Nc_2023_02_12
[0:01] Hi, this is Allison Sherrod into the NoCellicast Podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology, geek podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias.
Today is Sunday, February 12th, 2023, and this is show number 927.
Well, we got a big show for you this week, so let's jump right in with another interview, by Bodhi Grimm, the awesome host of the Kill a Watt Podcast.
[0:23] That's a podcast you should go subscribe to, of course, when you're done listening to this show.
Anyway, the Kill WAP podcast is a show all about electric vehicles and alternative energy.
Now the interviews he got us from CES have nothing to do with electric vehicles.
They're just things he thought would be fun for the no-cilla castaways.
Tonies - Ces Interview By Bodie Grimm (No Blog Post)
[0:40] Hey everybody, Bodhi here and I have a really cool interview for you today.
Honestly, this is not a company that I would normally cover on my show or just in general, but it was such a neat demonstration that I decided to ask them if they'd be willing to be interviewed and they were.
And that company is Tonys. If you don't know or have never heard of Tonys, like I was a week ago, Tonys is a really cool tech device for kids 3 and up.
They provide screen free entertainment for kids.
[1:13] The Tonys device is a speaker that allows children to independently listen to audio books or age appropriate songs. There are two parts to the Tonys system.
The first part is this really cool soft squishy huggable box which is equipped with Wi-Fi, and like I mentioned a speaker and it's got two little ears on the top and those ears are used for volume control and also on the top it has this little lit up square and that brings us to the second part of the Tony system which is the Tony itself and these are just little figurines equipped with RFID and the child just puts the figurine on the top of box and then it plays the content for that figurine. I got to interview Cole from Tony's, and he is going to explain all of the features of this device. All right I'm here with Cole and, Cole is with Tony's. Could you please tell me what Tony's is? Yeah so Tony's is a squishy.
[2:14] Screen free audio speaker. It's designed for kids as young as two years old to play with all their.
[2:19] Favorite characters whether it's a Disney princess, Sesame Street, Pop Patrol and all you do is you put your favorite character on top of the box.
I'm putting Peppa Pig on top of the box.
[2:29] And you'll start hearing Peppa Pig. Peppa Pig's gonna play music, audio books, stories and educational content.
And you work it by pressing the big gear to turn the volume up.
[2:41] Volume down is the little ear, and it's entirely tactile, so a two year old can work this, without any help from mom or dad or grandma or grandpa.
And so if you wanna change tracks, you just slap the side of the box.
[2:55] If you wanna fast forward, you just tilt the box to the left.
[2:58] If you want to go to the right, it rewinds it. And then there's a headphone jack as well.
Yeah, I saw that you have branded headphones out there. Yes.
In addition to the regular headphones you can just plug in with it.
Yes, so any headphone will work with the box. Ours are built so it's got a lower decibel rating, so it's not gonna hurt a developing child's ear. So a one year old or two year old can wear headphones, and not worry about volume hurting them.
Yes, that is something that drives me crazy about kids toys is how loud they are, especially when you consider how sensitive their little ears are.
Cause I'm almost 50 years old and deaf and it still hurts my ears. Absolutely.
So that's cool. So you have some branding here. You mentioned Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol.
You have Disney branding.
[3:44] What else you got here? I can certainly mention we have these, they're called Creative Tonys. So these Tonys that are in white packaging, and they have little ears on them and these come blank.
So we have a My Tony's app, and we have a lot of grandparents, whether they're, I have a grandparent who lives in Minneapolis where I live.
Her grandkids live in South Africa.
And so every morning she records a new message on her phone on her My Tony's app, and she says hi to her grandkids, and her grandkids wake up in South Africa, put the Tony on top, and they get to hear a new message from grandma or grandpa every single day.
And that's because this is Wi-Fi.
This has Wi-Fi. I don't know if we mentioned that at the beginning.
It's been a long day. Yes.
But that is so neat. So every single day, I was under the assumption when.
[4:32] I forget her name, I was just talking to her, I'm so embarrassed. She was very nice.
[4:37] Yeah. When she mentioned that, I just assumed that it was like a one-time thing.
So if you're a grandparent, you live in a completely different continent, you could say hello to your grandkids.
That's right. And we have a lot of parents who are maybe military parents or have certainly at this company, salespeople who are traveling away from their family, using that My Tony's app to always send a message, to their kids back home, wherever they might be on the planet, is a great way to stay in touch and to stay engaged.
And then the kids have the agency, so this is something that they use all by themselves. This is their box.
And so they can always listen to, whenever they want, that new message from grandma or grandpa, and they don't have to wait for a FaceTime, they don't have to wait for a phone call.
They have complete autonomy of when they want to connect with their grandparent, relative, parent, what have you.
Man, that is so cool.
I'm telling you, the design is very kid-friendly. It's just a cube with a green box on the top where.
[5:32] The kid puts the... what did you call it? Tony's. The Tony. And then it just plays the audiobook.
That's in between 30, 90 minutes? Is that correct? Yes. So every character is going to be anywhere, from 25 minutes to three hours long, depending on it. So some of them are just audiobooks like our Shrek or Peter Rabbit, which is just an audiobook experience. Some of them are just music, like Coco Melon or Counting Songs Tony, but the majority of our figurines are going to be a mix, between audiobooks and music. And then how much is the cube and then how much range wise are the, Tonys? Yes, great question. So the Tony box is $99.99. It comes with a figurine right out of the box, so it's a great value right out of the box. And then all the figurines themselves range anywhere, from $14.99 to $17.99 or $19.99 depending on how long the content is for each character.
[6:23] And so also we like to say at Tony's when you're listening to audio you're tuned in.
