NC_2024_11_03
The episode covers FaceScreen's video overlays for virtual presentations, critiques Apple Notes, and features Sam King from GigSky discussing the benefits of eSIM technology for travelers.
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Long Summary
In this episode, I share my experience with FaceScreen, an innovative app developed by Ram Patra designed to place a small video window of your camera on top of your screen share. This tool proved invaluable during a recent presentation at the Silicon Valley Mac Users Group (SVMug), where I was discussing how to utilize Audio Hijack. I emphasized the significance of the audience being able to see me while I demonstrated, and FaceScreen enabled just that. The feedback I received from the producer, Robert Brown, confirmed that the FaceScreen video quality was superior to the Zoom thumbnail, making it an essential addition for virtual presenters.
FaceScreen is available in the app store for a mere $4.99 and functions smoothly as a menu bar app. After installation, it offers an intuitive experience, allowing you to activate or deactivate your camera display with a simple click. I appreciated its accessibility features, confirming through my tests with VoiceOver that all settings were easy to navigate, thus ensuring inclusivity for all users.
Diving into the app's settings, I discovered various customization options. The General tab offers essential controls, such as selecting a default camera and choosing whether the app starts upon login. The interface allows users to position the video window in any corner of their screen and provides flexibility in its appearance. The Camera tab is particularly fun, offering different shapes for the floating window, including circle, squircle, and rectangle, each accompanied by sliders to adjust the size and aspect ratio effectively. For presentations, getting the correct size is critical to avoid overwhelming the audience's view, and I found the process seamless, especially when setting the appropriate display resolution prior to my talk.
A unique aspect of FaceScreen involves its mirroring feature, which initially confused me during my SVMug presentation, as it reversed my image for viewers. Additionally, the app allows for further personalized adjustments, such as color settings, text overlay beneath the video, and keyboard shortcuts, greatly enhancing the presenter’s control over their visual presentation.
Transitioning to my frustrations with Apple Notes, I explored its shortcomings compared to other note-taking applications I prefer, such as Bear. While Apple Notes has improved in certain areas like data syncing across devices, I remain perplexed by various facets of its organization features. Despite the ability to pin notes and create folders, I often find myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of notes and the limitations imposed by its tagging system. My experimentation with tags revealed a cumbersome setup process, and I struggled to grasp how to create and manage them effectively.
Another annoyance stems from the formatting options available on mobile devices, particularly with the complex sequence of taps required to apply basic text styles like bold and italics. The process is cumbersome, detracting from the streamlined experience I seek in a note-taking app. I also encountered challenges with exporting and sharing notes, as formatting is frequently stripped away upon transfer, reducing the utility of Apple Notes for anything beyond temporary jottings.
I touched on the inability to export notes easily while referencing the cumbersome experiences that led me to explore other options. Apple Notes’ setup reveals significant room for improvement, particularly concerning accessibility to one’s own data and to shareable formats.
Finally, I found an interesting conversation with Sam King, the Chief Revenue Officer of GigSky, about the nuances of eSIM technology and how it differs from older SIM alternatives. GigSky emphasizes its role as a true mobile operator, ensuring customers have a reliable connection during travel. Sam illuminated the complexities surrounding roaming agreements and the vast discrepancies in pricing between different providers, especially between U.S. and European telecom markets.
Through our engaging discussion, it became clear how critical eSIM technology has evolved for modern travelers, offering greater flexibility and cost savings. He emphasized that GigSky, unlike many competitors that just resell SIMs from established carriers, maintains its network infrastructure, allowing them to provide better service and adaptability for users.
Overall, this episode provides a close examination of both FaceScreen, an app enhancing virtual presentations, and Apple Notes, an often frustrating tool for note-taking, alongside valuable insights into eSIM technology that assist users in making informed connectivity choices while traveling abroad.
FaceScreen is available in the app store for a mere $4.99 and functions smoothly as a menu bar app. After installation, it offers an intuitive experience, allowing you to activate or deactivate your camera display with a simple click. I appreciated its accessibility features, confirming through my tests with VoiceOver that all settings were easy to navigate, thus ensuring inclusivity for all users.
Diving into the app's settings, I discovered various customization options. The General tab offers essential controls, such as selecting a default camera and choosing whether the app starts upon login. The interface allows users to position the video window in any corner of their screen and provides flexibility in its appearance. The Camera tab is particularly fun, offering different shapes for the floating window, including circle, squircle, and rectangle, each accompanied by sliders to adjust the size and aspect ratio effectively. For presentations, getting the correct size is critical to avoid overwhelming the audience's view, and I found the process seamless, especially when setting the appropriate display resolution prior to my talk.
A unique aspect of FaceScreen involves its mirroring feature, which initially confused me during my SVMug presentation, as it reversed my image for viewers. Additionally, the app allows for further personalized adjustments, such as color settings, text overlay beneath the video, and keyboard shortcuts, greatly enhancing the presenter’s control over their visual presentation.
Transitioning to my frustrations with Apple Notes, I explored its shortcomings compared to other note-taking applications I prefer, such as Bear. While Apple Notes has improved in certain areas like data syncing across devices, I remain perplexed by various facets of its organization features. Despite the ability to pin notes and create folders, I often find myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of notes and the limitations imposed by its tagging system. My experimentation with tags revealed a cumbersome setup process, and I struggled to grasp how to create and manage them effectively.
Another annoyance stems from the formatting options available on mobile devices, particularly with the complex sequence of taps required to apply basic text styles like bold and italics. The process is cumbersome, detracting from the streamlined experience I seek in a note-taking app. I also encountered challenges with exporting and sharing notes, as formatting is frequently stripped away upon transfer, reducing the utility of Apple Notes for anything beyond temporary jottings.
I touched on the inability to export notes easily while referencing the cumbersome experiences that led me to explore other options. Apple Notes’ setup reveals significant room for improvement, particularly concerning accessibility to one’s own data and to shareable formats.
Finally, I found an interesting conversation with Sam King, the Chief Revenue Officer of GigSky, about the nuances of eSIM technology and how it differs from older SIM alternatives. GigSky emphasizes its role as a true mobile operator, ensuring customers have a reliable connection during travel. Sam illuminated the complexities surrounding roaming agreements and the vast discrepancies in pricing between different providers, especially between U.S. and European telecom markets.
Through our engaging discussion, it became clear how critical eSIM technology has evolved for modern travelers, offering greater flexibility and cost savings. He emphasized that GigSky, unlike many competitors that just resell SIMs from established carriers, maintains its network infrastructure, allowing them to provide better service and adaptability for users.
Overall, this episode provides a close examination of both FaceScreen, an app enhancing virtual presentations, and Apple Notes, an often frustrating tool for note-taking, alongside valuable insights into eSIM technology that assist users in making informed connectivity choices while traveling abroad.
Brief Summary
In this episode, I discuss FaceScreen, an app by Ram Patra that allows presenters to overlay a video window during screen shares, enhancing virtual presentations. I share its user-friendly features and superior video quality compared to traditional methods.
I also express frustrations with Apple Notes, highlighting its organizational challenges and cumbersome formatting.
Finally, I chat with Sam King from GigSky about the benefits of eSIM technology for travelers, underscoring its flexibility and cost-effectiveness. This episode provides insights into virtual presentation tools, note-taking issues, and modern connectivity solutions.
