NC_2023_06_11
[0:00] Music.
[0:06] Technology Geek podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, June 11th, 2023, and this is show number 944.
Well, hey, this weekend, we're at our daughter, Lindsey's house.
But next weekend, we're going to be going to Houston to visit our son, Kyle, and his family, including our other two darling grandchildren.
Since we're flying, we are way too lazy to carry two microphones, two mic interfaces, two lights and a giant pile of cables on the plane.
That means we are not going to have a live show on June 18th.
Now as it turns out, Sandy wasn't going to be able to be there anyway, so really, what was the point?
I know this will be devastating to many of you, but I hope you'll try to soldier on.
Allison on – DTNS 4535
[0:47] You know I'm a well-established VR skeptic and my overall opinion on VR is not much changed, but what Apple showed us last week with the Vision Pro is something I had not envisioned.
To be fair, nobody else predicted what they'd come out with.
Tom Barrett has been on the front lines for my VR skepticism over the years, so he asked me to come on the Daily Tech News show to talk about Vision Pro.
It's episode 4535, and of course, there's a link in the show notes to the episode.
CCATP #769 — Bart Busschots on visionOS
[1:15] This week, our guest on Chit Chat Across the Pond is Bart Bouchats, but it is not a Programming by Stealth episode, it's a Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, you know, at least within my personal definition of lite.
[1:26] Bart joined the show this week to talk about what else Vision OS, the new operating system that will power the Vision Pro headset that Apple announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference.
We talked about how we can see the future now in spatial computing as a big shift.
Now we don't talk about the hardware at all, and we don't talk about the price at all.
We're talking about Vision OS itself, this spatial computing.
So Bart tells us about what he learned about Vision OS from the platform State of the Union, As well as two sessions he watched, Principles of Spatial Design and Design for Spatial Input.
He also gave us links to the chapterized videos so you can jump right to the parts he talked about if you like. Of course, those are in the show notes.
[2:07] As a bonus, my granddaughter Sienna made her debut appearance on Chit Chat Across the Pond.
She's an old hand at coming on the live show, but this was her first appearance on Chit Chat Across the Pond.
It was a bit of a surprise and she didn't stay very long, but she did want to say hi.
I made it a chapter mark just for fun.
And again, you can get links to all of the different videos that Bart talks about in the show notes, and you can look for Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite in your podcatcher of choice.
Portal — Immersive Soundscapes for Focus or Relaxation
[2:34] All right, it's time to listen to the very calming voice of Alistair Jenks.
Recently, there has been a groundswell of ambient noise applications.
These are intended to provide a background level of noise to help you focus, relax or even sleep.
[2:51] The simplest may offer white noise and a few other colours of noise.
More feature rich examples may add in other natural sounds like rain, a crackling fire, or birds chirping. iOS and iPadOS 15 added some basic options directly into the OS as one of their many accessibility features. One application I had tried was called Dark Noise.
It offers many looped sounds as well as white noise, pink noise and several types of natural noises.
It also includes such things as a freight train, a city street and snoring.
Dark noise also lets you layer these sounds which can be interesting.
Another feature some applications offer is the ability to leave the ambient sound playing alongside other system audio such as music or podcasts.
The application I want to tell you about today takes a different approach.
It has no white noise, no freight trains, or layering of multiple sounds.
Portal is an application that brings you out into nature with real recordings of natural environments accompanied, if you wish, by a beautiful video of the recording location.
[4:07] Portal has been available on iPhone and iPad for many years I had tried it I think when version 3 came out in mid 2020 but I stopped using it for some reason.
I recently rediscovered it and have been using it often when working.
When I am in the office, the general hubbub around me does not faze me most of the time, only when I need to concentrate. This is usually when I am trying to read some technical information or writing some code, or perhaps trying to pick at the threads of an issue to understand what's actually broken. Popping in my AirPods Pro I fire up Portal on my iPhone and choose a favorite scene.
I really like some of the ones that feature rain, especially if the day outside the windows matches this. While the AirPod Pro's noise cancellation also helps a lot, the soothing sound of rain lets me focus my mind on the task at hand. Portal has recently taken on a whole new level of usefulness to me. They have now released a Mac version and it is gorgeous.
[5:13] All three platform versions have feature parity, at least where the features make sense to the platform. However, I really think Portal is elevated running on a Mac. It's lovely looking at the visuals on my iPhone, wonderful on my iPad, but stunning on my Mac. If you let it, Portal will play the videos, some up to 8K resolution, as your desktop background.
[5:38] All the videos are real time and completely natural. You will of course occasionally catch the end of the recording as it loops back to the start with a quick crossfade.
But all the scenes are largely static with some amount of movement within.
Rain falling, waves lapping, waterfalls falling or grass swaying.
All the audio is spatial audio too. As you load up a scene you will see various badges that denote the characteristics of the scene. The one I have running now says 6k dynamic spatial audio 5.1 7.1. All the newer scenes have at least these specifications. Some original scenes from pre-version 3 are not as high as 6K.
[6:23] Speaking of those scenes, you can choose by time of day, activity, let's focus Create or Escape on Mac, location, or from some curated collections.
You can also search by keywords such as summer, birds, or lake.
Going by location, you can tell how many there are to pick from.
31 from Iceland, 6 from St Lucia, 5 from Devon and Cornwall, 14 from the Scottish Highlands, 11 from the Slovenian Alps and 19 Classics from around the world, that's 86 in total.
Given you're listening to me right now, I can offer you a brief taste of some of my favourite audio scenes.
Oh yes, you can also mark some favourites for quick access. Rain on the loch at Eileen Durnan Castle in the Scottish Highlands.
[7:25] Fingal Woods on Dartmoor in the UK.
A thunderstorm in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Dawn at Black Sand Beach in Iceland.
[8:01] Morning dove chorus on St Lucia.
And my favourite of all, dawn at Lake Bled, Slovenia.
[8:25] Since I've had the Mac app only a few days now as I write this, I have a scene playing most of the time. I use the Airfoil application from Rogamiba to stream it to a pair of HomePod minis that sit on my computer desk. Portal uses a modest amount of CPU and doesn't seem to impact on my other uses of my M1 MacBook Pro. Curiously the CPU graphs in iStatMenus don't look a lot different with video playing and not playing considering it is playing on my 5k studio display and the internal laptop screen and it looks gorgeous on both. Portal can be used for free with just six of the classic scenes and with slightly lower video quality. Aside from this there are no limitations you still get incredible immersive sound and all the other features some of which I haven't even mentioned. A subscription of $9.99 per month or $49.99 per year provides you full access to all.
[9:24] Scenes and covers you across all the platforms. There is a seven day free trial too if you want to sample all the scenes available. I encourage you to check out Portal and allow yourself to drift away to your favorite place. We are getting really close to MaxDoc and I want to make sure
Midwest Mac Barbecue
[9:44] everybody who signed up for Mac Stock realizes that there is a Midwest Mac BBQ and wine tasting event being put on by none other than the lovely Barry Falk. If you would like to attend, it's extremely easy to do. Go to BarryFalk.com. That's Barry, B-A-R-R-Y, F-U-L-K.com, and all.
[10:02] The information you need to find out about the Midwest Mac BBQ is on that link. It's actually scheduled for the day before Mac Stock starts, so it's on July 20th. Again, go to BarryFalk.com to learn everything about it. Speaking of Mac Stock, I can't believe I'm doing this,
Jill from the Northwoods on Mac Voices
[10:20] but I'm actually going to plug Chuck Joyner's show, Mac Voices. The reason I'm going to do it is because the lovely Jill from the Northwoods, who you've gotten to know as a stalwart Nostella castaway with all of her great contributions to the show, she is his guest on his Road to Mac Stock series. So Jill gets in there and starts talking about what she's going to be talking about at Mac Stock. And it's a great way to learn about her background.
