Transcript

NC_2024_02_11

[0:00] Music.

[0:05] A technology geek podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias.
Today is Super Bowl Sunday, February 11, 2024, and this is show number 979.

Image Descriptions for Social Media – ScreenCastsONLINE Tutorial

https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2024/02/sco-image-descriptions/

[0:17] Back in the olden days, it used to be really hard to add descriptions to images, you know, when you're posting it to social media.
You probably know that without an image description, people with visual impairments who use screen readers get zero value out of your posts.
But you know, it was so hard that a lot of people didn't bother to include everyone.
But nowadays, it's really easy to add alternative text for screen reader users.
My latest ScreenCastsOnline tutorial is all about how to add descriptions to your images on Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Discord, and Threads.
And for bonus points, I even show how to use Be My Eyes to write your alt text for you with Mona for Mastodon.
I've embedded a teaser video in the show notes, but also a link to the full tutorial on ScreenCastsOnline where you can watch it with a free seven-day trial, again, over at ScreenCastsOnline.com.
I always like to give the disclaimer, don't ever get the free seven-day trial because it lets you have access to all of the back catalog that's available, and you're going to want a subscription if you do it.
But hey, I warned you, go over, check out the free trial, and you can watch my image descriptions for social media tutorial on ScreenCastsOnline.

Dumb Question Corner – Magnetic vs. MagSafe vs. Qi2

https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2024/02/dqc-magsafe-qi2/

[1:26] Music.

[1:41] Chelsea Cook wrote in with a great question. She wrote, Do you happen to have any recommendations for MagSafe stands?
I'm very late to the MagSafe party having upgraded from an SE 2020 to an iPhone 15 Pro.
I'd like one that could ideally charge all the things, but I'd like to know what my options are since looking at photos online line isn't really feasible.
She's visually impaired.
Also, the horizontal ones where everything is just in a row would take up way too much space on my desk.
I've been eyeing the Hi-Rise 3 from 12S since I like that company, but getting two of them, one for the desk and one for the bedroom, is kind of pricey right now.
Should I just wait for Qi 2 to get the full 15 watts?
Well, I think Chelsea's final question is the right answer. My answer to her question was to wait.
But let's flesh this out a bit more so you have the context and even a better better technical understanding of what's under the hood with these chargers and why the very near future will be much better than where we've been.

[2:35] Right now, iPhone users have a couple of different options to choose from to quote-unquote wirelessly charge their phones.
Now, wirelessly is a misnomer, of course. There is a wire, but it just doesn't go into the phone. Let's ignore that for the purposes of our discussion.

[2:51] Now, I'm going to be saying watts quite a bit. It's abbreviated with just a W.
And let's make sure we all understand what watts means to you.
It's not how much you can store in a device.
It's a measure of how much energy can be poured into a device at an instant in time.
This makes it the right measure for the speed of charging.
Now, we're all pretty familiar with MagSafe devices if you're an iPhone user.
They're magnetic and they charge an iPhone at 15 watts, which is considered fast charging.
Now, fast charging is another phrase I really find annoying. Like, how fast is fast?

[3:22] So Apple certified MagSafe chargers are super expensive. It's really easy to drop $100 or more.
You can also find cheap magnetic chargers that sound like they're just like MagSafe without Apple blessing them. them. They're magnetic, and when you stick your phone to them, the phone charges.
But if you don't see the word MagSafe in the description, it's not going to charge your iPhone at 15 watts. They're limited to 7.5 watts.
Keep in mind that price is not a reliable way to tell the difference between MagSafe and plain magnetic chargers.
Chelsea mentioned the 12S High-Rise 3. As she said, 12S is a beloved company by Apple fanatics, but even 12S are vague about this distinction. distinction.
You'd think that for the $100 cost of the Hi-Rise 3, that would be MagSafe.
But if you look at the wording about it, they do not say it's MagSafe, and they don't show the charging speed on the spec sheet.
However, if you look at the 12S Hi-Rise Deluxe for $150, they do say it's MagSafe, and they say it charges at 15 watts.
The two chargers look like slightly different configurations of the same kind of device to charge an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods, pods, but the non-deluxe version does not have fast charging.

[4:35] Let's step back for a second and ask an important question. Do you need fast charging?
Fast charging of batteries degrades them over time more than slow charging, reducing their overall capacity.
This is true for every device, from phones to electric vehicles that have batteries.
You also might not be in that much of a hurry. Maybe you sit at a desk all day and it's easy to slap your phone on a charger for a top-up midday.
But maybe you're a road warrior, always on the run, about about to catch a plane that you're going to fly, and when you need to top up, you need it now.

[5:05] Well, the non-MagSafe chargers out there use a standard called Qi.
It's spelled Q-I, but it's pronounced Qi, and it's governed by the Wireless Power Consortium.
Apple never joined the Qi bandwagon, so MagSafe chargers are not under the Qi standard.
The good news is that Apple have decided to give their MagSafe technology to the Wireless Power Consortium to be incorporated into to the new and improved Qi 2 standard.
Quoting from the consortium's announcement about Qi V2.0, the Qi V2.0 standard consists of two profiles, the magnetic power profile, MPP, which is based on MagSafe technology contributed by Apple to WPC and branded with the Qi 2 logo.
I'm going to stop my quote for a second. It's QI2, slammed together, the three letters, the two letters and the number stuck together, Qi2, and that's important.
So they say that this magnetic power profile, MPP, is branded with a Qi2 logo and an enhancement.
The second technology is an enhancement to the existing wireless charging extended power profile, EPP.
That does not include magnets, but complies with the Qi V2.0 standard.
New Qi V2.0 EPP products will be branded with the the existing Qi logo customers know and use today.

