow Christophe on Twitter @BigDealPod and Instagram @BigDealPod

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This week's guest is Doc Rock to talk about the Apple Spring Loaded Event. Doc's background in all things Apple as well as high end live video makes him the perfect person to talk about this event. He explains to me how this color calibration of our TVs using our iPhones and an Apple TV will work, we talk about whether the cool colors of the iMacs might be a distraction to photographers, how the coolest thing that got nearly zero air time was having Ethernet over a MagSafe connector, how much we'll all want the new keyboard with Touch ID but how it will only work with M1 Macs, and Doc tries to convince me that I need a 1TB 12.9" iPad Pro.

The discussion is not a linear walk through the event, but more of a meandering talk about what interested us and to tell stories to each other. I had an absolute blast, and I can prove Doc had fun too because he suggested we get together after the next two Apple events this year. I think you'll get a big kick out of this conversation.

Everything good starts with docrock.live!

YouTube: docrock.live/YouTube
Facebook: docrock.live/group
LinkedIn: docrock.live/linkedin
Instagram: docrock.live/insta
Twitter: docrock.live/twt

During the conversation when we talked about the Mini LEDs of the new iPad Pro, I said I'd put a link in the shownotes to Tom Merritt's Know a Little More episode about Mini LEDs.

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We continue on our journey to learn how to use Git to do version control as a single person, but this time with multiple devices. As Bart says during this episode, "Who is learning to program here who doesn't have multiple computers?" We've learned how to push our changes to a single separate repo, but we had to always say what branch we wanted to push to what branch on the origin. In this installment we learn how to tell Git to _track_ our branches so they stay in sync without us having to tell Git every time which branches to push where. We also learn how to make sure our annotated tags get pushed as well by setting a single repo or all Git repos on our computers to push our tags. Bart leaves us with a big tease at the end. We learn how to clone a repo in preparation for having two computers accessing the same code in Git with a primary source acting as the go between for them.

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This week our guest is Gregg Vanderheiden, Professor and Director Trace R&D Center at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.

Listen to Gregg talk about Morphic at 19:40 on the NosillaCast
You can find more about the Trace Institute at trace.umd.edu/...
The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure at gpii.net/...
His work on the Morphic project (coming into beta in just two weeks) at morphic.org/...
You can follow Morphic on Twitter @mymorphic or Gregg's very infrequent tweets at @Greggvan.

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Last time on Programming By Stealth, Bart introduced the concept of remote repositories, also known as remotes. It was one of those episodes where we learned a lot but didn't get to apply what we learned. In this week's installment we get our hands digitally dirty as we create a _bare repository_ (a repo with no working tree), and declare it to be a backup of our local repo. We learn how to fetch and view remote branches and tags, how to push everything to the remote, and then after making some changes, push them to our remote backup. We're still in a bit of a sandbox as we do all this on one computer inside a couple of local folders, but the lessons exercise our new muscles to get ready for the big leagues.

Bart's excellent tutorial show notes are as always available at pbs.bartificer.net/...

[audio mp3="https://media.blubrry.com/nosillacast/traffic.libsyn.com/nosillacast/CCATP_2021_04_03.mp3"]

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Matt Campbell is a blind software developer who has specialized in making computers more accessible to blind people for over 20 years. He was the lead developer for Serotek for 15 years, where he developed several affordable and easy-to-use products, including a Windows screen reader and an online community for blind people. More recently, he was a developer on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft, where he contributed to Narrator, the screen reader built into Windows. Now he’s the co-founder and chief technology officer of Pneuma Solutions, which is working to make online meetings and documents fully accessible.

Matt wanted to be on the show to talk about two things: Accessibility Overlays and Cloudflare's Remote Browser Isolation project. Accessibility Overlays are intended to help companies pass accessibility standard tests, but according to Matt, they often actually make websites _less_ accessible. He's written an open source browser extension for Chrome and Edge called Accessibyebye that will disable these overlays if they make your web browsing problematic. In the conversation he references a blog post about the problems at adrianroselli.com/...

He's also trying to raise awareness about a huge problem with a product from Cloudflare called Remote Browser Isolation. This technology is designed to help companies protect their employees from browser-based attacks, replacing VPNs. But the way it accomplishes this is problematic for accessibility. The idea is that your employees browse to a website but the URL request goes to Cloudflare instead, where it navigates to the site. Cloudflare renders the site, and then sends only JavaScript draw commands to your browser. This means the original elements are not sent to your web browser, which means screenreaders have nothing to read, and mobility tools have nothing to connect with. Matt is in the beta and has tested it himself, and I've signed up for the beta so I can see this for myself.

You can find Matt on Twitter at @mw_campbell

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In this next installment in our mini-series on learning Git, Bart Busschots gives us some foundational knowledge on how to work beyond being one person with one Git repository.

He starts by reinforcing what he's explained before, that Git is a peer-to-peer technology, which is hard to wrap your head around if you're used to client-server relationships. He walks us through three scenarios to explain how every "actor" gets a repository and why. Then he explains the jargon of "local" vs "remotes". It's at this point that my head started to hurt, but Bart claims this is where I'm value-added to the podcast. I ask all the questions you might have, and I suspect many more than you have. Bart sticks with me and makes sure I fully understand.

You can find Bart's tutorial show notes at: pbs.bartificer.com

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This week our guest is Jill McKinley, aka Jill from the North Woods. I’ve been using a Mac since 1984, and other than a 3-year stint using Windows Vista at work, I’ve been heads down in the Mac operating system all that time. Jill has recently bought her first Mac, which as is usually the case turned into a second Mac purchase. She is still straddling both operating systems and honestly not using macOS too much yet. I thought it would be fun to have her come on and chat about what it’s been like to learn macOS and the differences and challenges she’s finding.

If you'd like to chat with Jill, the best place is in the Podfeet Slack. Join us at podfeet.com/slack.

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In the last Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Lindsay Tondee made her debut appearance where we talked about working from home. After the show published, Allister Jenks wrote to me and told me that halfway through listening he had to stop and start writing down notes for a recording he would have to make talking about his views on the same subject.

I forwarded Allister's message to Lindsay and then I connected the two of them and before I knew what was happening they had decided that we were going to do a three-way Chit Chat Across the Pond! Allister comes from a completely different perspective as someone who has worked far from his team for many years. We talk about what works and what doesn't for him in his capacity doing IT support, from a technology perspective and even from a "how to stop people from asking you questions they could find answers for on their own" perspective.

You can follow Lindsay on Twitter @idahomonkees and you can find Allister at zkarj.me and on Twitter at @zkarj.

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Bart Busschots joins us for Chit Chat Across the Pond in an episode of what he calls "Programming Adjacent". It's not about programming, it's actually about cooking and not wasting food. But Bart, being a programmer, approaches the problem like a programmer. I guarantee you that no one else on earth approaches cooking and food inventory in the same way as Bart. It was great fun to learn how he does it and to contrast it to how in my house, two engineers have come up with a completely different systems.

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Lindsay Tondee, Senior Manager in Quality Assurance at a global pharmaceutical company, joins us to talk about whether it's a good or a bad thing that companies are thinking about having their workforce continue to work from home indefinitely. I originally thought this would be a great thing because we'll have fewer cars on the road, less traffic and pollution, office buildings won't be needed and people gain hours of their life back because they're not spending it commuting in their cars.

Lindsay explains what is missed when you work from home and the benefits of a blended model where people work only partly from home. She talks about the issues surrounding building relationships at work that help people get things done, and how the fun activities of her office have been transformed into safe-distance fun. She also talks about how much more challenging it becomes if two people are working from home in the same small house.

We don't come up with all the answers but I found it to be fascinating to throw these ideas around with someone who is currently in the middle of figuring this out for herself and for her employees.

And one more thing, Lindsay Tondee is a frequent attendee of the live NosillaCast - known as "Lindsay (the daughter)". If you want to chat with her, the best way is through the live chat on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific time podfeet.com/live and you can follow her on Twitter at @idahomonkees.

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In 2017 on Taming the Terminal installment 37 of n, Bart taught us about SSH agents and the advantages of using a passphrase to further protect your SSH keys. In the intervening four years, things have changed a bit in macOS, so we decided to do a supplemental update to installment 37. We review a bit about what SSH Keys are (from installment 30) and then discuss how much easier and cleaner things are on macOS with the clean integration of your identity, passphrase and Apple's Keychain.

You can find the replaced show notes for TTT 37 at ttt.bartificer.net/...

If you've downloaded the Taming the Terminal book, please go to podfeet.com/tttbook to get a fresh version.

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This week the tables are turned and you'll actually hear me being interviewed. I was asked to be on the Magic Mac Show, which is on the American Council of the Blind's streaming radio channel. Hosts Tyson Ernst, Katie Frederick and Jason Castonguay asked me on so they could learn about how I got interested in accessibility and what it's helped me do.

During the latter part of the show, they do something terrifying - they allow live audience listeners to call in and ask questions! I've always been afraid of that, but Debbie Hazelton, managing director for ACB Radio does a great job of moderating the callers.

You can learn more about ACB radio at www.acbradio.org/... and more about the American Council of the Blind at ACB.org. With that, here's the interview, at the permission of ACB Radio.CCATP #671 – Allison Sheridan on American Council of the Blind Radio

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This week our guest on Chit Chat Across the Pond is Ken Ray, host of the macOS Ken Podcast, hosted at macosken.com. You may have been wondering why Ken had never been on Chit Chat Across the Pond before, but I just wanted to make sure he was going to stick with it. Since he just hit his 15 year anniversary of doing macOS Ken, I decided it was probably safe to have him on the show. I asked Ken to come on the show to walk us through Apple's record-breaking quarterly earnings call and what the big numbers mean. How big IS $110B? What drove Mac sales up 21%? What drove the services numbers so high?

You can find Ken Ray on Twitter @macosken https://macosken.com

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us how Git can help us when we forget to switch to the correct branch before starting to make changes to our code. We're only human, and we will forget, and Git's stash command allows us to set our changes aside, switch to or even create and switch to the correct branch and then apply our changes. His explanations and repetition in the exercises really cement the knowledge. As a bonus tip, he teaches us how to make shell variables inside the Terminal which will help us with some of the repetitive typing in the future.

Bart's tutorial shownotes are at pbs.bartificer.net/pbs111

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth Bart teaches us how to deal with conflicts in branches of our code. He has been purposely only changing one thing at a time before now, but it's time to face the reality of when two branches change the same line in the same file. I've been terrified of this topic for a long time, but Bart shows us how easy it is to see exactly what the conflict is, how you can back out of merging if you make "a pig's breakfast" of it, and how to resolve your conflicts without fear. It's not nearly as terrifying as I thought it would be.

You can find Bart's tutorial show notes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

And if you learn a lot from Bart, please consider becoming a patron of his by going to www.patreon.com/...

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This week our guest for Chit Chat Across the Pond is Mike Price, also known as @Grumpy in the podfeet slack and our live show chat room. During the live NosillaCast, I have to perform a super repetitive set of tasks to add chapter marks as I'm recording the show. If you enjoy there _being_ chapter marks, you should give partial thanks to Mike, because he figured out how to automate the process for me using Keyboard Maestro from keyboardmaestro.com/...