[10:44] You don't get obviously everything that you're going to learn if you go to Mac Stock, but I think it's a fun listen because you're going to learn about how she moved from the PC to the Mac and why she moved from the PC to the Mac.
That was kind of my favorite part.
Now, that's not right. My favorite part was when she told Chuck that she was on Team Allison.
So if you know anything about our fun little rivalry, you'll get a big kick out of it.
If you go to the link in the show notes to MacVoices.com, you can watch it in video there and you can see him put his head down on the table when she tells him that she's on Team Allison.
Anyway, go check it out. And of course, if you haven't signed up for Mac Stock, sign up for Mac Stock. It's the best thing ever.
The Emergency Mac mini Upgrades of 2023
[11:23] Last week, Steve and I went to visit his parents who live about four hours away.
His parents are fantastic about always staying up to date on their apps and doing all of the security patches on their own because, you know, stay patched so you stay secure.
But when it comes to major macOS upgrades, we like to be there to do it for them.
We had actually forgotten that we hadn't yet given them macOS Ventura, so when I glanced at Steve's father Ken's computer and noticed the classic macOS Monterey background, I realized we had some work to do. I popped down in his chair, went to software update, and it said he was already up to date. Ken and Merlie have had their Mac minis for a while, so I figured maybe they weren't eligible to get Mac OS Ventura. I looked up their model in MacTracker and discovered that their Macs were from 2014. This is a testament to Apple that these 9-year-old Macs were still happily humming away on a fully supported operating system.
[12:17] However, these Mac minis have 5400 rpm spinning hard drives that have been spinning for nine long years.
You know, at this point, you got to ask yourself, do you feel lucky?
Now, if we lived around the corner where we could race over and help if one of their Macs died, we would have let them keep on spinning.
But since we're four hours away, we can't just jump in the car and make that kind of trip easily.
We explained the situation to his parents and suggested that we probably needed to buy them new computers.
Well, with their money, but we needed to go buy them. To our delight, both of them immediately said, all right, let's do it.
They have a great appreciation for the fact that the two of us have skills that others around them do not.
Their trust in our advice and those skills makes things a lot easier than if we had to sell them on the idea.
Now, a lot of people share computers, and while technically they could have if one had, failed, I don't think there would have been peace and harmony in their home until we could get up there to help.
[13:15] Well, I figured they didn't need anything top-of-the-line, so I started looking for M1 Mac Minis in the ReFurb store at Apple.
I quickly determined that we wouldn't be able to get anything in ReFurb same day, and same day was the only way this would work since we were actually leaving on the following day.
We literally had just a few hours to figure out what to buy, buy the equipment, and completely set up these computers.
We looked at their current storage usage on their existing Macs, and Merle was using around 100GB while Ken was using only 50GB.
That was great news because it meant we could buy them the stock M.2 Mac Minis with 256GB SSDs and 8GB of RAM.
This model was available for pickup at an Apple store just 10 minutes from their house.
Now I know Bart is shaking his fist at Apple for not having any Apple stores at all in in all of Ireland, so we do appreciate that we have so many of them.
[14:07] Now Steve had an idea for an improvement for his dad. Ken has neuropathy, which has destroyed all of the sensation in his fingers. Coupling that with a slight tremor, typing is an arduous process for him. Because he cares deeply about security, his login password for his Mac and his login for his 1Password account are both very long and very secure. With his troubled typing, it's a very long process for Ken to enter these passwords. Now he doesn't complain about this at all, but Steve thought, why don't we make this easier for him? Steve told Ken that for a Father's Day present he'd buy him a Touch ID keyboard. Ken's current keyboard was a nine-year-old full-size keyboard, so we spent some time with him testing to see if he actually used the nine keypad for numbers or maybe the delete key, and he did not. That told us we could go with the smaller, slightly less expensive Touch ID keyboard from Apple. Our shopping list so far was two Mac minis and the Touch ID keyboard.
The new Mac minis have two Thunderbolt USB-C ports and two USB-A ports, plus an HDMI port.
While Ken could have used the Touch ID keyboard wirelessly, we knew it would drive him bananas if he had to suddenly charge it. So rather than having him worry about charging a battery, we decided to make this an always charging wired keyboard.
We bought a 2-meter USB-C to Lightning cable that would reach all the way under the desk and into his keyboard tray to be permanently plugged in.
[15:33] I didn't think about it ahead of time, but the Touch ID keyboard does come with a nice braided USB-C to lightning cable, so I didn't necessarily have to buy that one, but when we saw it, it would not have been long enough.
We harvested that little cable to take home.
[15:48] I'm sure some of you are sitting there grinning, waiting to hear me talk about how many dongles we had to buy to make their system functional.
You'll grin even more when I tell you that their displays were from around 2008. At least Merlis was. I think Ken's is a little bit younger.
We were going to need to be connecting 2023 Macs to 15 year old displays.
Now, Ken's display was connected over DisplayPort using mini DisplayPort on the Mac mini and full-size DisplayPort on the display.
I started hunting on Apple's website for a solution like maybe an adapter with male HDMI on one end and female mini DisplayPort on the other, but that wasn't going to be an option.
Fairly quickly I abandoned Apple altogether as there was a Best Buy around the corner with a much better catalog of available cables.
[16:35] Another investigation, accomplished by taking photos upside down from underneath the Dell displays, revealed that both of their displays also had VGA and DVI connectors.
By the way, how much do you hate trying to look underneath a Dell display?
I hate it with a fiery passion.
Anyway, for $7.03 a piece at Best Buy, we were able to buy HDMI to DVI cables for them so we could connect these ancient displays to their brand new computers.
I got to tell you, that was a big hurdle. It took probably 45 minutes to unscramble with us taking photos and drawing pictures and scribbling notes. It was it was a big mess, but we finally got it unscrambled.
Now, Marlee's setup for USB on her old Mac was pretty straightforward.
In the back of her Mac mini, using her four USB-A ports were a printer, Time Machine backup drive, a Logitech C920 webcam and a keyboard.
In addition, she has a Logitech mouse transmitter dongle plugged into the USB-A port on the side of her full-size keyboard.
Unlike Ken, Merli is a heavy user of the number keyboard that I'm sorry, the number keypad on her keyboard because she was an accountant for her career.
She doesn't have any problems typing quickly and accurately, and she never got Touch ID to work on her iPad because her fingers are unusually dry.
So we decided to just let her keyboard stay.
And that was good because it meant we could keep the mouse transmitter plugged into the keyboard as well.
[17:58] Well, that meant for Merle, we only needed two USB-C to USB-A dongles and she was all all set with her new computer.
[18:06] Let's go back to Ken's Mac, though, where things got a little bit more complicated.
Like Berlee, he had a printer, a webcam, and his keyboard plugged in via USB-A, but unlike Berlee, he has a wired USB mouse and he has no backup drive.
Now, before you jump all over Ken for not backing up, he has his own process.
He has a thumb drive that he keeps in a very secure place, and he plugs it in at regular intervals and does a manual backup.
Now remember, he's only using 50GB of disk space total, including his operating system.
So his process all along has been to plug the thumb drive into the USB-A port on the side of his full-sized Apple keyboard, and then he simply drags the two folders he backs up onto the thumb drive icon and says yes when it asks to replace the files.
This works for him, and he is especially rigorous, so I know it's a good process.
But remember, we're going to be removing his full-size keyboard and replacing it with the modern Touch ID keyboard, which does not have a USB-A port on the side. That means we will be one port short.
At Best Buy, we found a 4-port USB-C hub for $32 that we could pick up that day. This would give us more than enough USB-A ports for his needs.
But one thing we weren't willing to put him through was having to reach around and over his display to the back of his Mac Mini to stick his thumb drive into the 4-port USB hub. You can imagine how challenging that would be.