[6:24] Okay, let's break that down a little bit. We need to learn the new terminology.
Magnetic Power Profile, or MPP, is what they're calling their implementation of MagSafe.
They say if a device has MPP, it'll have the Qi2 logo.
But there will also be Qi V2.0 devices that don't have the magnetic power profile.
Those devices will not have the fancy new Qi2 logo, but rather the old Qi logo.
I don't know about y'all, but sure sounds to me like the Wireless Power Consortium folks went out for beers with the USB implementer forum folks and they decided, man, it'd be super fun to be just as confusing with their specs and product marketing rules.
So this leads me to want to explain how this whole magnetic charging even works in the first place.
For the electrical engineers listening, put your pencils down and just bear with me as I oversimplify my explanation explanation so the audience doesn't go into a coma.
First, we're going to talk about Faraday's law of induction.
You may have heard people talk about a Faraday cage, you know, when they try to make a cell phone call inside of a metal elevator.
Yes, this is the same Faraday we're talking about. But here's what Faraday figured out.
If you take a coil of wire and you send electricity through it, it will induce a magnetic field.
Okay, that's kind of cool, but what good is that information?

[7:44] Picture coiling a wire around some kind of a cylinder, like maybe a wood dowel, to make it into a little spiral.
So you pull the dowel out and you've got that spiral of wire.
Now if you stick a smaller magnetic rod through the middle of that spiral, if you send electricity through the spiral of wire, the magnetic field that gets induced will actually move the magnetic rod.
They call this process the creation of an electromotive force.
Now this is a fun experiment to do with kids. When our son Kyle was 13, we helped him and his lab partner, Darius, do this experiment.
Well, Steve and I tried to engender excitement in them of this amazing feat of electromagnetism.
They reacted exactly as you would imagine to teenage boys to react, utter and total boredom.
Well, we had fun anyway.

[8:31] Now, by the way, this thing I've been describing here, the coil of wire and the magnet inside it, that's exactly how speakers work.
So you put electricity through the, well, I won't get all the way into it, but it is how speaker coils work.
Anyway, keep going. Now that we understand that current can move a magnet, let me blow your mind.
A moving magnet can induce electricity into a coil of wire.
Yeah, it works in both directions. Grab that cylindrical magnet and move it back and forth along its axis, and you can measure the electrical current changing in the wire. I love science. science.
Well, we need one more piece of information for the story before I can connect the dots back to magnetic chargers.
We've established that running electricity, current, through a coil of wire induces a magnetic field around the wire.
We don't actually need the magnet inserted into the coil for this to be true.
That was just a way to demonstrate the electromotive force.

[9:27] If you take one coil of wire with current flowing through it and get it near another coil of wire, the first coil's magnetic field will induce a magnetic field in the second one, and that will induce current to flow through the second coil.
This works with both coils of wire flat as a pancake, as long as they're parallel and they're relatively close to one another.
You can probably see where I'm going with this. With MagSafe and Cheath, the charger has a coil of wire in it, and so does the back of the phone.
We can plug the charger into main power, which which causes electricity to flow around its flat coil of wire, which induces a magnetic field in that first coil.
When the phone is placed on the charger, a corresponding magnetic field will be induced in the phone, and that will in turn cause electricity to flow into the phone, thus charging its battery.

[10:17] Now, I put a screenshot from the iFixit video of their teardown of Apple's MagSafe charger into the show notes.
I froze it at a point where you can actually see the coils and the magnets inside.
I learned something really important by watching this full video.
Near the beginning, they cut open the connector end of the USB-C cable and they show the circuitry inside the cable's connector.
At this point, a light bulb went off for me. I have an Apple MagSafe Duo charger.
It's a travel charger for the iPhone and the watch. It's been broken for two years.
But after watching the video, I suddenly realized that since the cable on that MagSafe Duo is detachable from the device, maybe I hadn't reconnected an official Apple cable.
I grabbed a USB-C to lightning cable I was pretty sure was made by Apple, and my MagSafe Duo immediately came to life.
Now, it isn't great anymore, and definitely not if you have a case on your phone, because this was designed before the huge camera bump on the newer iPhones, but I'm kind of able to smush it into a good spot to charge.
And I was happy to know that MagSafe Duo I'd been sitting, looking at, staring at, angry that it stopped working.
There was nothing at all wrong with it. That cable turned out to be important.

[11:32] Now, there's one more thing that makes this whole MagSafe thing just that much more confusing, and that's the magnet that holds the phone to the charger.
This magnet has nothing to do with this whole magnetic field stuff.
It's there to align the phone's coils to the charger's coils.
You remember the original Qi chargers without magnets? When you were never sure whether the coils were lined up, you'd wake up to a dead phone in the morning because you'd bumped it.
That's because because they didn't have magnets to align the two devices.
Now, the part of this that I didn't understand before now is what magic sauce does Apple add to MagSafe chargers to make them so much better than vanilla magnetic Qi chargers?
Steve and I did a lot of research, and we can only infer the answer to that question.

