NC_2024_06_02
Allison Sheridan on NoCillaCast discusses tech challenges, aroma art for the visually impaired, Overcast app accessibility, podcast management tips, and EV braking mechanisms.
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Long Summary
Allison Sheridan discusses technical challenges faced during a recent NoCillaCast episode, emphasizing the significance of immediate feedback for quality improvement. The podcast also touches on the innovative concept of aroma art for the visually impaired, aiming to offer experiences of art through scents and colors. The detailed walkthrough of the Overcast podcatcher app includes insights into its interface, functionalities, and accessibility features with VoiceOver, providing listeners with a deeper understanding of the popular app's capabilities.
Exploring Overcast features further, the podcast delves into sharing clips, managing playlists, adjusting playback settings, and customizing user experiences. Tips for efficient podcast management using Overcast, such as pinning podcasts and manipulating playback speed, are discussed alongside personal experiences to enhance user interaction with the app. The episode sheds light on hidden features like quick navigation to chapter marks and sleep timer settings, establishing Overcast as a robust tool for podcast listening with advanced features like SmartSpeed and voice boost.
The conversation then transitions into a detailed analysis of EV braking mechanisms, focusing on the shift towards regenerative braking in electric vehicles and the nuances between one-pedal driving and blended braking systems. The discussion provides insights into user preferences and safety considerations related to braking systems in various EV models. The potential impact of EV charging levels on regenerative braking functionality is explored, accompanied by an engaging dialogue between guest expert Bruce and host Bodhi, emphasizing the diverse options available to consumers in the EV market.
Exploring Overcast features further, the podcast delves into sharing clips, managing playlists, adjusting playback settings, and customizing user experiences. Tips for efficient podcast management using Overcast, such as pinning podcasts and manipulating playback speed, are discussed alongside personal experiences to enhance user interaction with the app. The episode sheds light on hidden features like quick navigation to chapter marks and sleep timer settings, establishing Overcast as a robust tool for podcast listening with advanced features like SmartSpeed and voice boost.
The conversation then transitions into a detailed analysis of EV braking mechanisms, focusing on the shift towards regenerative braking in electric vehicles and the nuances between one-pedal driving and blended braking systems. The discussion provides insights into user preferences and safety considerations related to braking systems in various EV models. The potential impact of EV charging levels on regenerative braking functionality is explored, accompanied by an engaging dialogue between guest expert Bruce and host Bodhi, emphasizing the diverse options available to consumers in the EV market.
Brief Summary
Allison Sheridan discusses technical challenges on NoCillaCast, highlighting the importance of immediate feedback. The podcast introduces aroma art for the visually impaired and dives into Overcast app features and accessibility with VoiceOver. Tips on efficient podcast management and hidden features like chapter mark navigation are shared. The conversation moves to EV braking mechanisms, comparing regenerative braking in electric vehicles and exploring user preferences and safety considerations.
Tags
Allison Sheridan
technical challenges
NoCillaCast
immediate feedback
aroma art
visually impaired
Overcast app
VoiceOver
podcast management
chapter mark navigation
EV braking
regenerative braking
electric vehicles
user preferences
safety considerations
Transcript
[0:00]
NC_2024_06_02
[0:00]Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NoCillaCast podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, June 2nd, 2024, and this is show number 995. All right, everybody here, how come Darren Henley was the only person who told me that Bart's audio was all messed up in last week's security bits? Unfortunately, the communication method he used was something I don't check often, so so I didn't see his message for five days. Late last night, I swapped in my recording of Bart's voice, which was slightly better, and I reproduced the show. It used up credits on the Auphonic service, but I'm hoping I saved some people from having to listen to it. Bart and I had a heck of a time recording last week because he couldn't hear anything on Zoom. Couldn't figure it out, so we resorted to going back to Skype. But we can't actually blame this problem on Skype because it was his local recording that was messed up, and mine through Skype was at least passable. On his local recording, the first five and a half minutes were dandy, then his volume dropped to about a quarter of what it was and got super scratchy and hissy. At about 28 minutes in, his voice volume came right back up to normal.
[1:14]Evidently, Skype compensated for that problem he was having locally because I never heard his volume drop. It's definitely quite hissy during the drop volume section, even on Skype, but I'd rate it as listenable. When I used his local recording, Auphonic did a great job normalizing the audio so it wasn't quiet during that period, but it also amplified the hiss on top of his recording.
[1:35]Bart doesn't monitor his own voice while recording because he says it makes his head explode, so he never heard what was happening on his end. I always sampled the audio after we record, but I sampled at the beginning and at the end. Turns out Skype last week caused a slip of our audio tracks for the 50 plus minutes, so I spent a lot of time while the live audience was watching splitting and sliding the audio to get us lined up again. But it was only towards the end, so I never heard that middle 22 minutes where he was all messed up. The bad news for Bart is that the same thing happened when he recorded his latest episode of Let's Talk Apple today. Halfway through his recording, his volume dropped by 75%. Now, while that was awful for him because he had to re-record everything, the good news for us was that he figured out what went wrong. In last week's Security Bits, before things went badly, you may have heard me say that his voice got much quieter. That wasn't the real problem, though. He realized that in his enthusiasm about security, he had bumped the mic, so it was farther away from him. He moved it back, and we went on our merry way.
[2:40]Unbeknownst to both of us, though, that mic bump actually dislodged the XLR cable, so it was only intermittently connected. After the disaster recording Let's Talk Apple, Bart wiggled the XLR cable, and he heard a distinct click as it fully connected. So fingers crossed that this was the root cause, because neither of us wants to go through this again. Now that we're done with the audio lesson, the main message I want to send is, please, please, please tell me immediately if something doesn't sound right in one of my shows. I always want to know as soon as possible. I may not be able to fix it. It might just make me sad, but if I can't improve it, at least I'll have the opportunity to give it a go. Many thanks to Darren, who may have saved your ears from hearing that awful recording. recording if you didn't listen very quickly after the show came out maybe a week late maybe a couple weeks late you probably never heard any of this,
[3:31]
Reminder about the 1000th Episode Recordings
[3:31]Let's take a quick break for a public service announcement. Reminder that Steve wants you to send in audio recordings of a minute or less for the 1000th NoCillaCast show to share your thoughts about the show. He needs them by June 23rd, which is only three weeks away, and he only has a couple so far. If you want them played on the show, you need to get them to him by June 23rd. And the way you do that is to send your thoughts about the show to steve at podfeet.com.
[3:58]
CSUN 2024: B.fter Aroma Art for Visually Impaired People
[3:59]I think I may have found one of the most unusual things at CSUN this year. We're going to learn about aroma art from Angela Meng and Jiyun Kim. And so what are we looking at here? Yeah, so you're actually looking at aroma art, which is basically having different colors and different scents coming together, for to help visually impaired people and the blind people to to be able to enjoy art in the forum as well so so i'm going to describe things in detail here because my audience is mostly audio and many are blind so we need to describe what we're looking at i see a beautiful painting here and the first thing you did was you held it up and you told me to smell it right so got a big orange painting bunch of different colors and it smells really good but it's not just to smell good, right? It's more than that. Yeah, so how this company actually all came together was our CEO right here, Jian.