The thing that fascinated me was that he didn't know Keyboard Maestro before creating this automation for me. In this conversation he explains what Keyboard Maestro is, how he learned it, and what you can do with it. I asked him to break down each panel of the software for me methodically and explain the interface, because while I've done some super simple automations with Keyboard Maestro, the interface continues to confuse me.

David Sparks has one of his famous Field Guides on Keyboard Maestro, which are really mini-video tutorials. Mike watched David's Field Guide to learn the tool, so I've included my affiliate link in case you want to learn from the great MacSparky yourself: learn.macsparky.com/...

Mike is funny, articulate, and a brilliant developer. We used a Google Doc to collaborate on an outline, and Mike added enough detail that I think it could be really valuable for you as a reference guid for our discussion so I've included it in the shownotes: CCATP notes with Mike at docs.google.com/...

Mike also promised to provide the Keyboard Maestro macros that he talked about during the show: DoNotifications, Grumpy's Hindy Chapter Marks, and possibly the most useful, his XKPasswd Macros to connect to Bart's awesome password creation tool. Here's a link to a zip file of his macros - remember to be cautious when downloading macros from the Internet so check them carefully before enabling them!

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We continue our mini-series within a series learning the version control system Git. We learn two methods to enhance our branching strategy. First, we'll walk through some basic principles on how to number our released versions of our code. From there we'll explore three types of changes that would cause a change in our release version: fixes, new features, and breaking changes. Each of these types of updates to the version of our code can be articulated with Semantic Versioning, also known as SerVer. This numbering convention informs users of our code on the meaning of each release. Finally, we marry these concepts by creating meaningful commit messages using another convention called Conventional Commits. Not only can a user of our code see at a glance what happened in a specific commit, documentation can be auto-formatted to explain the commits.

There's not a lot of hands-on in this lesson but as a structured person, I really appreciate these conventions and why they're important.

You can find Bart's tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots continues on his series within a series explaining the version control system Git. We advance in our branching strategy by working several commits on our dev branch and then learn to use a merge commit to bring only the final commit into the main branch, leaving the half-working intermediate commits to exist only on the dev branch. This process illustrates the need to learn about tags, both light-weight and annotated. Once we understand how these tags work and their importance, we evolve our PBS branching strategy one step further.

Bart's tutorial shownotes are available at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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This week's guest is Tom Merritt, prolific podcaster, author, and lover of dogs. I asked Tom to come on the show to explain how on earth he does as much as he does. We walk through all of his podcasts, what he has to do to prepare for them, and how he makes the time to get all of them done. He talks about the research required for each of them and even how some require him to watch TV. On top of podcasting, he's an author, he walks his dogs, he exercises, and even spends time with his wife, Eileen.

You can find links to all of Tom's shows at tommerritt.com/... and his books at tommerrittbooks.com/.... You can follow Tom on Twitter @acedtect

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This week in our miniseries on learning the version control system Git, Bart dips our proverbial toe into branching. Branches allow us, as developers, to work on bugs or feature enhancements in a separate place from our stable code, and only merge the code back in when the bugs are squashed or the features are stable.

We don't get much practice in this instalment, but rather Bart talks to us about the idea of having a strategy for when to branch and how to name your branches in order to prevent chaos. He gives us some simple and yet difficult to adhere to strategies and then takes us through more rigorous strategies that will actually be easier to follow. He emphasizes that he's not telling us which strategy to follow, but rather to have a strategy.

We do a few small examples from the command line, but we get to open our Git GUI clients, like GitKraken and Sourcetree and see how the commands we're typing are graphically represented in the clients. It's a good illustration of what Bart has been promising us – that the GUI clients are doing exactly what the command line is doing.

You can find Bart's tutorial shownotes at https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbs107. And if you'd like to support Bart on Patreon, go to patreon.com/ltpod.

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This week Rod Simmons of the SMR Podcast smrpodcast.com/... joins me to talk about our tips and tricks for doing effective screen casting. We started by going through some more strategic ideas on how to get your message across with a screencast, and then we dug into some of the techniques and tools we use to edit our screencasts.

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As we continue to learn Git from the command line for version control, Bart teaches us some tricks to travel through time. First he shows us how to view more compact Git logs so we can just see a shortened hash and the first line of our commit message. Then he shows us how to pick out a single commit from the past and see what changed. Then he shows us how, with surgical precision, we can go back in time and get a single file or even just the changes from a specific commit and bring them forward in time. It sounds head bendy but I could immediately see the usefulness of going back in time and grabbing some code that was working well and bringing it forward.

You can read Bart's tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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It wouldn’t be an Apple announcement week without Lory Gil joining us, managing editor of iMore. We start the conversation by talking about what all of the new M1 Macs have in common, which is much more than we're used to seeing. Then we talk about what System on a Chip (SoC) actually means and why it's so important to us. There is a very subtle, but possibly important difference between the 256GB and 512GB storage models of the MacBook Air, which makes it even more interesting to decide between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Air that were just announced. We explore why Apple never said the word "gigahertz" and how that makes the nerds crazy because we can't compare the models to the previous Intel-based Macs. We explore the future just a bit and start dreaming of the next models Apple will release.

You can follow the wonderful Lory Gil at @appaholik and even email her at lory@imore.com. She has really enjoyed hearing from those of you who have written to her.

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Bart takes us on a time traveling adventure with Git. By using commands like git diff we can see changes over time, but we can actually see older versions of the code in a couple of ways. Using the archive command we learned out to pull just the files at a certain point in time (without the history) and the more terrifying checkout command that creates a "detached HEAD"! Bart even explains why that phrase was introduced and what it actually means. This was a fun lesson and a good foundation for what we'll learn next time, when we'll learn about stashing and branching to control the past and future.

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In our next baby step in learning to use the version control system Git, Bart teaches us how to track changes. We start by doing a bit of housekeeping, especially for Mac users to set Git to always ignore those pesky .DS_Store files. We learn how to stage and then commit a simple change, then we stage and commit multiple changes and even learn to see the differences in our staged files from the database all from the command line.

While we all think we're capable of making one structural change and then committing our changes, Bart knows that it isn't going to happen. But there's still a way to follow Helma's advice to "commit early and commit often". Bart teaches us how to divide the changes we inevitably make into separate commits with separate comments so we can figure out what we did later.

I enjoyed this installment because I could tell it was laying a very important foundation of understanding. You can follow along with Bart's famous shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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Lory Gil, managing editor from iMore is back to talk about the new toys announced by Apple this week. In a show where we do NOT talk about 5G we instead talk about how cool it is that Apple brought so many features to the entire product line of iPhones, and then we go deep into a couple of the differences between the models. We talk about magnetometers, nano ceramic crystals and more nerdy terms. Lory speculates on what fun things we'll get out of the MagSafe connector - like maybe we can stick our phones to our refrigerators. I nerd out a bit on size and weight specs (did you know the 12 is 12% thinner than the 11, and the 12 Pro is 9.4% thinner than the 11 Pro?

In any case, we had a blast together as we always do, and she promised to come back when Apple announces the new Silicon-based Macs, which John Prosser's rumor says will be on November 17th.

If you'd like to interact with Lory, you can follow her on Twitter @appaholik, you can email her at lory@imore.com and of course you can read her work at imore.com.

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After some quick revision from the previous episode, Bart explains how Git commands work with their subcommands. We start by looking at how to configure Git and the differences between local, global and system-level settings. Then we create our very first repo with an exciting README file, and we commit the file to our repo. It's a fairly simple lesson while laying down a good foundation for all future work.

You can find the shownotes for this installment at PBS 103 of X — Getting Started With Git

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This week our guest is Jill McKinley of the Start with Small Steps Podcast at smallstepspod.com. Those of you who listen to the NosillaCast may already know her from her many fantastic tech reviews for the show as Jill from the North Woods.

I'm a fan of the Start With Small Steps podcast thought it would be fun to have Jill to come on to talk about what it's like to start a podcast in 2020. All of my experience and knowledge about starting is 15 years old so I was curious what it's like now. We talked about why she wanted to do a podcast in the first place, what kind of hardware and software she's using for her recordings, and how she makes her podcast feed. We get into style of reading vs. bullet points and even into editing a little bit. We talked about community engagement and whether to obsess on download statistics. We learn from Jill how important it is to her to always give attribution to her sources.

Jill mentioned that she uses her iPad with an app as a teleprompter. It's called PromptSmart .Pro and is available in the App Store for $20. There's also a lite version of PromptSmart in the App Store.

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In our last Programming By Stealth we learned about the concept of version control, and the evolution from client/server version control to peer-to-peer version control and the creation of Git. In this installment we start learning the fundamental concepts of Git. We learn about the database, the working copy, and the index and understanding the difference is critical to effectively using Git. We also dig into the Git database and begin to learn the terminology inside it, which oddly uses normal English words but those words might not mean what you think they mean. We gain an understanding of why Git uses SHA1 hashes but not for encryption. We start to get into the power of Git as we learn about commits, staging, stashes, and tags.

We didn't get to play with Git yet but the challenge is to install Git and if you want the extra credit, choose and download one ore more Git GUI clients.

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With the new announcements of Apple Watches, iPads and services like Fitness+ and Apple One, the best person to talk to is Lory Gil, managing editor of iMore. In this episode we talk about whether the new Apple Watch Series 6 processor matters, or is it the new colors that excite us. Is Apple doing a good job bringing out lower-priced products for those with less disposable income or are they doing it wrong? Family setup allows a child or an elderly parent have an Apple Watch that makes phone calls but they don't need an iPhone. Is this a solution for your family? The new Apple One service bundle appears to be exactly what we've been asking for and there may be a bundle combination that works for you. The new iPad and iPad Air are really awesome offerings, but what is the market for the iPad Pro now?

All these questions will be answered! If you'd like to interact with Lory, you can follow her on Twitter @appaholik, you can email her at lory@imore.com and of course you can read her work at imore.com.

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It's time to take on a new subject: version control. As Bart explains in this week's episode, version control allows you make changes in your code and roll the changes back. This gives us the freedom to experiment and if an idea doesn't pan out, get back to where we started. Bart explains some of the origins of version control, starting with client server systems and then tells us how peer-to-peer version control has become the standard from industry to open source.

Bart explains how the version control system Git was created and how it proved itself worthy of becoming the standard. There's not a lot of heavy lifting in this episode but Bart promises that future episodes will be challenging as we get into how to actually use Git.

If you like Bart's work, please support him by going to lets-talk.ie and becoming a Patron.

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In this positively _delightful_ episode, Bart and I celebrate 100 episodes of Programming By Stealth. When we hit 99 instalments, Bart declared that for 100, there should be cake! So I got Bart's darling beloved to deliver him a piece of cake right as we started, and Steve delivered one to him. To say that Bart was surprised and delighted would be an understatement!

This episode is entirely dedicated to us describing our solutions to the Time Sharing challenge from PBS 96, and to explaining what we learned while working on the assignment.

You can view Bart's working solution at this-ti.me/ and you can view Allison's working solution at podfeet.com/time-shifting-clock

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This week's Chit Chat Across the Pond is an episode of Taming the Terminal, where Bart winds up our series within a series all about the Terminal command TMUX. In this final piece he teaches us first how to string commands together to create the TMUX sessions we want with the screens split and the processes running in each pane as we like them. After teaching us how to string them together he shows us how to make a little script file we can run so that we can automatically open up our TMUX sessions exactly the way we like them.