I also express frustrations with Apple Notes, highlighting its organizational challenges and cumbersome formatting.
Finally, I chat with Sam King from GigSky about the benefits of eSIM technology for travelers, underscoring its flexibility and cost-effectiveness. This episode provides insights into virtual presentation tools, note-taking issues, and modern connectivity solutions.
Tags
FaceScreen
Ram Patra
video window
screen shares
virtual presentations
user-friendly
Apple Notes
organizational challenges
eSIM technology
Sam King
GigSky
flexibility
cost-effectiveness
modern connectivity solutions
Transcript
[0:00]
NC_2024_11_03
[0:00]Music.
[0:12]And this is show number 1017. Well, as you can tell, my voice is still a little bit gravelly, but I'm going to power through and still bring you a show.
[0:23]
Make Your Screenshares More Engaging with FaceScreen
[0:23]A few weeks ago, I told you about a nifty little app called Presentify by Ram Patra. As I often do for devs when I talk about a piece of software, I dropped Ram a note telling him how much I enjoy Presentify, and I sent him a link to the review. He was delighted and asked if I wanted to code to his newest app, FaceScreen. Of course, I said yes. FaceScreen's reason for being is to present a small video window of your camera to be shown to people with whom you're sharing your screen. I had the opportunity to use it for the recent talk I did for the Silicon Valley Mac users group, SVMug, about how to use Audio Hijack. While I was presenting my entire screen, the Zoom call didn't show my video to the viewers. I wanted them to be able to see me, and FaceScreen worked brilliantly to do that. The producer from SVMug, Robert Brown, confirmed that they couldn't see my face other than face green, so it was a big help for those watching live. He went on to explain that when he was recording, I'm sorry, when the recording was complete from Zoom, there was a thumbnail view of my camera in the upper right. However, he said the video wasn't very good compared to the video from face green. He covered the Zoom thumbnail with a black rectangle and kept my face green video thumbnail view instead. I think that's a pretty good endorsement. Now that I've sold you on the idea, let's learn about the application.
[1:40]FaceScreen is a menu bar app available in the app store for the grand sum of $4.99 US. And once installed, it's a simple click to enable and disable your camera, presenting a small floating window on screen. There's no fancy keystrokes to memorize to move the window around. You simply drag it with your cursor. The power of this simple tool is all found in the settings for face screen. Before I go through the settings, I wanted you to know I tested them with voiceover and every single thing I tested passed with flying colors. I was able to move sliders, toggle switches, and read every element in settings. Yay for accessibility!
[2:18]Now, the General tab gives you a few simple controls, just such as whether to start at login and which camera you'd like to use as your default. In my case, I have a big girl webcam, the Logitech 4K Pro, but I can also choose the internal webcam on my Mac laptop. Note that if you switch cameras, you have to toggle face screen off and back on again to have the change take effect. I explained that you can move the window around with your cursor, just click and drag it, but in General Settings, you can also give it a default location of top left, bottom right, bottom left, or top right. If you're like me and you have a lot of menu bar items, you may find it hard to tell some of your icons apart, so ROM gives you a lot of options about the look of the app icon for face green to help you out. While you choose your camera in the general tab, there's another tab in settings called camera, but that's not where you choose your camera.
[3:08]Anyway, lots of fun to be had in there anyway. First of all, you can change the shape of the little floating window that will be framing your lovely face. You can choose between circle, squircle, and rectangle. Now there's one oddity to those three choices. Lower down in the camera settings, you'll see a slider for corner radius. You would think that the corner radius would only affect the squircle option, but it's grayed out for squircle. Turns out you can add a corner radius only to the rectangle option. The squircle is a quick way to get the desired shape, but if you want more control, a rectangle with a corner radius seems like the way to go. Below the three radio buttons for the shape, you can set the aspect ratio to 1 to 1 for square, or 3 by 2, 4 by 3, or even 16 by 9. Additionally, you can change to portrait or landscape orientation for the rectangular aspect ratios. There's a slider to increase the overall size of that floating window. I encourage you to set the size when you have your screen resolution set for your presentation. If you have a large, high-resolution screen, it's just plain mean to your audience to show them your screen that way. Remember, people are often viewing on iPads these days, and most of those aren't bigger than 11 inches.
[4:18]Before presenting, I always ask what resolution they recommend for the particular audience, you know, the people running whatever it is you're presenting to. From my recent presentation to SVMug, Robert Brown explained that setting my display to 1920x1080 would be best. Evidently, when you do a screen share, Zoom presents at 720p, which scales perfectly for 1080p. I set my screen to 1920x1080, and then I dragged the scroller up on size and face screen until it looked big enough to show them my face, but not so big that it was overwhelming their view of my demo.
[4:49]Now that you've got the size of the video window set properly, you may want to zoom in on yourself a little bit, and FaceScreen has a slider for that. If you crank the size up to the max, the video fills about two-thirds of a 15-inch MacBook Pro screen. The next control is interesting, and I think I did it incorrectly when I was presenting to SVMug. It gives you the option to mirror the camera, meaning your face will look the same as it does in a mirror. I chose that option because it looked right to me, but it turns out that makes it backwards to your viewers. Maybe it's not critical because you don't have any text showing in your video, like something written on your shirt or in the background, but it could easily be confusing for the viewers either way. I had Sandy take a look at it and she said, oh no, that looks completely wrong because she's used to seeing me in the live show and she knows which side the pillow she made for me is on, so she could tell that it was just all wrong the way it looked. Well, if you've messed around with the settings and you'd like to get back to the defaults, there's a nice reset button.
[5:49]The settings window isn't quite tall enough to view everything in the camera tab. So if you scroll down, you can see some controls for the color from your camera. You can adjust saturation, contrast, brightness, and hue rotation. That last one's super weird. I was wearing a pink shirt, and when I rotated hue all the way, my shirt was purplish-blue and my beige walls were pink. If you want to have more fun, you can change the color multiply setting. I'm sure this is useful if maybe the white balance is off on your camera, but I mostly made everything just look psychedelic. Good thing there's a reset for the color settings too.
[6:23]While you're displaying your video to your audience, you can also have text displayed under your video. You can toggle it on and off from the menu bar, and from settings on the text tab you can edit the text shown. By default it will say face green, so you might just want to change that. You can choose the font, the font size, the font color, and background, and even the radius and padding of the background around the text. It's fun to play around with these settings because you can make the text and padding huge and put it all in a really fun font. Well, after you've had a nice play with it, you'd be happy to know there's a reset button you can start over with and create a boring but professional look. If you're a keyboard junkie, you'll enjoy the key shortcuts tab. You can create shortcuts to toggle face screen on and off, toggle the text on and off, and to increase or decrease the camera's video size. The bottom line is that I already got my $5 worth of fun on a face screen by allowing viewers of my audio hijack tutorial for SVMug to see my little face while presenting, and I can't wait to use it again. Learn more about the fully accessible face screen at facescreenapp.com.
[7:34]
Why Do People Like Apple Notes?
