I was lucky enough to be on the MacCast and Clockwise this week talking Apple Watch. Donald Burr explains how perhaps Apple’s guidelines on location accuracy in Core Location might explain why my Apple Watch was giving inaccurate results. In Dumb Question Corner Todd McCann of the Trucker Dump Podcast asks a question about using an Airport Extreme in bridge mode. Interview from NAB 2015 with Pond5 from pond5.com to acquire legal audio, video and images for use online. I walk through the trials and tribulations of how to put together a presentation I call Password Playdate without revealing my own passwords to the audience. Interview from NAB about the VSN Mobil V.360° Waterproof Action Camera. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Jason Snell joins us to talk about the Apple Watch, Photos and what it’s like to strike out on your own.
Hi this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Mac Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. Today is Sunday May 3, 2015 and this is show number 521.
Appearances
It’s been a busy week for me in podcast land. I had the great pleasure of joining Adam Christianson on The Maccast. He invited five of us to come on individually to talk to him about the Apple Watch and then compiled it into one long show including a segment on his own impressions. His guests include Ken Ray, David Sparks, Veronica Belmont and Erfon Elijah. I’m really excited to be included in that group!
I also got to be on the Clockwise Podcast hosted by Jason Snell and Dan Moren. If you haven’t heard this show before, I highly recommend it. It’s 2 hosts, 2 guests, 4 topics, 30 minutes. It’s probably the crispest, well orchestrated show I have ever listened to. I was a fan of the show already and then Kirschen Seah recommended me to Jason and he took her up on the idea. The other guest was Scholle McFarland another former Macworld person who was a lot of fun. Clockwise is hosted over on relay.fm and of course there’s a link to episode #85.
Go check out both shows – they’re awesome and I’m not saying that JUST because I’m on!
Distance Calculation on the Apple Watch
Last week I talked a bit about how on my straight line run on the beach, the Apple Watch said I ran farther out than I ran back, which didn’t make any sense. Donald Burr wrote a comment on that blog post and I wanted to read it to you because it does help explain the inaccuracy.
As a developer I have a bit of inside knowledge to support that in fact. When calling on Core Location (the framework that handles location updates) you can tell it the type of location accuracy you want. You can specify this value as an absolute value in meters, but Apple defines several default values they recommend you use. The most accurate is kCLLocationAccuracyBestForNavigation, which, as its name implies, is best used when doing GPS navigation. Of course while you’re driving you would want the most accurate position information possible, a couple of feet could mean that you miss the turn that you needed to make! They strongly recommend that this mode be used only when the phone is likely to be plugged in to a power source (e.g. to your car) The next lowest level is kCLLocationAccuracyBest, which basically means that the OS will do its best to balance accuracy vs. power consumption – this mode will still consume a fair amount of power, but not as much as BestForNavigation.
I think Donald is probably right, and I love that the NosillaCastaways are THIS geeky!
Dumb Question Corner
Todd McCann of the Trucker Dump Podcast sends in our dumb question today. He has a wireless modem from his cable company and wants to know if he puts his Airport Extreme in Bridge mode but still have the advantages of the security of the APE or will it just pass along the problems.
I take offense at Todd thinking we don’t know about lightning, because I do have distant childhood memories of when it used to rain in California. It’s like living in a Mad Max movie around here now though. Anyway, Todd and I went back and forth on this question of his about the Airport Extreme in bridge mode but I’ll boil it down for those of you listening.
Back in August of 2013 on episode #431 Bart and I walked through how to configure an Airport Extreme behind a Verizon wireless router, and we put together a tutorial on it (of COURSE we did!) I pointed Todd to that tutorial and explained that if he followed these instructions, he’d be able to NOT use Bridge mode and let the Airport Extreme wrest control from the cable company’s router. It’s kind of complicated and has some sleight of hand that Bart figured out, but it’s stable for me and gets what Todd wants.
But there’s a problem which he elaborated in a later email:
You see, our country-bumpkin Internet goes out A LOT. In the past, when the guy came over to fix it, he always looked dumbfounded when he found out we were bypassing the router and letting the Apple Extreme do all the work. Therefore, he would just unplug it and set it up the way he knows how to do it. (Makes you wonder what I’m paying $100 a month for, huh?)
Back then, it was no big deal because The Evil Overlord ( the tech-hating wife) and I were always home at the same time, so I was always there to set up the Airport again. But now I’m on the road and she’s at home. That’s why we started using bridge mode. That way when the doofus fixes the Internet, she can just go and plug the Airport Extreme back in and everything just works.