[19:29] In our photo taken under and around the display, we discovered that his display also has two USB-A ports underneath and one on the side. I'm sorry, two on the side. So he's got two underneath and two on the side. We figured that the ones underneath must be so that you can plug in the display to the computer and then use the ones on the side for data transfer.
This meant we needed one more cable and an unusual one at that. We needed a mail-to-mail USB-A cable to allow the display to act as a USB hub for Ken. Luckily, and I'm putting that in In air quotes, Best Buy had one available for pickup for the exorbitant price of $33.
I guess it's an unusual plug or unusual cable, I should say, so that might explain it.
[20:10] At this point, we had our bill of materials finally figured out, or so we thought.
When we got back from our shopping spree, it was time for Ken to participate in a Wii bowling tournament, so obviously we dropped everything to go watch this highly competitive sport.
In all seriousness, it was super fun to watch, and Ken's team is really good.
After our sports break, Steve and I got to work.
We took very different approaches to setting up the new Macs.
I was able to pretty easily pop in the new Mac and connect all the dongles and all of her peripherals.
As soon as the Mac mini booted up, it wanted to do an OS upgrade, which was pretty annoying, but I figured it was best to just let it finish.
Since Marlene had a Time Machine backup and she doesn't have much cruft at all, I figured the fastest, easiest, and most complete way to get her system just the way she liked it was to use Migration Assistant to set up her new Mac. While it was easy and complete, fast would not be how I would describe it. After close to two hours, it was still fixing to make a plan to start moving the data. It was still saying, preparing to transfer user documents.
It's after two hours. Remember, she's got 100 gigabytes, including the operating system and applications.
[21:21] Well, I sent a screenshot of this fix-it-to-make-a-plan screen to the Podfeet Slack asking, is this normal? Because you know, I never use Migration Assistant.
Well, I was waiting for a response and I thought, I'll call Pat Dengler to find out if this is normal. But sadly, she wasn't available either. Finally, I decided enough was enough. I was going to start over and do it by hand. I marched back into Merle's den and it had finally started to transfer the data. It told me it was going to take 40 hours, so that was nice. After a while, it said 9, and then 6, and then 2. In the end, it took over four hours to transfer less than 100 gigabytes of data from her vintage backup drive to her snazzy new Mac. I bet I could have typed in all the files faster than that. Anyway, while I was cooling my heels impatiently waiting for release time machine backup to migrate, Steve simply booted up Ken's new Mac, let it do the software update, and then dragged Ken's files to the desktop. I think his entire process was around 20 minutes, and I totally should have done that.
Anyway, on Ken's machine, we plugged in all of the dongles, including the USB-C hub and his printer, camera, and new keyboard.
Steve spent some time teaching him to use the Touch ID, and he learned something interesting.
The Touch ID sensor is in the far upper right of the keyboard, but with his limited hand control, it was nearly impossible for him to hold his hand properly to touch the sensor without hitting a bunch of other keys at the same time.
[22:44] Finally, Ken suggested, why don't we try my left hand since I'm left-handed, and he found he was able to rest his wrist on the table and activate Touch ID nearly 50% of the time.
But he reported back the day after we returned home that he'd found the sweet spot of holding his forefinger flat and now it's working very well.
I gotta say, I hope I'm as patient and forward-thinking at trying new things as he is when I'm in my 80s. After that, it was time to get his backup thumb drive working with the new Mac.
As you may recall, about an hour ago when I started this story, he used to plug it into the USB port on his keyboard, but the new one doesn't have a USB port.
Planned was to use the display as a USB hub.
We plugged this stupid expensive male-to-male USB cable from the Mac to the display and then plugged his thumb drive into the side of the display.
It didn't work.
[23:35] Well, there's two USB ports on the side and two underneath, and we tried all of the combinations and it still didn't work.
We changed USB ports on the Mac too, ensuring it wasn't going through a dongle, but it was no good.
This project was certainly flexing every cable and connector muscle of our brains.
We then got the idea that if we could buy a USB-A to female USB-A cable, we could hang it out from under his display for easy access to plug in the thumb drive.
Apple didn't have one for sale, and the one at Best Buy would have taken a few days, but Target had a 6-foot USB extension cable for $11. Sold.
[24:11] So, at this point in the story, Steve was on his way over to Target when I realized something.
Remember I said Ken's original keyboard had been connected by a USB extension cable before we unplugged it. In other words, we already had a USB-A male-to-female cable. I called Steve right away and he suggested, why don't you test it before he turned around and came back?
[24:31] Well, for the life of us, neither Ken nor I could get that thumb drive into the female USB connector on the extension. Finally, I peered inside the female USB connector and I noticed it was keyed, meaning it had a dent into the rectangle that was stopping a normal USB-A connector from going into it. Like USB-A isn't annoying enough, why would you have a keyed one?
[24:53] I pulled out the old keyboard and sure enough, its USB-A male connector had a slot in the top, which allowed it to slide in. I have a very vague memory of having seen a cable like this, but it was such a long time ago, I just don't know why anyone would be that mean to us. Like I said, we thought USB was mean before. Anyway, Steve came back with a new extension cable and Ken's thumb drive fit right in. While it's something for him to get used to having this cable just kind of hanging out on his desk, I think it'll be easier for him to lift up the cable off the desk to connect the thumb drive than it probably was to look into the side of a keyboard. We probably need to check that with him, see how that's going. Now after I got home from this trip, I was studying the photo of the underside of Ken's display and I noticed something I'd missed while we were there. In addition to the two USB-A ports, I realized there was also a USB-B port.
That's the kind that you see on printers. The kind of cable that goes into it is called a device cable.
Now, I haven't been able to prove out this theory, but I bet if we'd plugged a USB B device cable into the display from the Mac, all four of those USB A ports would have worked.
I may just throw a device cable into my bag at Christmas just to answer that question.
[26:05] Now, the software story was a lot easier than the hardware story, but Microsoft went out of its way to make it hard for us.
Ken and Merli, like many of us, finally gave in to the subscription model for Microsoft 365, which meant it was the one app that didn't migrate even for Merli.
We had to download the installer on each back from scratch and log into their account.
By default, Microsoft insists on installing every single application and service they have ever invented. Ken and Merli have never used PowerPoint, which makes me very happy.
I liked it when Ken goes, what's that? I don't even know what that is.
Anyway, they don't want Outlook. They don't even know what OneNote is.
And they don't want anything ever, ever, ever in the cloud, except iCloud Photos, of course.
So they don't want OneDrive. They want Word and Excel. And that's it.
[26:51] I've done a few thousand more software installs than Steve. so when I was installing Word and Excel for Merli, I knew to stop on the installation step of the installer and select Customize to eliminate all of those other silly apps.
Steve didn't catch it, so we had a bit of cleanup to delete those other apps that Ken didn't need.
Now, after the installation, Steve had his dad exercise the Excel the way he does every day to make sure things were working properly. A bit later, when we were trying to get Ken's thumb drive working, Ken tried to interrupt us to ask a question about Excel.
We were very impatient with him. We told him, we're busy working on this thumb drive, we can't take the time to listen to you. And we made him wait.
Finally, we let him tell us what was wrong, and it turned out to be way more important than the thumb drive. He said he'd created a file in Excel. It was called book1, just a test file, but it didn't show up in his folder of Excel files. I figured we just needed to change the default save location, and that's when I realized Microsoft had pulled a fast one on us.
When you install Office from scratch, it defaults to saving your files in OneDrive, even if you don't install OneDrive. This is the last thing Ken and Merle want.
It was surprisingly difficult to figure out where and how to change it back to saving on the Mac.
[28:06] Unless I just missed it, there doesn't appear to be a setting or preference to change the behavior.