When you're watching a screen you're tuned out. So you're allowing kids to think for themselves what a fire truck might look like or what a story might unfold in their imagination, compared to the screen type of entertainment. Thank you so much. Tell people how they can buy one. Yeah, absolutely. So you can go to your local Target, local Best Buy, you can go to Amazon, and you can go to Tony's.com or the kind of main distribution. But if you have independent toy shops, in your local geography, our independent toy stores will be happy to see you as well to look, for Tony's. Awesome. And that is it. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Thank you very much.
I want to thank Cole for agreeing to be interviewed. It was definitely the end of the day at CES, and everybody was tired and ready to go home on a Saturday night.
So Cole was very nice and stayed a little bit to chat. So I appreciate that.
If you want to learn more about Tonys, go to Tonies.com.
[7:27] Well thanks so much for this, Bodie. What an inventive toy. I just love the idea of being able to send an audio message to my grandkids every day. I have a couple of granddaughters that are turning three very soon. That might be on my list. But also, one of my granddaughters is absolutely obsessed with Cocoa Melon, so she would really love what he was talking about there. I have a feeling the feature she would love the most would be slapping the side of it to change what it's playing.
The Darcy Method For Screencasting — Real-World Test
[7:54] In October, I had a gentleman named Darcy Hegarty on Chit Chat Across the Pond to talk about the process he uses to create video screencasts for the video tutorial podcast Screencast Online.
I wanted to talk to him at the time about his methods because he created a process that is vastly different from how I normally do mine for Screencast Online.
For my last few tutorials, I have followed what I'm calling the Darcy method and I have, some observations about how I'm actually liking it better than my own process that I've been using for years.
So before I can explain why I liked his method better, I need to explain the differences in our workflows, and I'll start with mine.
For at least a week or so before I start recording, I test every single feature of the software I'm going to teach.
As I poke all of the buttons, I keep a mind map open in the awesome iThought software.
I throw concepts onto the mind map with brief explanations of each one.
As I start to get a mess of nodes, I then start to organize them in order to tell a, For example, I might decide to teach an entire tool and then march through its settings at the end, or the tool might be better explained by jumping in and out of settings as the need arises in the use of that particular tool.
[9:04] When I'm done working out the story I want to tell, I make sure to flesh out any details I didn't already understand.
I write a little bit of the intro, and then I start doing my recordings.
Now we use ScreenFlow as our recording, editing, and producing software for Mac apps, but iOS apps are actually more reliably recorded using QuickTime. ScreenFlow can record iOS devices, but as a collective the ScreenCastsOnline tutors have found, it can be kind of hit or miss on how, well it continues to work when you're trying to do these recordings. So for iOS, we record in QuickTime, we import the file into ScreenFlow, and then we separate the audio track from the video track, and then we go to town editing.
Now I'll describe the process for macOS as it's easier to explain the Darcy method differences, if I stick to just that one platform.
I also need to explain the geometry of how I work because it highlights some of the advantages of the Darcy method.
I have a 14 inch MacBook Pro on a 12 south curved stand that's diagonally off to my right.
And I have a Pro Display XDR display directly in front of me.
My microphone is on a boom arm that comes out diagonally between those two devices.
When I'm recording, I set the MacBook Pro as the primary display, and I rotate the microphone so I'm speaking into it at the correct angle.
It's not the most ergonomic positioning to sit at my desk because I'm kind of crooked, over at an angle, but since I do the editing on the big display, I'm switching back and forth enough that I don't get that crooked in my neck.
[10:31] Now on the big display, I've got ScreenFlow taking up the left two-thirds of the screen, and the right third is the mind map.
I look at the mind map for a very small section of what I want to demonstrate, maybe practice it once in the app, and then I hit record for both audio from my mic, and video from the Mac's internal display.
I can usually only do like three minutes max before I have to stop.
ScreenFlow asks to import the clip and name it on import, and I need to choose whether to drop it in immediately, or drag it into the timeline manually.
Now you might think it would be good to just jump right back in and keep recording to stay in the flow, but I tend to edit the short clip right away, especially when I'm doing Mac recordings.
The problem is if I record too much, it's not uncommon for the screens to change significantly.
So going back and doing a re-record of a small piece if I find a mistake is impossible.
Now I pride myself on the fewest number of page curl transitions to cover up moving items on the screen, so that's one of the reasons I do it in small chunks.
I do a chunk, I edit, I chunk, I edit, I chunk, I edit.
So this means the process is to review the mind map, record a couple of minutes, edit a couple of minutes, review the mind map, record a couple of minutes, edit a couple of minutes, and so on and so on.
Every time I stop between these steps is an opportunity for my procrastinator's brain to think, hey, you know, I really should go empty the dishwasher, or hey, I think I need a snack, or hey, I should take Tesla for a walk.
Once I step away from recording, it's really hard to get back into it again.
[12:00] I've recently gotten a new interface for my big girl microphone, the Elgato Wave XLR.
My previous USB interfaces were too slow, and I used to get pops and clicks because it was too slow, so that meant constant voiceover recordings were required during the editing process.
Now while the Wave does a much better job, I do get the occasional pop or click.
I also get road or airplane noise that I didn't notice while recording, so those require a voiceover recording as well.
I bring up the voiceover problems because the layout of my desk setup affects what you hear.
As I mentioned, the mic is on a boom arm between the big screen and the laptop to my right.
I record video and audio looking at the laptop screen, so the mic is slightly to my left, but when I'm editing, it's on the big screen and the mic is now to my right.
Now, when I do this switch to go over and start doing these voiceovers, I try to position it the same distance and angle as I flip back and forth, but it's not at all uncommon for me to get it wrong, and a voiceover bit will sound very obviously dubbed in.
Overall, the process I've just described is tedious. It gives me opportunities to walk away and procrastinate, and it's really hard to keep in the flow.
[13:12] All right, Darcy's method is much different. I'm not sure how he gathers his original ideas of how to tell the story, but he writes out an entire written script for the full tutorial video.
That sounds like something I can do, right? I'm really comfortable writing scripts.
He starts by recording a scratch version of the audio from the script.
Then while listening to that scratch audio, he records the video without talking.