[4:59]Her aunt herself was blind and visually impaired, so she came up with this great idea to learn the fragrances and learn the colors and to combine both ideas into one and here as you can see like she put together how white color can remind you of you know like the cottony fresh smell that you can smell to visualize white in your head and imagine the color white okay so can I smell it she's good she's putting it up to my nose here oh yeah that's very Very light, very light. It smells like a really good, clean bathroom. And here, for like the bright red, it will show to you some fresh fruit, fresh cherry smell. Yes, yes, I can smell it. Wow.
[5:52]So each color has a different smell. And it's like, maybe like paint by number to a sighted person is your painting by color, by smell. Painting by smell, that's the big idea. Exactly, you got it. So the kit here is called, this is called Bifter, B-F-T-E-R. Yes. And this looks like it's a kit of 12, no, 10 colors. 10 colors. 10 colors. And it's $25 for this one box up on Amazon that's available right now.
[6:23]Oh, that's really good. I thought this was going to be a lot more money than that. Now, I see some little characters down here have been painted. Is this another kind of kit? So this is actually just a sample, just a kit that they have come up with to bring it to America to show people how this can be painted onto a figure, an empty figure like this, that you can paint onto and make it into a really, really cute little keychain that you can bring around, too. So it's a little mouse that's just white, and it's got the different colors. Oh, a little bear, sorry. And it's got little paints to go with it. So this is an idea you're working on to bring to the United States, this sort of thing? Maybe not for sale just as yet. But if it is very popular and it's a big hit here, maybe we'll put it up for sale too. Too, but we just wanted to give people a chance to just try a little bit of the paints just as a sampler, and we made it into a small kit that we are giving it for free for a small mini event. Oh, that's really cool. So the company name is Another Day, and you said you can find this kit, Bifter, on Amazon? On Amazon. You can search up Aroma Art, and it will be right on Amazon. Very good. Good luck to you. This is really a nifty idea. Thank you so much.
[7:46]Isn't that an interesting idea? I thought it was pretty cool. I worked with the people from another day because there was a little bit of a problem with buying the paints through Amazon. So in the link in the show notes to the video of this recording, you can find a link to it on Amazon. But one of the weird things is you have to say, what is the button that you see when the real seller isn't actually selling it? It's like more buying options, I think it is. So if you you click on that, then you can just immediately add it to your cart. They were never able to get Amazon to fix it. They had some problem with it. But anyway, that's the real deal is the link in the show notes.
[8:23]
How to Use Overcast as Your Podcatcher of Choice
[8:23]Sometimes an app or service is in such widespread use that it doesn't occur to me to tell you how it works. But then someone asked me about it, and I realized widespread use doesn't mean everyone knows exactly how to use it. This became obvious to me this week when two different people asked me what my podcatcher of choice was. One was struggling with Apple podcasts, and the other was an Android refugee wondering where to start to meet their needs on iOS. I explained to both of them that I use Overcast by Marco Armit. With 37,000 reviews and 4.7 stars in the App Store, I think we can easily refer to this as a beloved application. I think the reason I've never reviewed it or walked through it is because I don't love it, but I do like it. I like it better than any other podcatcher I've tried, but I still think it's a bit mysterious in its interface.
[9:12]I did go through Overcast seven years ago, but it was kind of a brief walkthrough and it was in comparison to Downcast and Pocket Cast, so it's not something I can say point people to when they ask me how to use Overcast. By the way, I still use Downcast on my iPad because it does video podcasts and Overcast does not. Today I'm going to rectify this with a detailed walkthrough to the Overcast interface, explain what you can do with it, and where I find it a bit mysterious. Mysterious, and by detailed, I mean we're going to go through every single little button and knob in this app. In the blog post, I did a fair number of headings so you can jump to what you can learn, but if you're listening, you'll find I made the last segment of this walkthrough, well, nearly the last, how to actually play podcast episodes. I sure hope you can stay awake till the end. I do want you to know that even if you've been using it for a while, I'm willing to bet that I'm going to teach you something you didn't know it could do. Before I dig in, I want to make sure you know that Overcast is an accessible app with voiceover. I found one thing in the entire interface that wasn't accessible, and it's not a big deal, and there was one slider I didn't know how to change, but that one could just be my talents with voiceover. Let's start with the cost. Overcast is free with very unobtrusive ads at the bottom of the player. If you want to remove the ads and support the developer, it's only $10 a year. Now personally, I choose to support the developer, especially at such a reasonable price.
[10:37]Adding a new podcast is trivially easy and intuitive. There's a big plus button in the upper right when you're on the home screen. There's a second plus button just to the left of it with some lines in it, which is where you can add playlists, and we're going to get into playlists in a little bit. The big plus button takes you to the directory where you can browse for or search for the show you want to listen to, and there's also an add URL button in the upper right. That's if you already know where to find the show. The URL they're talking about is the link to the RSS feed, which is the XML text file, which is literally the file that causes podcasting to exist. For example, if you go to podfeed.com and you click on the text in the top menu that says subscribe to the podcast, you'll see all of the podfeed podcasts listed with links to subscribe in three podcatchers, but also a link to the RSS feed. If you right click and copy that URL, you can subscribe in any podcatcher. It's actually rather fun to look at the feed itself if you want to. You can do that by opening that same link in Firefox or a Chromium browser like Edge or Chrome. I think it's fun to peek under the hood, but you may be different. Subscribing via URL is something you also might need if you subscribe to some paid-for podcasts, so it's good to know the option is there.
[11:51]Now let's understand the episode list interface. After you've subscribed to one show, obviously it's going to be the NoCillaCast, you can tap on the podcast in the list to see the available episodes. You'll see three tabs. Let's start with the third tab, Settings, because it helps explain the earlier tabs. In Settings, you can control exactly how this podcast behaves. I'm not going to go through every settings, but I do want to highlight quite a few of them. There's a toggle the pin to the top of the list, which is a feature I definitely use to make sure I don't miss my must-listen-to shows. If you really want to make sure you don't miss a show, you can toggle on notifications of new episodes for specific podcasts.
[12:31]Overcast lets you control how many unplayed episodes to keep. Let's say you have a podcast that comes out daily, but you only have time to dip in and out a couple times a week. You can set it to keep one unplayed episode, and you'll only ever see that latest one. Where this falls down for me is when I listen to part of an episode. That partially played episode will sit there along with the new one. Of course, this is how it should work, but I want Marco to simply know when I've just tired of an episode and have no intention of completing it. Now, do you have any podcasts where you really like them, but they constantly blather about nothing at the beginning of every episode, and or maybe they do an ad first thing. One of my favorite shows goes on for eight minutes before they actually start the real content and it's a predictable eight minutes. With Overcast, in the settings for each podcast, you can tell it to skip a number of seconds of intro and outro. It'll take me quite a while to get to eight minutes in five second increments for that one show, but most are only a couple of minutes.