[7:33]In the early days, Apple Notes were an okay way to jot down a thought, but Apple's put a lot of work into making them much more useful. Nowadays, I hear people on tech podcasts and in my nerd circles talking about how much they use and like Apple Notes. But I don't get it. I find myself constantly frustrated by Apple Notes. I'm going to wander through the interface to tell you what I think works well and what makes notes feel like sandpaper on my eyeballs. Probably the nicest thing I can say about Apple Notes is that the data syncs flawlessly through iCloud. I can depend on anything I write in a note on my Mac to show up instantly on my iPhone and my iPad. To be fair, though, iCloud syncing with a lot of note-type apps works pretty flawlessly.
[8:15]Let's talk about organization. I do also like how with Apple Notes, I can pin notes to the top, allowing me to have quick access to critical ones, like the one my daughter and daughter-in-law and I collaborate on to see where we are in Grey's Anatomy so we don't do spoilers to each other. Pinning works well to not have to scroll around through my 1,058 notes or use search. They implemented folders a while back along with smart folders and they seem to work reasonably well. I have a smart folder for pinned and one entitled unpin me and they're leftovers from a catastrophic experiment pinning notes. I don't remember how long ago it was but I tried to pin several notes and didn't notice I had selected all notes when I hit the pin button. Unpinning them was quite a trial because I didn't want to unpin all, I just wanted to maintain the ones I had pinned. I used smart folders to help me triage my way back to where I started and I guess I never got rid of those smart folders. You can tell I only use Apple Notes for things I don't care about by the fact that I have very few folders set up in the app.
[9:16]Another organization tool I don't use much as tags. I had three tags in the left sidebar when I started writing this up. I had one called, let's see, it's a hashtag D6277297837. I had one that says someone's name with a hash mark in front of it, and a third one that says all tags. When I was writing it up, I was very curious how those got there. I studied the user interface and tags, and I couldn't even figure out how to create a tag. There's no new tag, or assign tag, or create tag, or even a nice plus button down in the tag area.
[9:51]Now, I'm a big fan of the app Bear for my notes. In Bear, if anywhere in a note you type a hash mark, also known as an octothorpe, also known as a pound symbol, followed by a word, it will create what looks like a folder in the sidebar. I tried that in Apple Notes, and sure enough, that's exactly how it works here too. I guess Bear did a better job of onboarding me when I was learning it than Apple Notes. Armed with this new revelation, I selected the tag D627297837, which revealed a note containing a ticket number from an Apple repair I had done recently. Well, obviously, I didn't want this to be a tag. In a lot of apps, you can stop them from interpreting symbols, like the hash mark, by typing a backslash before the symbol. This is called escaping.
[10:38]In notes, I tried to put the backslash before the hash, but it didn't stop it from being a tag. I thought I would just put a space between the hash and the number to remove its taggy behavior, but Apple Notes simply would not let me put my cursor in between. I could not edit that tag that was embedded in the note. I tried clicking and even by using the arrow keys to go back and forth, but it would not let me get between the hash and the next character. That tag was now a single entity. I put my cursor ahead of the hash and I did a forward delete to see if I could just remove the hash, but instead Apple Notes deleted the entire ticket number. And guess what else? Undo does not bring it back. I had permanently lost that ticket number. But wait, I typed it into this very blog post while I was figuring it out so I was actually able to put it back. Now why on earth would notes make a deletion of a tag be undoable? I tested this later and I was able to undo the deletion of a tag and note, but I got to tell you, now I'm very nervous about them. I created a new tag called hash software. I thought it'd be easy to command select several software related notes and simply drag them into my shiny new software tag. I was able to command select. I was able to simply drag them onto the tag. And when I was dragging, it even showed me how many notes I was dragging in a little red box. But when I let go, only the last selected note was added to the tag.
[12:05]Now that I know how tags work, it's not a terrible system, but it's dodgy enough that I probably won't use it. In contrast, I use tags all the time in Bearer because they aren't so weird.
[12:16]And one good thing about Apple Notes is that you can collaborate with other people on a given note. But even that gives me fits. You click the little share icon, you know, the box with the up arrow, or as some cool kids like to call it, the share-o. At the top, it shows the title of your note, and then there's a drop-down that's defaulted to collaborate. You can change it to send a copy, but, you know, my goal here is to collaborate. You can control who can access. It says invited people versus anyone with the link. And you can set permissions, like whether they can make changes or only view. There's also a pre-checked checkbox to allow others to invite.
[12:50]All right, that's pretty intuitive. But then I get stuck. I just sit there looking at it because I'm never confident of what I should do next. There's no go button at this point. I do see a row with four people or groups I've recently sent Apple messages to. And then I see a list of applications. Few of them look promising, you know, like mail and messages. But the other options simply don't make any sense. Sometimes I've seen Open In News, Freeform, Xcode Simulator, and even my Paprika Recipe Manager. But that list seems to change. When I see these options, it makes me wonder what this list is even about. Along with Mail and Messages, there's an option that says Invite with Link. All right, that sounds useful. I just want to Invite with Link. This pops up a little window that says Create Link. You'd think that it would, you know, I don't know, create a link that you could copy, maybe paste into a text message or an email? Instead, you see a very plain window with an empty to field and a grayed out copy link. It says to add people.
[13:50]How? With what information? Probably not their Mastodon handle, but do they want an email address? Does it have to be their Apple account email address? I literally have no idea when I'm looking at it. I clicked in the to field and a plus button appeared. Tapping that opened a mini version of my contacts. In here, it's a free-for-all. You can put in email addresses or any type of any type or a phone number. I enlisted Jill from the Northwoods to test what would happen next. I decided to put in her non-Apple account email address and then it allowed me to click the copy link button.
[14:25]I sent her the link over Telegram and told her when she clicked it, it said she had to verify her email address by sending her an email. She clicked the link from that email and it took her to iCloud.com where she had to log in with her Apple account email twice for some reason and then she could see the note. I'm glad to know that it worked and I do think it's kind of cool that I didn't have to have the right address for her to still be able to get in. Can't tell you how many times I try to invite someone to a Google Doc, and I use the wrong email address, and they have to request access. Actually, it happens to my friends too, because I use an address that I don't use for anything else but Google Docs. My main point is that I eventually figure out how to share a note every time I need to, but it doesn't seem intuitive for me. I'm sure if I did this all the time, I'd probably get used to it. Or is it just me, or can everybody else do this right away? They know what to do.
[15:17]Well, the main reason I dislike notes is how cumbersome it is to format text on iPad and iPhone. If the joy of notes is that we can write them on any of our Apple devices, then it needs to be good on all of our Apple devices. On the Mac, I can use keystrokes for bold, italics, underline. I can use keystrokes to make headings, links, and even code blocks in a monospace font. But all of these options are buried under multiple taps on the iPhone and iPad. Let's say I want to make a word bold. First, I have to tap on the AA to bring up the formatting options. This is kind of equivalent to using the drop-down menu on the Mac. I can tap the B for bold, but I can't now start typing in bold. It's waiting to see if I want to make bullets or do strikeout or add some highlighting. In order to get back to typing, I have to hit the X button. I know that extra step isn't huge, but now I type my word and I don't want the next word to be made bold. I have to tap the AA again, then tap B to unbold, and then tap the X again. That's six steps to make a word bold.