After he's gotten the video recorded, he goes back in and he records a good version of the audio to match the video.
For my tutorials on touch, retouch and under my roof, I used what I'll call the modified Darcy method, or maybe the Darcy method with a pod feed twist.
The touch retouch tutorial was 90% iOS based while the under my roof tutorial was 90% on the Mac.
I think the benefits of the Darcy method are more evident in recording on the Mac, and I'll elaborate on why.
[14:06] When I created the Under My Roof tutorial, I still started by creating a mind map, but I found I, didn't flesh it out nearly as much as I normally do. Part of that might be because I know the Under My Roof tool so well already, I've been using it for years and years and years, but I, found out that I wanted to start writing the script very early in the process. I also found that I couldn't stand to wait until I had the entire script written before starting to record.
I normally delay recording till the last possible moment because it's so hard to do, so this was a good sign that I was really itching to record.
I wanted to practice the new method, and recording audio from a script is a very easy lift for me, so I got started really quickly.
[14:48] First benefit, I start recording sooner because the Darcy method is easier.
I wrote about 10 minutes worth of script with a reasonable stopping point, and then I used ScreenFlow to record the audio in one cut.
I'm not saying I didn't make any mistakes, but I didn't stop and start like I do when recording audio and video at the same time.
Since I was only recording audio and the script was on my big display, my mic was on my right side.
When I stopped and edited out the few mistakes and did any voiceovers, my mic placement was identical so it did not sound like a bad dub.
In the Allison method when doing a voiceover, I had to listen to what I had tried to say, memorize it, and then re-record.
My skills at memorization aren't great, so I'd clip out the bare minimum, which was often a small segment of a sentence.
It was hard to get the intonation to match with the rest of the sentence.
Since with the Darcy method, I have a script, I can re-record a much longer segment, so the cadence and intonation sounds exactly the same.
There's our second benefit. Voiceovers sound just like the original, because of the angle and because of the script.
[15:54] Now I'm calling my new method the modified Darcy method, because of how he does the audio.
I told you he records a scratch version of the audio, then records the video, then records a final version of the audio.
I'm not sure how he reads a script for the final audio while actually watching the video at the same time, to ensure he says things at the correct time.
My method was to do a good audio take and then record the video.
There are some challenges to my process, which might explain why he does two audio takes, but I'll get to those in a moment.
When I first started on this new method, I simply read through my script in a normal cadence.
But when I went to record the video, I realized I hadn't left myself nearly enough time to execute some of the steps.
Now it's not difficult to cut the audio and yet add a pause after the fact, but it does make it hard to record the video when the audio has already moved on.
I felt rushed like, oh, wait for me, wait for me, I'm still recording video.
As I created later segments of the script, I learned to type in intentional pauses, so I'd remember to give myself a little bit of time in the appropriate places while recording the video.
[16:56] Now it's hard to actually start recording the video because you have to ask ScreenFlow to do two things at the same time. You have to tell it to play back the audio recording but also start a video recording session. Now it's up to the task but the timing of that is tricky. I have to back up the scrubber by a few minutes, hit play, then invoke the video recording, wait for it to let me start and then sit there and wait until the audio catches up to where I need to be. If I'm having Having timing trouble, I can stop the audio in ScreenFlow, finish a step and go back to ScreenFlow and restart, but that does add some editing steps.
When you skip to, or I'm sorry, when you flip to ScreenFlow, even though it's on a different screen, the menu bar will change on the main screen and that just won't do.
[17:39] After I learned to put in pauses, I found I could catch up in doing the steps on the video without too much trouble.
Then after recording the video and dropping it in, I could fix any timing problems by, putting in freeze frames in the video.
Frames are super easy in ScreenFlow. You click in the timeline, grab the scrubber and just kind of pull the video apart.
Then you put the scrubber back at the cut point and hit command shift F and that adds a one second freeze frame.
It's really easy to stretch and shrink those to match the audio.
[18:08] If the audio needed a pause to wait for the video, I wouldn't necessarily make dead air while I completed those steps.
In ScreenFlow, you can cut a video clip, hold down the option key and then stretch or shrink the video to slow it down or speed it up. It's a really great tool to know because it makes your tutorials far less boring. We use it all the time when a step requires typing in text, for example. Nobody wants to watch you painstakingly pack out a sentence, so, we speed it up and drop it under the audio where we say what we're doing.
So now we've gotten to the first downside. Getting the timing right on reading the script, is a little bit tricky.
[18:47] While getting the timing just right on the audio for the script when not recording the video simultaneously is challenging, that downside is far outweighed by how much easier it is to do one thing at a time.
As humans, you know, we were convinced that we can multitask, but it's been proven in many, many tests that we aren't actually multitasking, we're rapidly task switching.
[19:08] Even though I repeatedly practice the steps I'm going to demonstrate in a video screencast, it's really hard to remember what I want to say at the same time I'm executing the task.
You should see how many takes and retakes I do for the shortest, simplest tasks.
It's not uncommon for me to have to edit a segment that ends up only being two minutes long, but it was eight minutes of fumbles, either in what I say or what I do on screen.
So now we're back to another benefit. Recording only one thing at a time is way easier.
Now, because recording audio and video at the same time is so difficult, It's stressful and it becomes exhausting.
I found that with two separate tasks, I simply enjoyed myself ever so much more.
I should add one caveat to this though.
Both of the applications on which I tested the new process were very well-behaved applications.
I didn't run into any glitches or unexpected results.
Under my roof in particular is a rock solid application and one I know really well, so that definitely helped make creating the tutorial more enjoyable.
On the timing of the video and audio recordings with respect to each other, there's one thing I need to work on.
JF Brasette is my editor for the ScreenCast Online videos, and he said that my timing was such, that I tended to start doing an action in the video slightly before I explained the steps.
It's a much more natural thing to have the explanation come slightly in advance before starting to demonstrate a step.