[12:18] Evidently, Apple do a better job of aligning the coils, which makes the energy transfer much more efficient with less loss.
MagSafe also has the advantage of matching the send and receive coil sizes.
They make the phone and they define the MagSafe requirements, so it's easy to make all the coils match.
But generic magnetic Qi chargers work with all different phones, so alignment and size of the coils is not guaranteed.
Now there's a term in this field, pun not intended, called magnetic coupling coefficient.
For a given magnetic system, if that coefficient was 1, that would mean that 100% of the energy was transferred from one coil to the next.
That's not possible because there's always loss, so it's a number less than one.
We were able to find that the magnetic coupling coefficient for Qi is up to 0.5, so up to 50% efficient.
That's the best you're going to get. When the USB Type-C interface was created, it introduced native power capability of 15 watts.
This means that if a Qi charger has a magnetic coupling coefficient as high as 0.5, than a 15-watt power supply will only give you 7.5 watts of instantaneous power delivery.
Okay, now we know why it's 7.5 watts on the non-MagSafe chargers.

[13:35] We were unable to find a spec that gave us the magnetic coupling coefficient for MagSafe, but we can back into the number.
Apple say that to use MagSafe for fast charging, you have to use a 20-watt charger to achieve the 15 watts of charging.
15 divided by 20 gives us a magnetic coupling coefficient of 0.75.
This higher magnetic coupling coefficient, along with allowing 20 watts, gives us our 15 watts of power rather than the 7.5 watts with vanilla Qi chargers.
I was pretty depressed about these efficiency numbers for both technologies because I thought about all of the wasted energy for zillions of iPhones across the world if we even use MagSafe chargers.
But then it occurred to me to check what the efficiency of a regular USB-C cable is for transferring energy.
I had a little trouble digging up the definitive answer, but the folks at Bachmann had a chart that said 60-watt USB-C chargers operating at DC 5 volts, 3 amps, and 15 watts was 84.6% efficient.
That's not that much more than MagSafe at 75%. So you're much better off in terms of energy efficiency using a MagSafe or Qi2 charger that will get you this of 15 watts.

[14:48] People often ask me how important is it to have a MagSafe case on their phone because the regular case still sticks to the magnet.
Well, the farther away the coils are from each other, the lower that coupling coefficient becomes.
MagSafe cases include magnets that help with the critical alignment of the coils we talked about earlier.
If you want the fastest charge with the least amount of wasted energy while having a case on the phone, definitely go for a MagSafe case, and it doesn't have to be made by Apple.
Having no case at all would of course be even more efficient, but for most of us that's not really practical. Now that we understand the limitations of Qi magnetic chargers versus the advantages of MagSafe, we can get back to why I told Chelsea to wait.
When Steve and I were at CES, we were positively tripping over companies telling us about their Qi2 products.
Remember that Qi2 is not proprietary, and yet it contains an MPP magnetic power profile that Apple gave to the Wireless Power Consortium. This should break open the competition to be able to provide lower cost 15 watt wireless charging.
We may still have to have an eagle eye out though, because you'll have, you'll see ChiTu, I'm sorry, you'll see ChiChargers out there that don't include MPP and those will not have magnets in them. Remember that.
You can actually find a couple of Anker ChiTu chargers over on Amazon right now. They're already out.
But I'd wait until ChiTu chargers are out there before investing in anything new. Thank you.

CES 2024: VisionAid Air and Eye Disease Simulator

https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2024/02/ces-2024-visionaid/

[16:18] A lot of you know that my mother had macular degeneration, and I actually have dry macular degeneration myself.
I'm not yet going blind, but we don't know what's going to happen in the future.
So I've got a lot of interest in blind accessibility anyway, and so I've now stopped by the VisionAid booth to talk to Taylor Spiegel, who has a terrifying pitch that he's going to convince me to try on these goggles anyway.
Let's let him tell you what they're in business to do here. Absolutely. Absolutely.
So, we at VisionAid were focused on developing mixed reality technologies, so headsets like this, and how that can improve the lives of those with visual impairments.
And so our first product is called Eye Disease Simulator.
Oh, goody! That sounds fun, Taylor! It is exactly what it sounds like.
We're on the nose with the name.
And it allows people to experience firsthand life through the eyes of someone living with eye disease.
And it can be from the earliest stages of macular degeneration, for example, to the most advanced advanced stages.
And the idea here is really all about empathy and understanding.
From medical students who are the future doctors and practitioners that are going to be seeing thousands of patients, can they better understand that journey, as well as someone recently diagnosed, as well as their loved ones around them.
That's an interesting idea with the loved ones, to be able to understand what you really can't do or where you're going to need help and what it feels like, huh?
Yes, and we've heard countless stories of those where, you know, somebody might drop a pen and be able to pick it up, but then they also can't see the TV in front of them.
And a spouse or a loved one is confounded by that concept.

[17:46] And through being able to see the eyes of that individual can completely change relationships, dynamics at home.
For example, color contrast of cups. You have a white countertop, you have white cups, you have white plates.

[17:59] We've had people whose spouse has experienced it, went home, rearranged the house, got high contrast cups and their whole lifestyle at home, which is your everyday life, has improved as a result.
That's a really interesting idea. I do remember my son Kyle making fun of my mother because we were watching the Rose Parade and my mother could barely see at this point and she said, hey, did you notice the water coming off the wheels on that cycle on the left side? And he's like.