This will be the last of our Taming the Terminal episodes for a while, but we'll be back after macOS Big Sur ships and is stabilized. In macOS Catalina the default shell was changed from bash to zsh and it does bring some changes to things we learned earlier in the series but it seems prudent to wait till we're over this big hump getting into Big Sur.

You can find Bart's tutorial shownotes over at ttt.bartificer.net/...

Don't forget, you can download the Taming the Terminal book at podfeet.com/tttbook. The book will be updated with this instalment shortly.

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This week our guest is Dr. Helma van der Linden from the Netherlands here to talk about how she created the Taming the Terminal book using all Open Source software.

On the NosillaCast I talked a lot about the book but I should probably give an explanation for the Chit Chat audience. Bart Busschots and I created the Taming the Terminal podcast and for this series on learning the macOS (and Linux) command line, Bart wrote a spectacular set of tutorial shownotes on his website at bartb.ie.

I had a dream for many years to make Taming the Terminal into a book as a surprise for Bart, but my few attempts to do it failed spectacularly. Around Easter, I mentioned my dream to Helma and she said, “I bet I could do that!”

I don’t expect anyone to learn from this discussion how to do what Helma did, but rather to learn what’s possible and how cool it was that Helma put these pieces together. Below are the rough shownotes we used for our discussion, included so that you would have the links to all of the tools she explained in the episode

Downloads of the book can be found at podfeet.com/tttbook and the GitHub project for Taming the Terminal can be found at github.com/bartificer/taming-the-terminal. You can communicate with Helma through our Slack community at podfeet.com/slack where her handle is @Helma.

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Shaun Peterson, who’s inherited name is Qwalsius, is a member of the Puyalup Tribe in Washington. He is a professional artist working in public sculptures, printmaking and mixed media.

Shaun utilizes technology to plan installations for major works and private commissions. He works in the Seattle area and draws inspiration from his Native American heritage blending technology and tradition in what he calls ‘traditional innovation’.

You can follow Shaun's work online at qwalsius.com/..., on Twitter as @qwalsius, on Instagram as @qwalsius and his Facebook Page at facebook.com/...

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This week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond was another installment of Taming the Terminal. Two weeks ago Bart taught us the basics of a technology called tmux, or terminal multiplexer that allows you to access the same server in many different ways at the same time. He covered how tmux replaces the deprecated screen but he didn't go much further. In this rather light and easy-to-follow installment, he takes tmux up a notch and shows us how to create multiple windows, and multiple panes all within a single tmux session. Like I said it was super easy to understand, very visual and fun!

You can listen to this week's installment by searching for Taming the Terminal in your podcatcher of choice or it's included in the full Chit Chat Across the Pond show as well. And as always you can get to Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at bartbusschots.ie/...

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Doug was one of the founding forces behind podcasting (his podcast was the second one created!) He founded The Conversations Network in 2002 with the intent of coordinating a global team of volunteer podcasters to capture and publish lectures, seminars, and other significant events that would otherwise go unrecorded. Out of The Conversations Network came the beloved podcast software tool, The Levelator.

Doug has turned his attention now to photography and I highly recommend you give yourself a treat and go to Doug Kaye Photography at https://dougkaye.com/. His photos are absolutely breathtaking and every one is completely different from the next.

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When Bart first started the Taming the Terminal series in October of 2015, he purposely declared every installment to be "of n" where n was not defined. It's been 3 years since there was an episode of Taming the Terminal, but today we've got a new one for you. In Taming the Terminal 36, recorded in 2016, Bart introduced us to a nifty command-line tool called screen. Screen allowed you to ssh into a server, and start a session but disconnect and come back to it without stopping the processes you were running.

But in the last year, screen was deprecated by Red Hat Linux (which means it's gone from the free CentOS version as well). The good news is that it was replaced with an even more powerful tool called tmux. In this installment, Bart walks us through just how tmux solves the same problem as screen, but teases us with the knowledge that this tool has much more to offer.

It was a super fun episode with lots of surprises (for me at least) and whether you followed along with the first 37 installments or not, I'm sure you'll find it useful as well.

You can find Bart's fabulous shownotes at bartbusschots.ie/....

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macOS 11 Big Sur: Everything you need to know | iMore
New Apple accessibility features coming this fall make technology usable and more accessible to all | iMore
How to send feedback to Apple about iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS betas | iMore
How to send feedback to Apple about macOS betas | iMore
Recovery mode redo coming to Apple Silicon Macs | iMore
Follow Lory on Twitter @appaholik
Email Lory at lory@imore.com

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This week Bart Busschots brings us the penultimate JavaScript installment of Programming By Stealth as he brings us part 2 of building with classes. This wraps up our third look at Object Oriented programming in JavaScript. We learn about the concept of inheritance, and how it allows us to build classes that inherit attributes and functions from parent classes. This allows us to eliminate code duplication which Bart explains is called a "bad smell".

You can find Bart's tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/pbs99.

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In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart explains one single concept, that of "Has-A". This is part 1 of 2, where next time we'll learn "Is-A" which is about inheritance. These both sound like odd terms but they're part of what makes object oriented programming so powerful. Bart spends 90% of the time going through a worked example which not only explains how classes can have instances of other classes as properties, but also how classes can be more specific versions of other classes. Along the way, I think he achieved his goal of cementing the foundation of getters and setters and Class functions and Instance functions. We'll see if I can use them in anger on the homework though!

You can find Bart's tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...h

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This week I decided to take a pause from tech and talk to Robb Dunewood of the SMR Podcast about what it's like being a black man in America. This was of course inspired by the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. I wanted to have Robb on to describe to us what the daily life is like for black men across this country. I've heard some of Robb's stories before but I was floored at the relentlessness of how he and his fellow African Americans are treated as a matter of course.

It's not an easy episode to listen to but probably the most important Chit Chat I've ever recorded. I hope you'll open your minds and listen.

If you'd like to follow Robb online where he talks about tech and football and being an entrepreneur and gaming, you can find him @RobbDunewood on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. If you'd like to converse with him directly you can email him at Robb.Dunewood@bloggerpreneur.com

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I'm not going to lie to you guys, this episode of Programming By Stealth was pretty rough for me. It builds on the foundation Bart laid in PBS 95 where he introduced Getters and Setters and it was pretty clear that this previous lesson had not sunk in for me yet. I'll definitely have to go back and study PBS 95 a couple more times and get a chance to practice this Getter/Setter concept before the penny will drop. Hopefully you understood it better than I did the first time through!

In any case, in PBS 97, we extend that knowledge to learning about class data attributes and functions. We'll learn the "static" nomenclature, which is used to mark attributes and functions as belonging to the class rather than the instances of a class.

Bart spends most of the lesson on a worked example using emoji to create what he playfully calls a Nerdtouche, as a head nod to the cartouche used by Egyptian Pharoahs. And yes, he manages to work the poop emoji into this lesson.

You can find Bart's shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/pbs97.

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If you'd like to follow Lory Gil online, she's @appaholik on Twitter, @lorygil on most other social media and you can even email her at lory@imore.com. And of course you should go read all of her great work over at imore.com.

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This installment of Programming By Stealth is a solutions show all about the clock assignment from PBS 92. Bart's been quite busy this week designing an entirely new distance final exam system for the university where he works so he asked if I'd take on half of the content by presenting my solution to the clock challenge. I have had an absolute blast on this assignment so I gladly accepted. I walk through my approach and some of the challenges I met along the way, and then Bart complements mine by talking about a few things he did quite differently. We both had a great time and I think Bart even learned something from me at one point.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/pbs96.

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This week Bart explains how to give our JavaScript classes better data attributes via a very powerful JavaScript feature: getters and setters. On my first read through the notes for the episode, my head was spinning a bit, but Bart explains this so well using concrete examples (like a circle with a radius) that I think he got it through to me. When I told him up front that I struggled a bit when reading the shownotes, he said that this is the "pointy end" which I think meant that it was a difficult concept so I felt a little better about it.

In the end it made a lot of sense and I see the reason for the tools he explained.

I highly recommend you read Bart's terrific tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/pbs95 as you listen along.

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Adam Engst has been publishing TidBITS for 30 years so I asked him to come on the show to talk about that journey. While we technically had an agenda, this conversation wandered into all kinds of fun topics like why Adam still goes to the same dentist office even though the dentist left and why he doesn't know how many words per minute he types. I found a kindred spirit in Adam in his ability to keep doing something he loves for a very long time. I smiled and laughed and enjoyed the heck out of recording this episode.

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In the early days of Programming By Stealth, Bart tried to explain JavaScript classes, objects and instances. He talked about it in Installment 17 before ES6, and then took another run at it in installments 27-31. But it never felt to Bart like he had explained it in a way that made it clear.

In installment 94, Bart finally nails it. I told him the shownotes for this installment might be the best he's ever done. Everything he explains is clear and concise, the examples are superb, and we get to say Hoonyaker a lot. Instead of being frustrated and confused, I was smiling through all of it because I finally get it. I also told him that I feel far less stupid than I did before because I always thought it was my failing that I didn't get it. I enjoyed this so much I drew Bart a picture of what he'd taught and he said I nailed it!

You can find these legendary shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/pbs94.

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This week our guest is Mikah Sargent of the Clockwise Podcast and the TWiT network. Mikah was talking on some show about how much he loves TextExpander, and I thought it might be fun to have a session where we talked about our favorite TextExpander snippets from Smile. You can find all of Mikah's work at http://chihuahua.coffee.

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Anthony Lemos of Audio Aperture Media successfully explains what mixers are for and what all those darn knobs and buttons are. Even if you're not into audio recording, I think you'll enjoy learning about mixers from Anthony. He doesn't use a lot of jargon, rather he breaks things down into simple terms that are easy to understand without a background in audio. I've never been able to figure out the difference between gain and volume, and Anthony's simple explanation finally clarified it for me.

Contact Anthony at @ethancaine. If you're interested in getting started in podcasting, he's very interested in bringing more diverse voices into podcasting and is willing to help you get started for free or very little money, or if you need assistance with a more advanced show he's also very interesting in helping.

Image of the Yamaha MG10XU Mixer we talk through:

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In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart takes us through the last "hat" that JavaScript objects can wear: encapsulation. As Bart walks us through the problems encapsulation solves using a funny NosillaCast-specific example, he shows how the code becomes reusable and sharable with encapsulation, and even more readable.

You can read the tutorial shownotes as you listen at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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Video — Automators 24: Blog Post Editorial Calendar in AirTable with Shortcuts

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CCATP #630 for March 14, 2020, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. This week our guest is Bart Busschots with PBS 92 of X in which he walks us through his solution to the assignment from PBS 89 to create a grid of currency conversions.

He doesn't go through his code line by line, but rather gives us the big picture of his process. Most of the time he spent on the solution was actually in refactoring his code because he decided to preload the data rather than fetching it repeatedly on-demand. I loved it when he referred to his original work as "Organically-grown Weasley-kind of code".

He also explains how he used both coercion and assertion to do his error handling and why. Eventually he got to start working on the grid and he walks us through how he cracked that problem. It was great fun as always and we have a new, six-week challenge to build a world clock.

You can find his full tutorial shownotes and download his solution at pbs.bartificer.net/pbs92

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Dr. Maryanne Garry of the University of Waikato and I break down the meaning of a research paper published in the journal Nature in which subjects were measured to see whether language aptitude had a high correlation with learning to code. The paper can be found at "Relating Natural Language Aptitude to Individual Differences in Learning Programming Languages".