[16:18]Now, you might think I'd be better off typing the word, selecting it, making it bold. That does make it one step shorter, that is, if I count the double tap to select as one step. I type the word, double tap it, tap the AA, tap the B to make it bold. Now, I can't start typing because the AA menu is still up, but I figured out a trick. I can tap to get my cursor at the end of the word, not selecting the word, all without X-ing away the formatting bar. This means I can tap the B again at the end to stop using bold and then tap the X to make the formatting menu go away. Did you count those steps? I was wrong. It's still six steps. Maybe people who like Apple Notes never do any formatting with iOS. Maybe they go back to their Macs to make headings and checklists and such. Of my annoyances with Apple Notes, this is the one that bothers me the most. Making tables in Apple Notes isn't bad. It's pretty easy to add a column or a row. On the Mac, if you select a column, you get a three-dot button at the top and also a downward chevron. Select the chevron and you can add a column before or after the current column. On iPhone and iPad, selecting the three-dot button pops up a menu that allows you to add a column, but you don't get a choice of whether to put it before or after. I don't know why that's not an option, but it's pretty easy to press and hold on the three-dot button and drag them back and forth. It's one of my favorite features of Apple Notes.
[17:43]Interestingly, this pop-up menu gives you way more options on iPhone and iPad than you get on macOS. You can format the column, bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough, and you can copy or cut the column or row. As much as I like tables in Apple Notes, there's one thing I just don't like about it. You cannot change the justification of the text in a table. It is always left-justified. No fancy center or right justification for you.
[18:11]IOS 18 is bringing us a bunch of cool stuff and notes for using Apple Pencil on iPad. I suppose you could scribble with your finger on an iPhone as well. I've played around with it a bit, and while I think these new features have quite a ways to go to be super useful, they will all suffer my rage because of one thing about Apple Notes. Anything you write with Pencil is in a separate region of any text-based content in the same note. You can't draw next to some text, it has to either be above or below the text, and that's it. There's actually a visible line of demarcation between the regions if you tap in the right spot. You can't see it all the time, but as you tap around trying to figure out where you can type versus draw, you'll see a horizontal brownish-gold line with a little triangle stuck to the left. Triangle seems to imply you could drag it up and down, but you can't. I think it's just there to say, keep out!
[19:00]When I've got a combination of drawing and text, I find myself repeatedly tapping, trying to find the safe place to type. I should note that you can drop a floating text box next to your scribbling, which I guess is better than nothing. I did an experiment to see how well you can alternate drawing and typing. I did some handwriting, and it was kind of cool how it cleaned it up a bit. Then I typed below that, and then I did some more handwriting. They gave me three distinct regions, scribbling, text, and scribbling. I used the selection tool, the pencil with the diagonal lines on it, to select my second section of scribbling. This allowed me to drag the scribbling around. But guess what happens if you try to drag the scribble above one of those lines of demarcation? It disappears.
[19:41]Even if I drag the second scribble up to the first one, it still disappears. That just ain't right. I can't see giving up my beloved notability for drawing and handwriting and typing all piled into the same note. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than Apple Notes. The final complaint I'll issue about Apple Notes that keeps me from using it for anything I care about is that the notes are portable to different apps or even easily exportable. I distinctly remember when Bart first tried to get me on the Markdown train and he explained the joy of a plain text format that you can use anywhere. I've become accustomed to knowing that any Markdown file I create, I can open in Ulysses and Typeora and Keepit and heck, even in TextEdit. Any app used to open a Markdown file will retain all of the formatting because it's all there in plain text. But Apple Notes are stuck there. As we came across in the sharing options, you can send a copy of the note to someone, but guess what? All of the formatting is stripped away. You can't export your notes on your own, either in bulk or even one by one. There's no save as or export to.
[20:44]Now, I was careful to say you can't export notes on your own, because you can ask Apple to do it at iCloud.com. On Reddit, Alexandria gave the step-by-step process. For science, I'd requested my notes to be exported, and as Alexandria reported what happened, it took five days to create the export. Apple emailed me a link to download the 1.5 gigabyte zip file. Seems unusually large for only 1,000 notes, 98% of which don't have images.
[21:13]When I expanded the zip file, I got a CSV and two more zip files. I opened the first of the two zip files and it contained just four folders. The four folders I have in Apple Notes. It's going to sound confusing to describe, but that's Apple's fault. One of these folders is called simply Notes. Inside that folder seems to be a single folder for nearly all of my notes. In each notes folder, most of the time you'll see a plain text file, .txt, and attachments folder, which contains any images that were embedded in the note. If they'd chosen to give us, I don't know, rich text format, like an RTF file with the images, the images would have stayed embedded in the notes in their original location in the text. With a plain text file, you have no idea where those images were in your note. Now, another thing you lose because they chose plain text files instead of RTF for export is 100% of your formatting is gone again. Again, there's no headings, nothing's bold, nothing's underlined, there's no bullets, there's no numbered lists, and of course you don't get any checkboxes. Maybe you're not much of a scribbler in Apple Notes, but if you are, any notes that had scribbles in them simply don't come across at all as a .txt file. They're just not included. If you had images in the notes, you'll get those attachments, but no note at all.
[22:29]I've just given you the good news. Remember I said there were two zip files? My second zip file, which is 800 megabytes in size, will not expand. I get an error that says inappropriate file type or format. So that's nice. Nearly weak to get total garbage. To pile on the lack of exportability, one of the things I often want to do is just save an image that I've pasted into a note. In Notes on the Mac, if you right-click on the image, there's no save as option. There is the option to open the attachment, that will pop it up in whatever app you've designated to open that format of file. You can also double click the image to open it in that same external app. From the external app, then you can do a save as. I guess I should be grateful Apple lets us do it at all. Oddly, it's easier to save an image from Notes on iOS. Tap on the image once and it will open as big as possible with kind of black bars around it. Tap again and there's two ways to get to the Save As option. In the bottom left is a Share icon, which will reveal all of the sharing options, and one of those is Save to Files. I found that Share icon to be a bit difficult to select. It kept going back to the black bar view. An easier way is to tap at the top of the screen on the downward chevron next to Pasted Graphic. This reveals Save to Files, Save to Photos, Print, and it can even take you to the full Share menu.
[23:50]The bottom line is I keep trying to use Apple Notes and I keep trying to figure out whatever anyone else likes about Apple Notes, but I remain baffled by the love this app gets. I use Apple Notes only when I know for a fact that I never need to reference that particular note again and I know I won't want to use the information in any other way. I'm experimenting with the new features to smooth out your handwriting and with math notes, but I'm not yet ready to give you a review on those features. If you think I'm judging it unfairly and you feel joy when you use Apple Notes, I would love to hear what you like about it.
[24:25]
Support the Show
[24:25]Do you remember just last week when I said that another great way to support the PodFeed podcast on your own schedule was to go to podfeed.com slash PayPal and do a one-time donation? Well, guess what? That's exactly what Philip Ricotta did. Isn't that wonderful? Speaking of wonderful, the lovely George from Tulsa made another of his many PayPal donations. Thank you, Philip and George, for helping keep the lights on at the PodFeed Podcast.