[18:25] Faking all this time. But it happened to be something she could see out of the side of her eye because the center of vision was gone, but not the side.
But he still gave her a hard time. She had a good sense of humor about it, though.
Well, that's good. And we hear a lot of those stories. And we began VisionAid from our own personal experience.
My co-founder's grandfather suffered from macular degeneration.
We saw firsthand his trajectory and how his path was.
And we started to explore, well, what other technologies are out there that can help him him and the entire family.
And through that, we started developing, finding those gaps and developing our own technology.
Now, when we were speaking a little bit earlier, he mentioned that maybe if he'd been able to see a simulation of what his future was going to be, he would have gotten more medical care earlier and had things maybe slowed it down at the very least?
Yes. With a lot of these diseases, macular degeneration, glaucoma, there's not a cure, but you can slow down its trajectory dramatically.
And a lot of situations, if you're lucky, you can outlive the disease, if you will.
So you'll never go legally blind. However, if you wait until you have early stage glaucoma, you can see just fine today, but they were able to detect it.
You'll wait years in some situations to take your drops and to go into regular appointments until it's too late, until you can't see well and your vision will never get better.
And the trajectory of that disease now means you're losing functional vision.

[19:45] Actively and more rapidly.
I know two people who had early stage glaucoma and were able to get a surgery that they did the drops and that stopped being effective, but they kept at it with the doctors and they had surgery that actually has now stabilized it for now at least.
And with macular degeneration, my uncle did get the injections and it was probably like an extra decade that he was able to drive continuously and still read before it actually did progress beyond that.
But he was quite elderly by the time it hit him really badly.

[20:15] And that's the goal, you know, in a way is to effectively outlive it.
And it doesn't just impact the individual, but everyone around them, their whole family experience, you know, the ability to have your own independence and be able to drive late into, you know, as late as possible, as long as you need to.
That's really our goal. There's great treatments and medications out there.
We're one of the few companies who are building technologies to make your senses worse, but with the longer goal of improving quality of life and patient outcomes.
Now, so I think you're going to make me wear this virtual reality headset.
And this is an audio podcast, but also has video. So I'm going to be describing in detail what I see.

[20:51] But one of the questions I asked Dr. Heatley is your advisor here.
And I asked him how you actually simulate what it is someone can't see.
Because you can't see through their eyes. You can see the effect on the physiology.
But you really don't know what they can't see unless they have a way to describe it to you in some way. So a little bit of this is generalization, I think.
Yes. So there's obviously a body of clinical research of different ways to measure one's low vision or blindness, if you will.
One common misconception is that if you lose vision, it's always just blackness or lack of vision.
But a lot of the times take macular degeneration, you lose central vision.
It's kind of like a blend of the colors of the environment around you.
So it's more of a gray or the tones of, you know, if you're in a forest, in theory, it'd be different kind of blended colors of that green background of a forest.
And that's part of what we're trying to get through is also create a gold standard of representation of these diseases.
Because if you go on, you know, three different websites and Google, you know, what does it look like with glaucoma, you may get three different things.
And that inconsistency drives us crazy, personally.

[22:01] And that's part of our goal there is, you know, we can look at things, not only the clinical research, but also let's say somebody has a lack of vision in one of their eyes.
And so, you know, glaucoma or macular degeneration is impacting just their right eye.
Well, that means that they are a great candidate to help inform us on the accuracy of our own data because their right eye is experiencing the disease, but they can still see our simulation with the left eye.
And so we can do that type of research on our end to help fine-tune what diseases look like. Very, very interesting.
Now, you've got several different kinds of eye diseases that I'm going to get to be able to see.
Do you have, is it retinopigmentosa?
We don't yet. We're actually, that's the next disease that we're developing today.
That's the one I don't have any feel for what they can see. So I'll come back next year and see what you've done with it, you know, when you're upstairs.
Maybe, I'm just real curious what that one looks like. But I guess, is it time to torture me?
Let's do it. So I think you may have to hold the microphone.
I will. So when I'm talking, you need to hold it right up on me, and then when you're talking, hold it right up on you. That's perfect.
You got it? I'll make sure the disease is on, and then we'll swap rules. All right.
Terrify me. The disease is on, he says. The disease is on. You're looking at intermediate to severe stage macular degeneration.

[23:18] Okay. Okay. So, yeah, that's interesting.
I'm seeing a pretty annoying gray bubble in the middle.
Where right now I'm looking directly at Taylor and I can't see his face, but if I look over towards Steve to the left, now I can, if I, it's kind of like when you try to look at a star and it disappears, but if you look away, you can see it.

[23:37] Yeah, I don't want to see this, but okay, so that's moderate to severe.
What are you going to do to me next?
So one key note with macular degeneration is central vision loss.
That's your high-fidelity vision. That's your color vision.