Figures we discuss from the open access journal:

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

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This week our guest is Bart Busschots with an installment of something he's calling Programming By Stealth-adjacent. It's not part of the regular series of Programming By Stealth, and yet it's not technically very "light" in terms of the chit chatting. Since neither podcast is the right place for it, I've decided to put it in both podcast feeds to be wrong twice.

Bart walks us through how to create Quick Actions with Automator (also known as Services) to do some simple but very useful text manipulations using a smidge of JavaScript. Even if you don't want to write these Quick Actions yourself, you can download his services from his Github repo where he's put them up as open source: https://github.com/bbusschots/macos-quickaction-text.

You can see how Bart created this in his blog post at www.bartbusschots.ie/...

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This week we're joined by Robin Christopherson. Robin is the host of the Alexa skills podcast Dot to Dot and he’s co-host of the weekly Tech Talk show from the Royal National Institute of Blind People. Robin is also Head of Digital Inclusion and part of the globally-acclaimed accessibility and tech team of AbilityNet and has spoken at numerous events in recent years. Oh yeah, he’s also blind.

Robin tells us about how the advancements in technology have made such a huge difference in the lives of people with disabilities. He also explains that in the US at least, people with disabilities refer to TABs, or the Temporarily Able Bodied. He talks about th ework AbilityNet is doing in the UK to try to get accountability for companies that don't comply with the laws around accessibility.

He suggested an interesting (and funny in a British uncomfortable comedy kind of way) video about Diversish: https://youtu.be/oOQYFZMglCc

He's funny and fun even though we're obviously talking about a subject near and dear to his heart. You can follow Robin at his very odd Twitter handle, @usa2day.

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Bart takes us through the penultimate hat JavaScript wears and that's Regular Expressions. Luckily since we haven't talked about REs in ages, he reminds us of the syntax for Regular Expressions literals in JavaScript first and then he takes us through three common uses for Regular Expressions. We joked around during this episode at how many times I said, "That makes sense!" Bart said it was music to his ears, and I say this was a very intuitive lesson considering how arcane Regular Expressions are in their syntax.

Bart's tutorial for this episode are available at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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Tom Steven, aka Tom on the Internet from tomontheinternet.com/... joins me to tell the tail of how he went from knowing zero about programming to landing a full-time job as a web developer in two years of self-training. Then he talks about the things that surprised him that he learned as a developer in that first year. In listening to Tom, you'll feel like he's not extraordinary and like maybe you could do this too. That is, if you're willing to put the time and energy into teaching yourself all with a laptop and the Internet. I found Tom delightful and entertaining and inspiring, and I hope you will too.

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Hope you enjoyed getting the little extra Tidbits episode this week. In this installment Bart continues our on-going mini-series looking at each of the proverbial hats JavaScript objects wear. Bart explains the concept of JavaScript wrapper objects that allow you to access properties of otherwise property-less primitives. It's pretty magical and I only got lost for a little while as we brushed the cobwebs off my memories of prototypes and such.

Bart's shownotes for this episode can be found at pbs.bartificer.net/pbs90

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Bart explains how alert listener @lbutlr on Twitter found a mistake in Bart's math and he walks through how he figured out what was wrong and what we can all learn from it. Bart's explanation can be found here:

bartbusschots.ie/...

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While we were in Las Vegas for CES, we carved out some time to have dinner with our good friend, JF Brissette, who is also the editor of all of my videos for ScreenCastsOnline. He brought his daughter Lila to dinner and she started talking to me about her journey of discovery into accessibility on Apple devices. I asked her to come on the show to talk about her perspective on accessibility as a young person without any disabilities. She's delightful and intelligent and I really enjoyed seeing these topics through her frame of reference.

If you'd like to connect with her, you can find her on LinkedIn as Lila Brissette.

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In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart explains his new plan for both the content of PBS and the way the shownotes are created and presented to you. Bart has noticed that because we put a challenge solution and new content into the same show, the solution gets short changed. That's a shame because there is so much he can teach by explaining the "whys" behind his design of his solutions.

The new plan is to have the challenge solutions be standalone shows, and then the new content will be standalone shows as well. We'll be having more time to do our challenges with this new plan as well. I'm excited about this new plan because I've enjoyed the extra time we've had with our currency converter challenge, allowing us to enhance our solutions and be more creative.

Bart is also completely rearchitecting all of his web presence, including his Programming By Stealth show notes. His new online presence will be at his site, bartficier.net and PBS will now be at pbs.bartificer.net. That link is actually to a GitHub page. I know that sounds crazy and Bart is going to tell us more about it, but it will allow him time to be much more creative and spend less time faffing about as a system admin.

With all that said, you can find the shownotes to this week's installment at pbs.bartificer.net/...

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Cat Eye Volt400 Duplex
cycl.bike/...
BPM Core Blood Pressure Monitor
Withings Sleep Mat
Withings Thermo

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Withings Sleep - Sleep Tracking Pad Under The Mattress With Sleep Cycle Analysis

CATEYE - Volt 400 Duplex Bike Head Light with Helmet Mount

Withings Thermo – Smart Temporal Thermometer, No Contact, Suitable for Baby, Infant, Toddler & Adults, FSA- Eligible

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This week we're joined by Eleanor Mazzarella, a musician turned programmer. She gives us her background in music from finding a clarinet on a bookshelf as a child to a career as a classical performer. She then walks us through how and why she decided that programming sounded like more fun. She's a funny, delightful storyteller as she weaves in her love of the arts with her love of everything nerdy.

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Bart is nearing the end of his mini-series recapping al of the different hats JavaScript objects wear, doing a lot of redux to cement the concepts that have been spread over so many lessons. He takes a really interesting approach this week to his teaching. He explains a concept and then instead of having a contrived example, he shows us exactly how that concept works in action in his homework solution from PBS 85. His solution to the homework assignment is, of course, beautiful and elegant. Beautiful he gives credit to Bootstrap, elegant he would probably give credit to jQuery.

I am really enjoying these redux segments because they cement things that were still wobbly, or perhaps even gone from my memory. Each time through I'm finding I understand how to even categorize the information in my brain. I explained to Bart that I think he's actually changing the way my brain is wired now.

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Adam Engst, veteran author of TidBITS for the last 29 years, inventor of Internet advertising and someone who dresses appropriately for the weather joins us for this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond. Adam explains the fascinating results that IBM has reported since they first decided to give their employees the choice of whether to use a Mac or Windows. I'm afraid this discussion will cement any EVER so slight Apple bias you might have already had, because the statistically-significant correlation between Mac usage and employee success is simply startling.

If you'd like to read Adam's article before, after, or during the discussion, you can find it and all of his other fine work at tidbits.com/...

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I'm not going to lie, this episode of Programming By Stealth with Bart Busschots was a bit head bendy. Bart explains JavaScript Iterator Objects and Generator functions but without his excellent examples I'm certain I would never have been able to get the concepts to even slightly congeal in my brain. Iterator Objects and Generator functions are some of the joys of ES6 and have great value.

That value is demonstrated in the succinctness of the code Bart writes for us to create a Fibonacci series in a beautiful web form. That work, by the way, is a bonus challenge if you're done with your homework from the previous episodes. As you listen along, if you hear us yelling "spoiler alert" and making alarming noises, that's when Bart's solution to the challenge is about to be described. It's a rare instance where I actually let you have one chapter mark in Programming By Stealth so you'll be able to jump back to the solution after you're done with your own solution.

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This week I asked Don McAllister, owner of ScreenCastsOnline to come on the show to talk about how he automates the production of his video tutorial podcast business. We start at his humble beginnings as a new convert from Windows with a Mac mini and a monitor, up to and including a global workforce with automated workflows. He's even moved his Mac Pro into MacStadium so it's a resource for his back end production folks.

I must do a disclaimer that I do screencasts for Don's show, which means I have a conflict of interest in telling you how awesome it is. We try to stay to the technical parts of the show production but we're both so enthusiastic about the service it's hard to avoid talking about the quality of what Don and his staff creates.

You can find ScreenCastsOnline at screencastsonline.com and you can follow Don on Twitter @donmcallister

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This week Bart Busschots takes us back through JavaScript function objects, explaining the three different ways to define a function. It was great to have them all together to refresh our memory. He explains how only one method is hoisted, which lead him to explain the medieval history reference of "hoisted by your own petard". There was a part where he talks about wearing tutu, but Only a podcast with Bart could go that route! We went from there to function scope and enjoyed some time going through advanced arguments which is way more fun than it sounds. Things took a turn for the weird when Bart explained fully-simplified fat arrow syntax as all common language conventions disappeared. Also we talked about Bart wearing a tutu. You'll have to listen to learn how that was actually in context.

Bart's tutorial show notes are at bartbusschots.ie/...
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This week's Chit Chat Across the Pond is really special. It's an interview with Ken Case, the CEO of Omnigroup. We don't actually talk much about his current work, but rather start back with how he went to college when he was only 13 years old at the University of Washington. He takes us on the fascinating journey of technology that lead him to work for Steve Jobs's NeXT computer company and how it changed his view of what computing could be. It's a wonderful story filled with super geeky details including bitnet (which I'd never heard of) and how he helped write the precursor to IRC.

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Bart continues his redux and new information by circling back through Objects as Arrays in JavaScript. I don't know about you, but I get a lot out of the redux episodes because it cements in place concepts that were a bit wiggly before he goes through it again. The one new concept he goes through is Array Destructuring which sounds ominous and destructive but which allows us to dive into arrays and create new and more interesting arrays.

Bart also debuts a new way he's providing the content for the lesson. If you still want to download the zip file with all of the example files, you can, but you can also view the source code and view the html in a browser with a Github link. By the way, the zip file is now living on a content delivery network. This is important to note if you're coming in from Safari with the more recent security updates because it will prompt you to agree to downloads from this new URL.

Bart's fabulous tutorial show notes (including the links to the source for this week's episode) are available at bartbusschots.ie/...

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This week we're joined by returning guest Ray Robertson, well-known AppleScript guru and general all around automator. Ray joins me to talk about the increased challenges developers faced working with Apple. It's no secret that iOS 13 and iPad OS 13 have been problematic on their own, but the betas and final delivery of macOS Catalina has also produced huge problems for developers. Ray says he's no expert, but he tries to get into some of the details of the modifications Apple has introduced in the interest of security that have made the developer's life much more difficult.

You can follow and contact Ray on Twitter @scriptsmatter or email him at ray@automatedworkflows.com

I mentioned two links during the conversation: * How to stop macOS Mojave from nagging you to upgrade to macOS Catalina, and also how to turn it back on: pro-tools-expert.com/... * Adam Engst's TidBits article explaining why Dark Mode actually makes it harder to read: tidbits.com/...

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Bart has been noticing that there are a few key features in JavaScript that haven't ever really congealed for me and is circling back in hopes of firming them up. The other reason he's going over these topics is that new options have been created since we first covered them. The first of these subjects is objects as dictionaries. I confessed to him recently that I've never successfully done a for loop on my own yet, so we slow down a bit during that part but we speed up again into what are actually more challenging topics. We had a lot of fun doing this episode (even when I was stuck!)