[24:52]
Sam King of GigSky & How to Use a US Phone Number Using WiFi Calling with a Foreign eSIM
[24:52]As an unwritten policy, I don't generally interview people who sell products or services, but you know what? Since it's my own guideline and it's my own show, I figure I can color outside the lines when I want to, and this is one of those times. As you probably know, Steve and I do a bit of international travel, and in my stories about tech on travel, like our most recent trip to Africa, I've talked about the ease and cost savings of getting an eSIM for data while out of our home country. My process has been to go to a site called eSIMDB.com, and in there they list various companies and their plans, and then you can choose a company based on the best combination for you of the time span of how long you're going to be gone, the amount of data you want, and the price. On our last two trips, the company I chose through eSIMDB was GigSky. Coincidentally, after I got back, I was approached by GigSky and asked if I'd like to chat with Sam King, Chief Revenue Officer for GigSky, about how most eSIM companies are simply resellers of other telecom companies' products. I did not know that, and so I thought this sounded like a fun discussion, so a good opportunity to learn even more about the process of choosing an eSIM. So, I would like you to welcome the Chief Revenue Officer for GigSky, Sam King. Welcome to the show, Sam. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. All right. So let's start with, for the benefit of those who've only recently upgraded their phones to get the joy of eSIM versus a physical SIM, can you explain exactly what this means to people?
[26:16]Sure. So, um, eSIMs stands for embedded SIM. So that means that the card that used to be removable is now embedded in a chip inside your phone. And this also enables you to download SIM cards over the air to be stored on this chip. So there's a download capability as well. So this means that the SIM technology, the purpose of a SIM card is to authenticate your phone or your device onto the network. You can think of the SIM card as like a key that enables you to use the network and be, you know, to identify yourself on the network as someone who has an account and is, you know, in a, has an account in good standing and is therefore unable to, to, to use the network. So, eSIMs just, you know, at first blush digitize the, the removable SIM card.
[27:13]And now consumers have the opportunity to, to get SIMs from different providers by simply downloading them from anywhere in the world uh onto their phone provided their their e-sim is uh unlocked um so there's still the sim walking thing that that exists um in the u.s and in a handful of other countries under certain circumstances um but uh but by and large that's that's how e-sims work now that's an important point i did i did uh go out of my way to make sure the last two or three phones i've bought are unlocked with at&t even though i'm buy an AT&T and we're doing it that whole way, there's an option to just say, I don't want it locked. And you used to have to even wait, like the unlocked phones were only months later. And then you could request to have them unlocked, but it was a big thing. It was a big hassle. And it seems like that's gotten a lot easier now. Yeah, that's gotten a lot easier now. There's been a lot of consumer pressure to be able to do that. Also, the device manufacturers led by Apple have their own alternative retail channels. So the telcos don't distribute phones nearly as much as they used to the apple stores have grown um you know and and and that that kind of thing so so that helps but there's.
[28:24]There's two concepts that are really important with respect to eSIM today. One is the eSIM itself, but the other one is that the phones, like the iPhone that added eSIM back in 2018, is not just a single SIM phone, it's a dual SIM phone.
[28:43]So, these phones have two SIMs in them. Um and and today they're they're two embedded sims you know in the iphones of 2018 it was one removable sim and one e-sim now they're they're both east they're both e-sims so the the fact that there's two e-sims in an iphone today or in you know high-end android phones as well um like like pixel or the samsung galaxy series means that you can use two providers at the same time so what that enables you to do is unbundle talk text and data from a single provider so when you're roaming uh you know what what the apple and you know gives you in in google give you the the ability to do is to have maintain your your current phone number um you know for talk and text and then use another SIM, like from GigSky for your data in order to save on the roaming fees. And so that's the kind of the foundation of our business is this ability to, you know, with the new technology, new since 2018, the technology and the device enables an unbundling of talk text and data. So talking text, you know, you can still receive an SMS, let's say from your bank that doesn't incur a roaming charge. but when you're in South Africa.
[30:09]You're using a connection from GigSky and you're saving money over what you might pay to AT&T. I might have missed a really important point then in the last couple of trips. I always assumed that if I even let my eSIM from AT&T just breathe when I was in another country, it would cost me a kidney in payments. So I've been disabling my eSIM from AT&T. I assumed that making a phone call would cost me a fortune or getting a text message through iMessage? So, um, Making a phone call or receiving a phone call would cost you a fortune. Okay. Receiving a text message does not trigger a roaming charge. To receive one.
[30:52]But a text message, if you're getting it through the messages app, and it's an iPhone, it's a piece of data. So that would trigger a data cost. Okay. So this is where the distinction, this is where it gets somewhat complicated, tricky. So there's a, you're right. You are absolutely correct that a message and iMessages, you know, when you've got the blue. Yeah, if it's a blue bubble. If it's a blue bubble, it's going over, you know, a data connection. And then if our SIM were active, it would be going over the GigSky connection. If you were to do like two-factor authentication with your bank, for example, that is sent over an SMS.
[31:34]Oh, okay. So just getting that. Oh, okay. Now to receive that when you are in a foreign country does not typically trigger a roaming charge from telcos worldwide they've all kind of agreed to not charge each other like those don't count like those don't count if you send an sms an sms um you know over your primary sim it will it will you will generally get hit with a with a roaming charge okay but most people are iphone to iphone or they're using whatsapp or they're using you know the other well you bring up whatsapp steve uh didn't have my husband steve didn't have whatsapp on his phone and in order to authorize it he needed to get an sms and we didn't have a way for him to get an sms and i think we ended up turning on his other line temporarily hoping to just get it to sneak through but it took a couple of days for that to actually work a lot of experimentation so something we should have known about earlier yeah yeah yeah and so there is a so not to.
[32:38]Make this even more complicated but you you are an engineer so um there there is a hack that can work which is if you call your home carrier like at&t uh and you disable roaming all international data roaming on your account you say i don't want there to be any chance that i get data a data roaming charge turn it off at the core on my account all right and then and you have wi-fi calling right and.
[33:09]If you enable data through GigSky or a data sim in general, your Wi-Fi calling will still work. Okay. Because the phone thinks that the data connection operates like the Wi-Fi connection.
[33:27]So instead of, as long as you've got Wi-Fi enabled, for all intents and purposes.
[33:33]From a billing perspective, AT&T thinks you're at your house or you're on Wi-Fi.
[33:38]So i don't have to be at a restaurant having you know it asked the waitress for the uh uh for the wi-fi code there i'm i'm using gig sky for my data i'm on cell service but it thinks i'm on wi-fi calling would work that's right and so you can call so you could call so it thinks you're in the u.s i mean kind from a billing perspective the telco bills it as if you're still at home domestically and you can make you can dial regular you know us to us phone numbers or send and receive sms's because they they because they turn the sms's into ip traffic over wi-fi anyway like you can still like if you have no cellular connection but you're you're on wi-fi you can still send an sms so right anyway there are layers to this roaming roaming avoidance thing i did a i did a linkedin post a long time ago about this i'm happy to email you the oh yeah the pictures and the instruct instructions about how to do this now i want to i want to caveat that with like you know all telcos are different how they implement wi-fi calling is different um but i can speak from personal experience that this works on at&t um and work for me and it's how i travel internationally i just keep my at&t sim on but i but i tell at&t to disable.