[23:50] And so that sometimes can be, even at the smallest little blind spots in the center of your vision, can take away a lot of your functionality, your ability to read, especially look at someone's in the face, your loved one in the eyes.
You lose that ability. So not only independence, but a lot of the elements that make us us. And so this is macular degeneration.
I'm gonna make this one stage worse for you before we move on if that's okay.
That sounds awesome Okay, I'm seeing the screen right now. So I don't think I'm supposed to be am I?
It is something that is okay. I'm gonna actually navigate with that screen.
Okay So I just increased the severity to a late stage macular degeneration.
So your center blind spot should be darker It should be larger and you're relying more and more on your peripheral vision.
Yeah, that's really interesting So it's almost black in a lot of areas, but it's got blobby gray spots.
And then most of the outside is gray, and I'm seeing maybe 10% around the edges.

[24:44] Yeah, I could see how I could maybe walk through a room if I always looked sideways, but that's about all I could do.
Yeah, and people who have this disease have to train themselves over time to rely entirely on your peripheral vision, which is incredibly challenging.
Yeah, it's really hard not to look at you. I have to look away in order to see you. That's interesting.
Okay, what what other torture do you have? So let's go ahead and introduce you to glaucoma.
Oh goody I do know the one thing I understood that my mother was really experiencing something awful with macular degeneration was when they thought she might have glaucoma and that terrified her because all she had left was the.

[25:22] Periphery so to lose that would have been a.

[25:26] Luckily, they were wrong. Yes, and we do have the ability with our eye disease simulator to stack the diseases because that brings up a very good point, which is your eyes won't necessarily be symmetric, and you could have more than one condition.
But right now, you're experiencing glaucoma, and think of it as tunnel vision.
So you're losing the majority of all your peripheral vision.

[25:46] So I'm noticing that this one with my left eye, I've got some central vision.
The right eye has very, very little. Is that on purpose? You've made it unbalanced?
Correct. Correct. Something that's often overlooked is the asymmetry of one's eyes.
A disease does not impact you the same on your left eye versus your right eye.
It can progress differently.
And so your mind actually does a very good job if you lose a part of your vision in one eye, the other eye does a great job accommodating in your brain to process that information.
But it's really when those things like blind spots overlap that you completely lose that visual information.
Wow. Yeah, this is terrifying, but I think it is good to try to understand it and experience experience it. Thank you. Of course. Thank you. All right.
All right. So if people wanted to find out more, oh wait, no, tell, you have another product that you also make, which is why the company is called VisionAid, not Vision Terrify People Make Them Scared to Death.
That is, even though that's a great name, I do, I do appreciate it. Yeah.
So VisionAid started because our goal is to improve the quality of lives and aid the vision of those suffering from diseases.
And so in a way we do think Eye Disease Simulator is a VisionAid in the sense that it can help through the right actions, retain vision for longer.
But our other product that we have in R&D right now is we call it VisionAid Air, but it's actually augmenting one's vision in real time.
So think of it as similar experience you put on glasses, the mixed reality headset.

[27:10] We now, with the feet of the world around you, can change that image in real time and help accentuate and improve your available vision.
So, for example, if you have wavy vision, like that's a symptom with a lot of diseases, and it's warped.
If we know where that is, because we have the image, we can counter-warp that image.
Say AI in that sentence. It's got to be some AI going to happen there.
At CES, there's going to be a lot of AI, kind of AI washing.
But yeah, that can be part of the training just to make us go faster, and we can customize that faster.
I see AI really as an accelerant in that process.
But really the fundamentals of optics are, if you can increase the light saturation and delivery to your eyes, it can actually help reduce those blind spots that you saw a minute ago with like macular degeneration.
We can change color contrast, higher contrast, so that you can still have differentiation.
So there's a lot that we can do to effectively put on a pair of sunglasses, if you will, and allow someone to have instant improvement in their vision.
And so that's really our main dreamscape right now with VisionAid is step one, we're going to make your vision worse, but really step two is augment that vision and improve it.
If people want to find out more about your work, where would they go?
VisionAid.io. You can find out more about all of the products that we have both available today as well as coming down the pipeline. one.
Well, congratulations for the work that you do here. This is cool.
Thank you. Thank you so much for coming by. Appreciate it.

[28:39] That interview was positively fascinating and they're doing really important work, but let's kind of cleanse our palates and move on to something a little bit more joyful.

CES 2024: Exobrew Smart Home Brewing

https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2024/02/ces-2024-exobrew/

[28:49] My family is a big fan of beer and in fact, a big fan of hoppy beer.
And so I'm in in the ExoBrew booth with Bart van der Kooij. I got it.
He's Dutch, and we've been practicing the pronunciation here.
And you've got an interesting product here that looks like maybe do something at home. What are you working on here?
Yeah, what I'm working on is ExoBrew. It's a company, like a compact device with a unique technology.
And we basically have a cloud-based platform where you can download unlimited recipes.

[29:22] That means you can brew 1.6 gallons of beer, or kombucha, or ciders, and it's ready in three to 30 days.
Oh, wow. So describe this device we're looking at here. Yeah, the device what's here on the right of me.
So basically, it's one brewing device. It has a copper kettle.