So the question still stands. Since I HAVE to use the Airport Extreme in bridge mode to keep my marriage intact, are we still subject to all those router exploits? I realize this wouldn’t be an issue if I could convince her to follow your tutorial every time, but I’m pretty sure if I even suggested it that she’d stab me in the neck with a dull fork.
After reading that I understand how he does have to live with bridge mode, or move to a place with decent Internet, or make the Evil Overlord into a NosillaCastaway. If he does leave it in bridge mode, the sad answer is that the Airport Extreme would not provide him any security in this mode. The router from his provider is the one talking to the outside world, while the Airport Extreme is just passing along whatever comes in. I’m not sure what having an Airport Extreme is buying him using it in this mode, except perhaps the new fancy pants beam forming antennas with 802.11 a/b/c/g might give him a better wireless signal in the house. I still think the solution is to invite the Evil Overlord into the community…
Blog Posts
Pond5 for Royalty-Free Stock Media – Movies, Music, Sound Effects
Password Playdate
VSN Mobil V.360° Waterproof Action Camera
Clarify
I’m working on a hardware review I hoped to fit into this week’s show but it looks like it will have to wait till next week. When I started working with this product, I noticed that it had a software component that I hadn’t expected. As soon as I started to use it, I realized that I was doing an initial setup that I wouldn’t be able to do a second time. I took a screenshot of the first screen using the built-in tools of OS X, then opened Preview to save it with a good name. Then I realized I’d need to do more than one of these so that was going to be a tedious process. I opened Pages and just pasted the first screenshot in. I had a bit of text I wanted to add so I started typing but the images started moving around in a weird way. I started to look at the formatting of the images to change the way the words wrapped around…and then I slapped myself on the forehead – this is totally the wrong tool for the job!
Clarify is for making tutorials for other people so for a short bit there I forgot that you don’t HAVE to be making a tutorial to use Clarify. I popped open Clarify and as I ran through the process I used its built-in screen capture tool to grab shots of windows and portions of windows as I went through the screens. In a few cases I wanted to remember a specific point on a shot so I simply dropped an arrow to point to what I wanted to remember. Since Clarify creates a unique step for each screenshot, I didn’t have to fiddle with image formatting to drop in the text comments I needed.
At one point I needed two screenshots side by side, and the new version of Clarify let me do that too. I know it’s a tease to not tell you about the product but I was so delighted that Clarify solved a new problem for me, even if I was using it for the wrong thing! If you’d like the swiss army knife of documentation, tutorials, screenshots, and memory enhancers, check out Clarify from clarify-it.com. Don’t tell them I’ve been misusing it though!
Chit Chat Across the Pond (30 min in)
Jason Snell is the founder and editor in chief of Six Colors, which provides daily coverage of Apple, other technology companies, and the intersection of technology and culture.
Just in case you don’t know the name, Jason was the lead editor for Macworld for more than a decade. For a couple of years I also oversaw editorial operations for PCWorld, and launched TechHive and Greenbot. He worked for IDG for 17 years and Ziff-Davis for three before that, adding up to two decades of doing technology journalism and covering Apple at close range.
Moving from a Company to Independent
- What are you, nuts?
- How hard was this? Is it fun? Scary? Awesome?
Apple Watch
- What do you think it is today?
- What do you think it will be?
- What has surprised you?
- For you personally do you think it will reduce the amount of time you spend with your iPhone?
- Will this get people to wear watches?
- How about a “band” that turns it into a pocket watch?
Photos
So you’re writing a book about Photos – are you a big ol’ know-it-all about it?
- What tool did you use before Photos?
- How cool is it to have ALL of your photos everywhere?
- What editing tools do you miss?
- What editing tools do you like that they did include?
- You wrote on Macworld.com about how the Mac OS X Automation people have written some Automator actions for Photos – can you talk about why we’d need them?
- Do you see this reducing our need for giant disks on our portable devices?
You can find more from Jason at…
- Website: sixcolors.com
- Podcasts: Upgrade, Clockwise, the Incomparable, TV Talk Machine, Total Party Kill at sixcolors.com/podcasts/
- Jason’s book, “Photos for Mac: A Take Control Crash Course” is available at takecontrolbooks.com/photos-crash-course
That’s going to wind this up for this week, many thanks to our sponsor for helping to pay the bills, the makers of Clarify over at clarify-it.com. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter @podfeet. Check out the NosillaCast Google Plus Community too – lots of fun over there! If you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.