[13:30]Once you have the settings the way you like for a particular podcast, the The other two tabs are Current and All. Now, All is pretty obvious. It's all episodes, whether you've listened to them or not. And Current is your unplayed episodes. With the podcast selected but no episode selected, you can see the album artwork and a link directly to the listed website for the show. Below that is something really nifty. It's tiny, but it tells you the frequency of the show. For the NocillaCast, it actually says Sunday evenings. openings and let's talk apple by barbu shot says monthly i like that because it lets you help to help you kind of set your expectations.
[14:09]We've subscribed to a podcast now, and we have an episode in the list. Because I'm evil, I'm not going to let you play it yet. To the right of the episode, I want you to click on the little eye, which will show you the show notes for that episode, if the podcaster has created them. For the NocellaCast, you'll get links to all the blog posts, a link to the transcript for the show, contact information, and some ways to support the show. Now, there's a lot of variability in how much information podcasters give you, but it's worth taking a look. At the bottom of the screen, you can see the currently playing podcast, which may not be the one you have selected at the time. From any podcast you're viewing, you can play, rewind, fast forward, or pop up that currently playing episode to see all of the controls. This is great, but 100% of the time I see a different podcast down below the one I'm looking at. It just confuses me. I understand it intellectually, but it still takes me a couple of heartbeats to remember how it works. If you tap on an episode of the show you're viewing, it does not play. Instead, below the episode, you get a drop down of five controls, the middle of which is play. I know, I know, you just want to listen to your podcast, but first, we simply must explore more options.
[15:18]In this panel below the selected episode, the first icon is all about sharing, and sharing is nice. You can share a link to the episode with a friend, but you can do even cooler things with sharing. Let's say the podcaster just said something terribly clever, like they were explaining how gyroscopes work. You can share a link at the current time. This is a killer feature of Overcast that I've never seen anywhere else.
[15:41]You can also share a link at chapter start, or you can share a clip where you just isolate a short segment of the show. It's a little bit tricky to edit just that little clip, but when you post it, the viewer will see the podcast's album art with a little waveform of the audio as it plays. It's very cool.
[15:57]Finally, you can export the entire audio file. I've been known to use that function to export an audio file, and then I take a screenshot of the waveform to show the podcaster that they really, really, really need to level their audio. Not that I I haven't done that to a bunch of my friends.
[16:12]All right, next below the episode is a three-dot menu. I always think of that icon as the one developers use when their imagination isn't good enough to pick an icon that tells me what that button's going to do. Now, in Overcast, it's mostly about playlists, but it does a wee bit more than that. You can star an episode if little stars make you happy. I make fun, but they do have some utility that I'll mention later. The next two options completely baffled me until I did some experiments. They say play next and play last.
[16:40]Well, if you select either of those, nothing appears to happen. I did figure it out, but I can't explain it to you until I explain the next option in this three-dot pop-up menu. The next option says add to queue. The queue is a very special default playlist, and it's my favorite because that single button is all you have to select. You don't have to make any decisions. The queue playlist lives at the top of all the playlists, so it's the easiest one to get to. I figured out through experimentation, not because any clues were given, that the play next and play last options were putting the selected episodes into the queue playlist. Play last is pretty self-explanatory. It puts that episode at the end of the queue, but play next is a bit more subtle. The selected episode will be inserted into the queue playlist right after whatever episode you were most recently playing, which is not necessarily the top episode. I like the play next and play last feature because it could make it quicker to build up my queue playlist, but if you weren't thinking about the queue playlist when you tapped it, you'd think nothing at all had happened.
[17:45]I didn't explain where the playlists, including the queue, are located. They're back on the main screen, but you have to scroll to the tippy-top of Overcast. Playlists are pastel, pill-shaped buttons, the top one of which is queue. If you tap into the queue playlist, you can press and drag to reorder your chosen episodes. In the upper right of any playlist, including the queue, there's another three-dot menu. The first option in this menu is to edit the playlist, which immediately gives you hamburger buttons next to each episode for reordering, just in case you didn't realize you could press and drag them. The Edit Playlist option also lets you select a bunch of episodes and then delete them from the playlist. Finally, you can change the playlist settings. The cue can be renamed so you can change it to something you like better, and the icon and color can be changed. The other changes you can make in Playlist Settings seems more appropriate to handcrafted playlists than the default cue, but maybe you'd like it there too. I'm not going to go through all of those settings just yet because I think it defeats the purpose to make these changes in the queue playlist.
[18:47]People like to create playlists for a specific exercise or maybe their commute to work or possibly for doing chores around the house. Maybe you want an angry show for running and a podcast with calming topics while vacuuming. With Overcast, you can create as many custom playlists as you like. Actually, I don't know if that's true. I don't know if you could make a thousand of them, but you can make a lot. To create a new playlist, tap the plus button with the lines next to it at the top of the main screen. Your choices will be custom playlist, all episodes, starred, downloaded, or in progress. I think it's kind of weird to have a playlist that's all episodes, but that must be the way someone likes it. I told you starred would come in handy, and it turns out that's a way to have auto-generated playlists created. The last of the playlist options positively baffles me. It says, hide recent episodes. I have no clue why anybody would want that. And what is considered recent? Oh well, moving on, let's create a custom playlist. We can name it and give it an icon and change the color. The icons aren't very interesting, but there is one that looks like John Travolta in his staying alive pose from the movie Saturday Night Fever in 1977, so that's fun.
[19:59]The next section in creating a new playlist lets us choose what episodes to include, which is defaulted to all episodes, but we can change it to selected episodes. Then it asks which selected episodes we want, and adds a giant list of every episode of every show that's been downloaded to your phone. At least my list was giant. This is a hard way to add episodes, so instead I'd recommend tapping done, then go into the podcast listing, and choose the episodes you want in your playlist. If you go back into playlist settings after adding some episodes, you can set a sort order of oldest to newest or vice versa, but also oldest to newest or vice versa by podcast. In addition to adding specific episodes of specific podcasts, you can add entire podcasts to a playlist. You do this with the include podcast button. Oddly, you get a choice to include or exclude podcasts. I guess if you have more shows you like than don't like, starting with exclude might make sense. If you include a podcast in a playlist, every episode of that show will be in the playlist. As I said, this can be a combination with selected episodes of other shows, which is interesting.
[21:09]After experimenting my way through this, I can see a way to use this. I could see creating a podcast playlist maybe by subject. I have several Apple Apple-centric podcasts. I know you're shocked, right? And I also have political podcasts. Using the include option, I could break them up that way pretty easily. As an experiment, I set up a playlist for Apple podcasts and dropped in my favorite shows. When I did it, it illustrated one of the pain points for me with Overcast. I'm not entirely sure it's Overcast's fault, and it probably isn't, but let me elaborate and you can decide. When I created this playlist of Apple podcasts, one of them was Mac OS X, Ken, and it showed 23 episodes of Ken Ray's show.
