Chit Chat Across the Pond

In this week's Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst of TidBITS fame and fortune joins me to talk about recent changes to AppleCare. While the big story of the day is AppleCare One, there have been changes over the past few years (and even this year) to what AppleCare covers and how it's charged. After discussing those changes, we get into the huge pitfalls and dangers in AppleCare One. If you don't pay attention, it's fairly easy to end up with a worse deal. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_08_26 Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me PETLIBRO - 30% off for you and me 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 Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

Tage Bushman joins me this week to talk about his career path to become a Professor at Western Technical College. It's a fascinating subject for obvious reasons. The ground has been shifting constantly since he first got into tech, but now with AI, things have gotten even more "interesting. Tage teaches in the Cybersecurity program and Web & Software programs. Specifically, I teach Cisco 1 (networking basics), Linux Administration, Database Server Administration, and DevOps. I have also taught Web Programming 1, Intro to Cybersecurity, Cybersecurity Essentials, Business Information Systems, and Software Apps for Business. Tage also hosts two podcasts. He is a huge Disney Parks (specifically Disneyland) fan. He and his friend Teresa host the DLWeekly Podcast and he's also part of The Hub Crawl Podcast, which he calls "a riff off Clockwise" where they bring a Disney question and go around the virtual room. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_08_25 Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me 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 Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

Adam Engst recently wrote a post on TidBITS describing his journey migrating from a 27" Intel iMac to an M4 Pro MacBook Pro. He entitled the article Switching from a 27-inch iMac to a 14-inch MacBook Pro: A Fresh Start. I asked him to come on Chit Chat Across the Pond so he could walk us all through how he decided on the MacBook Pro (vs. a Mac mini or a Mac Studio), how he made his display migration decision, how he had to modify his desk, and how he's wrong about trackpad placement. But that's not all, Adam chose to migrate no data and no applications! It's a story of a clean install beyond anything I've ever done, so you know it was super fun. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_07_25 Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle NosillaCast 20th Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me 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 Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

This week, our guest is Adam Engst, writer, editor, and publisher of the fabulous TidBITS Newsletter. In late May, The Browser Company announced that they are discontinuing their ground-breaking web browser Arc. As soon as I saw the headlines, my heart sank for people like Tom from Ontario, who first introduced the NosillaCast audience to Arc and Adam, who has been one of the biggest fans of Arc. In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam walks us through a brief overview of what Arc gave us, how he feels The Browser Company treated its fans, and then he explains a little bit about how their next browser, Dia, works. Of course Adam has written all of this up on [tidbits.com/...](https://tidbits.com/2025/06/20/dia-browser-debuts-with-contextual-ai-chat-but-arc-users-feel-left-behind/). Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me 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 Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

Bart Busschots joins me to talk about his trials and tribulations finding a good bookmark manager to replace Pocket, which he never really liked in the first place. He tells us everything he loves about Raindrop.io. Unlike most Chit Chat Across the Pond episodes, there's a full blog post in the show notes if you'd rather read than listen ... or do both! Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me 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 Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

On Chit Chat Across the Pond #814, Adam Engst and I discussed the results of a VPN survey he conducted with the TidBITS subscribers. From there, we got into a discussion where Adam challenged the common wisdom that we need a VPN when we're on public WiFi networks. We got a bit mired in some of the discussion, where we almost had enough knowledge to explain our positions. Networking is a topic on which Bart has a depth of knowledge, and he's here to clarify some of the things we talked about. The recording you're about to hear was created for the Security Bits segment on NosillaCast #1048, but I felt it was important for the Chit Chat Across the Pond audience to hear it as a follow-up to our discussion with Adam. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_06_08 Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me 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 Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst joins me to talk about two recent articles he wrote for TidBITS. The first topic is life-changing for me. Have you ever wanted to send someone a link to a specific spot on a long web page? With text fragments, most, if not all, web browsers now allow you to select some text, right-click, and select "Copy Link with Highlight". This link will not only take them to the right spot on the page, but it will highlight the text you selected. Learn the details in Adam's article: Text Fragments Enable Deep Linking on Web Pages. Next up, we talk about a survey Adam conducted amongst TidBITS readers asking them about their usage of VPNs. We had a fun discussion about how he figured out what four simple questions to ask before he even started the survey. He walks through the results, and we talk about some of the more surprising results. you can read the full article here: Do You Use It? VPN Use Is Widespread During our discussion, we talked a little bit about Tailscale, and we referred to the article that the great Glenn Fleishman wrote on the topic: Tailscale Gives You Remote Access to Your LAN from Anywhere

This episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond is going to be a bit different. On the NosillaCast #1042 for April 27th, Bart Busschots and I recorded his usual segment on Security Bits, but the majority of it was a deep dive. The subject was whether cryptography as we know it is doomed because of quantum computing. His explanation was so good that I wanted to be able to point people directly to the audio instead of referencing the chapter mark or a time stamp so we decided to make it a standalone Chit Chat Across the Pond. If you want to listen to the rest of the original recording of Security Bits, be sure to subscribe to the NosillaCast and look for episode #1042. You can find Bart's shownotes for the episode of Security Bits at Security Bits — 27 April 2025 — Deep Dive into Quantum Computing. [audio mp3="https://media.blubrry.com/nosillacast/traffic.libsyn.com/nosillacast/CCATP_2025_04_29.mp3"] mp3 download Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_04_29 Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle NosillaCast 20th 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 Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst from TidBITS talks about how traditional search engines like Google and Bing no longer provide valuable information because they surface unreliable content first. Instead of using traditional search engines, he's been testing tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Claude to see how well they search the web. He calls these tools "Answer Engines" when they're used to search the web rather than generate their own responses to your prompts. You can read Adam's extensive blog post about Answer Engines, and his see his research results at tidbits.com/... Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_04_29 Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle NosillaCast 20th 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 Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

This week, Adam Engst joins us to talk about some work he did to try to measure the accuracy of several different AI models in creating audio transcriptions. He let me help him with some of the transcriptions so I was invested in his findings. We'll learn about ways to measure accuracy, including Word Error Rate aka WER. You can read Adam's article where he describes in detail the process he followed and the rather unsatisfying results at [tidbits.com/...](https://tidbits.com/2025/02/28/comparing-audio-transcription-in-notes-audio-hijack-and-macwhisper/). Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_03_23