I finally figured out that if you open a file and attempt to save it, you'll see under the name field that it says place and a drop down that says one drive dash personal, confusingly there's also a button that says on my mac which might make you think it was going to save it on your mac but that's actually a button that changes it to saving it on your mac if you click it the entire dialog box changes to a standard mac os save as dialog box but now it has a button that says save to one drive which doesn't make any sense because you can't save to one drive when when you're in the... Anyway, I really, this is a terrible user interface and a terrible Experience Here's the fun part though. We had to do it both in Word and Excel to direct both of them away from saving on OneDrive. With a little more sleuthing, we were able to figure out how to move the few files that had already gotten saved to OneDrive and get them back to our Macs. That wasn't easy either. Gee, Microsoft, maybe you could ask people before making the assumption of where they want to save their files to not saving it in the cloud. Anyway, okay, shake it Shake it off, shake it off.
Now, we were finally finished with the great emergency Mac Mini upgrades of 2023.
When I described to Pat Dangler the challenges of cabling the new Macs to the ancient displays, she asked a simple and obvious question.
Why didn't we upgrade their displays at the same time?
[29:30] Now, if we'd had more time to think it out and more time to spend deciding on what monitors would be right for them, we probably would have done that.
Replacing their 22-inch displays, or I think Ken's is 24 but Merle's is 22, that wouldn't been very expensive, but it was just one more layer of complexity to add to what was already an incredibly stressful day.
We planted the seed with Merle that she might really find value in a newer, higher resolution display and she seemed open to the discussion for next time.
Ken wasn't as excited about the idea and we realized later after we got home, we were able to get the model number from him and his display is a bit newer and the text is crisper because it's actually much higher resolution.
[30:12] The bottom line is, we were amazed that we could pull this off in such a short amount of time. So we're really kind of bragging here that we did this.
In five and a half hours, we went from deciding to buy new computers to nearly complete installations with all data and applications transferred.
I think that's pretty miraculous.
We were gratified when Merle exclaimed about how incredibly fast her new Mac is.
She said, I just touched something and it opens instantly.
We were also gratified when the day after we got back, Ken sent a note telling us that his success rate with Touch ID had gone way up when he figured out to make sure he laid his fingertip flat on that sensor.
Personally, I appreciate their faith in us. Ken and Merle both often say they don't know how other elderly people who don't have kids with our knowledge level, even use a computer.
[30:59] All right, I've got one more thing, if you'll forgive the phrase, on this story.
We brought the elderly Mac minis home with us to clean up and sell back to Apple.
Turns out they'll give us $165 each for them, which was more than I expected.
A few days after we got back, Ken called Steve, asking for some help getting his browser to look like it did before with the right home page.
I thought it might be helpful if I brought Ken's Mac up at our house so we could take a look at what he was hoping to see.
Luckily, we have a 27-inch Apple Cinema Display that has Mini DisplayPort on it, so it was a breeze to plug in this old machine at our house.
Those cinema displays, man, they are workhorses. Apple displays just last forever.
Anyway, remember that the first reason we wanted to upgrade the Mac Minis was that they couldn't run the current operating system, so they would soon be two OSes behind, but still supported.
The bigger reason was because I told you they had 5400 RPM spinning hard drives, and I figured nine years of that spending was long enough.
However, when I booted up Ken's machine at our house, for some reason I thought to double check the system configuration, and discovered under the storage tab that his Mac had a 1TB SSD.
[32:10] Turns out, Merle's does too. Okay, so remember I said I'd looked at MacTracker when I saw the age of the Macs, not system information? I told you it was MacTracker.
Well, MacTracker is not wrong, but it says the little field says the late 2014 Mac mini storage is 500 gigabytes or a one terabyte 5400 RPM hard drive.
I stopped reading right there.
The rest of the line says configurable up to 256, 512 gigabyte or one terabyte flash storage. I couldn't believe it.
Now, it's wonderful that Merlie really appreciates how fast the new machines are, and it's wonderful that Ken has Touch ID on his keyboard to help him enter his complex passwords and it's wonderful that they're running the very latest operating system, but I never would have done the upgrade in such a rush as we did that day if I'd realized they had SSDs. Feels good to know we pulled this upgrade off in such a short amount of time, but holy cannoli was that hard.
Retrobatch Real-World Use for Sticker Packs — by Graeme Sheppard
[33:06] Graham Shepard joins us next for a little review. When Alison reviewed RetroBatch, it seemed like just what I needed for my sticker workflow for our iOS app PT Sticker Shop, so I downloaded it and set up a couple of workflows on my iMac, testing the waters.
I had a couple of niggles at the time but generally loved it.
[33:29] When my two week trial ended, I let it lapse and carried on with other projects.
Then my wife finished another set of 24 drawings for the first Eddie Bear sticker pack, and I needed to go through my laborious, but pretty neat, slog of renaming them, adjusting the colours, compressing and doing that in three formats.
I have the pieces of this as shell script instructions in a note somewhere but it's not fun. So, RetroBatch. I have a MacBook Air as well, so I downloaded it and, started another two week trial. Naughty, I know. Second run at it, I set up a beautiful workflow in a matter of minutes that takes a folder of stickers as the input and spits out renamed, resized, recolored, reorganized, recompressed stickers. Automatically.
It's a thing of beauty, even my wife is impressed and she normally falls asleep during this part.
And you, and Flying Meat, will be glad to hear that I've bought the Pro Licence now, which is currently on sale as part of their Flying Meat Inflation Act of 2023 Super Sale.
I'm so glad I procrastinated.
[34:52] And here's one of the best features about this app. Halason mentioned it in her review, I can preview each sticker at every stage.
If the colouring damages the look, I can inspect that before hitting go.
I love this app.
Let's take a closer look at my workflow. I start off with a folder of images that my wife drew in Procreate on her iPad.
So the first node points to that folder.
[35:19] It then immediately splits off into 3 branches, so I will end up with 3 versions of each sticker.
The bottom branch starts off with an indexed PNG node.
The name of this particular node, indexed PNG, is not very obvious, but what it lets me do is reduce the number of colours in the image.
Although my wife will tell me she only used 4 colours, the files could actually have tens of thousands.
Setting this number down to 256, 128 or 64 massively reduces the file size. Think 75% reduction.
Wonderful.
I can adjust the slider and see the results in the preview, scrolling through each sticker.
Clicking on the import node shows me that sticker before adjustments for easy comparison.
My aim is to reduce colours but imperceivably, so being able to flick between before and after the conversion is a real lifesaver.
[36:23] The next node saves the image, with a slight rename to include the pack number and text to indicate this is destined for the messages app.
The middle branch is similar, but an added step resizes the image since WhatsApp only accepts 512x512 pixels.
A separate index.png node gives fine grained control since WhatsApp stickers are also limited to 100KB, so I might need to reduce their colours more than for messages.
The top branch is for GIFs to send to LINE or other apps. This is needed since LINE does not respect transparency in a PNG, so I make a 2 frame animated GIF. Actually, now I think of it, I forgot to try adding the 2 frame bit to this workflow, so I better go and update that. Now that's a lot of faffing around with images, and although I just realised I have a little more to do still, Retrobratch has turned the whole thing into a simple click of a button. Nearly.
[37:28] I checked with the creator, Gus, and apparently the wonderfully named Flying Meat Inflation Act of 2023 super sale will run at least through June, so go buy it from Flying Meat at your leisure.
You may even have time to use a trial first.
Now as a final note on the colours, my wife insists that the image she drew of Eddie Bear has 4 colours, but using ImageMagick's identify command I can see it actually has 5166.
And it has a file size of a massive 315 kilobytes.
Let's run it through imageoptim to losslessly compress it, getting it down to 262 kilobytes with the same number of colours.
Good so far. It's also far below Apple's generous limit of 500KB, but we can do better.