[21:50]Remember I explained you can change how many episodes to keep within a given podcast? I have Mac OS X set to save only two. But if you listen closely, the setting is for the number of unplayed episodes. If I go back to my Apple playlist, I can see the shows have four minutes left, a minute 50, and 740 left. It means I started them, but I didn't finish them, so they sit there forever. The reason I put partial blame on Overcast is that it's harder than it should be to convince it's Overcast that you're done with an episode. I can prove it. One of the episodes in this list said 0 colon 00 left.
[22:27]It turns out when you get to the end of listening to a show in Overcast, even if you use the fast forward button a bunch of times to get to the end, it will always leave a few seconds at the end. I don't know why it's coded that way, but it drives me bananas. There is a way to clear them without fast forwarding, but I'll get into that in a minute. The good news about the playlist having all of these old episodes dating back to January is that in a playlist, it's easy to delete them from here. Back in the podcast listing, I've always deleted episodes there. You have to drag across every episode till you see the delete button and hit the trash can, and you have to do that one by one by one. And if you've got 29 of them, that's a pain. But back in playlist, you can use edit episodes, which puts that little selection circles next to them and go tap, tap, tap, tap, tap to select and hit delete just one time. Even better, here's an iOS trick that works in a lot of iOS apps. You can use two fingers to drag along the list and it will select every episode you drag across. Yay! Finally, I can clean up my episodes quickly.
[23:30]Now, I mentioned that there's a way to clear partially listened to episodes or even not listened to at all episodes, but it's another confusing one. I had to phone a friend to figure it out. Let's say you've just finished listening to as much as you want of an episode. You're viewing it in the show's listing. As I mentioned a moment ago, if you swipe across, you get a delete button, but you also get a checkmark button. No matter which button you press, the episode disappears. peers. Stephen Goetz is a heavy Overcast user, so I asked him what the difference was between delete and checkmark. He said the checkmark simply means it's completed.
[24:07]Okay, what happens to a completed episode? Stephen pointed out that in the global settings, you can decide what happens to completed episodes. The default behavior appears to delete completed episodes, so it is literally the same thing as deleting. But you have other options for the checkmark, including making you manually delete completed episodes or having them deleted after 24 hours. That's a lot of complexity. I'm sorry. Well, anyway, remember I had all of these nearly completed episodes lying around? Evidently, the way to tell Overcast that I'm done is to hit that complete button. If it let me fast forward to the end, he wouldn't have had to program in this complexity. I wonder if I'll ever learn to use the check mark. I have a feeling I'll still think, oh, I'll finish that later, and I'll still end up with piles of old half-finished shows again, but at least for now I've figured out a quick way to clean up the shows by using Edit Playlist.
[25:04]Back in the list of podcasts, you have three tabs, current, archive, and all. Current is any shows that have new or, shall I say, uncompleted episodes. I had to do some work to figure out what archive means. It says it means podcasts you're not following and have no added episodes or seem to be inactive. Well, I understand inactive podcasts. When I looked at this, I had two that were labeled that way, and they have a little moon on them. That's because they don't have new episodes. It was nice to have them listed there so I could unsubscribe. But how do you get podcasts you're not following? I figured it out through an experiment. With Overcast, you could look up a podcast in the directory and then just download an individual episode without following the show. And I do this a lot of times when Bart calls our attention to something, say during security bits in the palate cleanser, he'll tell us a cool episode, but I don't want to necessarily subscribe to the whole show, so I'll download a single episode. When you do that, the episode shows up under current until you mark it as completed or you delete it. But after you're done listening to that single episode, the podcast still shows under archive and it's labeled as not following. I guess that's kind of a cool feature in case you decide later that show would be fun to follow or to dip into more individual episodes.
[26:24]Another way to control your podcast that I really do like is to pin a show. That way, as soon as there's a new episode, it will immediately show at the top of your list of current shows. Even if there are no new episodes, the pinned podcasts still show at the top of the all list. I often check here when I'm itching to see a new episode of a show and I get worried maybe I accidentally unsubscribed. So I go over to all to make sure it's still there, even though under current it won't show there, even if it's pinned. To pin a podcast, go into settings for the show and toggle on pin to top of list.
[26:58]All right, only I can talk this long without actually telling you about playing audio podcasts in an audio podcatcher. But there's a couple of cool features in here, super cool features, no matter how weirdly they are hidden. When you hit play on an episode, you get the album artwork big and pretty with an obvious scroll bar with a play button below. You can use this interface without noticing any of the other cool things you can do from here. On either side of the album artwork, you can see a little vertical line, and this is a very subtle hint that there are screens to the left and right of the main player screen. If you swipe to see the screen to the right, you'll see show notes for the latest episode. In the case of the Nocilla cast, all of the links to the blog posts are right here, like I mentioned before, so you can read and go look at all the images that I was describing.
[27:45]If the show has chapter marks, like the delightful Nocilla cast, there's one more screen to the right. You'll see each chapter title with the elapsed time for each chapter, and you can tap right on them to jump to that chapter. I use that all the time for shows with chapters. If you swipe to see the screen to the left, you'll find the best part of Overcast. You have a button to enable what Marco calls Smart Speed to shorten silences. I used to listen to a show where one of the hosts would leave these frustratingly long pauses, and Smart Speed was why I still enjoyed the show. I'll give you a warning, though. Some speakers use pauses for a reason, and smart speed is a bad thing. A while back, I was listening to Bart's Let's Talk Photography podcast, and he was explaining something really complex, but I was having a really hard time following him because he wasn't giving the listener any time to absorb what he was saying. I was halfway through writing an angry email to him when it occurred to me to check my settings, and smart speed had been enabled. I disabled it, and there was that perfect explainer back in my ears.
[28:48]And one of the reasons that happened is that I never seemed to remember to use the very obvious custom for this podcast toggle. I'll turn on smart speed for a different podcast and not toggle the custom option on that podcast. And suddenly all of my podcasts have this enabled. So be smarter than me and pay attention to that toggle. This happened just recently with, I think I was listening to Buzz Blossom and Squeak by Jill from the North Woods. and I was like, man, Jill, I got to talk to you about your editing. You're just clipping things together. This is ridiculous. I was like, oh man, I did it again. Sure enough, SmartSpeed was enabled for her show and it doesn't work with Jill's voice.
[29:26]Now, another custom or global option is to turn on voice boost. This is a great feature to add to podcasts that don't level their audio properly or maybe the volume is too low. You can also set the speed of the podcast playback, back, but watch that custom toggle. If you don't want to hear Jill from the Northwoods at 2x when you just meant to set it to 2x for MacBreak Weekly, remember that toggle.