At the end of the show I suggested a palate cleanser, which is a feature of his Security Bits segment he does for the NosillaCast. I found an awesome tweet by developer Sarah Dresner (@sarah_edo: "Apparently the only cure for jetlag is to make SVG animations of farting rhinos with the new @greensock API 💨". Of course I had to follow that link, and it was awesome. It is literally an SVG file of an adorable little rhino trotting along and tooting. After Bart and I got off the air we took advantage of the fact that she'd posted the farting rhino on codepen.io so we view the html, css and JavaScript to see how she did it. I know this is silly but that's what makes it so awesome.

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Bart finishes up our first exploration of Bootstrap 4 with a look at one its most versatile components, the so-called Card. This is one of those components that’s so generic it’s hard to describe, but once you learn about it you’ll start seeing it all over the web. Cards really are ubiquitous!

It’s important to stress that while we’re wrapping up our exploration of Bootstrap 4 with this installment, that does not mean we’ve come close to covering every feature this impressive library offers. Instead, the aim was to cover the big-picture items, and leave you with enough experience to be able to learn the rest independently by reading Bootstrap’s excellent documentation.

Bart's tutorial show notes can be found at bartb.ie

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We're back after a summer hiatus (where Bart was working too hard) with a new installment where we attempt to dust off Allison's brain and learn about two new promise-related keywords, async and await. Both of these keywords were actually added to the core JavaScript language, so this doesn't happen that often.

With async and await, we can actually get away from doing promise chains and create much more readable code while still being able to control parallel and in series tasks. Bart had to drag me along a bit in this one but I saw the beauty of it when we were done.

Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes can be found at PBS 82 of X — Async & Await : Bart Busschots.

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Doug Ingram joins us to talk about what he calls Nightscape Photography, which is a combination of astral photography (photographing the stars) and photographing of the surrounding landscape. His photographs of the Milky Way with the landscape are absolutely breathtaking. Doug explains his gear, the settings on his camera and the surprisingly little he does to edit his photos after the shoot. He also talks to how far he's willing to drive in a single night to capture these amazing shots.

You can follow Doug's amazing photography at: nightscapades.com, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, 500px, Email

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In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart Busschots joins us to talk about how he arranges his podcast listening, how he categorizes them and then what kinds of shows he likes. Bart listens to around 6 hours of podcasts per _day_ so this is quite a long list. He purposely didn't include the usual suspects that he's talked about often before. That means that you are bound to learn about some shows you've never heard of and might enjoy. There are TONS of links to every show in the show notes.

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In this "Lite" version of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart answered Scott Fairclough's request to explain DoH and DoT. It's super nerdy and really interesting. First Bart gives us a full refresher on exactly what DNS is (and I needed that refresher. Then he explains the problems with DNS from a security and privacy point of view. Then he walks us through how DoH, aka DNS over TLS and DoH, aka DNS over https (which is actually http over TLS) will start protecting us in the future (and in some cases the present.)

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In this week's episode, Sandy Foster, aka @MacQuilter joins me to talk about why CarPlay is so awesome and how it influenced her decision to buy the top-of-the-line Prius, called Prius Prime. We also talk about the new tech in the Prius Prime including the fact that it's not just a gas/electric hybrid, it's also a full electric vehicle for short-range driving.

You can follow Sandy online at sandymike.net and find her in the NosillaCast Live chat room and the Podfeet Slack @Sandy.

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Bart Busschots joins us to talk about the technology decisions that go into buying a bike these days. I thought I knew about bikes, but I learned a lot about what's changed just in the last five years. In the blog post, we have a video where Bart walks around his bike and points out each of the things he talked about in the recording:

Bart's video showing the bike components

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This week our guest is Laura Kane, CFA, CPA, Head of Investment Themes Americas for UBS. Laura specializes in something called Sustainable Investing for UBS. As part of her research she has written several articles about investing through a gender lens. I've asked Laura to come on, not to talk about investing per se, but rather what she has discovered about the impact women have on the success of a company.

Here's a link to the research we discuss in the interview: ubs.com/...

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us how to use Promises, with a capital P to get promises when we already know the value we want to supply. That sounds funny but it will make sense in context. Then he shows us how we can control parallelization of promises using Promise.all(). It's a very sensible lesson, and not brain bendy at all. (I really like those.)

Please consider supporting Bart's hard work for us via Patreon at patreon.com/ltpod

Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes are available at bartbusschots.ie/...

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Dr. Garry, self-proclaimed Crusher of Dreams, joins us again on Chit Chat Across the Pond, this time to talk about how she thinks science is broken and why. Dr. Garry is a professor of Psychology at the University of Waikato, and also professor of the NZ institute of Security & Crime Science. In this episode, she takes on the topic of how science journals choose which papers should be published, and the flaws she sees in that process that cause the extraordinary claims to be published, rather than those efforts with less flashy premises. She backs up her thoughts with specific research that has been conducted in reviewing how well these claims of amazing success pan out over time.

Please follow Dr. Garry on Twitter at @drlambchop.

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In the very first Programming By Stealth supplemental episode, Allison interviews Dorothy Rendon, the programmer behind the PBS Index. If you haven't seen it before, it's an index that Dorothy has created for the Programming By Stealth students to helpt them find key topics in Bart Busschots's fabulous tutorial shownotes.

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This week we’re joined by Dr. Devon Polaschek. Dr. Polaschek is the Joint Director of the New Zealand Institute for Security and Crime Science at the University of Waikato. I will further embarrass her by mentioning that she was recently awarded with a Queen's Birthday honour (as in Queen Elizabeth). Dr. Polaschek has has been made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to criminal psychology.

In this interview, we talk about Devon's work with imprisoned psychopaths and her successful efforts to rehabilitate them. It's a fascinating discussion of the perspective of psychopaths: how they differ from other criminals and the ways in which they are similar.

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Interview with Oleksandr Kosovan of MacPaw about SetApp, his work to enhance tech in Ukraine and how he created a Mac museum.

MacPaw

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Bart Busschots (successfully) explains the concept of JavaScript promise chains. It's a rough ride because of the subject itself, but he gets us there through his care and detail in explaining the concepts and of course his great examples. When he's done, you'll know how to chain promises together, you'll understand what data is passed through, and you'll understand why he says, "Don't have unhandled rejections, it's just not nice."

You can find Bart's detailed shownotes at bartbusschots.ie/...

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This week on Chit Chat Across the Pond I had the great pleasure of talking to Slovenian tech podcaster, Anže Tomić. Anže also works for RTV Slovenia's Val 202 public radio, and as he says on his website, he sounds like an Eastern European Bond villain. He's also a writer for the most read Slovene tech magazine Monitor (think PC/Macworld in Slovene.) We talked all over the tech map from net neutrality, to the lack of spam calls in Slovenia, to Internet speeds, to his love of the old Nokia handsets, to Huawei's current problems, to his Chromebook. I used the format he uses on his podcast including asking him what his top 5 apps are and what one physical thing he's ever owned that felt like it was made for him.

Anže mostly podcasts in Slovenian in a podcast called Apparatus. He sometimes has English-speaking guests on and when he does, those episodes go into his podcast called Storming Mortal at stormingmortal.com. You can even hear John Siracusa saying his name there which is fun all by itself. You can follow Anže on Twitter in English at @atomicxx. If you speak Slovene, you can follow his much more frequent tweets @anzet.

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Bart has been _promising_ us Promises for ages now and he finally fulfills his promise by explaining thenables. Promises are a tool to get us out of "callback hell", which we experienced a while back. I think he made us suffer through that so we'd appreciate Promises. In this episode he shows us the beauty and elegance of the concept but leaves us wanting more. Bart spent a lot of time trying to get the shownotes and his narrative to take this rather abstract concept and make it concrete, and I think he did a grand job of it.

Bart's amazing tutorial shownotes are available at bartbusschots.ie/...

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David Woodbridge of the Vision Store in Australia tells about how he's been testing and using the Samsung Galaxy S10, the Galaxy Watch and the Galaxy Buds side by side with his iPhones, Apple Watch and AirPods. It's a delightful discussion of the relative goodness of both platforms from an accessibility perspective. David is hilarious and we have a bit of fun wandering off topic from time to time. You can find David's many podcasts at:

iSee Various Technologies from a Blind Person’s Perspective
Vision Australia Radio weekly Talking Tech
VACast
David's video tech blog
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Bart Busschots and I both had a great time doing the challenge this week. In this week's installment Bart takes us through his homework not in a detailed step-by-step method, but rather he goes through some major structural ways he created his code. He digs deep enough to explain why but it's a great lesson on building code that's easier to debug and more fun to write. I got to be the tester of his code, and as I suggested improvements he decided he needed to use Bootstrap Popovers. He walks us through how they work and I have to say they're really slick. Then he introduces us to a super intuitive JavaScript library called is.js that solves will simplify our code. I asked Bart if he could back up 2 weeks and show me is.js BEFORE I did last week's homework!

As always, Bart's awesome tutorial shownotes are available bartbusschots.ie/....

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Bart Busschots starts this week's episode with a great refresher on what a callback actually is (because I have remained mystified by the term). He starts with simple examples and then shows us how we've been using callbacks all along and just didn't realize it. Then he'll walk through the challenge solution and the extra credit. He shows us how there's two paths to "callback hell", one through nested AJAX calls in parallel, and one with them in series (which sounds worse than it actually is. The challenge for next week is super open-ended which terrifies me but I'm sure it will be fun.

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BUZZR buzzrtv.com/...
WhatTheFont? myfonts.com/...
Transit ricostacruz.com/...
Clear Divs/GtP —> Mousetrap craig.is/...
NW.js nwjs.io/...
Makey Makey makeymakey.com/...
Villas FunForce Touch Controller vilros.com/...
Whiteboard app - Doceri doceri.com/...
Zettai Geek Dayo Podcast at platypuspodcasts.com/...
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In this week's episode, we have another in our series Programming By Stealth with Bart Busschots. We'll spend the majority of our time talking about Bart's solution to last week's challenge. It's a great refresher on the methods he's taught us in the past, all rolled together with our newfound skills with Mustaches and templating. Then we'll get a start on using AJAX with jQuery and what sounds to me like a relatively easy challenge … except for that extra credit bit.

Bart's extensive tutorial shownotes (and I really mean extensive this time) can be found at bartbusschots.ie/...

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and be sure to check out the #pbs channel to talk all things programming.

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In this episode of Programming By Stealth we get the foundation to start learning about AJAX. Bart gives us an overview of HTTP that is really interesting. I learned so much that I didn't know about what you can see in a URL. I know this sounds super nerdy but I loved learning about query parameters and HTTP methods and even HTTP request headers and cookies.

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Jeff Gamet of Smile joins us to talk about the life of an Evangelist for TextExpander. We talk about some of the cool things you can do with TextExpander that you may not know about, how TextExpander works on Windows now, how awesome Jean MacDonald was when she was in this job and even funny snippet abbreviations. If you'd like to learn more about TextExpander you can go to textexander.com and you can find Jeff on Twitter and Instagram as @jgamet.

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In this week's Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us the last two concepts in Mustache, one of which is a real head bender and for me at least, the second was almost as hard. The first is how you can add an optional third argument to a Mustache view which is actually a function within a function. It's a very meta concept. The second is the use of Mustache Partials which are templates within templates. I expect you'll follow along faster than I did but I _think_ I got there in the end!