[35:04]Data roaming and then i use gig sky very cool i'll send you some cool screenshots it's yeah yeah that's fun you should try that on your next trip yeah we're going to japan in april so i can try it again lovely perfect perfect perfect so i hope that wasn't too much you know no it was That's fantastic. That's exactly what I was hoping to hear. So now, I've chosen to use an eSIM before, but like I said, I just go to eSIMDB.com. I look for, I set it, I'm going to be gone for, you know, three weeks. Okay, let me set it to a month. I want 10 gigs of data. And I look at the prices and I pick one. And I happen to have picked you twice in a row. Thank you very much. But you want to talk about the difference in the providers that you see in these long lists. And so just start explaining that to us. yeah so this is like a this is the wild west for you know really so this is like.
[36:04]What the eSIM technology with the downloadability of SIM cards has done is it's digitized the people that used to sell you SIM cards when you got off the airplane, right? Okay, right. So if you, you know, traveled internationally in the pre-eSIM era, especially if you were going to places that were a little bit off the beaten path, as soon as you get out of the airport, there's like people coming up to you, you know, with SIM cards trying to get you to, you know, buy a local SIM card. I do remember doing that in India, except the problem was they had just gone to the nano SIM on the iPhone and the Indian providers didn't have nano SIMs, so none of us could get one. Right, right. So, you know, what's happened is that, you know, most companies, like pretty much all the companies that are out there that are doing this, what they do is they take a SIM from a telco.
[37:04]Like, say, Orange France, right? They then get a website, get an app, and they resell you the Orange France SIM card for Europe. And they when you say they get a sim card do you mean they get a physical card they get they get they get the like they get digital cards okay they get a you know they basically go to orange and they buy you know a thousand digital sim cards at a wholesale you know rate for the five gigabyte plan they mark it up and then they sell it to you over the internet okay they are not mobile operators all these companies are competitors none of them are mobile operators they're they're digital resellers of sim cards none you're the only real provider in the world so there there are like two or three that really that yes um that uh true phone is one.
[38:06]Um, and that's, you know, pretty much, pretty much it. Um, and so like the big ones, Aralo, Olafly, uh, you know, other folks that hang out on, on eSIMDB, for example, what they're doing is they're going to Orange France or they're going to China Mobile, or they're going to, you know, um.
[38:29]Whoever will sell them a, you know, an embedded SIM with a package associated with it. And then they just resell it, just like the person that used to, you know, sell SIM cards with prepaid with already credit, you know, on them preloaded that would sell to you when you got to the airport. Now, what this means is they don't, they don't have any idea what's happening to you on the network once you've got their SIM in there, because it's not their SIM.
[38:58]It's somebody else's SIM. They don't, all they can do is like swipe the credit card and you know go to a you know an api to to add the credit but they're not like they're not they don't even know exactly which like visited networks you might be in possibly they do possibly they don't they can't do anything to shift traffic if a network goes down they can't even reset the the like if you delete your esim accidentally or have an issue they can't like reset the sim or send you a new one it's that they're not a network operator we are a network operator so the gig sky sim that you download is is our sim you know we built it we've got um relationships with the you know mobile operators across the world to be able to provide the coverage but it's our sim you know we you know your subscriber data is on is on you know protected by gdpr on you know on our infrastructure you know we're an american company um we uh when when there are like outages or problems um we're able to like open and close networks so like if.
[40:11]Folks aren't having um if there's like an outage on three in the uk we can move the traffic to vodafone and keep you connected um when at&t had its string of outages uh this year there was a big one back in february yeah we were able to to to move um folks that were using us in the u.s onto, other networks so and keep them connected so i was i was bricked on my home at&t sim but my but gix guy still worked so we have redundancy that's it's built in there and um we try to optimize you know coverage and cost uh there's a lot of wide and i think we'll get into that some of your further questions but there's some like wide variation in costs of networks in different countries and stuff like that but we uh we have visibility into all of this um and we we've invested in in having care a care team as well that can access that stuff and be able to like solve these eSIM installation problems, you know, and troubleshoot, you know, whereas, you know, our competitors, it's just a different business model. They're not network operators, they're just reselling, and they can't really, they can't really help if there's a problem.
[41:22]Let me turn this into, flip it around, just because I understand the way the United States works. So we have Verizon and AT&T, and then would you call T-Mobile a network operator? Yeah. Okay. So they have their own separate network. They're not dependent on those. So let's say we have three.
[41:43]And does Gigsky exist as its own network operator here in the United States? Okay. So this is where we get into two distinctions. There is a mobile operator and then a mobile virtual network operator, um, versus that's one distinction. And then there's, uh, there's resellers. So, um, yeah.
[42:10]Mobile operator means, a mobile network operator technically means that you have your own carrier infrastructure. You've got towers. So AT&T's got towers, T-Mobile's got towers, Verizon's got towers. They have radios. They own the network.
[42:28]So the network, you know, this is a simplification, but basically consists of two parts. There's like the, the radios that are everywhere, like the towers, and then there's the, the network kind of core that takes the, the traffic and, you know, sends it off to the, to the internet or interconnects voice calls and stuff like that. So we do, we do not have the, we don't own like radios on, on towers.
[42:53]Right. We, we lease that from, from our suppliers, but we have our own core. So the traffic that, you know, your internet traffic is going through, you know, GigSky's data centers and out onto the internet. So sort of like a, you know, like a broadband, you know, internet provider. So that's how we operate. So but because, you know, we're monitoring the traffic and can see the, you know, have visibility into the stability of the network, because we receive, you know, kind of reports of, you know, where our users are around the world and how they're doing on the network, that enables us to, you know, do some things to mitigate kind of issues and have some insight into what could be causing a problem like, you know, Some parts of some countries have better connectivity on certain providers than other providers. And so, you know, being able to switch people onto the right network if they go to a corner of a country, for example, is some things that we can do. Our competitors who just are reselling another operator's SIM card, they don't, they just can't have that visibility.
[44:08]Okay, so that kind of explains the three tiers, at least in the United States. Yeah. That's interesting. It makes me want to ask all kinds of questions about cost. Why is it so cheap in other countries versus here? But maybe we'll circle back to that. Unless you want to jump in on that right now. You know, it's one of my favorite topics. Oh, it is? Okay. Well, one of my favorite topics is when my friends are coming to the U.S. from Europe and they say, hey, how do I get a cheap SIM card in the United States? And I just start laughing. I said, no, I know you can get it for a dollar in Zimbabwe, but you can't. Well, actually, Zimbabwe is another example. Not Zimbabwe. South Africa. but right here that's just something you can't really do right yeah so you know the the i mean in terms of so we so that so are you are you talking about like domestic, yeah text and data yeah i've got a friend coming from germany klaus wolf he's coming over from Germany. He wants to get a SIM card to work in the United States. Right.
[45:13]I suppose... If he's going to be here for a while, you know, there's, I mean, we, we just pay, we just pay more for telephony in the, in the U S than, than like Europeans do. Right. Part of that, part of that has to do with how the part of that has to do with geography. Part of that has to do with the per capita GDP of the U S versus European countries. Part of that has to do with, um the regulatory role that the you know how the u.s is sort of structured the regulated part of our telecommunications industry you know in terms of like um you know the how the the costs are apportioned and part of it is we have a really big country um with a lot of open space and um.