[20:32] JF was able to correct for this, but that's a lot of rework that I can remove if I can get that timing right before sending it to him.
I love that JF gives me very gentle suggestions on improvement whenever possible because it helps me improve my craft.
The final benefit to the modified Darcy method is that when I'm done, I have a nearly perfect transcript of the entire tutorial.
I'm convinced that this transcript could cut costs in creating the subtitles, but I, I haven't convinced the ScreenCastsOnline team to suggest it to the company they use for transcription.
[21:05] Whether they need it or not, there's a big benefit to me. While there's no substitute for a video tutorial to learn a tool, there's still value in the blog post I do that explains the capability of software I enjoy using.
With the transcripts, if I haven't already told you about an application, I now have a nice framework from which to start a blog post.
For example, I've done tutorials on Under My Roof and TouchRetouch as I've mentioned, both of which have a lot of capability and I've never told you about either of them.
Actually, touch-retouch, I told you about a really long time ago, but it does so much more than it used to. And under my roof is a grownup version of a tool called Home Inventory that I did tell you about, but now I could teach you about the new stuff, and I've already got a script written that I can use to help work out what I wanna tell you.
[21:51] I wanna briefly circle back on the Darcy method with iOS. I still like using the Darcy method for iOS, but the benefits aren't as great because it's so much easier to demonstrate things on iOS apps for a video tutorial.
The screens are much more predictable. So if I mess up the audio, I just pause a heartbeat and re-record and I'll know for example, that my cursor hasn't moved to the wrong spot on the screen, the menu bar hasn't changed, it's just so much easier to record iOS.
I think I'll probably still keep using the Darcy method for iOS, but the benefits just aren't as big.
The bottom line is that I'm really enjoying the Darcy method, or the modified Darcy method, and I plan to keep on using it and refining it until I can call it my own.
Support The Show
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Did you know that you could go to podfeed.com slash paypal and just choose an amount that shows the value you get out of the shows?
I don't set a goal of making money off the shows, but it does cost money for servers and software and hardware, so every little bit you can contribute will make you a real hero in my books.
Tech On Travel - The Antarctica Edition
[23:00] Whenever Steve and I go on our wild adventures, I found myself learning something new about how to use our technology when away from home. The problems and solutions evolve over time.
I wanted to give you a few things we learned on our Antarctica, Argentina, Brazilian trip, some of which are successes and some of which are failures.
[23:19] For many years, I've sung the virtues of Google Fi for international data for our cell phones.
The model's pretty cool. You get one primary SIM card with voice and data and up to four or or maybe it was five, I forget which, data only cards.
You pay a monthly fee of $20, and then it's only $10 per gigabyte up to six gigabytes, and after you hit that limit, you don't pay any more, but you can keep using more data.
Because Steve and I could share a plan, we knew we'd never pay more than $80, no matter how much data we used.
The other beauty of this plan is that you can turn it on and off at will, so you only pay the $20 per month while you're using it.
Now for a long time, I didn't understand one subtlety of this plan.
While it is $20 per month, if your trip extends across two billing cycles, you'll actually pay $40 for the service, bringing the potential cost to $100 for a trip.
We found this out when I loaned the cards to Dorothy when she went to Ireland and visited Bart, and she ended up paying $20 more than I had promised her.
[24:18] When we went on vacation with our kids, it worked out to be a pretty good deal because I could pass out all the data cards and pay no more than I would for just one of us.
It was a hassle-free way to go because I knew I could stick the cards in and go to pretty much any country in the world and it would work.
[24:34] However, on the MacGeek app, fairly often I've heard Dave Hamilton talking about getting a data plan through a site called eSimDB.com.
I didn't pay much attention to it because I assumed that paying for two cards for Steve and me would be an inefficient way to use data, making the total cost more and a hassle to track.
[24:54] Before we left for Antarctica, I decided to check it out anyway and I am sure glad I did.
International data plans have gotten way, way, way cheaper than back when I originally set up Google Fi. Dave recommends eSimDB.com because it's a broker for data providers all over the world. You enter either the country or region you're going to visit and you'll, see a list of options from different companies vying for your business. They offer different duration plans, so you can choose like one day, three days, 15 days, 30 days, and within those durations they offer different amounts of data. Let's say you're going to be in Spain for three days, you might only need a gigabyte or maybe 500 megabytes. But if, If you're going to South America for two weeks, you might want a longer plan with lots of data.
[25:38] At first, I searched for Antarctica, and I discovered there is no cell data on the entire continent.
That wouldn't end up being a problem because we ended up having satellite internet on the ship, but it was still interesting.
I was also surprised that satellite coverage existed that far south.
We'll get into that a little bit later.
On eSimDB.com, you can also choose a plan with voice service, but immediately increase the cost to a level I didn't think was worth it.
I knew that my friends and family could use FaceTime audio in an emergency since they're mostly on iOS.
As it turned out, Lindsay was able to call me on Telegram audio, so even if she had been on Android, it would have been possible to talk in voice without paying for a voice plan.
[26:19] The newer iPhones have the capability to use multiple eSIMs and they have no physical SIMs.
This paralyzed me at first because I already understood how to sit in a tiny airplane coach seat and change out microscopic digital cards without dropping them. What was this sorcery of an electronic SIM? How could it even work? Well, when you download an app like the one for GIGSky, which is the company I ended up choosing for our international data, you tell it the same info you you did on the eSimDB.com website.
You choose the plan and then you put in your credit card information.
The other cool part of this is that you can always top up your plan if you run low.
I didn't test this but I suspect you need to top up before you actually run out so it's probably a good idea to open the app from time to time.
[27:07] Now for the pricing. Steve and I each paid $14.40 for 5GB for 30 days.
So we had 10GB total for 30 days for less than $30.
It was unbelievable. We actually didn't end up needing 5GB, but how could I turn down less than $30 for the two of us?