You can find Bart's shownotes for this installment at www.bartbusschots.ie/...

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This week our guest is Bart Busschots but this is not Programming By Stealth. This week we're talking about Bart's recent post about the different types of free that are available for online services. We talk about his four categories: Free, Freemium, Free-for-now & Freepi (rhymes with creepy). It's a thoughtful discussion about understanding what we're getting for free and how we're paying for it. We don't ever suggest what you should do about any of this, rather Bart is trying to help us better understand what's happening.

In the discussion I mention an article by Paris Martineau's about FourSquare and tracking and how Apple Maps is included in the tracking. Here's the link to the article: wired.com.

You can read and reference Bart's article on the topic at Free, Freemium, Free-for-now & Freepi : Bart Busschots.

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us about Mustache Templates. Mustache Templates are a library that allow you to input any string and output a string. Unlike the template tag for HTML5, Mustaches are not restricted to HTML snippets. Mustache isn't the only game in town but it's Bart's favorite. I found this lesson fairly confusing along the way but when I got to the very end I think I understood it all! There was a key point in his instruction when he said to think of this as being like Mail Merge where you have a form letter and then a separate file that has the info that gets plugged into the form letter. Once he said that it became much more clear to me. Hope that little hint helps you too!

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Dave Hamilton of the Mac Geek Gab and The Mac Observer joins us to talk routers, and mesh routers in particular. He explains the difference between a range extender with a traditional router vs. a modern mesh router system. He explains why some IoT devices demand a dedicated 2.4GHz network (or at least they used to). He explains what the marketing numbers mean on routers, like AC2600 and in fact he "does the math". We talk about the importance of the number of antennas, band steering and beam forming. He explains SU-MIMO vs MU-MIMO and why we can't have it but why mesh gives us many of the same advantages. He explains Quality of Service and why you might want to turn it on. Finally he gives us his short list of good mesh router manufacturers, while answering the question everyone is asking, whether it's of concern that Amazon recently purchased Eero.

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Last time Bart teased us that we were going to learn about the template library called Mustache, but he realized that he needed to teach us about vanilla HTML 5 Templates first. He starts by showing the problem to be solved: how messy and error-prone it is to create HTML elements using jQuery. Then he shows us how templates allow you to create multiple elements via cloning of the templates. The syntax is quite annoying, but I think once we get used to it, it will be pretty easy and efficient to use.

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After a hiatus that was far too long, we're joined this week on Chit Chat Across the Pond by Donald Burr. Even if you don't think you'd ever want a 3D printer, I guarantee that you'll enjoy hearing Donald explain the different models of 3D printers, how you can actually buy one now for far less than you think, and how you can actually build one from a kit. In his wonderfully humorous way, he teaches how not to do it, and how to fix the mistakes you make along the way. I smiled throughout this entire conversation. Donald wrote up every single thing he talks about for the show notes so there's lots of link goodness for everything.

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In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots spends most of the time walking us carefully through each of the methods he used to solve the challenge from last time. He does a great job of reminding us of things we've learned, in some cases more than a year ago, and showing how they were applied for this particular problem. I'm quite proud of one little thing I discovered that Bart didn't know had been introduced in HTML 5. After he's done walking through the challenge, he introduces Bootstrap Spinners. Spinners are a visual indicator to the user that some operation is going on that will take some time and let them know that things aren't just broken.

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In this week's Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart Busschots is back with another installment of Programming By Stealth. We'll shift gears a bit away from web pages to web apps as we explore the usage and code behind Bootstrap Modals and Toasts. It's a combination of HTML, Bootstrap for styling and JavaScript for actions so it flexes all of our programming muscles.

We wanted to give a special shoutout to Caleb Fong, aka @GeekoSupremo for posting a link in the Podfeet slack to a fabulous cheat sheet for a ton of programming APIs. It's got JavaScript, Regular Expressions, Flexboxes, and lots of other things we've haven't yet learned. You can find the cheat sheet at freeCodeCamp at medium.freecodecamp.org.

And as always you can find Bart's tutorial show notes at www.bartbusschots.ie/...

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This week we have recurring guest Shai Yammanee back, but this time not to talk about photography, videography or performing as he has in the past. Shai recently decided to remove Facebook from his phone (he still accesses it from his computer) and I wanted to have him on to find out why and also to explore this whole movement of people getting out of social media. We talk about the repercussions for "normal" people but also we learn about how important Instagram is for employment for performers. We talk about how social media makes us feel and what we would lose if we left.

You can follow Shai on Instagram at shai_yammanee and shai_yammanee_photography. You can follow him on Twitter @shaiyammanee.

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In Chit Chat Across the Pond we are finally back to a Programming By Stealth episode. In this installment, Bart teaches us how to create navigation bars in Bootstrap. We learn how to make them collapse and expand to different device screen sizes and how to style them to look nice. We learned how to add branding and how Bootstrap makes it do logical things. It was an extraordinarily easy lesson because Bootstrap makes it that easy.

You can find Bart's tutorial shownotes for this episode at www.bartbusschots.ie/...

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This week I'm joined by Darren Carr, host of the Mac Quadcast. Darren is an Apple blogger and podcaster and he's also paralyzed from the neck down. We spend a bit of time talking about how on earth he does all of this. Just learning how he types 20-30 words per minute using only his eyes (not to mention editing audio and video) was fascinating. After he explained the accessibility tools he uses, we switched gears. I shamelessly stole the format he uses on his show to interview Apple-centric guests to interview him. We talk about his favorite Mac of all time, his favorite iPhone, what album and movie he'd put into a digital time capsule so people would know what geeks liked 500 years from now, and the most enjoyable question, what would you do if you could control Tim Cook with Siri for a day.

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This week we have returning guest, Dr. Maryanne Garry from the University of Waikato but this time it will not be an intellectual, deep learning experience about the mysteries of human memory. This time we're going to talk about our grammar pet peeves. As Maryanne would say, we're both quite pedantic on this topic. Sit back and enjoy our silliness, and please add _your_ grammar pet peeves as comments on podfeet.com, in our Slack group at podfeet.com/slack or in our Facebook group at podfeet.com/facebook.

I bet you have your own grammar pet peeves, add them in the comments!

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In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots introduces us to how Bootstrap will help us create navigation in websites or web apps. This is using what Bootstrap calls the Nav component. As always we'll learn how to style the navigation using Bootstrap Pills and Tabs. Then we'll take it up a notch and learn about Bootstrap Panes and how to reveal them within Bootstrap Tabs.

As always, Bart's fantastic tutorial can be found at www.bartbusschots.ie/...

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Nica Montfort, co-host of the snobOS Podcast (along with Terrance Gaines) answers my questions about her education (two STEM degrees, about to be a third), her mentors growing up, how it was getting an education as the only woman or the only black person in her classes. She then tells us why she and Terrance felt it was important for them to create their Apple-centric podcast and why they add the cultural flavor to the show. I think you will to be enchanted by Nica, at least I was!

Partway through you'll hear us incorrectly quote the percentage of Facebook users that are African American. We come back after the end of the show and correct ourselves. Here's the article to which we were referring: Facebook is failing its black employees and its black users.

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In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes into the land of Bootstrap dropdown menus. He explains the differences between dropdown and selects in HTML, and how there's two different kinds of dropdowns - menus and navigation. The descriptions of how to make the Bootstrap dropdowns takes a while, but when he puts the pieces together, the code is quite sensible.

With any luck at all, I _think_ I have added chapter marks to the show to let you jump from the intro to the homework challenge and then to the new material. I won't be able to tell if it worked until after I push the publish button, but I think I figured out how to do it. If it worked, and if it provides value to you, it would be swell if you sent me a note in some way about it.

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Dave Ginsburg, host of the In Touch with iOS podcast at intouchwithios.com joins us to teach us his top favorite iOS 12 tips. Dave is a master at iOS and I learned a lot so I think you will too. You can find Dave on Twitter @DaveG65.

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This is a rather unusual Chit Chat Across the Pond where I interview Joe Dugandzic as he walks us around his tiny, smart home. Joe's home is 395 square feet and he produces his Smarter Home Life Youtube series all in that space. The interview is a combination of learning about how to create lighting that is intentional to what you're doing, how he's automated certain functions of his lighting and television and security, and how he's done the Master Class by programming on his Mac through the Indigo software using AppleScript and Python. Steve has also recorded it on video and the video version should be up soon.

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HTML 5 gives us form validation for free, but it's not very nuanced. In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart will show us how to use Bootstrap to make our form validation a little less shouty and more useful for the viewer. He shows us how to take a little control, how to take a lot of control and how to take supreme control. That last bit scared me when he introduced it but he does a fantastic job of breaking down the building blocks for us. He builds up the form validation in logical steps, using tools we already know (but might have to dust off a bit.)

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I get a lot of PR emails trying to get me to interview people. I’ve never responded to one until just now. I was asked if I wanted to interview a former NASA Space Shuttle Engineer turned science fiction author. How could I possibly refuse? Darren’s stories were fascinating as he described being one of the last people tramping around in the cargo bay of the Shuttle before the astronauts got into it to go to space. Crazy dream job!

We then shifted gears into his science fiction books. He’s got two books out in The Anghazi Series, book one called “Casimir Bridge” and book two was just released, called “Pathogen Protocol”. I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to Darren’s stories as much as I did.

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Chit Chat Across the Pond this week was Programming By Stealth installment 65 of X. This time Bart takes us through Bootstrap Input Groups. These are really cool. Think about a form that has information you have to fill in, but you're never sure what they're asking for. If they ask for money, what currency do they mean? Are you supposed to include the numbers after the decimal or not? With Bootstrap input groups you can put little symbols or words before or after the input field to make it obvious. As with all things Bootstrap, it's not something that can't be done in HTML, but it's so much easier to make them pretty and elegant without being a designer.

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We're joined by Nuris Coronado and Dan Eckmeier this week as they talk about their experiences as blind users upgrading from iPhone 7 to iPhone XS. How is the transition from a home button to Face ID if you can't see? What about the form factor for women vs. men? I learned a few things about iPhone XS that I didn't know along the way.

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In this Programming By Stealth episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart Busschots teaches us about three more types of Bootstrap Form Layouts. It's not too tough of a lesson and we had a lot of fun working through the lesson. You can find Bart's full written tutorial at bartbusschots.ie/....

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I met Matthias Keller on Patrick Beja's Phileas Club when we were both guests on episode 114 entitled "The Social Media Sickness". Matthias mentioned how he's on Mastadon, which is a new-ish social network. I've tried to figure Mastadon out, and hadn't cracked the code, so I asked Matthias if he could come on Chit Chat Across the Pond and explain to us how it works and why he thinks it's useful and fun.

Matthias explains what federated instances are, how the local timeline works and how you can follow people who aren't in your instance.

If you'd like to connect with Matthias on Mastadon you can find him at: @matzkult@chaos.social. I'm not sure I've figured it out yet, but you can find me on Mastadon at @podfeet@mastadon.social

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This week in Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots and I spend a fair amount of time going over the homework challenge from PBS 62. The nuances combined with some refresher on how the pieces fit together was something I really needed so hopefully I wasn't alone. The new part of the episode is dedicated to the all-important Bootstrap Button. We'll learn how to turn things into buttons and why you might want to do that, and we'll learn how to make Button Toolbars which are really slick and pretty. We don't have new homework for this week but if you're like me you need time to properly finish last week's homework.