Going down to 16 colours drops the file size to 47KB with no noticeable change in the image.
Going to 8 colours drops the file size to just 36KB, but the eagle eyed might spot that the red heart patch has lost its vibrancy at this point. I could go in and specify a palette of colours to improve things, I guess, but that's pushing my patience too far.
[38:48] Oh, and in case you're wondering, stepping back to 9 colours instead of 8 might possibly help with the colour, but I've found that using numbers that aren't binary or hexadecimal friendly, like 8, 16, 32, 64, etc, can have minimal size improvements and they're not really worth worrying about.
[39:11] In this case, file size becomes 10% larger if I go from 8 to 9 colours and the image looks identical.
So, go buy RetroBatch from flyingmeat.com if you spend any time at all manipulating images, and go buy PT Sticker Shop from the App Store if you like Eddie Bear.
[39:32] You can find me on the Podfeet Slack as GrayMS, though it does actually seem I might need an identifier if I can think of one.
Https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2023/06/retrobatch-sco/
[39:41] Thanks so much for that, Graham. That was really interesting, and I love that you were able to immediately get such value about from RetroBatch just right after learning it from my review from it last week. Well, I've got even more on RetroBatch here. You've heard me recommend it, and now you've heard Graham recommend it. If you'd like to really learn how to use the tool in detail, ScreenCastsOnline has just published my latest tutorial about, You guessed it, RetroBatch.
I start from the very beginning and I go step by step, building up a few scenarios and I explain the interface along the way.
I'm very pleased with how the tutorial came out, mostly as a credit to the developer Gus Mueller for making such a cool product.
I put a teaser video in the show notes, and if you're interested in the product after looking at that, or I'm sorry, you're interested in watching the video tutorial, go to ScreenCastsOnline.com link in the show notes of course, and start a free 7-day trial to get this tutorial and all of the Modern Back catalog.
It's really a terrific learning resource.
Support the Show
[40:42] I'd like to give special thanks to Christoph Trusch for his quarterly donation through PayPal to support the work we do here at the Podfeed Podcast.
He goes to podfeed.com slash PayPal and he chooses an amount that's right for him that demonstrates the value he gets out of the shows.
If you'd rather do that than a pledge through Patreon, I'd take donations any way that's right for you. Thanks again, Christophe, for your continued support.
Security Bits — 11 June 2023
[41:06] Music.
[41:15] Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for security bits with Bart Booth Shots.
How are you doing today, Bart? Apart from the fact that I'm melting, I'm doing good.
[41:25] It's warm and humid, and I'm not used to both. Well, we've been just sitting under a cloud since November in California.
Oh, no. Does that mean it's greener?
Yeah, it's greener. We got grass growing. We got trees growing.
Everything's growing. Everything's happy. We got flowers blooming and everything, but the humans are cranky.
Well, hopefully summer kicks in soon. Exactly. All right. What have we got going on this week?
We have some new stories, but there wasn't it wasn't like a massive jam packed show.
So I actually thought it might be interesting to do a bit of a deep dive into the security and privacy stuff from WWDC.
So on the one hand, we don't get to have it straight away, which is frustrating because I want my shiny toys now, please.
But we can't have them. But on the other hand, with everything else going on and everyone talking about the new Macs and the new the entire new paradigm of computing, I think a lot of this stuff has gotten lost.
And some of it was they had so much to say. Some of it was in a press release on Wednesday.
They literally put out a press release on Wednesday saying some some updates to Apple services was like the title of the press release. And they had loads of cool news hiding just in a press release.
So I picked out the security and privacy stuff and I figured we could do that as a sort of medium slash deep dive.
[42:49] So, the first one that I don't know how much attention it got.
So, we've talked a lot about Apple's various child safety features, and they had three, and one of them very, very, very, very publicly did not happen, which is the CSAM detection.
That died.
But the other two did go ahead, which is Siri protections. And so, if you ask Siri for certain things, it will give you answers and point you towards child protection agencies.
It basically with the help of Child Protection Agency, Siri has been trained to give certain answers.
And the other one then is what Apple had called communications safety, which is an opt-in parental control that existed on child.
So if you have a family and you set up parental control, your child's iPhone is in a different mode to your iPhone.
And on the child's iPhone, the parent can enable communication safety, which means that there's on device image detection in messages looking for inappropriate images and the child will get presented with a blurred out version of the image and a warning in child friendly language saying this is an image you may not want to view.
It's not your fault. Yada, yada, yada. So that's communication about that for a long time.
[44:05] Correct. Now being implemented. No. So that's me setting the scene.
So that's how it was. It was a child only feature, that was optionally enabled by a parental control.
That's now expanding. It was also messages only. So that's now expanding into a feature everyone can opt into.
It is still opt-in.
It is still on-device only, but it's bigger than messages.
It's now all of Apple's apps and an API for developers, and it's on all iPhones, and it's been rebranded as sensitive content warnings.
And so you can turn it on as an adult on your iPhone, and every app that chooses to implement the API can give you that same level of protection.
[44:46] Interesting. That'll be interesting to see which apps, which messaging apps in particular choose to do that.
Maybe we should have a bingo card on that one. Ooh, yeah, we could take a little pool in there.
With Facebook in the four corners.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, we shall see. Something else that is getting a lot of TLC that, again, didn't make the keynote because they had so much stuff, is Safari is getting a lot of TLC this autumn, or fall, as you guys would say.
So some of it is around.
You always say that like we don't know the word autumn. We say autumn. OK, good, good, good.
Well, we don't say fall.
So maybe I'm saying, OK, so some of it is just usability stuff, which is cool.
But there's actually a security and privacy angle to a lot of it.
So one of the things we're getting is what they're calling profiles, which is effectively multiple browsers within the one browser.
So if you set a personal profile on a work profile, then all of the tabs in the personal profile will share one cookie.
[45:46] Jar and all of the tabs in the personal profile will share another cookie jar.
So you can be simultaneously logged into two Google accounts, say, you know, your Google Work account and your Google Home account.
And they won't fight with each other because they're effectively in separate little buckets.
So would you have two separate Safari windows that were doing that?
Simultaneously? I think it's at the tab. You can do it at the tab group level.
So you could even have one window with two tab groups.
You don't have to. You could do it by window. But if you want to do it within the one window, and I guess in iOS, you probably want to do it with tab groups, because in iOS, multiple windows is messy.
[46:24] Yeah. So you know the way at the moment you can change from private browsing to not private browsing on iOS is at the bottom.
Yeah. Well, on the newer versions, when you click that button, you'll also have a toggle for changing your profile in that same place where you change between public and private browsing.
And again, it'll be different collections of tabs. So I believe Chrome's had this for a while, right?
It has. It's never worked very well for me, but it has had it. Yes.
And so it's already useful, but it's also a privacy thing, because if you make a persona called Facebook and you log into Facebook, in that persona, then none of its tracking cookies can leave.
They can't see anything you do in your real persona. So you can use this feature to Island off anything that you don't want tracking you around so you can make like a little, you know, a little persona for crude.
You don't trust.
You know, you're a bit like your special home network for IoT devices or whatever.
So you put all of that stuff that you don't want tracking you in one persona and do all your real work in another persona.
Interesting. That's sort of a cool use of it. You can also, if you turn on...
Actually, there's also a related feature.
[47:45] Actually, there's a couple of related features. So we know that cookies is a thing that you want to keep an eye on because cookies are a way of tracking you. But another way of tracking you is sticking ?somerandomglup on the end of URLs.
So if you go to Amazon and copy a link, the first bit of the link is actually the link to the thing you're looking at, and all the rest of it is a whole bunch of tracking cookies.
And so if you send that information, if you copy that URL and paste it into a chat to me and I click on it, Amazon don't just know where I want to go.
They also know who told me to go there. And so they start to build up a connection.