[29:49]You know how with YouTube you can change the playback speed and as you bump it up a notch it says 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x, and 2x. It also has numbers for slowing down, 0.75x, 0.5x, and 0.25x. But with Overcast, Marco's made that way harder. While there are big tick marks for 1x, 2x, and 3x, it's harder to tell what speed you're picking between those values. Between 1x and 2x, there are five small tick marks. That means six segments. So those values might be 1.17, 1.34, 1.51 and up. Also, there's only one tick mark between 2x and 3x. So can we assume that's 2.5x, I guess? The best one, though, is the small tick mark below 1x. There's just one tick mark, and it doesn't tell you what it is. Is that 0.5? 0.1? 0.05x? I don't know. Now, Steven Getz pointed out that if you have smart speed enabled, Overcast shows you how fast you're listening. If you haven't changed the speed from 1x as the show progresses, you'll see the speed above smart speed changing to more than 1x. If you slide up on the smaller tick marks between 1x and 2x, the number above smart speed gets even bigger. Now I realize, it doesn't make a darn bit of difference what those tick marks represent. We can all just adjust it till it sounds right for a particular show. But it still bugs me that they're in one-sixth increments.
[31:16]Now, the best thing about doing a detailed walkthrough of an app is all the things you learn when you poke every icon. I just noticed for the first time that there's a small circle with horizontal lines in it to the left of the play bar when you have an episode up. A single tap of this button jumps two screens to the right directly to the chapter marks, if they're there. That's pretty cool. The circle itself is also an indicator of the process, the progress I should say, through the show. You know, that gets a little darker line going around it. I think that's a funny thing to add to the interface since the giant progress bar is right next to this tiny icon.
[31:53]Now, across the bottom, when you have an episode up to be played, are five icons. The first one looks like a settings icon, and it jumps you to the left screen for smart speed, voice boost, and playback speed. If you use podcast to go to sleep, there's a timer to let the player stop at an elapsed time or even at the end of the episode, so it doesn't just keep using up all of your shows while you're sleeping. The middle one jumps you right to an AirPlay screen, which is probably one of my most used features. yours. You can star the podcast episode from here, and the final icon is another information icon, which slides over the show notes. At first, I was curious why these redundant buttons were here, because we know we can swipe, right? But it turns out they get used by voiceover. Remember I explained how you could slide the album artwork from right to left to reveal the chapter marks and show notes and things like voice boost? Well, that interface would be far too clumsy and and undiscoverable with VoiceOver. Instead, those screens are essentially invisible to VoiceOver. You get pop-ups instead with entirely new controls when VoiceOver is on to allow quick and easy changes to the settings and to choose chapter marks and read the show notes. This is some really good coding here.
[33:05]Before I close out here, let's take a look at settings, which you get to from the main screen using the gear icon in the upper left. If you'd like to listen to podcasts on more than one device, you can create a login to sync your playlists and even progress through shows all across your devices. Overcast runs not only on iOS, but iPadOS and macOS if you have an Apple Silicon Mac. You can see in settings how much total storage your podcasts are taking up. Yikes, mine is at 4 gigabytes. If you tap into that menu, you can see all of your podcasts sorted by how much storage they're using. If it's time for desperate measures, you can even delete all downloads.
[33:43]I'm going to skip down a bit and come back to the next one because it won't make any sense in the order it's laid out in the app. One option lower than we were says downloading, and you can choose stream when played. And I presume that means it won't take up storage on your device. You can also choose to download on Wi-Fi only or download on Wi-Fi or cellular. Now that we've got that covered, I can go back up to the data usage section where you can get a tremendous amount of detail. For cellular data and for all data, you have separate tabs where you can see total usage since a certain date, and I think it's a month ago. But there's a note saying it's estimated data. The reason I waited to explain this section until covering the Wi-Fi versus cellular one is that there's one metric that's confusing. It says episodes. And when I select it, the only show I had in there was the Nocilla cast. I asked Sandy Foster to check hers while I was writing this up, and she had seven shows in there, which is far fewer than she subscribes to. If you have your downloads set to Wi-Fi only, but you're out and about and trying to manually download an episode, Overcast will ask you if you really want to override the Wi-Fi only setting. My working theory, but I can't prove it, on this episodes list thing is that those are shows where in the last month you overrode the Wi-Fi only setting. Don't hold me to that. That's just what I think it might mean.
[35:07]As you continue with the data usage page, you can see how much data comes from syncing, the size of the app itself. Marco is very proud of the fact that Overcast is only 2.8 megabytes. Isn't that amazing? Anyway, you can even see data usage from images. Finally, you can see by podcast how much data you've used. If you're an Overcast premium subscriber, or if you want to be one, you can manage your subscription from within settings. The premium version lets you turn off banner ads for podcasts, as I mentioned earlier. There's also a toggle to let you upload files. I'll be darned if I can figure out how or why you'd be able to do that. I don't know if that has to do with that sharing a clip thing. I don't know. Didn't figure that one out. You can also change the icon, which I know a lot of people love to do.
[35:54]Marco recently made it possible to change the main color theme within the app. I've chosen a nice purple, as you can see in my screenshots, shots, but you do you. By default, in Overcast, above your list of podcasts, there's a horizontal scroll area of podcast icons that have recent episodes. In Settings, you can remove it with the Show Recents toggle. One of the useful but oddly named sections of Settings is called Nitpicky Details. I love a good snarky name for something. One of my favorite settings is hidden in here. Every podcaster has a Seek Back and Seek Forward button, and with Overcast, you can change how many seconds it goes. I very often want to go back to hear what someone said, so I set my seek back to 15 seconds. But I also like to skip ads, so I set my seek forward to 60 seconds. By making one a multiple of the other, I can go forward 60 seconds once, and if I hear the show is resumed, I can jump back by 15 seconds, and I know that if I hit it four times, I'll be back to where I started.
[36:55]By default, Overcast will autoplay the next episode in a playlist or in a podcast that has more than one episode, but you can toggle that off in nitpicky details. Overcast has a smart resume feature that rewinds slightly after pausing and even slightly adjusts seeks to fall between words. That's bananas! How does he do that? And I never even noticed he'd given us that feature. If you don't favor smart resume, you can toggle it off. I'm not sure I understand the seek acceleration toggle. It says, and I'm quoting here, increase the interval when repeatedly seeking to skip time more quickly. Now, does that mean it reacts faster to your taps? Or does it mean if I hit my 60-second forward seek three times and it would in reality go forward more than three minutes? I'll let you do your own experiments and figure that one out on your own. Now, I'm glad I dug into nitpicky details because I found a toggle I might change. Remember I said when you're looking at a podcast with a list of episodes, If you tap on any one of them, it expands down to show you a bunch of options, one of which is to play? Well, there's a toggle to change that to one-tap play. That'll be faster 98% of the time since you usually just want to play a podcast. However, you lose quick access to the share, add to playlist, and completed buttons.
[38:15]Now imagine you have a playlist that has specific podcasts at the top that you want to listen to first. Now you've gone down to a lower priority show. When that one is done, Overcast will move on to the next one down. But you can override that in nitpicky details with the play top podcast next toggle. Boy, I guess some of these are really nitpicky.