[29:43] It has a transparent mesh on, that's what we call it. And on top you have a cylinder where you put in the hops.
And basically what the brewing process looks like, you put the water in the copper keg, then you put the mash in and the hops on top.
It circulates, so it mashes, it boils, it cools down.
And then when you're done with that, you need to put a lid on the keg and then start fermenting. You can add the yeast.
When after the fermenting it's done that could be three or 30 days depends on the recipe and you can tap it from the same keg.
Wow so it's basically we're not gonna say Keurig because then we'd get sued for saying that but it's your it's a not cake up quite but we've got the the hops I like seeing the actual hops sitting at the top there that's very cool.
Yeah that's what we want to do we we make brewing simple you don't need any experience just your creativity and But we do want people to feel the real ingredients.
So we supply people with a brew pack.
You have 15 different styles, from alcohol-free to IPA, stout beer, sours, whatever you like.
But if you don't want to do a brew pack and you want to do your own thing, you can have a subscription on our system.
You can create your own recipes. You can clone other recipes.
You can make your own twist.

[31:10] This one that we have here on the right, the Get to the Hoppa. Get to the Hoppa.

[31:16] I've got to describe this to the audience here. The box says, Get to the Hoppa.
And it's a stylistic representation of someone who might look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
He's got the machine guns, but it's actually shooting hops out of it.
It's a great logo. That's a great line there.
So that's New England IPA. If you were to buy Get to the Hoppa, that's what you would be making, would be the New England IPA?
Yeah, that's one of the recipes that we offer.
It's a New England IPA, can be done in two weeks.
So four to five hours brewing and then fermenting is two weeks and then you can tap the beer.
Wow, that's pretty cool. So do you buy the, I forgot the name of the product, ExoBrew and then you subscribe to get these recipes or what's the model?
Yeah, the plan is right now because we we started in Europe maybe that's my Dutch name from we sold 5,000 units in Europe oh that's quite a lot and that's why we now in the US trying to expand here the goal is to offer a beer subscription so you get each week or each month depending on your frequency you get how much you like it how much you like it how many kegs you have.

[32:33] And then on the other hand, we offer a pro subscription. And that means you have access to a library.
We have about 13,000 recipes there from other users.
You can either create your own or clone the recipes, tweak it, and then order your own ingredients from your local shop and then brew it on the ExoBrew.
Oh, that's nice. So you've got all the different variations you might want.
And so how much, well, is this available today then?
We're taking pre-orders in the U.S. right now. Okay. Shipping in 2024, end of the year.
Oh, towards the end of the year in 2024. Okay. And what's your price point going to be on the XO Brew?
Starting is from $879. I'm saying starting because most people buy an extra keg, an extra $300, or buy a second or third one.
Kits the brew kits are $25 selling from is not bad at all oh that's great you make 1.6 gallons, so that's an afternoon's beer right he said the price already how much is it oh how much you make 1.6 gallons yeah 1.6 gallons on average so like I said about an afternoon's beer right.

[33:54] Preserves, sometimes we get that question as well, but most people drink 1.6 gallons at some friends and it's gone in a couple of hours.
But let's say you drink it by yourself, the keg has a cooling at the back and then preserves the beer up to three months.
When it's in the exo-brew? Yeah. You need to keep it inside the vessel.
It cools and heats.
So, basically it depends on your home temperature, your room temperature, what it needs to do.
So the size of this thing, I'm going to estimate it, what is that, about three and a half feet, three feet tall, maybe a foot and a half wide, and maybe two, three feet deep, something like that?
So it's maybe not countertop, but... It's bigger than your kitchen device, let's call no brands, but we have people that put it in the kitchen.
Yeah, I can definitely see that, yeah. In the den or hobby room, garage, yeah.
All right, well this is very cool. So if people want to get involved then, they want to find out about ExoBrew, where would they go?
Yeah, you would go to exobrew.com and then on the website you can find everything.
Perfect, Bart, I really enjoy this. This is very cool. It sounds like a lot of fun.

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CES 2024: Whispp Real-Time Assistive Voice Technology

https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2024/02/ces-2024-whispp/

[35:29] I'm at the WISP booth with Joris Kastermans, and they have won a fine CES Innovation Award for accessibility and aging tech for their product.
And we're going to find out right now what this product is. What is WISP?
WISP is a real-time assistive voice technology that converts whispered speech and affected speech into a person's natural voice, a clear and natural voice in real time.
Oh, wow. So if you've got a problem having lost your voice in some way, you'll be able to... What if you've never had a natural voice?
So WISP is meant for people with throat cancer, for example, for cortical paralysis, but also for people who stutter severely.
I tend to stutter myself slightly, and people who stutter severely, they are really fluent when they whisper.
So that was the starting point of the story. Oh, that's a really interesting idea.
So how does this work? What is the product? How does it work?
Of course, it's a lot of AI, but we have an app.
You can download the Wisp app in Google Play and the App Store.

[36:27] You can download it currently already, but at the start of CES, we will launch our phone functionality. So, you can make phone calls with the WISP assistive voice technology.
Really? In real time. Even on iOS, they're going to let you do that?
They let us do that, but it's with the WISP application.
Oh, okay. You are making phone calls. Oh, I got you. Like you'd make a call through Telegram or whatever.
You download the app, the WISP app, and you make the phone call with...
You're not using the phone function, you're using the WISP app. Okay.
All right. So, we're going to do a live demo here, right? Absolutely.
So, this is an audio podcast as well as we're doing video.
So, we have a fine gentleman over here. We have Tatsu.
You're going to be whispering into a microphone.
First, I'm going to listen to it because I've never heard this.
So go ahead and put the headphones on me.
He's going to make sure it's ready to go here. Okay, we're going to plop those headphones on me, and he's going to whisper.