Had I stuck with Google Fi, it would have been $100 because we did straddle a billing month.
So we saved $70 by going to eSimDB.
[27:37] Most people we met on the trip just let AT&T or Verizon start charging them for international data.
That cost $10 per day. I'm not sure if they were charged while we were in Antarctica, but even if they weren't, we were in Argentina for 6 days so that would have been $60 per person or $120 for the two of us.
And again, we paid less than $30.
Out of the 5GB we each paid for, I ended the trip with 1.8GB left over and Steve had 3.2GB left over. So even at $14.40 each, I could have bought an even less expensive data plan.
This to say, I am now a big fan of eSimDB.
[28:16] Let's talk about photos. Before we left for the trip, Steve and I updated our M1 Macs and our iPhones 14 Pro to macOS Ventura and iOS 16 respectively. We turned on the new shared photo library feature and we ran some tests so we were sure we understood how it worked. We wanted to have a shared photo library so that every picture either of us took on the trip would be on all of our devices. In the camera app you can enable the shared library so that every photo you take goes into it until you disable the shared library button. Our plan was to keep our photos separate, until we go on a trip where we're likely to want each other's photos. When we got home, we simply open the camera app, tap the shared library icon to toggle it off. I have to say that having a shared library on this trip was positively liberating for me. Steve and I have a habit of taking the exact same photos of the exact same thing because we don't want to have to ask the other person to send them to us. On this trip, I actually took far fewer photos with my iPhone because I could see Steve capturing what we were seeing. That allowed me to be more in the moment enjoying things than I normally am. I did take artistic photos or I worked with panoramas, to try to capture the grandeur of the waterfalls and I was able to use my big girl camera to get, some fantastic close-up photos of the penguins. Together we got complimentary photos instead of of duplicates.
[29:38] Since we had good data connectivity in Argentina, our photos happily zoomed up to the cloud and back to each other's copy of the shared library.
It was awesome.
Now every night I put my memory card from my big girl camera into my Mac, pull the photos into our shared library.
While in Argentina, the photos happily went up to the cloud back down to our phones in the shared library.
But there was one huge problem. Remember I told you that Steve and I upgraded and enabled the shared library on our M1 Macs?
[30:06] Well Steve decided before we left that it would be prudent to not bring his M1 Mac but instead to bring his 2016 Intel MacBook Pro on the trip instead just in case something happened to his backpack.
This strategy saved him a few years ago when we went to Peru and his backpack was stolen.
He was very glad that he'd been smart enough to carry his old laptop instead of his new one.
The problem with this strategy for this particular trip was that the 2016 MacBook Pro cannot be upgraded to macOS Ventura.
Neither of us remembered that this would become a problem. The MacBook Pro on macOS Monterey received none of the photos we were taking because they were all in the shared library and it didn't know anything about shared libraries.
He was so bummed.
That meant that in order to use his Mac to write posts to friends and family, he had, to connect his iPhone to his Mac using a lightning cable like an animal and import them images manually. As it turned out, once we got on the ship, that was the only way either of us could do it because the internet was so slow. I ran a ping test and the latency was comically bad from Antarctica. In the terminal, if you type ping www.apple.com it will show you how long the data packets to take to go from your computer to Apple's servers and, You could use any website, but apples are really fast so it's a good one to use.
[31:26] From my house, this is normally 5, 10, 15, as much as 20 milliseconds to get to Apple, but it was taking more on the order of a full second over satellite internet on the ship.
[31:37] Not only that, it was dropping around 3 out of 10 packets that it set.
[31:42] To be fair though, it was extraordinary that we were able to even get this satellite service, being so far south from the equator. You see, geosynchronous satellites sit at the equator, but they have a wobble to their path and they call that inclination. This makes the path look like a wave going above and below the equator over the course of 24 hours. Most geosynchronous satellites have a very small inclination, like a half a degree, but that inclination isn't big enough to be able to see around the curvature of the Earth to Antarctica.
[32:13] To hit the South Pole, for example, only a few geosynchronous satellites have an inclination big enough, 8.7 degrees, and at that it's only for 4 hours per day that that inclination allows it to be far enough down to be seen at the South Pole.
Now we were at around 65 degrees south of the equator on the ship, so we had access for much of the day.
I put a link in the show notes to USAP.gov where you can read more if you're interested.
Now rather than complain about one second ping times, we were delighted to have even this tiny pipe to get our messages back home.
But it did hamper our whole photo strategy.
I did the same dance as Steve, importing my photos manually from my iPhone to my Mac on the ship.
I also used my big girl camera to get super cool close-ups of penguins as I mentioned before and I imported them to my Mac as well.
Now I never figured out a batch method to move the big girl photos from my Mac back to my iPhone, so I could show them off to other folks on the ship.
I did airdrop a few of the best of the best, but it seems that there should have been a way, to push the photos the other way.
[33:17] I met a woman on the ship who had a better strategy that I will be deploying in the future.
She bought one of those SD card adapters with a lightning connector for less than $20.
She connects the SD card adapter to her iPhone, puts in her big girl camera's SD card, and, then the iPhone recognizes it in Apple Photos and offers to import all new photos.
If I'd done that, I could have then connected the iPhone to my Mac and pull both the iPhone and big girl camera images into my Mac and back them up from there.
[33:46] Now while I tried to be very rigorous with my process, I knew that manually importing photos while the shared library was still active would assuredly cause duplicates.
I don't have my final count, but I've been cleaning up my photos since I've been home and there's at least 500 duplicates because of that process.
Oh, I'd rather have duplicates than missing photos.
Now, speaking of backups, when Steve and I traveled to Ecuador and Peru a few years ago, we employed a good backup strategy, that saved us when Steve's backpack got stolen.
We carried two external SSDs and we daily backed up our photos from our phones, Steve's camcorder and his GoPro and my big girl camera.
But the smartest thing we did was we swapped backup drives. So I was carrying his and he was carrying mine.