You can find Bart's tutorial and solution to the challenge at bartbusschots.ie/...

Support Bart on Patreon!

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This week's Programming By Stealth was great fun. Bart Busschots teaches us how to create a web form using the Bootstrap classes to do the job. He explains how Bootstrap literally insists that we make our code accessible, and how sensible it is to just that. We learn the importance of Form Groups, and how Checkboxes and Radio Buttons are a slightly different type of input to a form and so have their own Bootstrap class. It's great fun and the challenges look like fun too.

At the end of the episode I added what Bart likes to call a Palate Cleanser. I've been following a woman named Samantha Ming on Twitter and samanthaming.comw where she posts fun little CSS and HTML tricks. I learned how to make the caret on an input field blink in pink, and how to make regular HTML text on a web page be editable.

Bart's tutorial for this episode is available at bartbusschots.ie/...

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I know I say this every week, but I had the best time recording this week with Dr. Michael Kramer, a digital historian from Middlebury College in Vermont. Michael talks about the impact of digital technology on history and culture and the humanities. We talk about the impact of women actually being the computers in the 1960s. We talk about what he hopes his students will do differently in their careers as a result of what they learn in his class. We talk about the insane number of books he makes his students read (but they look really fascinating!

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In this week's installment, Bart explains how to create two simple Bootstrap components, the Jumbotron and badges. A Jumbotron is a show-case area at the top of a website's front page that shouts out the site's main message and usually has a call to action. Badges are the little bubbles next to titles or within buttons that contain extra information. Often they contain a number, such as number of unread messages, or a short phrase like "New!" or "Best Value". It's a pretty easy lesson and the homework looks fun too as we figure out how to add badges to count the number of open alert windows and add a Jumbotron to our work.

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Rob Dunewood of the SMR Podcast joins us to talk about how Epic Games has decided to support their insanely popular app Fortnite on Android but will not offer it through the Google Play Store. This may have significant security implications for users so I asked Rob to come on the show to walk me through what all of this means.

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In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond I talk to Sal Soghoian and Ray Robertson. Sal was the Product Manager of Automation Technologies at Apple from 1997 to 2016. During his tenure, he was pretty much responsible for all of the automation in the Mac operating system and even the Terminal. Ray Robertson is a seasoned instructor of AppleScript who has spent most of his career teaching beginners and creative people how to use AppleScript.

Be sure to check out their Down-Home Scripting Bootcamp at cmddconf.com/... and don't forget the coupon code you'll hear in the interview to get $200 off.

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In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth Bart introduces us to Bootstrap Components how we can use jQuery to extend Bootstrap. This is the first baby step into JavaScript with Bootstrap. I'm glad Bart started slowly because my JavaScript muscles are just a bit stiff and dusty. You can find Bart's tutorial over at bartbusschots.ie/.... Please consider supporting Bart's work on Patreon.

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This week Tom Merritt, host of the Daily Tech News Show, (and co-host of Cordkillers, Sword & Laser and Current Geek) joins us to talk about the importance of the community to his podcast. We’ll explore how he created such a thriving and participative community, what it means to him, what it would be like without it and even the downsides of having a community. It’s probably one of my favorite discussions with Tom and I always love talking to Tom. You can follow Tom on Twitter @acedtect.

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Bart takes us back to Bootstrap content, now that we know all about breakpoints. He never told us when we were looking at things like margins and float and the display tag that they are also breakpoint-aware, because we didn't know about breakpoints yet. It's an easy lesson and it's great fun to learn more about how responsive design is done with Bootstrap.

You can follow along with the audio with Bart's awesome tutorials at bartbusschots.ie/...

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In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots explains Bootstrap breakpoints. Breakpoints allow the designer to define how a web page reacts depending on the size of the viewer's screen. He explains how through some very simple Bootstrap classes, we can allow a semantic tag to be in the "correct" order for screen readers and search engines, and yet have the layout be visually appropriate across all screen sizes.

Follow along with Bart's detailed tutorial shownotes at bartbusschots.ie/...

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Dr. Maryanne Garry returns to Chit Chat Across the Pond, this time to talk about how and why persuasion with facts and data simply doesn't work. If you haven't heard her before, she's a professor at the University of Waikato in New Zealand where she's a scientific researcher into memory, memory distortions, fans memories, the myth of repression and its overlap with the laws. She's also really funny and entertaining.

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Things take a turn for the mind-bendy in this installment about Bootstrap as Bart Busschots explains the Bootstrap Grid. He teaches us how containers have rows, rows have columns and the number 12 is really important. In the end he leads me to understanding but it was a bit of a bumpy road getting me there. You'll probably swim right through it without difficulty because of Bart's fabulous shownotes at bartbusschots.ie/.... If you a

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Steve Harris, developer of Feeder and Keep It from Reinvented Software joins us to talk about how much the Mac App Store has improved for developers and also about the work that will go into making apps work in Dark Mode on macOS Mojave.

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We continue learning about how to style our HTML with Bootstrap as we take a look at styling images, figures, and tables. These Bootstrap classes are really easy to use and make such a difference in the look and feel. You can find Bart's tutorial shownotes and the downloads at bartbusschots.ie/....

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This week our guest is Bart Busschots but this is not an episode of Programming By Stealth. Bart is here to talk about the tech tools he uses to prepare his shownotes for his podcast Let's Talk Apple and for his Security Bits segment for the NosillaCast.

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We finished learning the Bootstrap Utilities last time so this time we get to start learning about continue to learn about Bootstrap moving on from the Utilities into Bootstrap Content. Content is kind of an odd word; it means Bootstrap's styling of regular HTML tags for things like headers, paragraphs, lists and tables. We have a lot of fun playing with our recipes in this episode, learning how to easily style them to be much prettier. Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes are at bartbusschots.ie/...

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Lupita Salazar talks to us about how she learned to read at 6 years old (just like everyone else) through Braille. She was highly influenced by my awesome friend Lore Schindler, who taught Tech and Braille to her and the other students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He explains why Braille is so important to literacy when many believe audio is a substitute for being able to read. Lupita is a hard core tech head who just loves to experiment and learn new tech (she even used Android for a year just to understand it!) She's funny and passionate and has a great perspective that I really enjoyed. You can find Lupita @queeenofthesea31 or email her at looptheloop31@gmail.com.

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In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes us through the last bit of the Utilities for Bootstrap 4. We'l refer to the WABAC Machine (kids, ask your parents about Sherman and Mr. Peabody) to installments 8 and 9 comparing positioning with CSS vs. Bootstrap. Thenwe'll learn about sizes and float utilities, Flexbox utilities, and Screen Reader utilities. It's great fun and of course Bart has his excellent companion tutorial at bartbusschots.ie/... and you can find Dorothy's awesome index of all things Programming By Stealth at podfeet.com/blog/pbs-index.

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This week we had David Sparks, AKA MacSparky himself on the show to talk about iBooks Author, writing his famous Video Field Guides, how he traded in his saxophones for children, how he believes in "cooking ideas" and his love of mind maps. If you haven't learned from David Sparks, you haven't lived.

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We're finally back to a new episode of Programming By Stealth after a few weeks chatting with different things like GDPR and DNS with Bart Busschots. In this installment, Bart starts explaining the Utilities available in Bootstrap. We'll learn how easy it is to use the pre-built CSS styles in Bootstrap to color text, add borders, spacing, text alignment and fonts all with semantic phrases that actually make sense! In an odd bit of luck, Bootstrap had been updated and Bart's code didn't reflect the new version. In most shows, this would be a problem but the change allowed Bart to walk me through how to figure out what was wrong and how to access the Bootstrap documentation to fix it. The best way to learn something is to break it first, or at least Bart and I feel that way.

Bart's most excellent shownotes are at bartbusschots.ie/...

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In another Lite version of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart agreed to come on and explain the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. This is a regulation that will take effect across the European Union starting on 25 May 2018. Bart first gives us an overview, outlining the main objectives, the 7 core principles, and explains how a regulation differs from a directive. From there he defines the terminology and concepts which are critical to understanding the regulation. He explains the legal grounds, what consent means and what rights individuals will have. Then he covers data processing objections, how automation decision making is affected, and people's right to erasure. Finally, he goes through what kind of data breaches are mandatory to be disclosed and to whom. It's a really impressive bit of work that the EU have done here, and Bart does a great job explaining it.

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In this "Lite" version of Chit Chat Across the Pond (within a NosillaCastaway's definition of Lite), Bart teaches us about DNS Resolvers and helps give us the information to choose the right one for us. To get us there he starts by explaining the background technologies. He explains DNS and how there's two kinds of servers, he explains DNS Name resolution and why caching is important, and the security problems (and solutions) of DNS. Then he explains how third-party DNS providers can solve some of these problems. He explains their motivations which will inform your own decision. Finally (at about the 1 hour mark) he walks through the solutions offered by OpenDNS, Google, Quad9 and Cloudflare. I loved this episode and you can tell Bart really loves talking about DNS.

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Joe Dugandzic of smarterhomelife.com joins us again, this time in a crossover episode. We start by him asking me to describe my progression in Home Automation from my first smart lightbulb to the more advanced capabilities Steve and I enjoy today. But then we turn the table around and I ask Joe a series of questions submitted by NosillaCastaways.

If you'd like to see the video version of the show, check it out at: https://youtu.be/TlGtzGRL5o0

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We're finally back after spring break, and we're going to be moving on from JavaScript while we learn about Bootstrap. Bootstrap is a set of open source libraries which provide pre-built foundations for creating responsive and good looking websites. It's an easy episode with easy and fun homework I think you'll enjoy.

Before we got started I talked about a fantastic post Will (aka @beiju) wrote to me to help me understand JavaScript objects better. If you've been struggling like I have or just want a nice reference written in conversational style, check it out at Objects in Javascript Explained (for PBS) – by Will aka @beiju

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As our last episode of Programming By Stealth before our spring break, Bart wraps up our Cellular Automaton. He goes through his solution to the PBS 49 challenge first, and then he walks us through three examples of how a user could produce three different representations with our code. He demonstrates how to build a Conway Game of Life, the Maze Rule, and Brian's Brain. It's fun to see it all wrapped in a bow ending this long project. We'll be back on March 31st with a whole new project.

Bart's full tutorial shownotes are at bartbusschots.ie/...

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I asked Mike Potter to join us on Chit Chat Across the Pond this week with the express purpose of trying to convince you to come to Macstock Conference and Expo on July 20th and 21st. Do not listen to this episode if you don't want to be talked into it because I guarantee you'll want to after hearing Mike and me talk about how interesting and fun and inclusive and geeky it is.

During the show Mike gives us a special $10 off coupon (discount off the $179 early bird price). That coupon code is podfeetbonus10. Learn more and sign up to attend at macstock2018.com.

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This week Bart and I celebrate 50 episodes of Programming By Stealth. As Bart points out, we've been at this for two years now. I'm so happy he's stuck with me on this and he says he's got literally years of material yet to go. To commemorate this occasion, Bart got the crazy idea to build a web app live on video. We used a YouTube Live Hangout on Air while he shared his screen. He started with a blank canvas and when he was done we had a working web app.

The video is probably a better experience over at podfeet.com but the audio is supplied for those who prefer it. We did try to narrate what was going on to help with the audio.