[37:21] He said, welcome to CES 2024. He sounds like he's speaking correctly.
So hang on. While he's doing this, I'm going to move the microphone over so you can hear what he's actually sounding like, not what I hear.
Hello, welcome to CES 2024. This is Datsun.
I'm an AI researcher at WISP. Okay, so now we're going to take it up one more notch.
I want to talk into that to make sure you're not faking, because what I'm hearing in my headphones is a perfectly natural human voice.
I do not hear whispering. I'm walking around in a circle.
Wait, I'm going to talk to myself right now for a second.

[38:04] Okay, you guys can't hear anything. This gets really confusing because I'm hearing my own voice coming through the microphone.
That is really freaky. Now, what I noticed was that when I was whispering, it sounded exactly like Tatsu's voice.
That was not my voice that I was able to hear.
But we can make your voice. There are a lot of recordings of your voice, right?
Well, in my case, yes. We can make your personal Wisp voice.
Please send us files, two, three, four, five minutes, and we can make your personal Wisp voice.
Is that part of the app? So currently in the app, you can make, for example, voice recordings.
So, like this, you press, hello, it's so nice to meet you, Ellison, I'm doing a live demo with the app. I stop, it gets converted.
I need you, Alison. I'm doing a live demo with their app.
So this is my voice. I made it personalized. We can do it for you too.
Okay, well, not on the recording here, but that's something fun.
So the app is called Wisp, it's W-H-I-S-P-P, and it's available right now in the app stores, Google Play, and all around.
Well, we're gonna have to check this out. And oh, how much does it cost?
We start now with a 50% early bird discount. discount.
So it starts from $19.99 a month for a subscription-based model.
Okay, $20 a month. Okay, thank you very much. Thanks a lot.

[39:30] Hi, I'm George from Tulsa, and I started this piece thinking it would be a simple

George from Tulsa on Display Settings and Why He Went With a 45" Curved LG Display

https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2024/02/curved-monitor-george-tulsa/

[39:35] report about my new monitor and how it answers Allison's great framing question, what's the problem to be solved?
Answering that required context. I could have begun with the a 5-inch screen in my first computer, a 1981 Osborne 1, but decided to focus on my experiences beginning with OS X 10.0, which I bought on a 12-inch iBook Snow in 2001.
While developing this segment, I discovered some Mac viewability settings that were new to me.
I'm talking about them right at the top, so if you're only here for Mac stuff and not my monitor discussion, you could skip forward.
In the interest of audio brevity, you'll need to visit Allison's show notes for detailed instructions and links.
I tested them on Mac OS 14 Sonoma. They may not all work on older versions.
If you use two or more monitors, it's easy and useful to display the menu bar and and dock on each screen.

[40:45] One nice feature is the menu bar's brightness increases on the screen with an application in use and dims on the inactive screen, which helps if you lose track of what you're doing where.
It's also possible to very, very slightly increase the menu bar size.
I don't remember what version of OS X introduced the full screen mode, the advantages of which are said to be a bit more working space and more focus, less distraction.
I do remember my reaction the first time I unknowingly activated it was, ah, what happened to my menu bar?
How do I drive this careening car?
Beginning in Monterey, it became possible to make full screen slightly less all-consuming and keep the menu bar on screen.
I'm putting in a link to how to do that in Ventura and Sonoma as they differ slightly.

[41:46] Screen scaling can make everything on-screen either larger or smaller.
It's possible to set different resolutions on different monitors and to specify their relative locations.
MacOS also provides more granular settings.
Make text and icons bigger across apps and system features.
Make text bigger for individual apps or system features. Make icons bigger for individual apps or system features.

[42:20] So enough of those public service announcements. On with the show.
Since acquiring my first computer in 1981, much of my work has involved creating, editing, and reviewing spreadsheets.
The ability to usefully display two or more spreadsheets simultaneously has long been something of a personal holy grail.
By usefully, I mean in fonts large enough to read.
For most of my computing decades, even though Macs and Windows could display applications and open files in multiple on-screen windows, screens were just too small to display two readable files on screen.
Thinking over just the Macs I've owned or had at work, I count two 12-inch Snow iBooks, two 12-inch PowerBooks, two 11-inch Airs, one 13-inch Air, one 13-inch MacBook Pro, two 15-inch MacBook Pros, a mid-90s Performa with 14-inch CRT, two 17-inch and one 20-inch iMacs, a variety of minis, and one 27-inch 2010 iMac.
No wonder Apple is a trillion-dollar business.

[43:46] Only the 27-inch iMac had a screen that could, in theory, have usefully displayed two spreadsheets simultaneously.
Here's an extract from my rant about that computer in 2010's NoCillaCast No. 287.
It was a strain to read the system font when I pushed the computer far enough back on my desk to allow for keyboard and papers.
Native resolution is 2560 by 1440.
Meaningless in the abstract. In reality, it means tiny font.
Apple zombies call tiny fonts crisp.
Pulled close enough to read, I was wiping nose grease from the screen.
Can it get worse? Oh, yes it can.
The acre of shiny black glass reflected everything in my messy office.
I gave it away.