In the airport in Cusco, Peru, when Steve's backpack was stolen, he lost not only his laptop, but also his camcorder, his GoPro, and by the way, his passport.
But that's a whole nother story.
While that was a very, very sad day, imagine if we hadn't swapped backup drives.
All of his photos of the Galapagos and Machu Picchu would have been gone.
Needless to say, we did the same thing on this trip. If you learn anything from this tech and travel post, consider following our lead and carrying backup drives and swap them with one of your fellow travelers, whenever you're moving around.
[35:08] Now the ship we were on was pretty small, only 150 passengers.
That meant that after a few days it was pretty easy to have collected quite a few new friends.
When we'd get back from our excursions, we'd always talk about what we'd seen, and invariably someone would say they'd gotten a great photo of someone else on the excursion.
Immediately, the words you would hear would be, Airdrop it to me!
All day, every day they would be happily swapping photos around, and it was amazing how well and how often it worked.
The sad part was that the Android people just kind of sat there lonely and left out.
I wonder how many people go through an experience like that and maybe switched iOS as a result.
I actually felt sorry for them.
Now, Apple recently changed the settings for AirDrop, which was something I needed to teach people on the trip.
In order to receive something via AirDrop from someone you've just met, you need to set it to Accept from Everyone.
Now if you're up to date on iOS, you can't leave it set to Everyone anymore.
You can only change it to Everyone for 10 minutes.
Leaving Everyone open was a surefire way to give photos you may not want to receive, so, I think it was a good change.
But this also gave me an excuse to lecture my fellow passengers on keeping their phones up to date.
If I was helping them and in the AirDrop settings it said Everyone instead of Everyone for 10, minutes, I knew they had not kept their phone up to date.
I'd point to the giant red number on their Settings app and tell them that task number when they got home was to run that update.
[36:34] I thought I was quite clever to show him how to simply search for airdrop within settings, instead of trying to remember where Apple had buried it in settings.
But on the very last day of the trip, when we were in Iguazu Falls, one of the tour guides, offered to send a cool compilation photo of the falls in normal times, a drought year, and a flood year.
He said that he would airdrop it to all of us, again leaving out our Android Brevin.
He then explained a much easier way to change airdrop settings that I didn't know about.
Down in the upper right to reveal Control Center. Press and hold on the Airplane mode icon in the upper left box that has all of the network connections options like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. One of the options on that page that comes up will be AirDrop where you, can select between No One, Contacts, and Everyone for 10 minutes. I was so excited to learn this new trick on how to change AirDrop settings I had to share it with you. By the way, you don't have to click on the airplane itself, you can click on pretty much any one of those buttons in that area, but I find that the other ones tend to get toggled off, but for, some reason airplane mode doesn't, so that's why I choose to push on the airplane.
[37:40] Now on the ship, I realized that my Mac was trying desperately to sync photos to iCloud, which was A. never going to work on that internet service, and B. it was jamming up the itty, bitty internets for us and everyone else on the ship.
[37:53] I had to take the drastic step of shutting off iCloud. Now, if you've been listening to me for any length of time, you know that turning off iCloud is asking for pain and suffering when you have close to 100,000 photos.
When I got home, my Mac checked all 94,322 photos one by one until it was sure they were all synced properly.
Now, it used to take like three or four weeks to do it, but this time it was only three days. Something they've done, it's doing it a lot faster now.
But during that three days, my Mac's library didn't receive any new photos, and the worst part was it gave me zero feedback. It was annoying, but I suffered through it.
Now when I shut off iCloud, I knew what I was doing to getting myself into, you know, this agony with the photos, but I forgot what else would happen.
When I got back home and I went to save some files to my new Silicast folders, I noticed that all of my documents were gone.
I eventually discovered the archived copy it had automatically created, but it wasn't until I turned iCloud back on that the real iCloud folder came back.
It's a bit scary there for a moment, and I had to remember to delete that archived copy when I turn to iCloud Drive back on. I also learned how much I depend on using the continuity features of iOS with macOS. For example, I sometimes need to type something into my phone, but I'll just type it on my Mac or iPad that has a keyboard, and then.
[39:13] I'll copy it and tap on my phone and hit paste. I logged out of iCloud and I lost all continuity features too. It made me appreciate even more the convenience you get when you go all in on Apple.
[39:25] Now one of the big weirdnesses on the trip was messaging. While my beloved Telegram worked flawlessly for sending images to groups of people of, iOS and Android persuasion alike, the Messages app had lots of problems.
I knew I wouldn't have my real phone number since I was using an eSIM from another provider, so I made sure that the Messages app was set to send and receive from two of my email addresses.
But here's the weirdnesses.
[39:50] First of all, I could send a text-only message to anyone on iOS.
[39:56] That worked. But I couldn't send a message with an included photo to anyone on iOS.
I also couldn't send a text-only message to a group of people who were on iOS, so I couldn't send it more than one person.
I could only write text to one person. And I couldn't send any kind of message of any type to even a single person on Android.
If anyone knows why that happened, I'm all ears. I've never seen that before.
Now, my beloved Telegram, I noticed something nifty. While on the ship, if I uploaded an image to someone on Telegram, as you would expect, it would be super slow and take forever to put the image in.
But if I uploaded that exact same image to a second person or to a group in Telegram, it would be super fast. I knew they stored your data in the cloud, but it appears that they can recognize the same content and they simply don't upload it a second time. Now other folks on the ship were using WhatsApp to communicate with friends and family at home and it worked equally well for them. WhatsApp is owned by Meta and I've sworn off all services from Meta including Facebook and Instagram. I never liked the interface on WhatsApp anyway, and I only knew three people who used it and I convinced them to move over to Telegram so it wasn't a big loss for me.
Now over the years I've always traveled with my laptop and my 12.9 inch iPad Pro. The Mac.
[41:11] Is essential because I write an email travelogue every day telling folks about our adventures.