[46:10]You know it costs money to you know cover that open space with with networks and and stuff like that so there there is an element of that um you know in europe you know the eu i get it it's bigger than the u.s in terms of total population but with 28 countries in a land mass that's as densely populated as the eu is with you know 400 million or some odd people versus our you know 300 and some odd million people um each country in the eu probably has at least three mobile networks so you multiply 28 by three right right and it's that number of companies you know competition is a big thing we have for all intents and purposes three technically there's a fourth with dish um but they're really struggling to actually get get stood up here in the u.s in terms of building out their network um so it it it costs more you know here and as far as like inbound roaming um generally speaking.
[47:16]You know the the the roaming rates for the for the u.s um often are inbound into the u.s um the europeans tend to get get pretty good rates because they do send a lot of people okay here okay um and.
[47:32]Uh roaming rates in europe um are regulated by the european union and so you know europeans like don't pay like if you're in france and you go to germany you don't have to pay any extra to right right well but that's sort of like going from you know ohio to new jersey we don't pay any extra either right yes yes although you know getting into the questions of like eu federalism and stuff like that is a fascinating discussion probably.
[48:01]Should set that yeah yeah next we'll be talking about u.s politics okay maybe not um actually i'm looking at the gig sky uh page right now and 10 gigabytes is 26 bucks for 30 days in the united states so that's really that's actually a little less than i paid in uh to go travel in three countries in um in africa so that's actually not as bad as i thought yeah okay yeah let's get back to um well my the topic i wanted to jump into when i went to buy a sim card we we tried to find a sim card that would work in south africa botswana and zimbabwe and zimbabwe was never on the list we no matter how we looked at it we kept digging and i kept trying to find one and i find i found two companies arello was one of them and i forget the name of the other one who said that that worked there so we bought an extra sim they were it was cheap you know it was like nine dollars or something like that because we're only gonna be there for a few days and they didn't work when we got there Neither one of them worked.
[49:04]And to their credit, they gave us our money back when we asked for it. They went, you know, okay, my bad. What's wrong with Zimbabwe? Everybody there had cell phones. They had SIM cards. They were working. Why couldn't I get one? Well, you know, in Zimbabwe is one of those places where their mobile operators, for many different plausible potential reasons, are charging a very high rate to roam into Zimbabwe. Okay.
[49:39]So this tends to be a thing in, you know, highly autocratic countries. Zimbabwe being being one of them um and uh you know there there are a few countries like we have we have access to zimbabwe like we offer connectivity there but not to consumers um because it's um you know we have some some enterprise customers that can pay what we but we have to charge for it i mean it's like a lot of money okay so you could have it up there but it'd tell me I needed I didn't pay $900 to be there for four days or something. Right. Yeah. I just, we don't, we don't need, need that. Um, but that, that, that's kind of like the, it's, it's a bad luck. Um, and that has to do with, you know, our relationships and our supplier relationships and stuff like stuff like that. And there are just some parts of the world where that is the way it is. Um, um.
[50:37]Cuba was one of those places for a really long time, but, you know, you check us out, you know, we, we've got, we've been able to like crack the code in, in Cuba a little bit. And, um, uh, you know, we, we've been able to, to offer some, some good plans, um, in, in Cuba now, but really it kind of comes down to cost. And in countries where like the state and the only telco are fused together, those are often countries with pretty high, pretty high roaming rates. Interesting. We did learn a lot about the corruption of the government there, that things are just crazy.
[51:19]I mean, like education is mandatory, absolutely mandatory. You have to go to school and it costs money. You have to pay to have your kids go to school and it's a huge amount of money they've got over 80 percent unemployment there it's like right wait a minute how can you make it mandatory and then tell me i have to pay for you don't get to pick both and like yeah we can look at us yeah yeah and you know you you cross the border into botswana and all of a sudden like there's water for example literally right across the border you see farms and they're growing and everything's prosperous and on the zimbabwe side all the fields are dead because they can't get water because the government's corrupt yes yes so extend that to the government um either directly owning or indirectly owning the you know the one or two you know big telecommunications companies that are there okay and then imagine sitting on the other imagine sitting on the other side of the zimbabwean government to try to do a roaming deal and that's why and that's why if if you know air low sometimes there can be openings in the price so sometimes it's offered.
[52:27]But then if the, but then, you know, the, somebody changes their mind and then they jack up the price, then the network has to be shut off. So it could have been something like that. We kept trying in different areas. You know, we were in Victoria Falls, but then we were over in, I can't remember the name of the other place where we went to the painted dog reserve, but everywhere we tried it, it didn't work. And it's like, well, why did you sell me something that a hundred percent doesn't work? And they just went, okay, here's your money back. Sorry, my bad. Yeah. Yeah.
[52:59]It can happen. It probably had to do with their suppliers might have had something for a little while and then their suppliers no longer had something. But this is an example of the resellers not always being clued into what's happening. So if Erlo supplier had some telco, say in Africa or Europe, or the Middle East, Erlo's strong backing out of the UAE. So if like you know um etsy salat had at one point some good roaming rates for for zimbabwe then air low might have tried to sell that but if like you know uh zimbabwe which i think is like econet or something like that if econet and etsy salat have a spat then etsy salat closes the network but doesn't necessarily notify air low oh wow and then um and then you end up in the situation that you were in. So it was probably if you wanted connectivity in Zimbabwe, you'd have to go to the local shop if they sell to you. Yeah, that was one of the guides suggested, and I was like, ah, that's too much work. Yeah, we lived off of, oddly, hotel Wi-Fi was great there, so it worked out. So another question I had was, when you choose an eSIM, there's a massive disparity in cost between a data-only SIM and data and voice calling plans. What causes that?
[54:21]That has to do with how the big telcos price the roaming minutes, the voice minutes between one another.
[54:32]So, you know, in the kind of secondary, you can sort of think of the eSIM roaming market as the secondary roaming market. And um the the primary roaming market being like at&t you know roaming on vodafone and like their agreements that they have with each other um you know at 18 is an at&t subscriber you're not really um you're not really seeing what those agreements are and if you did you'd be shocked at the margin that you're you're being charged um but because you're just paying the whatever 12 a day or you know whatever it is but um there are you know agreements where the data rates are set at a at a like a a per megabyte rate like each megabyte costs you know x amount um voice minutes uh are are the same and as the as voice traffic has diminished over the years um in the some corners of the of the roman industry the cost of voice traffic has has risen to sort of offset the, the the down that's sort of the opposite of supply and demand there's plenty of supply so and no demand so the price went up yeah yeah and and also you know also they use.
[55:54]It's a trade right so also in the in the bilateral negotiations um you know they'll, they'll uh they might jack the price of voice in order to you know get a better rate for data and there's there's horse trading that's going on this is all kind of between like the the big the big telcos we participate in this you know to to varying degrees um but we don't do voice traffic you know we focus on on data because there are just some complexities with okay so you don't even you don't even offer voice no we don't okay okay but with your little hack we can get around that use our home phone oh no that's right that's right and that's one of the reasons why we don't um offer voice voice um you know gets you into sort of more regulated, the more heavily regulated telco space and it just creates a you know regulatory burden for us to manage and we think that people are pretty happy using whatsapp and using you know imessenger and stuff like that so we don't we don't mess with it but yeah that's what accounts for the cost of voice. Okay, that's interesting. So, oh, I did actually answer my last question already about eSIM data versus in the United States versus Europe was going to be my last question, but I accidentally asked that one sooner. Is there anything else you want people to know?