So Apple has probably machine learning, I'm guessing. But anyway, Apple have learned which of these URL bits are tracking and which are vitally important to making the web page work.
And they will begin to automatically strip out the tracking ones when you copy and paste URLs and hit the share button and things like that.
I like that because I go to a lot of effort to take everything from the question mark on off.
But every once in a while, the question mark, say from Amazon, might say gender women equals women, comma, size equals large, comma, you know, that kind of thing.
There's actually information in there that would take them, you know, this is what I want for my birthday.
You want to keep that, but you don't want all the glop cookie part.
But you're saying, that sounds like that's going to be a whack-a-mole problem, doesn't it?
[49:07] It is, but if you throw sufficient, if you throw machine learning at it, let it do the work. Yeah, there you go.
So machine learning is good, not evil.
[49:17] And at the end of the day, even if they only get 80% of them, it's still better than nothing.
Yeah, yeah, I like it.
Another thing you can do is in private browsing, you can have it that you need to do a biometric to unlock your private browsing.
So you're in the middle of some private browsing and you put your phone down, or maybe you hand your phone to someone else.
Else, if they go into Safari and they try to go to your private tabs, they'll try to face ID them.
You know, it's funny, I only trigger private browsing accidentally and on my Mac is all Safari has gotten this new behavior now that I'm sure is some setting that happened accidentally.
But when I do command N for for a new window, it makes a new tab.
And I feel like it's related to maybe a bug in in stage manager.
But anyway, so then I think, okay, I'll do command shift N, maybe that'll give me it.
And that gives me the private browsing window. Like, ah, but I don't even think I ever noticed private browsing on the iPhone.
[50:15] But on the iPhone, it's kind of tricky because you have to go down to the bottom of the screen and click the little toggle. Yeah.
And it's effectively it's like you have two sets of tabs, your private tabs, your regular tab, so it's actually quite faffing about.
I have to do it because there are no personas yet.
And sometimes I have to be logged in with WorkMe into something.
And sometimes I have to be logged in with not WorkMe into the same something.
And my trick at the moment is to use private browsing for one of them.
It's annoying.
So anyway that'll be nicer. Another thing is you get to set a different default browser on private tabs versus not private tabs. So you can decide that for the stuff that you're doing that's not private to use Google because you just can't do without it's much better job at figuring out that actually you're a bash programmer so when you say find you've actually been the terminal command or maybe you're a Mac user and when you say photos you mean the app not the concept or whatever right Google learns these things about you Google's way better than DuckDuckGo or whatever, at figuring out ambiguous search terms. But in private browsing, you probably want more privacy. So you could have DuckDuckGo set in your private tabs.
[51:24] Sorry, I got hung up on the idea that Google is good at learning that you're a Mac user.
I was just trying to look up the Microsoft 365 save window that you and I were just discussing before we started, and I even put macOS in the clue, and all it would show me was links to Microsoft for Windows.
I couldn't, I could not, I was finally, I was down to putting it in quotes when we had to get started recording.
So I was unable to convince it that I was a Mac user, and I'm pretty sure it should have noticed that by now.
So it can still be way better than DuckDuckGo, and what I said be true.
Fair point, yeah, it's probably not the best example. I just find that for search terms that are a bit ambiguous, I tend to get more relevant-to-me stuff from Google.
Yeah, I keep trying DuckDuckGo, but I keep going back to Google for the results.
I've ended up that my phones are in DuckDuckGo, but my desktops are on Google.
That's so far that that's done it for me, but I'll probably do this private.
This is an interesting idea anyway.
[52:26] The last Safari feature is that you can finally turn any website into a standalone desktop app with the full push notification support and stuff, which means you can command tab to it.
[52:37] But it means that all the cookies are in a separate little jar.
Are. So if you make a app for Facebook, now Facebook is completely separated away from the rest of your browsing experience. And you can even command tab to it and you can even get like messenger to give you push notifications and things. And it cannot track you across the internet because it's trapped in a single app instead of being in your main browser experience.
So this is identical to what the site specific browser applications like fluid we've talked about on the show we're doing, but now it's going to be built into Safari, which means more people will notice it.
Yes, absolutely. That's it. Exactly. That's perfect description.
Okay, so that's pretty cool. So everybody can make my my time shifter app, web app can make it into a an app on their Mac.
Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, so I think that's just cool. I've been waiting for this for ages because it's it's again, it's a great way to be able to do multi logins and things.
And it's something they just want to come on tab to like, I just it's nice to come on tab to certain things.
I'm thinking this could help Steve when we're doing the live show he logs he has to log into Google as himself and as me in order to do to stream on one and be able to watch it on the other and control things it ends up he needs it twice so what he's been doing is opening safari and chrome but he could have two personas in safari.
Yeah absolutely. But he still has to have chrome open in order to do stream yard so.
[54:03] I may not be that. Okay. I may not help them there, but there's lots of situations where it will help a lot of people, so I'm generally very happy. I like it.
Another feature, then, is this is one of those features I wish the world didn't need, but the world does need this. So at the moment we have location sharing.
Right. I can choose to share my location with you.
I have shared my location with you permanently because it's just easier for recording a podcast or whatever for you to be able to check if I'm not, you know, got the time wrong and I'm halfway around the country, as has happened once, I think only once that particular mistake.
I think it's happened when I've done it more often than you.
[54:42] Yeah, but and you can also share for an hour or whatever, but that's not quite the use case of I'm leaving a party. I need to go home, but I am a vulnerable person.
It's late at night and I want to be sure.
Or my friends want to be sure that I get home. Check-in is a feature specifically designed for that use case of I am leaving and I need to go to a place and I want to tell these people that I got there safely.
And so when you would check in, what you do is you tell your iPhone two vitally important pieces of information where you're going and who should be told if you don't get there.
[55:17] And then don't get there in what's a logical amount of time, according to maps navigation.
It's not just a logical amount of time, it's a little bit more clever.
If you stop making progress towards your destination for a period of time, it will get suspicious and start to raise alarm and say, this person was supposed to be heading home and they're stuck in wherever for the last 15 minutes or whatever.
OK, so what it will do then is it only then does it ping the other people.
So they don't have to watch you and they don't also I don't think they get your location information as long as everything's fine.
But as a moment that everything is not fine, They don't just get your location, they get the last time you were seen on the cellular network, they get your cell phone signal strength and your battery percentage, and where you were.
So if your battery died, they don't need to have a heart attack about it.
Exactly. That's genius. It is absolutely genius.
And so it will only share your location if it needs to.
So your privacy is way more protected and they don't have to watch you.
They can just get on with their lives. And if they're needed, they will be pinged by check-in. Interesting.
When you arrive home safely, do they get a ping?
[56:29] I forgot to check. I would assume the logic is yes. Yeah, I'm trying to think of when we left Fresno to see Steve's parents, I told his mom, don't worry, I'll let you know when we're home safely. And of course, I totally forgot to do it.
And it was like two days later, I was like, well, hopefully she assumes we got home safely.
But I'm wondering whether something like that where it's not necessarily we're in danger except of course getting in a car driven by humans and other humans driving cars.
It is a dangerous thing. So yeah, that's a really cool tool.
It sounds like it has enough complexity to it that it might be a little bit tricky, but, I get the impression it's harder to describe than to use.
Okay, good. Well, Apple. Apple.
[57:14] So I'm looking forward to seeing it in the flesh, but I think it sounds fascinating.
It sounds good to me. Another really nice thing is that we can now, if you're in an entirely Apple universe, this is really only useful for people who are fully on board with the Apple universe, but some of our audience might fall in that category.
I think it might be a slight selection effect here. But you can now share through iCloud, password and or passkey. So you can basically make a group and you can share passwords or passkeys with that group.
Or you will be able to when we get the new operating systems.