[38:36]Overcast has its own built-in browser for opening links from podcasts, but you can change the behavior to have them open in Safari. Fari. That's another one I'm excited to discover after discovering and going through this walkthrough. I've never noticed Overcast using haptics, but evidently they're there because you can reduce them. There's a toggle for icon badge number, and in delightful snark, Marco says, show the number of unfinished episodes on Overcast's icon to add stress to your life. I love that. This toggle won't do anything unless you go into your device's settings, notifications, find Overcast, and then toggle on badges. When you do that, he's right. This is definitely something I'm turning back off. It said I had 85 unfinished episodes inside Overcast. With the very bottom of nitpicky details, there's an interesting graphic explaining the remote episode skip toggle. It shows almost a Morse code level explanation of how on your headphones you can click once to play pause, twice to fast-forward by your chosen amount, triple-click to seek back, but then there's a click-and-hold for next podcast. I didn't know that was there. There's also a double-click-and-hold to go to the previous podcast. I guarantee you I could never correctly execute any of those actions other than the play-pause, maybe fast-forward. Remember at the beginning I said there was one thing that wasn't accessible with VoiceOver? This little graphic is the one thing.
[40:03]All right, I promise we're in the homestretch here, folks, but there are just a few more things in the main settings area to go through. On a per-podcast basis, you can set notifications for new episodes and even set limits to how many episodes to maintain for each one.
[40:18]Theoretically, you can send feedback from within the app, but I've never gotten a response from Marco to my feedback. Now, I guess it doesn't say, get response, does it? It says send feedback. You can also go straight to rating overcast. Now podcatchers use a text file in a format called opml and with overcast you can import an opml file from other podcatchers or export to other apps this might help with my little friend who just migrated over from android if you're a podcaster there's some info in settings to tell you how the directory works and some other details you may or may not care about privacy with your podcast but marco gives you information you may be interested in within settings privacy you You can see not just Overcast's privacy policy, but you can see all of the services used by the podcasts you subscribe to. For example, one listed is Blueberry.com, which is a service I use to track downloads. If you select Blueberry.com, you'll see Chit Chat Across the Pond, the No Silicast, and Programming by Stealth in there. He even gives you links to go see the privacy policies of each of those services when you drill down into them.
[41:24]You don't have to drill down into settings to see this information for a specific show. If you bring up any podcast, next to the album artwork will be a privacy link. If I select it for the NoCillaCast, you'll see that I use both Blueberry for statistics, but I also use Libsyn for hosting the shows, and it gives stats as well. It says that Libsyn does something called DAI, but I don't have any idea what that is. The final thing you'll see in settings is how much time SmartSpeed has saved you beyond speed adjustments alone. I've saved 92 hours so far. That's a lot of time in my life to have saved.
[42:01]So the bottom line is that Overcast is a terrific podcatcher, even if you have simple needs to subscribe and play back shows. That's way more than you can say for Apple Podcasts. If you want to listen more efficiently and with better audio, smart speed and voice boost are great features. While I think many of the design elements of the app are more mysterious than necessary, it's still an incredibly powerful tool that is likely to suit your needs. You can use it for free with ads or throw the developer a measly $10 per year. I haven't found any podcatcher that can do more than Overcast. One more thing I like about Overcast, which you might appreciate. When I'm ready to post my shows, I hit Publish in Feeder, which publishes the new RSS file to my server. I immediately pick up my iPhone, open Overcast, open my show's feed, pull down to refresh, and if I've done my job correctly, the show instantly begins to download. I do not know how Overcast can do this so quickly. In contrast, Apple Podcasts can take tens of minutes to be ready to download and check my show. Now, the downside for me of Overcast doing this so quickly is that if I make a boo-boo in the feed, it's out there for you to download before I can even fix it. I've noticed recently, though, that if I, say, make a mistake in the title, for example, I can fix it and it changes in Overcast even if I've already downloaded the show. So maybe I do love Overcast.
[43:25]Okay, this just in. After I posted my excitement about how many hours I had saved with SmartSpeed, everyone in the live chat room started throwing their numbers out. And as Steve said, I'm a lightweight, but the winner was Jill from the Northwoods with 1,184 hours saved.
[43:45]Okay, that's bananas. And also, Mike, who also goes by the name Grumpy, he said that DAI, the thing I didn't know from what Libsyn can do, that's dynamic ad insertion. But I don't do dynamic ad insertion, so it doesn't matter for us.
[44:01]
Support the Show
[44:01]Speaking of ads, I don't do ads. You can support the show by going to podfeet.com slash Patreon or podfeet.com slash PayPal. pal. Quite a while back, I talked on the NoSilicast about how much I love one-pedal driving in my Tesla. With one-pedal driving, you rarely need to use the brakes because you simply feather the accelerator pedal to speed up and slow down. If you've ever driven a golf cart or a go-kart, it's essentially the same thing, but quite a bit smoother. In my explanation, I said that this is the only way to have regenerative braking. I was really frustrated with a friend of mine who turned off one pedal driving on their Kia because that meant he wasn't getting the benefits of recycling the energy back into the battery when he was braking.
[44:44]This comment on the show caused Bruce, also known as UseTheData in our Slack, to gently and with facts and data explain to me how I was wrong when I said one pedal driving was the only way to get regenerative braking. While that conversation took place in the Podfeet Slack, you're now going to get to hear it explained by Bruce in a podcast recording from the awesome Kilowatt podcast. The lovely Bodhi Grimm interviewed Bruce and gave me the recording to play on the show.
[45:11]And you really should be subscribed to Kilowatt already, because you would have been able to hear this interview back in February.
[45:17]
Bodie and Bruce on Blended Braking and One-Pedal Driving
[45:17]Hi folks, Bodie here. Just a quick question. Have you ever wondered, with the advent of EVs and hybrid vehicles, when people throw around the terms like blended braking, regenerative braking, friction braking, what does that all mean? Well, I sat down with Nozilla Castaway Bruce Wilson, and Bruce explains the three different types of braking systems. All right, now that we got our intro out of the way, let's go ahead and welcome in Bruce. Thanks, buddy. I'm glad to be here. Appreciate it. I am very excited. We are going to be talking about braking systems, and more specifically, EV braking systems. But before we jump into that, could you just kind of give us a breakdown, just automobile braking systems in general? Sure. I've spent more time looking at a few of them. So there's things that I know less about, but we can start with the one that we're all used to seeing, which I'm going to call a friction brake. You've got a drum in older cars or discs in something new. And then you've got something that clamps a pad against that drum, against that disc. It slows the car down by friction.