[44:40] Following that experience i went back to running my 15 inch macbook pro one of the last with a non-reflective screen on a laptop stand connected to a 24 inch matte monitor then to a series of new and newer minis connected to dual aces 27 inch 2560 by 1440 eye care monitors with an excellent excellent anti-glare surface.
No mirror effect, no eye strain, no headaches.
But as they had the same native resolution as that iMac, they had the same tiny font problem and required scalability.

[45:20] Dual 27-inch screens, even within large scale, will display two spreadsheets.
Push two of the ASUS 27s together and their combined edge bezels create an annoying one and three-quarter inch break.
Not good for spreadsheets that stretch onto both screens.
I certainly didn't center myself at the annoying bezel, but in front of the primary monitor on the left, with the secondary stretching out to the right, the far right.
Sure, they could display two readable spreadsheets, one on each monitor, but sitting centered in front of the left, the far right side is 38 inches away, too distant for my reading glasses to bring into focus.
To actually use a spreadsheet that takes up much of the right screen, I had to drag it onto the left one where it covered the one there. air.
Poof! So much for two, usefully, at once.

[46:22] In Glenn Lidstone's post about getting the Mac OS toolbar on all screens, there's a photo of his workspace.
He has three 27-inch monitors mounted in a wide U, so his eyes are not far from any screen.
With the Asus 27-inch eye care monitors only $290 on Amazon, if you could copy Glenn's setup without rebuilding an office building as I would have to, the productivity benefits I'm hoping for might be achieved.
Well, none of my current computers could do the job.
In the Macverse, the 1299 M2 Mini Pro can.
Three monitors for $870 and a new Mini Pro at $1,299.
As I keep talking, that $2,169 total won't sound so bad.

[47:19] I tried 4K TVs. Best Buy's Insignia brand is only $170.
Ratingscom top 4K TV for use as a monitor, monitor.
Samsung's QN90 series, QLED, is $1,098 at Amazon, and there's a range between the Insignia and the top-rated one.
My daughter, with LASIK perfect eyes, loves her TCL 43-inch 4K.
She's able to run it in its native 3840 by 2160 pixel resolution and fill its screen with active windows she can easily read.
She gets frustrated when she asks me to look at something, and I have to confess I just can't see it at that resolution.

[48:15] I've become a juggler of reading glasses. One pair for working on a monitor that's right in front of me, and two more, each with increasing magnification, to read fine and finer print on paper.

[48:29] Three weeks ago, I bought LG's ultra-wide 45-inch OLED with a 3440x1440 resolution.
Note that's wide, but not tall. all.
The extremely non-reflective OLED screen is superb with deep, deep blacks.
LG claims a thousand nits of brightness.
It's aggressively curved and sold as a gaming monitor.
The curve provides a Cinerama-like surround experience in the videos and game demos I've watched. The aggressive curve lets me sit directly centered and the curve brings both sides close to my eyes.
On my dual 27s, the far right side was 38 inches away.
The curve on the LG brings it to a readable 21 inches.
I'm able to edit many, but not all, spreadsheets side by side.
Plus, it's really great for whoppers, those complex spreadsheets so wide they spread across two 27-inch screens, because on the ultra-wide, there's no annoying bezel in the middle.
One surprise, no speakers. Not a big deal, as I had good self-powered speakers already connected.

[49:55] The LG does have a headphone jack that will pass sound through, appropriate as I think most gamers use headsets.
It also has an optical port that will transmit digital sound received via HDMI on to high quality audio devices.
I'm running it on Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3, which offers high DPI scaling from 75 to 200%.
It also works well with my M2 Mini running Sonoma, using many of the viewability tips I mentioned at the top.
Currently priced on Amazon at $1,878 and Best Buy at $1,700, it's far more expensive than the top-picked 43-inch 4K TV or three great 27-inch monitors, But not Apple's 32-inch Pro Display XDR that's $7,000 when buying the optional non-reflective glass and stand.

[51:02] LG and other companies introduced a variety of new monitors at CES, so prices may drop for some wide and curved screens.
Though there doesn't seem to be an update for my LG that started shipping in April 2023.
How about Acer's Predator Z57 with a 57-inch 7,680 by 2,160 pixel screen?
Effectively, two 4K screens in one.

[51:37] Bring a powerful graphics card. Well, as people in the live show said tonight, we haven't heard from George in a long time, and it's a real pleasure to hear from him again.
I have a feeling George's solution is going to cost some people some money, but I think it's a terrific solution.
I have a large monitor. It's not as big as George's, but it's 32 inches, and I have to slide my entire head back and forth side to side because the corners are at the wrong distance. I can't see the edges of the monitor.
So I think this is a terrific solution, and I know a couple of other people who've gone with the wide format curved display, and it sure is tempting.
Well, that's going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me like Chelsea did by sending me an email at allison at podfeet.com.
If you have a question or a suggestion, a dumb question, send it on over.
Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeet.com slash Mastodon.
And if you want to listen to the podcast on YouTube, you can go to podfeet.com slash YouTube.

[52:37] If you want to join in the conversation, you can join our Slack community.
Where do you think that is?
Podfeet.com slash Slack. You can go there and talk to me and all of the other lovely Nocella castaways.
You can support the show at podfeet.com slash Patreon, like Jonathan did, or with a one-time donation at podfeet.com slash PayPal.
And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, like the great audience did on Super Bowl Sunday, just head on over to podfeet.com slash live on any Sunday night at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic Nosilla Castaways. Thanks for listening.

[53:09] Music.