[57:14]Yeah, so I guess, you know, I've talked about, you know, the kind of, you know, we're not, not all eSIM providers are the same. Some are, many are resellers. Some are, some are not. Some, you know, run their own network. So that's a, that's a distinction that a lot of people, you know, don't necessarily see. It's kind of transparent to the user, but it does matter in critical situations. The other thing is, because we're, you know, we are our own operator, we can do some unique things. So like, we have worked with Cellular at Sea to offer cruise plans.
[57:53]So you can now, we're on over 200 cruise ships around the world with, we like to call it the surf and turf plan. So you can uh so you can get a single package from us that works on the ship as well as on shore, and when you add up the costs on a on a cruise if you're on like a seven-day cruise and you've got four ports of call then um you know if you add up the wi-fi cost plus you know you're you might be doing excursions on shore for about four hours but then you'll get a full day charge from your home operator just for that that day you start to add up those costs it starts to look to be really expensive to stay connected so um you know we we think we've uh you know got a great option for um for people who want to stay connected while cruising and um because you have to be a real mobile operator to be able to get that set up um you know we're we're kind of leading the uh the e-sim cruising space it's uh it's just us it's so i'm kind of confused on how that's working i thought that you could only get uh the wi-fi on the ship was usually uh just um sorry satellite service so there so so uh there are companies out there that have installed cellular radios.
[59:17]Like alongside the wi-fi radio so that there's a cellular network that's running on the think of like little mini cell towers throughout the throughout the ship and then it's all it's all still backhauled over satellite it's going it's getting off the ship via satellite it's just that you can connect to it over a cellular connection versus wi-fi and the quality of service is usually a lot better because of the frequencies that cellular uses you know wi-fi you there's a lot of metal and stuff on a cruise ship and so like you know if you're in the wrong spot you're in the wrong cabin trying to use wi-fi in a cruise ship it can create problems so um cellular is more reliable and um you know we think we're able to deliver it in a really cost-effective way so for your for the cruising public um you know check out our cruising plans and see if that helps uh yeah save some money over the why would the cruise ships offer that because it seems to me one of the highest money makers maybe next to the alcohol rates on a cruise is the cellular service.
[1:00:23]Or the the wi-fi i'm sorry wi-fi service yeah my service yeah well i mean there there's sort of like, different use cases for different types of users you know i think that um there's a, there there's probably you know when it was only wi-fi trying to keep to the the high price point like for um folks that that really needed uh like a lot of data like the wi-fi made sense and the cruise ships could charge a lot for that because they're giving them like a lot of data that sort of bulk bandwidth access um but you know for folks that um maybe just wanted to stay connected you know have you know messenger access really you know have you know check email kind of do that that kind of thing um some you know social media stuff but they aren't they're not like gaming while they're on the cruise ship sure a cellular connection streaming um a cellular connection was the right like uh you know mid a mid to low level data user is probably better are served by the cellular connection.
[1:01:40]We were able to work with folks that had worked this with the cruise lines, and so we're offering these packages. And the nice thing about it is you have the single data package that works on land also. Yeah, you're not messing around. You're avoiding your roaming charge to your home operator as well. Right, right. Which helps it work. So, yeah, check that out. That's fascinating. I'm not a big cruise fan, but we did do one in Australia many years ago, and it was a horrible experience. The Wi-Fi was just a nightmare. That was not the fun. It's getting better with Starlink and the low orbit, low altitude satellites and stuff. It's been pretty disruptive, but it's still not quite like being on land on a 5G connection. Astronomers can't see any celestial objects anymore, but we've got cellular, so it's great. That's right. That's right. Exactly. That's what really matters. Sam, this was really fun, really informative. I expected to learn a little, but I ended up learning an awful lot of things about this that I didn't know at all before. So I would assume people should go to gigsky.com to buy their eSIMs. Does it matter to you whether we go to a place like eSIMDB.com? Probably pay a little bit. We can sometimes get discount codes there, so that's kind of nice.
[1:02:59]Yeah. I mean, you know, you can go to eSIMDB, you can come directly to us. I think the other thing is if you happen to be a Visa credit card holder and you have a signature and infinite Visa card, you can get some additional discounts from us as well. Okay. It's a nice partnership that we've done with Visa. Yeah. Now, if I had started this interview and never looked for your service before, I would have assumed that you were much higher priced than all of these resellers. But it turns out the reason I chose you was because it was a competitive price. And it gave me a good price for a long time. That was the thing I really needed, was I needed to straddle a lot of time in both of those last two trips. And you gave us a lot of data. Now, I ran through 10 gig in 23 days. But it worked out okay because Steve didn't run through 10 gig, his 10 gig. He used about eight and I was able to tether off of him. And the fact that I could tether, that was a huge differentiator because you didn't used to get that when you bought an eSIM. You couldn't tether. And not being able to tether, that just cut off two of my three devices I was carrying. So it really worked well for us. Yeah, we believe in freedom to tether. So you'll never get a tethering, even on our unlimited planes, you can tether.
[1:04:23]Very cool. Next time I have trouble with AT&T when I'm in Texas and the entire network shuts down. Actually, my son's house has no AT&T service at all. Like, zero. And so maybe I should get a GigSky card and then it'll just jump over to some other network while I'm there. Check it out and see. Check it out. There's got to be something there for us to connect to it.
[1:04:47]But yeah, feel free to give us a try. I think you probably, if he's got a sell signal from somebody else, it'll, it'll work there. That might be fun. Yeah. I'm not sure there's any sell signal where he lives, but it's worth a shot. In that case, I think Mr. Musk would be willing to sell him a, you know, Starlink for, for the house now. Sure. Sure. That's, that's available. And that's kind of interesting too. Right. Well, thanks a lot, Sam. Really appreciate you coming on and look forward to that link from you for the LinkedIn article for that hack. That, that sounds like the hot ticket right there. Absolutely. Allison, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Well, that's going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at alison at podfee.com anytime you like? If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over. Remember, everything good starts with podfee.com. You can follow me on Mastodon. Where? Podfee.com slash Mastodon. If you want to listen to the podcast on YouTube, you can go to podfee.com slash YouTube. If you want to join in the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfee.com slash Slack, where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely Nocilla castaways. You can support the show at podfee.com slash Patreon, or with a one-time donation at podfeet.com slash PayPal, like Philip and George. 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 Nosilla Castaways. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed. Boy, that's a lot of vocal fry.
[1:06:12]Well, that's going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at alison at podfeet.com anytime you like? If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over. Remember, everything good starts with podfee.com. You can follow me on Mastodon. We're podfee.com slash Mastodon. If you want to listen to the podcast on YouTube, you can go to podfee.com slash YouTube. If you want to join in the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfee.com slash Slack, where you talk to me and all of the other lovely Nosilla castaways. You can support the show at podfee.com slash Patreon, or with a one-time donation at podfee.com slash PayPal, like Philip and George. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic.
[1:06:55]Music.