I've tried doing it on the iPad and it takes me about five times as long, especially trying embed photos into these letters. It's very hard to carve out the time on these trips to write this document as it is, so anything that makes it take longer is a non-starter. So that's why I carry my Mac. Now, I've always had huge laptops with a 15-inch for six years and then for two years with a 16-inch. So I bring the iPad along for everything but writing the travelogue.
I do use the iPad Pro to watch movies on the plane, for example, because the battery life is is so amazing. On our trips to Iceland and the Eclipse trip in Chile, there was a lot of time on buses. Even though the final email had to be written on the Mac, I often brought the iPad along to work on a rough draft without photos and it was a big help to get that done during that dead time while we were stuck on buses. But now, I have a 14-inch MacBook Pro with also amazing battery life. I found I didn't find myself reaching for the iPad at all. The 14-inch doesn't weigh that much more than the 12.9-inch iPad with a magic keyboard.
I did watch a movie on it on the way there, but I could just as easily have watched it on my Mac.
[42:27] For the next big trip we take, I very well might not take my iPad Pro. Carrying both is really heavy, so my back would thank me. Last June I told you about a magnetic wallet I got from Kingard, along with a case I bought from them. All together, total cost $20.
[42:44] This magnetic wallet holds just two cards and it sticks to the iPhone's MagSafe connector.
I kept it connected to my phone for a couple of weeks when I first got it, but over time I stopped using it regularly since I carry a purse.
But you know what? On the ship, it was the perfect accessory. Held my magnetic key card for a cabin along with my phone when I tootled off to eat or drink. You can't leave the cruise ship without scanning your rim key and you have to scan in when you get back on so they know they didn't leave you with the penguins.
Having the magnetic wallet for my keycard was ideal and I will be bringing it with me on every trip from now on.
[43:19] And one of the fun things about this trip was that I got to do tech support for my new friends.
On the very first day of our trip with the alumni group, while we were still in Buenos Aires at a hotel, a woman named Linda walked up to our table and she said, Do you have an Apple Watch?
When we said yes, she plopped down at our table and said, Why does my phone know the new time in Buenos Aires but my watch is stuck on the time in New Jersey?
[43:42] That was a great question, Linda. We tried several easy things while chatting with her, including restarting the watch, but we were unable to fix it. We ran out of time at breakfast, but the next day we were waiting for our lunch at the hotel restaurant and Steve saw Linda out in the lobby. He dragged her over to our table so we could work on it some more. She turned out to be hilariously entertaining, so it was really fun to work on this for her. I'd like to take full credit for figuring it out, but this, one was definitely a team effort between Steve and me. It turned out that Linda's phone wasn't, paired with her watch. The reason Linda didn't notice sooner that her watch wasn't paired was because it was a cellular Apple Watch. While at home, it was happily using its own connection to receive email and text notifications and do all of the other things an Apple Watch can do.
[44:28] But as soon as she left the US, her cellular connection was gone, so the watch stopped getting any kind of updates including accessing the time servers. Now Linda had given us a clue.
She told us early on that she'd recently gotten a new phone. Evidently in the transaction with Apple, no one told her she'd need to pair the watch with a new phone. We scoured the internet and discovered that in order to fix the problem, we'd have to wipe her watch to factory settings.
She happily agreed to let us do that. After running the pairing process, it offered to download her watch configuration from an iCloud backup. Once we did that, she was 100% in business.
At this point, we basically became legends in our tech support skills.
Okay, maybe not legends, but we're definitely spread that we knew what we were doing.
[45:14] Our new friend Carol simply could not get internet while on the ship.
She was very disinclined to bother me. I kept telling her it wasn't a bother, I'd love doing this, and whenever I'd suggest we work on it she often didn't have her phone with her.
Can't blame her, she couldn't do anything with it. So I wasn't able to help her. Over and over and over again we kept making connections and I wasn't able to help her. She was also very skilled at throwing in information to obfuscate the root cause. Unlike Linda who'd given us a very good clue, She said things like, well it all started when they made me install a two-factor authentication app.
[45:46] I didn't understand what that had to do with this. Anyway, finally on the last day on the ship, I got her to bring her phone to me. In order to connect to the ship's internet, at least once per, day, you had to navigate to wifi.ponent.com and enter a username and password that we were issued on the first day. They gave Stephen and me two logins, so of course I had to go back and get three more because we had a lot of devices with us. I asked Carol if she'd gone to that web page on the, day I was diagnosing the problem and she said, no, what are you talking about? I've never been to that page. I don't know what you're talking about. What is this username and password log in nonsense?
[46:21] So we toddled over to the front desk. I arm wrestled the recalcitrant woman behind the counter to give Carol a login. She said, well, she got one when she came in and I was like, no, she doesn't have one. Just give it to her. Anyway, I entered the credentials and Carol was connected.
She was beside herself with awe at my incredible technical skills and was happy to finally have internet on the very last day of the cruise. I sure wish I'd been able to fix it for her sooner.
[46:45] Now I'm going to change the name of the third person I helped because her situation revealed so many frightening security issues. We're going to call her Martha. No offense to the lovely Martha's out there, I just picked the name out of a bag. So Martha could not get into email on the ship and she couldn't send text messages, but she could browse the web. Since this was clearly not a connectivity problem, I was baffled at what could be the root cause. When, we got back to Buenos Aires, she still couldn't send messages or receive email. She eventually mentioned that she'd gotten some emails from Google about some security alert, but she'd ignored them. I reviewed the messages and then I looked at in her settings on her iPhone, and there was a red alert on her account name in Settings.
I dove in and it was telling her that she needed to re-authenticate to her Google account.
I asked her if she knew her Google login and she proudly pulled out a piece of paper from her purse, with all of her important usernames and logins on it.
I was suitably horrified.
[47:46] I was even more horrified when I scanned the list of passwords, and I saw the same pattern of four numbers in every single one of her passwords.