[46:27]And that's what was on, you know, cars kind of since they were first made. You know, the more you use them, we got to go in for a break job, get the pads replaced, maybe get the rotors resurfaced, you know, all of that sort of stuff. That evolved in the world of hybrids to this idea of using a generator. Because when you do friction braking, you're going to lose 100% center of the energy. It gets dissipated as heat, to use some fancy words, in the deformation of the rotors and so forth. But they developed this blended braking system where you could use a motor running in reverse, which is a generator, and put some of that energy back into a battery. And now you could pull that energy back out and use it to move the car. And that's how those original hybrids were worked. There certainly are some other things, you know, around long enough that I can use a transmission and downshift and slow a car down. And we've all heard the trucks using a Jake brake or compression braking. Not going to get into that, but it's more of this, you know, what happens when I hit the brake pedal?
[47:41]Used to be, we'd put a clamp up against the disc and create friction that would slow things down. That's still the dominant braking in hybrids, but you get some of it stored into a battery. But now we come into an EV and it's got much bigger motors in it and it's got much bigger batteries. Batteries and so one of the innovations here is well heck you know we got a whole lot more stopping power now with an EV because the amount that you can slow a car down with this regenerative braking this idea of putting that energy of motion back into a battery the amount that you can slow a car down is really related to how fast it can accelerate so one of the cool things about EVs is they accelerate pretty quickly. Well, you can use that same thing running in reverse to stop a car pretty quickly without having to resort to a friction brake. Now, every EV's got a friction brake. You need it for some things. You may need it for that last little bit. You may need it because you really need to stop in a hurry and you need more stopping power than you can get out of a regenerative braking system.
[48:55]But most of what they do, you know, the way you get the more range changes use the regenerative braking as much as you can okay and then from there let's go ahead and move into the different type of braking systems that can be found on evs because a lot of people might think including myself and i've made this mistake several times is that uh all of the braking systems are built on are they're all the same for evs like you let off your foot it's slowing you down. It's not really braking, it's slowing you down.
[49:25]When I have my Tesla, for instance, and I put my foot on the brake, you had mentioned to me, now you're applying the friction brake as soon as you put your foot on the brake for the Tesla, and that's not necessarily the case for all EVs.
[49:40]That's exactly it. I mean, what we have to recognize is that Tesla, in so many many ways, defined the modern electric vehicle. They were the first to sell all electric vehicles in any significant numbers. And if you go to Motor Trend, for example, the Tesla Model Y was the fourth most popular vehicle sold in the United States for 2023. It was behind the Ford F-150, the Chevy Silverado, and the Ram pickup truck. So put another way, the Tesla Model Y in 2023 was the best selling car in the United States.
[50:15]Cool accomplishment. But Tesla made some interesting design decisions. And it's this question of what's the user interface? What happens when I push on the brake pedal? In any hybrid vehicle, when I push on the brake pedal, I'm going to engage the regenerative braking as much as it can, and it'll make up the balance with the friction brake. Tesla made a design decision that said, nope. But when you press on the brake pedal in a Tesla, you're just going to get the friction brake. We're going to tie all of the regenerative braking into the accelerator and what we sometimes call or often call one pedal driving. So push on the accelerator. I go faster. Lift off on the accelerator. I go slower. And if you lift off the accelerator completely in a Tesla in one pedal driving mode, you're stopping fairly quickly. and it'll bring you to a complete stop. But other automakers made different decisions and some made the same decision by what's true for the Tesla, that the brake pedal is tied exclusively to the friction brake is true for Rivians and it's true for Lucids. It's not true for any of the so-called legacy automakers. So I drive a Kia Niro EV. I've driven it about 30,000 miles.
[51:42]It does not have what a Tesla owner would call one pedal driving, although I can put it into a pretty aggressive regenerative braking when I lift off the accelerator. But for a variety of reasons, I don't use it that often. I drive my Kia Niro EV pretty much the same way I drive my 2004 pickup truck, which is ice vehicle. And that's part of why, because I don't want to have to change driving modes when I'm changing vehicles. But after 30,000 miles, I'm nowhere near needing a brake job. In fact, I just took it in for a checkup and the mechanic is telling me, yeah, you'll probably need a brake job at about 150,000 miles, which is, I think, consistent with most of what Tesla and other EV owners experience.
[52:34]But the point is, is the user interface is different. I press on the brake pedal on my EV and it's going to use the regenerative braking as much as it can and only apply the friction braking if it needs more stopping power than what the regenerative system can provide. And I can see that on the dashboard. It'll show me the little lights that say, Here's how much energy you're pumping back into the battery. It's kind of cool, but it's a different design decision. But what I think that leads to, and I've seen this in a whole bunch of reviews, there was one I was watching of somebody looking at the Hyundai Ioniq 5, and he said, yep, it's got a one-pedal driving mode, and you've got to turn that regenerative braking on with one-pedal driving mode. But that's not true. The Hyundai Ioniq 5, just like every other Kia, Ford, Chevy, Hyundai, whatever, is, It does this blended braking. You press on the brake pedal. It's going to engage the regenerative braking as much as it can and only bring in the friction braking when it's needed.
[53:50]Okay. I think that's a really good way of putting this. Is there any other type of system that we haven't mentioned out there that you know of? There might be, but there's none that I know of or that I've studied. It's just really this question of what's the user interface that I ask my car to slow down, and how does that car react to that user interface, and which is it using? Is it using a friction brake, or is it using regenerative braking? Okay. And can you think of, and if you can, it's okay, I can cut this part out, but can you think of any advantages over one system or another?
[54:35]Well, you know, you talked about a while back about Hertz's experience bringing Teslas into their rental fleet. And if you're not used to driving something with one pedal driving, it really takes some adjustment. I think, you know, Bart Bouchats has commented on this. I've I've spoken with Allison. Most people that I know that use one pedal driving really like it. Allison talks about it being less fatiguing to do that. But it's an adjustment. And it's also interesting that that same review about an Ioniq 5, I had to laugh because both the husband and wife that were involved in the review you prefer driving in one pedal driving mode. But the wife made a comment that she said, actually, no, when you're driving, I'd rather you didn't because I feel like the car jerks around a little bit more, you know, you're, you know, some of that little husband and wife banter back and forth. And there have been a few articles that, you know, want to take pot shots at Tesla because, you know, everybody wants to take pot shots. Sometimes, you know, pot shots at people who are successful Successful is one way to get attention and views and so forth.
[55:56]But so in a blended braking system, the driver doesn't have to learn how to do anything new. So I think that's an advantage. And I think the system, like in many of the EVs, where it's a driver's choice, do I want to be in one pedal driving mode or do I not? And by the way, the car should remember it. Yeah there is also another issue there's a terrifying i think video that consumer reports published where they showed an ionic five decelerating in one pedal driving mode the brake lights never come on now hyundai has fixed that um so you know that you're in in one pedal driving mode, you're pretty much only using regenerative braking. So you've got that degree of control. But it's also true that if you're hitting the brake pedal at all, your brake lights are on. So if you're in one pedal driving mode, you don't have control over what you're signaling to the drivers behind you about whether or not you're accelerating or decelerating. Sorry. I don't think I'm worried about that today. I dug into that as part of researching this. And I.