So that's good. That's one of the key features that pushes me towards 1Password is the ability to share passwords with Steve.
I wonder how that works. That'll be interesting to see. If I update the password or he updates the password, does the other person get it? I would assume so.
[58:08] My understanding is, yes, it is a shared like a like a shared album or a shared, you know, or a shared folder or a shared note or whatever it is.
It is a real sharing with being able to on the fly set up groups would be really cool, like I may share a password with Lindsay, for example.
But it's just a one off once in a while. And that's a little harder.
We're not in any sort of family group thing together.
We could be, but my I have seen some screenshots, because obviously I haven't got to play with it because I don't believe in installing developer betas on my machines because they're important to me.
I believe you just basically on the password you click add person.
[58:47] And then you can add multiple people by their Apple ID. So I think it's sort of a per password thing.
OK, that's cool. And it just I'm this person's in my contacts.
They're on an iPhone or iOS or Mac OS or whatever I can share with them. That's cool. Yeah.
And very similarly is shared air tags with up to I think it's up to five people in total on a single air tag.
So you can as the owner of the air tag, you can click a plus button And just add more people to the specific air tag.
So you obliquely mentioned this just slightly yesterday when we were recording our chitchat across the pond light about some of the announcements and I didn't actually think about what that means.
One of the great benefits I'd see of this is that if there's somebody who's always traveling with you, they're not going to get constant notifications, right?
So I can have Steve and me both in a group to share, you know, so he's not being told that he's getting stuff following. We don't tend to get that, by the way.
And I don't know why.
I'm we're covered in air tags. They're sprinkled all over us.
It's because you're with the tag, too. Oh, OK.
[59:55] OK, so remember, we talked about the new recently Google and Apple put out a spec to the ETF.
Yeah, well, that spec, that spec actually reveals how air tags work because air tags are already following that spec.
And so the air tags mode changes depending not only on whether it's following someone, but whether you are present.
So when the air tag is near you, it's in a different mode than when you're gone.
OK, so this is for the I borrowed Burt's keys and I've got them and I borrowed Burt's car. Actually, we don't have car keys.
That's a bad example. But let's say you had a car that had keys.
I carry your key and I would be driving along. It would and you've got an air tag on it.
It would stop notifying me that I'm being followed because you and I are in a group together.
[1:00:39] Precisely, precisely. Cool. I think it's very useful.
It's just a nice little thing that's been missing for families.
So I think this would be great to see. So really happy.
And again, you just in the in the find my app, you just click on the air tag and say add person and you just pop in their Apple ID and hey, presto.
Now, I know a lot of people complain about the air tag notifications, but we keep them all turned on for all of our devices all of the time.
And the reason I like it is because I know the number is five.
When I go for my walk at about three blocks away, I will see five air tags have been left behind, five air tags.
So because I see it every day, I know what that number is.
And when I came on this trip, it said two. It's like, okay, I know my big luggage and my other backpack are still at home.
That number should be two, correct.
So having that repetition, I know what number to look for. If it had said three, I'd be like, Uh-oh, I forgot something.
[1:01:31] Yeah. Interesting. Not everybody's cup of tea, but... Yeah, I've gone with a slightly different approach, so it knows that there are certain things I do leave in work. Because I used to get a lot of notifications because of my work backpack.
That stays in work when I go for my lunchtime walk, and I really don't need to be told that my backpack is still at the office. So I've told it that the office is a place I'm allowed to leave that, because it knows work and it knows home. So...
You know, I used to do it that way until we left for Lindsay's house one time, and I forgot my purse at home.
Oopsie. Because my purse, I know it's always at home, it's fine, I don't need to see it all the time. And I ended up in San Diego with just my phone, nothing else, no sunglasses, no nothing.
Because we didn't notice until we were quite a ways away.
Once I, if you have your phone with you, you don't look for anything else.
[1:02:20] That's funny, I never leave the house without checking for the, what I call it, the triple check wallet, keys, phone. It's like there's three different pockets, it's tap, tap, tap.
I actually can't leave the house without going tap, tap, tap on the three puppets.
My friend Diane, when her husband would leave for work, it was, watch while the keys ring glasses.
Yeah. Okay. He has more to remember. But yeah, it's a little routine, a little ritual. Okay.
So yeah, so, okay. So another nice little thing.
So you know that when on iOS at the moment, if you are using SMS-based two-factor authentication and you're in Safari, when a message pops into Messages, Safari sees it and automatically offers it to you as an auto-fill in Safari.
Yeah. Which is really useful.
Beautiful. The mail app is gaining that superpower.
So when you're on iOS, if it's emailed to you, it'll also auto-appear waiting for you in Safari. Why only on iOS?
[1:03:16] Well, I don't know for sure it's only in iOS, but the news story only said it's iOS, so it didn't say it was Mac 2.
Didn't say it wasn't, so I don't know. I would think it would be in both of them.
But yeah, I hate those apps. There's a bunch of apps coming out now. Web apps were...
Like, Streamirror's a perfect example. You start a Streamirror thing, it goes, okay, we're going to send you a link.
You literally don't have a login that you have to use. Yeah, I don't like it.
But then I've got to go open up email, copy the thing, bring it back over, paste it, and get it. It's like, oh, come on.
[1:03:45] And I get it's not storing a password for you and the membership club has that too.
Let me set up a passkey and I'll be happy.
Yeah, that's one of these things. So that's nice, but it gets even nicer.
There's also going to be an optional feature for auto delete in both mail and messages so that when you have logged in, it will clean up your inbox of that email and or that message.
Can I do a slow clap for that one?
It's great though. The messages are littered with those. By the way, Dave Hamilton knows the guy that implemented that feature for messages.
Oh, cool. That copies it, and he thanks him every time he talks about it.
I'd buy him a coffee every time I met him, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
And then one last little one is that Apple have introduced some new tools to make it easier for developers to accurately fill in their privacy nutrition label.
So that's kind of a little maturing of those privacy nutrition labels in the app store.
I've never heard them called nutrition labels.
[1:04:49] Oh, it's kind of a university. Yeah.
Anyway, I think that's a euphemism, but a lot of news sites call them that.
But it's like that. Right.
Right. Yeah. Here's how many carbs, here's how many calories. Yeah, exactly.
How much privacy are you giving away by using this app? So yeah, that's what caught my eye.
And if you'd prefer to hear someone else say it, the episode 331 of the Checklist podcast, Ken just reads it all out to you.
So if you find it easier to listen and to read, that covers that.
And there's also some, Craig Federighi did an interview where he talked about some privacy related stuff that covers a lot of what we just talked about, but also mentions that Craig is worried about AI.
There's a link in the show notes to that story as well. So that then brings us on to action alerts. And there's quite a lot here that I think people need to update. So I've written all of these from the point of view of if you are a dot dot dot. So if you are a Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave or Vivaldi user, be absolutely sure your browser is patched completely. There is a nasty zero day and it is being actively exploited. It was discovered being exploited before it was patched. So Definitely check your browsers.
So is that all Chromium?
Yes. Because there are more Chromium browsers than that. Like, I think DuckDuckGo is Chromium, isn't it? Or is that Gecko?
[1:06:13] Update your browsers. Update your browsers, yeah, update your browsers.
And also, because it's Chromium, update your Electron apps.
Now, at the moment, I don't know if this is a bug that's easy to exploit through Electron, but it's hypothetically possible to.
So, Pat? Yeah, I checked with the developer of Folga, which is one of my favorite Electron apps, the app that lets you create, like a screen steps replacement allows you to do tutorials and guides.
And there was a case of a bug that should have affected Electron.
And he said, you have to have been using that part of Chromium in order for it to affect your app.
And that particular one was not so. But yeah.
[1:06:57] So not necessarily your Electron apps, but if you see an update from one of your Electron apps, say yes.