Take a wild guess of what the four digit code was to open her phone.
Yep, the same four digits.
Even though she said she didn't have any important passwords on that piece of paper, remember that password resets go to your email.
So if someone had stolen her purse, she'd have lost her phone, lost her email password, and it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to guess her four digit passcode to get into her phone, to access said email.
She would have been owned in every sense of the word.
We had a short chat about one password and I told her that when she gets home I'm going to help her get started.
She's not ready quite yet but I'm not going to stop badgering her until I get her started with one password.
[48:34] Once I found the right password or email on her little scrap of paper, I entered it into settings in her iPhone and immediately all of her emails came flowing in.
[48:44] Back in 2019, I interviewed Eric Matheson from OmniCharge about their full range of power banks.
Shortly after that I bought one of their USB-C power delivery banks and it is one of the most useful devices I travel with. It sports 20,000 mAh of capacity and has two USB-C ports with power delivery and two USB-A ports. The newer model they have supports 100W charging which means they can quickly charge a MacBook Pro. My 4 year old model is only 65W but it can still charged by laptop just a little bit more slowly. With modern Macs having a spare battery around isn't as important, but for travel with a bunch of peripherals it's super handy and I'll explain why. Steve and I made a rule years ago that when we check into a hotel or a ship or stay at someone's house we will always keep the same side of the bed as we do at home. Now, we made this rule not because we would feel weird swapping sides, but rather so we wouldn't fight over who got the best side that had the bedside table and reachable outlets. When we arrived on the ship, Steve realized that while his side had a table, there were zero outlets. I graciously loaned him my Omni-Charge powerbank. That gave him four outlets for his devices. This was way overkill for his phone and his watch, but, allowed him to have them by his bedside where he wanted them at night, and then during the day he moved the powerbank to the counter in the room to recharge it. He was delighted with his solution.
[50:09] The other reason it was super useful on this trip was because the ship had European outlets, when we assumed it was going to have Argentinian outlets. We had a giant pile of Argentinian adapters but only two European ones. Using the Omni-Charge, he could charge his device at night using no power outlet and no adapters at all. During the day while we were out and about, he could take up one of those precious adapters to charge the battery. Now note that this device can also be plugged in to charge with one USB-C port while using the other USB port to charge a laptop, and you can be using the two USB-A ports to charge a phone and a watch. It can, even do data transfer via USB to your laptop to your phone. We didn't need to do it, but, it's a good thing to know that you can. Now I'm toying with the idea of buying myself the new Omni 20C Plus for $250 and giving Steve my old one so he would always have power when he needs it and I wouldn't have to share.
[51:05] The funniest tech and travel story of the trip actually happened to our new friends Bob and Nancy Ellen.
Part of our trip was to Iguazu Falls, which is an amazing place.
It's the second largest set of waterfalls in the world, right behind Victoria Falls.
There are 275 falls spanning 1.75 miles.
[51:25] As we rode to the hotel, our guide told us that they have capuchin monkeys in the area.
She explained that these little monkeys are very clever and know how to open the sliding glass doors to the balconies of the hotel rooms, so be sure to lock your doors.
When we checked into the hotel, the person behind the counter repeated the exact same thing. After our hike, we all went down to the massive infinity pool.
I'm serious, this thing was giant. It was 50 meters by 25 meters.
Anyway, we went down there to have a nice little swim after our hot hike.
We were hanging out with Nancy, Ellen, and Bob when someone said, hey look, there's monkeys on one of the balconies. We were all enjoying the spectacle when Nancy Ellen said, Bob, is that our balcony? Followed by, I'm not sure I locked the door when I came in from admiring the view. Well, Bob scampered up to the room only to find their mini bar completely raided, and monkeys all over the balcony eating Reese's peanut butter cups and other treats.
[52:21] While you might be enjoying this story at Bob and Nancy Ellen's expense, you might also be wondering what the tech angle is to this story.
Well, on top of the reeses and other treats, one of the monkeys stole the spare battery for Bob's Canon DSLR camera.
At first the monkey dropped it and then wandered off when they couldn't figure out how to eat it, but they came back later and took it to parts unknown.
You know what? Jokes on the monkey though, it wasn't a genuine Canon battery, it was a cheap knockoff from Amazon.
[52:50] If you comb the archives of podfeed.com, you'll find that as far back as 2006, I started trolling the audience to try to get someone to listen to the no-sill-a-cast from, Antarctica. Back then, I used to regularly review the list of countries from which someone had accessed the site, and I had 93 countries by then, but no one had ever come from Antarctica.
[53:10] I know Antarctica isn't a country, Tom. Just stay with me here.
Anyway, in 2008, someone named Michael wrote in a comment that he was planning a trip to Antarctica, and he said he was going to make sure to get a photo of him with his iPod and the show art from the continent. But to my memory, I never even heard from him after the trip. You know the old adage, if you want to have something done right, sometimes you just have to do it yourself. I've, included a photo in the show notes of me wearing my pod feet shirt, holding up my iPhone, playing the no silica on the ship with the coast of Antarctica in the background. The bottom line is, that on every big trip I learned new things about how to use our tech on vacation that we take for granted when at home. I learned not to leave the camera batteries out with monkeys around.
We learned not to bring an old Mac on trips. I debated whether to bring my big girl camera along to Antarctica, but even with all the faffing about with importing photos, I got some, absolutely terrific photos of penguins that I would have never gotten without it. While the iPad Pro probably won't take the next trip with us, I think I'll still carry my big girl camera.
I hope you enjoyed learning about what worked and what didn't on our grand adventure to Antarctica.
[54:20] All right, that's going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allison at podfeed.com anytime you like.
If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over.
You can tell I like doing tech support. I even do it when I'm on vacation.
You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeed at chaos.social. Remember, everything good starts with podfeed.com.
If you want to join in the fun of the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeed.com Slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely Nocilla Castaways.
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[54:58] Music.