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As promised last week, Bart Busschots brings us the second half of Programming By Stealth 49. We start by going through a lot of revision on JavaScript objects. It's really great to have all of this all in one place, and I got to ask a few questions that have been bugging me for a long time. I understood every bit of this and really enjoyed it, but I'm not going to lie, his little 6-part test after the revision baffled me a bit. But after we slog through that part, Bart gets us back on track improving our Cellular Automata. I never realized that we didn't actually define whether our cells are dead or alive!

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In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart had intended to work on improving our Cellular Automata, but we ended up spending a lot more time on reviewing the challenges from last week that we stopped before getting to the new stuff. The good news is that we're going to do the Cellular Automata improvements in only one week (it will be PBS 49B), and we have no homework for the week! As always, Bart's excellent tutorial shownotes are available at bartbusschots.ie/....

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Tom Merritt, host of the Daily Tech News Show along with many other fine podcasts, joins me to talk about how social media makes us feel. We talk about how we feel about pictures of food, how we curate Twitter, who in our family takes the photos, whether Instagram is a happy place, how we have real-life friends we only know online, how communities are awesome and how sometimes even Facebook is a place to share a deeply personal story. You can find links to all of Tom's podcasts and his books at tommerritt.com and the Daily Tech News Show at dailytechnewsshow.com.

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Bart decided to take a closer look at the JavaScript keywords 'this' and 'static' and boy am I glad he did. He said it was the hardest lesson he's put together so far. It's a convoluted topic but he gives great explanations as always. You can find his tutorial at bartbusschots.ie/...

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Joe Dugandzic of Smarter Home Life has been on the show several times in the past year talking about Home Automation. This time he's on to talk about how being a Youtuber working on Home Automation landed him a full-time job at a home automation startup company called Lynky. It's a story of his technical chops, grammar skills, his good sense about marketing, and his deep knowledge of Home Automation that helped him become the marketing and project manager for the Lynky Home Intelligence Hub.

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us about inheritance (relationships between classes) and polymorphism. Now he said polymorphism is a concept that throws most first-level college students, but in an odd twist, I didn't find it confusing at all! Plus, he lets us play with cows, ducks and turkeys in his example so it's loads of fun.

We also have a great new study tool created by Dorothy, aka MacLurker. She created an index of terms so you can jump right to the blog post where Bart talked about the term. I've been using it and it's grand! You might want to bookmark podfeet.com/blog/pbs-index.

As always, Bart's most excellent written tutorial is available at bartbusschots.ie/....

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart adds one more thing to the list of changes to arrays, and that's the spread operator. Then we'll learn how to get rid of the "const self = this" kludge for callbacks using the arrow functions. After that, we learn the basics of classes, a concept introduced in ES6 which brings JavaScript into the world of other C-style languages.

Bart's excellent written tutorial for this installment is available here: bartbusschots.ie/...

Bart at the end asks a question - would you be interested in learning how to build command line apps using JavaScript? So far we've only be working on web apps, but command line apps will allow us to manipulate things in the file system, the network and even to the Internet itself without using a web browser. Let us know via email to me at allison@podfeet.com, or write up your thoughts in our Facebook group at podfeet.com/facebook or our Google Plus group at podfeet.com/googeplus or you can even tweet us at @podfeet and @bbusschots.

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This week our guest is Allison Hartley. Allison is the Manager of the Napa Branch of the California department of Rehabilitation, and a podcaster. She co-hosts both the Tech Doctor Podcast with Dr. Robert Carter (dr-carter.com/...) and That Blind Tech Show (blindabilities.com/...).

Allison joins us to talk about the less than smooth experience she had upgrading to iPhone X. You might think it was hard because she's blind, but accessibility had nothing to do with it. We talk a bit about whether Apple has taken their eye off the ball about quality lately (spoiler alert, yes!).

You can follow Allison on Twitter @hot4technology.

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In this week's Programming By Stealth, Bart starts by actually giving me credit for leading him to rethink his strategy on the use of const and let. He was nudged along in the strategy by the most awesome Jill.

Then Bart goes on to reveal even more of the joy that is JavaScript ES6. He explains ES6 Arrays, how to loop through Arrays, and in a change that brings a tear to my eye, the simpler way you can now loop over Strings and how concatenation is a thing of the past when building strings. This is truly a joyful show!

As always, Bart's detailed tutorial is available at bartbusschots.ie/...

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Tom Merritt, host of Daily Tech News Show joins us to explain the implications of the different rulings of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding Internet traffic in the United States. He'll attempt to clarify the difference between the 2002 ruling where broadband was declared an information service provider and the 2015 ruling where it was changed to a common carrier.

And of course we'll talk about the implications of the vote by the FCC next week on this issue.

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This week our guest is Kaylee of the Zettai Geek Dayo podcast. You con find the podcast at platypuspodcasts.com and you can find Kaylee on Twitter at @kayleedayo.

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us new ways to deal with arguments and objects in JavaScript ES6. We learn how to set default argument values for functions in a way that is self-documenting. He explains how variadic (aka Rest) arguments allow you to shove all of the arguments of a function into an array. Then he walks us through how to use for ... in loops to loop over objects. He reminds us of the difference between instance and static properties and explains how for ... in loops work with both kinds of properties. I really enjoyed this episode and followed almost all of it on the first time through!

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This week our guest is Dr. Maryanne Garry, a professor from the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Dr. Garry is a scientific researcher into memory, memory distortions, false memories, the myth of repression and its overlap with the law. This is her fourth appearance on Chit Chat Across the Pond, and has pretty much ruined everything we think we knew about memory. She's back to answer even more questions we have about new research into memories.

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In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart spends most of the time talking through his solution to the previous challenge, where we added start and stop buttons to our Game of Life. In his solution he actually modifies the prototype to accommodate the ability to add these buttons. He explains his process and his decisions along the way. I'm not going to lie, this one confused me quite a bit in the middle but we both hope it's because we've been away from the hard-core JavaScript for quite a while.

Once we have that under our belts, he starts explaining some of the cool, new features in JavaScript ES6 where we abandon var and replace it with let and const. He explains the value of these new terms (and the problems they solve!)

Bart's full tutorial is available as always at bartbusschots.ie/...

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I've been impressed by the women who have stepped forward and told their stories about what life is like for us. I don't have any salacious tale to tell but rather a thousand paper cuts type of story. I thought about doing a monologue but I was terribly anxious about talking through this, so I reached out to Bart Busschots because I trusted him to help me.

I decided to push the audio out in both the NosillaCast and Chit Chat Across the Pond feeds, well, because I wanted you to hear it.

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CCATP #507 for October 29, 2017, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. It is also a Programming By Stealth, installment 42 of X with Bart Busschots. It's finally time to tie all the bits and pieces we've learned together and create our first web app. Armed with our HTML, CSS, jQuery and JavaScript knowledge, and our Cellular Automata Prototype, Bart walks us through how to bring the Game of Life...to Life! It's a lot of fun and I understood a great deal of it (I'm not gonna lie, it wasn't 100% this time.)

As always Bart's amazing tutorial for this episode is available at: bartbusschots.ie/

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I met Mark Fawcett at Macstock Expo in Chicago last year and we hit it off immediately. Mark does in-home tech support for Apple products, and he's full of great stories of the fun he has doing this job. After 20 years as a TV and video producer, he finds his new job more fulfilling and fun. I had a great time hearing his crazy stories of some "interesting" clients and I'm sure you'll enjoy the conversation too. And of course I tease him about the name of his company, MacMen.

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In this episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart ties up the last of the loose ends related to web forms. He teaches us about form events, which are critical to making our web forms not only accessible to screen readers but to allow our users to tab around to the different fields and interact with them without using a mouse. We learn about the keypress event and learn what it means for 31 to be the space key.

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Erica Peterson of Moms Can: CODE joins us this week to talk about her new startup designed to help mothers who code to connect and collaborate.

We talk about her life as a mother of a five-year-old, while coding, while teaching high school biology, creating a startup and running a non-profit. The non-profit is called Science Tots, which is focused on bringing STEAM activities to non-science-based events.

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In a shocking turn of events, I actually followed all of Programming By Stealth this week! Bart walked us through his solution to last week's HTML5 Forms Validation homework, and in so doing highlighted some especially clever things he did. I was pretty pleased with my own version of the homework, and in fact Bart gave me a gold star for one thing I did. Bart also explains how he used CSS to make his form even more readable.

In the second half of the episode he shows how to use jQuery to improve the forms even more. He demonstrates how certain requirements cannot be met with the built-in forms validation and how we can use jQuery instead. I loved this episode because it tied in our knowledg of jQuery back to HTML forms.

Bart's most excellent written tutorial can be found at PBS 40 of x – HTML5 Custom Validations with jQuery on bartb.ie.

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Megan Morrone joins us today. Megan is the host of iOS Today with Leo LaPorte and host of Tech News Today with Jason Howell on the TWiT network. She's got the new, shiny iPhone 8 Plus so I asked her on to tell us what she thinks about it. Megan talks about how the glass back feels, the fun she's been having with Portrait lighting and how she hasn't even tried the 4K 60fps video yet. She give us a tip for wireless charging - the Seneo Qi Wireless Charging Stand. iMore has a link to a code to get it down to only $13.

Megan talks about her identical twin sons and their plans to mess with Leo's iPhone X when he gets it. She talks about the significant speed bump she noticed with the new A11 bionic chip. Megan brought an interesting perspective to the iPhone price points; talking about how you can get a good iPhone for only $350 (the SE) and a good iPad for only $329.

You can find Megan at twit.tv/ios and twit.tv/tnt and you can follow Megan on Twitter at @meganmorrone.

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This week Bart Busschots joins us to talk about HTML Form Validation. We'll get back to our Cellular Automata next week. Bart has also decided that we're going to get our feet a little bit yet by using GitHub where we'll be getting the challenges and solutions from now on. You can see Bart's awesome tutorial at bartbusschots.ie/...

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I asked the fabulous Joe Dugandzic to come back on the show to talk us through the comprehensive HomeKit compatible product guide he created. For a long time there weren't a lot of HomeKit devices to enjoy but now that the market is filling up, having a really well organized page with all of the options is very valuable.

Joe has organized the page into categories rather than by vendor. He's got lighting, outlets and sockets, wall dimmers & switches, security devices like locks and cameras, thermostats, ceiling fans and shades, fire and smoke detectors, specialized sensors like for air quality and water leaks, sand even smart buttons (which I think are dumb actually).

If you're not of the HomeKit persuasion, every device on his site has a code for whether it's also compatible with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, and he designates if it works in countries with 240 volt power or just 120.

With all this to go through, it's a long show because I asked so many questions of Joe!

Check out the Illustrated HomeKit Product Guide at smarterhomelife.com/...

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We finally reached 500 episodes of Chit Chat Across the Pond (episode 499 will be next week) so who better to have on the show than Bart Busschots who started it all?

In our first Programming By Stealth after our summer vacation, Bart decided to do a retrospective on what we’ve learned to date from HTML to CSS to JavaScript. I thought it was a great episode because it refreshed my memory on so much that we’ve done. He even put together a set of quiz questions for each section and shockinglyI didn’t do too badly at them!

It was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoy this refresher episode as much as I did. Of course Bart’s fabulous written tutorial is available at www.bartbusschots.ie/...

Chit Chat Across the Pond: Recent Episodes

Allison Sheridan