Pretty much. Yeah, exactly. That's what I would say, particularly if they're Electron apps that interact with the Internet, which is kind of most of them, I think.
It's definitely worth just checking they're up to date, Because, as I say, zero day in the wild, not happy, happy, joy, joy.
If you have been holding off on updating to iOS 16, now would seem to be a really good time.
For a start, it's almost been a year. So maybe you want to get yourself ready for iOS 17 to not do that for a while.
So if you're still on iOS 15 and you can go to 16, I would strongly recommend you do because Kaspersky have discovered an in the wild, actively exploited bug, that is, as of this writing, not yet patched.
Now, it's actively exploited.
Yes, I was 15. Now it is actively exploited in a very, very fine grained sort of a way.
This is being used by state level actors at the moment.
And it appears to be what is at the it appears to be the small kernel of truth against this stupid story that the Russians are claiming that Apple is working with the American government to hack all Russian government people.
That's the horse poop. But the kernel of truth there is that there does appear to be a bug that is being exploited by some of these grey hat companies.
You're you're NSO group style people.
And it does. It is iOS 15 only.
[1:08:25] And as of this morning, it was not yet patched.
[1:08:29] OK. So, you know, good Now the next story is very annoying because this is one of those ones where I wish I could say this is easy, you will know if you are affected by this.
Unfortunately, if you're the kind of person who builds your own computer, you'll know whether or not you're affected by this because you will have chosen your motherboard.
But if you're the kind of person who just bought a PC, this may be a more difficult one because one of the biggest manufacturers is a company called Gigabyte and their firmware on their motherboards had a stupendously silly book.
[1:09:02] I think you talked about it the last time we talked, didn't you?
I talked about the fact that they were hacked, and that there was other stuff going on with Gigabyte, but this is somewhat different.
So, there is a feature in Windows that allows device drivers, to inject code into the Windows kernel at boot time.
So you can have your motherboard inject code into Windows as Windows boots.
Which means it gets injected into Windows before most of Windows' security features turned on.
Oh. And Gigabyte connected that code to their web app, to their, sorry, their web store.
So their motherboard phones home to Gigabyte, which is not a bad thing so that you get firmware updates, but they did it over HTTP.
Oh, come on.
[1:10:02] Which means that a machine in the middle can inject malware into the stream, and that malware will then get injected straight into the Windows kernel before any of the Windows security kicks in. You have yourself rootkit disaster.
So they have fixed it, but that should never have been allowed to happen.
That is just such a poor show.
Anyway, if you have a gigabyte motherboard, and how you figure that out, I'm not really sure, but you should be offered an update to if you get offered a driver update for your motherboards by Windows software update, because Gigabyte do things, the official channel.
So they will. You should be offered it through as an optional install and Windows update.
It won't be required when it'll be, you know, that optional section in the Windows updater or like you.
So I wouldn't know, but OK, yeah, there's a section called optional updates where you'll find like your printer drivers and stuff. That's almost certainly where you'll find your motherboard drivers, if one of them says gigabyte, do that.
Yeah.
[1:10:59] So, does Gigabyte sell motherboards to commercial manufacturers, like could you buy a Dell that has a Gigabyte motherboard in it?
I don't know if Dell do, but hypothetically, a Dell-like company would definitely be a potential customer of Gigabyte. Okay, so it's not just for people who make their own computers to keep an eye out for this.
Yeah, yeah, I think basically all Windows users need to just be a little bit careful on that one. So maybe just check those optional updates, because you probably don't go near them because because they're optional, and so why would you think of it, putting it in there?
But just have a wee look.
If you are a KeePass user, not PassKey, KeePass, it is an open source password manager.
If you're a KeePass user on Windows and only on Windows, they made a slight boo-boo when they were coding the Windows version of their app.
They called the wrong memory management API, which meant that they accidentally left your master password sitting in RAM after you were finished using it. So there's a function to zero and then free memory, or just to free it. And they called the one that just frees, it. So hypothetically, another app running on your machine could read that RAM and get your master password.
So it sounds like this was caught fairly quickly and...
[1:12:15] It was, yeah. I mean, the risk is kind of low because someone would have to already be on your machine. So you kind of already have a problem. And it was patched quickly.
So it's not an ahooga ahooga. But if you are using key pass, I would say patch it. You don't want it in RAM, right? Don't leave your master password lying around. Right, right.
Clean that up. And then finally, if you are an iTunes user on Windows, so not Allison, Alison, then you should be sure to patch because there's a nasty privilege escalation vulnerability which Apple have patched.
So there still is an iTunes?
It's not music? Depending on what version of Windows you have, I'm not sure if they've all been renamed yet.
The Apple insider story called it iTunes, so I sort of went.
OK, yeah, it might be. I just don't know. Neither do I.
I could ask my darling beloved, but I haven't heard him swear at it in a while, so I don't know.
[1:13:17] Moving on to notable news, then I have just the one story that caught my eye and it didn't catch my eye because I was happy. The US Federal Trade Commission had launched an investigation into Ring slash Amazon because until 2017, they didn't have processes in place to protect customer video from being accessed by Ring staff and the staff at Ring vendors.
Which meant that they could, anyone working for Ring or working for one of Ring's contractors could just access anyone's video. And unfortunately, we know they abused that feature.
And so there was an investigation and the hope was there will be a substantial fine and it would be clear that this is not something that is acceptable. And well, there is a fine.
There has been a settlement, a whopping $5.8 million, which I think Amazon found in the couch cushions.
[1:14:10] Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, it is a little spank, a little slap on the wrist.
And that's kind of it, apart from some palate cleansers. But it's one from each of us.
So mine is way less interesting than yours.
If you like having a schematic of your phone as your phone's wallpaper, a bunch of new ones were released in pretty colors to celebrate WWDC.
So Lincoln show notes are very pretty.
And then you have a way more cool one.
So, a company called, what was it, Company Moonlighter, is, they basically, they're launching a testbed satellite system of, like, the cubes, the little cubesats, for the purpose of letting people try to hack them.
So, the idea is to try to figure out how to harden against hackers, and so they're putting this up.
Let's see, it's Commercial Reply Services is the mission, and it's going up to the ISS, and Aerospace Corporation is working on them.
That's oh, that's Moonlighter is the name of the hacking sandbox in space.
I mean, that's just fun to say, right? Hacking sandbox in space.
Yeah. We're putting a CubeSat in space for the express purpose of letting people hack it to make all of our satellites safer.
Yeah, right.
We've got an article from ISSNationalLab.org that talks all about it.
And of course, I found that on Mastodon because I follow a whole bunch of space people on Mastodon.
Just hashtag space, follow it. Boom.
It's so fun, makes it really, really enjoyable.
[1:15:39] Excellent. OK, well, there we go. And I don't think I've frightened the pants off you because you're not a gigabyte user.
[1:15:47] Well, I recall, I think if you've got a browser, you should update it.
If you've got a motherboard, you should update it if you're offered it, even if it's optionally offered you. And if you've got an operating system like I was 15, you should probably update it.
I'm sensing a theme, Bart. Yeah, I think patchy, patchy, patchy, patchy is our theme of the day.
All right, isn't it? Yeah. Actually, they all have patches. Yeah, iOS 16, I guess, is a patch. So yeah, that's your gig.
Stay patched so you stay secure, basically, folks. So I guess that's my cue to say until next time, remember to stay patched so you stay secure.
[1:16:21] Well, that is going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at alison at podfeed.com anytime you like. If you have a question or suggestion, just send it on over. I know I have a question in my inbox that I have not answered, but it's because I don't know the answer yet, so I will get back to you, I promise. Anyway, you can follow me on social media on mastodon at podfeet at chaos.social. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. If you want to join the fun of the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com slash slack, where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely Nosylla castaways.
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[1:17:22] Music.