[57:26]Again, while Tesla has made some design decisions that I don't think I'll ever buy one, I have to also acknowledge that they've done a great job with a bunch of the engineering things and what I'm reading and with the acceleration stuff and sort of what I've observed. I think you can be pretty comfortable in most electric vehicles, certainly Tesla's and with what Hyundai and Kia have fixed in theirs, that if you're decelerating significantly with one pedal driving, your brake lights are going to come on. Okay. What happens? I'm going to assume this is the same for all electric vehicles. When I charge my Tesla up to 100% and then I leave, there's no regenerative braking whatsoever. That's 100% friction. It's probably not for the first little bit, but probably get a mile or two down the road and you've got some buffer left in your battery and you're going to get regenerative braking.
[58:27]Again, depends on what kind of battery you've got. If you've got an LFP battery, sure, charge that up to 100%. That's what it wants. If you've got one of those, the regular lithium ion, like is in most Teslas and in my Kia, I almost never charge more than 80%. So I've always got some buffer. If you're at real low speed, the regenerative braking might not give you much. And I know on my car, that last little stop is always with the friction brake from like two miles an hour to zero or something like that. That I've read whether or not that's true for Teslas. I don't find any consistent. So it's probably possible that that last little, you know, from two miles an hour to zero might be engaging a friction brake behind your back, but you're not going to get much regenerative energy out of it, and it's not really spending that much off the friction brake, which is why EVs, where you're using regenerative braking, you know, 100 to 150,000 miles for a brake job is not unusual as opposed to 10 or 15,000 miles for a brake job on a typical ICE vehicle. And maybe you got to get the rotors done at 30 or 40,000 miles.
[59:48]But, and by the way, so pulling on this one pedal driving, you know, so there is one thing that isn't a real high risk for you or for me, but if you really love one pedal driving, don't buy a Porsche.
[1:00:03]Porsche, for whatever reason, says, nope, we're not doing one-pedal driving, not a feature on our vehicles.
[1:00:11]So they just use blended braking or they use something else? They just use the blended braking mode. So, you know, there's the full spectrum. Well, if you have those beautiful red calipers, you have to use them, I guess.
[1:00:27]I mean, they're still using the regenerative braking, but they just said, no, we don't think one pedal driving is efficient. Deficient so there's so many of some of these things that are i guess i would kind of say emotional perspectives or people stake at a particular position and they're just gonna.
[1:00:47]Hammer on that nope that's 100 and that goes back to overall you should buy the car that, speaks to you the most so if you don't like the way tesla drives maybe it's because of one pedal driving and you don't know how to articulate that because you don't know the difference or maybe it's just because of the way the car drives in general then fine that that's fine there's there's the f-150 lightning there's the mustang there's the all of the hyundai and kia which they're knocking it out of the park yep with their evs there's so many different places you can go to and pole star being one of them as well pole star is is also one that that does either. It'll do blended braking. So Polestar is the only one of the EV only manufacturers that I'm aware of that doesn't insist that you have to use one pedal driving to get regenerative braking. I think we're going to end that here. Bruce, do you have anything you want to promote or a place that you would like to send people to follow what you do? I don't do the social media stuff. Don't have an X account. Don't have a Mastodon account. That's just not where I've been at.
[1:01:59]But if somebody wanted to reach out and got on to the Podfeet Slack, I'm there. You can find me probably by searching by name, but I also go by the handle of usethedata, podfeet.com slash slack. All right, Bruce, thank you so much for coming on and spending your Saturday morning with me.
[1:02:18]I appreciate your time and I appreciate all you do, sir. Wasn't that great? right? I loved it because Bruce explains things so clearly, and Bodhi is a masterclass in doing good interviews with clear and prepared questions. I want to add a couple of things to the discussion. Bruce explained that he disabled one pedal driving in his car because he didn't want to get confused when he switched back and forth with his ICE truck. I have been very happily surprised when I rent cars or drive other people's cars that I don't get confused with that. I think 56 years of driving ICE vehicles has ingrained the muscle memory well enough that I instinctively reach for the brake if the car doesn't slow down when I pull off the accelerator. However, I do get confused when I drive an ICE vehicle about other things. In my Tesla, when I complete a trip, I simply open the car door and I walk away. The car automatically goes into park, there's nothing to turn off, and it locks itself shortly after I close the door and walk away.
[1:03:12]This is dangerous in other vehicles because you do have to put them into park, and you do have to turn them off, and you do have to remove the car keys, and you do have to manually lock the car. Our fellow Tesla-owning buddy Ron was on a business trip once, and he stopped at a Starbucks to get a coffee. When he went back to his rental vehicle, it was not only unlocked, it was still running. So this isn't just me. The other thing is, in my Tesla, to change from forward, park, and reverse, use a stalk on the right side of the steering column. When I get into other cars, I am constantly turning the windshield wipers on and off when I try to change between those. Luckily, this just makes me feel silly, but that brake pedal is automatic in my brain.
[1:03:54]Bodhi asked if there was any advantage of one-pedal driving over blended braking or vice versa, and Bruce gave some good answers. One more thing I'd like to add in favor of one-pedal driving is that I think it's safer. If you're hurtling down the highway at 65 miles an hour and you need to come to a sudden stop, as soon as you release the accelerator in one-pedal driving, the car slows down significantly while you're moving your foot from the accelerator over to the brake. In blended braking mode, the entire time from when you release the accelerator till you get to the brake, the car is coasting at nearly full speed. I know that's just a split second, but it could be enough time to save a life or stay out of an accident. Bruce explained to me that some vehicles have some options that actually help with that, but in general, that's the way the two different methods of braking work.
[1:04:42]Lastly, I wanted to clarify what Bodhi was trying to explain about how if you charge an EV to 100%, you don't have regenerative braking. The reason for this is that there's literally no place for the energy from the brakes to go. While that makes sense, it's somewhat disconcerting to get into your car and not have regen. On Teslas at least, the display warns you that the regenerative braking is limited until you've driven for a while. Bruce said it would be one or two miles, but in Steve even my experience, it's longer than that. Something in the 3% or so battery drain is our observation.
[1:05:13]Well, thanks again to Bruce for his explanation and to Bodhi for giving us this wonderful interview from the Kilowatt Podcast. Now go subscribe in your podcatcher of choice. If that's overcast, you know how to use it. All right, that's going to wind us up for this week. Don't forget to send your 1,000th episode recordings to Steve by June 23rd by emailing them to him at steve at podfeed.com. Did you know you can email me at allison at podfeed.com anytime you like? Remember, everything good starts with podfeed.com. You can follow me on mastodon at podfeed.com slash mastodon. If you want to listen to the podcast on YouTube, you can go to podfeed.com slash YouTube. If you want to join the conversation, you can join our Slack community like Bruce does at podfeed.com slash Slack, where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely Nocilla castaways. You can support the show at podfeed.com slash Patreon, or with a one-time donation at podfeet.com slash PayPal. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic Nocilla Castaways.
[1:06:14]Music.