NC_2025_02_20
This episode covers CES innovations with Gözde Büyük Acaroğlu on Vivoo’s health tech, critiques of Apple’s UI, and Adam Angst from TidBITS sharing writing tips and AI's role in tech journalism.
Automatic Shownotes
Chapters
0:00
NC_2025_02_20
0:42
CES 2025: Vivoo At-Home Urinalysis for Health and Wellness
9:56
Are Apple’s Gestures Getting More Fiddly, Or Is It Just Me?
25:37
CES 2025: xTool Desktop Laser Cutters/Engravers
34:30
Bodie Grimm on Insta360 Link Al-powered 4K Webcam (no blog post)
49:46
Support the Show
50:18
CCATP #809 — Adam Engst on Writing with an Editor and Grammarly
Long Summary
In this episode, we dive into the latest innovations from CES with an enlightening discussion featuring Gözde Büyük Acaroğlu from Vivoo, a company specializing in at-home health testing solutions. Gözde introduces us to Vivoo's urine testing strip, which has been in the market for over five years. This product allows users to urinate on a strip, scan it with an app, and receive insights on various health metrics like hydration levels, pH balance, and specific vitamins. The app doesn’t merely display results; it also provides dietary recommendations to help users improve their health based on individual data, a feature that stands out in the wellness market.
Gözde elaborates on Vivoo's commitment to education, ensuring users understand what each metric means and how it relates to their nutritional requirements. She highlights the company’s recent foray into women’s health with innovative products designed to track ovulation, pregnancy, and hormone levels through urine analysis. By empowering users with all this knowledge, Vivoo positions itself as a valuable ally for those making conscious choices about their health and wellness.
Next, my conversation turns to the intricate world of Apple’s user interface, where I express my frustrations with the plethora of gestures introduced in their latest operating systems. I recount annoying instances where simple tasks become cumbersome due to gesture misfires, particularly on devices such as the iPhone and Mac. I discuss the evolving challenges in navigating Control Center and context-sensitive commands like Siri, which often result in unintended activations. Through a blend of personal anecdotes and critical commentary, I explore the fine line between user-friendly design and gesture fatigue, questioning whether convenience has been sacrificed in the name of innovation.
Bringing the episode to a close, we invite Adam Angst from TidBITS to share insights on the art of writing and editing in the context of technology journalism. We dive into the processes and tools that enhance effective writing, including the use of AI-powered applications like Grammarly. Adam shares his experiences of how the service has transformed his workflow by providing real-time suggestions, enhancing clarity, and maintaining his unique voice. We discuss the impact of AI on the editing process and the balance between utilizing technology and preserving authenticity in writing.
Join us as we navigate through impactful health technology, dissect interaction intricacies with Apple’s devices, and reflect on the evolution of writing in the modern tech landscape. Each segment is designed to offer viewers insightful perspectives and the latest trends in health and technology, equipping them with actionable knowledge and tips to enhance their personal and professional lives.
Gözde elaborates on Vivoo's commitment to education, ensuring users understand what each metric means and how it relates to their nutritional requirements. She highlights the company’s recent foray into women’s health with innovative products designed to track ovulation, pregnancy, and hormone levels through urine analysis. By empowering users with all this knowledge, Vivoo positions itself as a valuable ally for those making conscious choices about their health and wellness.
Next, my conversation turns to the intricate world of Apple’s user interface, where I express my frustrations with the plethora of gestures introduced in their latest operating systems. I recount annoying instances where simple tasks become cumbersome due to gesture misfires, particularly on devices such as the iPhone and Mac. I discuss the evolving challenges in navigating Control Center and context-sensitive commands like Siri, which often result in unintended activations. Through a blend of personal anecdotes and critical commentary, I explore the fine line between user-friendly design and gesture fatigue, questioning whether convenience has been sacrificed in the name of innovation.
Bringing the episode to a close, we invite Adam Angst from TidBITS to share insights on the art of writing and editing in the context of technology journalism. We dive into the processes and tools that enhance effective writing, including the use of AI-powered applications like Grammarly. Adam shares his experiences of how the service has transformed his workflow by providing real-time suggestions, enhancing clarity, and maintaining his unique voice. We discuss the impact of AI on the editing process and the balance between utilizing technology and preserving authenticity in writing.
Join us as we navigate through impactful health technology, dissect interaction intricacies with Apple’s devices, and reflect on the evolution of writing in the modern tech landscape. Each segment is designed to offer viewers insightful perspectives and the latest trends in health and technology, equipping them with actionable knowledge and tips to enhance their personal and professional lives.
Brief Summary
In this episode, we discuss the latest innovations from CES with Gözde Büyük Acaroğlu of Vivoo, who shares insights on their urine testing strip that provides health metrics and personalized dietary advice through an app. We then delve into the challenges of Apple’s user interface, as I express frustrations with gesture complexities. Finally, we welcome Adam Angst from TidBITS, who shares tips on writing and editing in tech journalism, highlighting the impact of AI tools like Grammarly. This episode offers valuable perspectives on health technology, user experience, and effective writing.
Tags
CES
innovations
Gözde Büyük Acaroğlu
Vivoo
urine testing strip
health metrics
personalized dietary advice
Apple
user interface
tech journalism
AI tools
Grammarly
Transcript
[0:00]
NC_2025_02_20
[0:00]Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the No Silicast Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Thursday, February 20th, 2025, and this is show number 1033. Since today is Thursday, that is your hint that there will be no live show this coming Sunday. Zoe, that means you can get to bed at a reasonable hour this weekend. We have a couple of fun interviews from CES. we've got an article by me, and we've got Bodhi Grimm talking about a very interesting AI-powered 4K webcam. We'll wind up with Chit Chat Across the Pond with Adam Angst, all about writing with an editor and Grammarly.
[0:42]
CES 2025: Vivoo At-Home Urinalysis for Health and Wellness
[0:42]Medical health is obviously something every single person is interested in, and the company Vivu has some at-home testing that I've never seen anything like before. So I'm here with Gyoze, and she's going to say her last name for me. Okay. I'm Gözde Büyük Acaroğlu. It's a really difficult surname, I know. It's also really difficult in my home country too, by the way. Okay. It's awesome. Where are you from? I'm from Istanbul, Turkey. Oh, wow. Okay, great. So let's talk about what you've got. And by the way, this is an audio podcast as well as video. So describe what you have in your hands. Okay. Can you give my phone? So this is a home urine test. It's only available on the market like more than five years. So basically... This is a piece of paper with some colored squares on the strip on the end of it. So you have to urinate on it and then take a test from the app. It looks like that.
[1:34]So she's tapping on an app and it's going to tell us to urinate on it. Wait 90 seconds and then scan this strip. It looks like that. And what kind of data can we get from this? So let me show. So after you scan it, you can see your water consumption level, your pH, your ketone, calcium, magnesium, vitamin C, sodium, oxidase, the same protein. And we are not just showing the data because let's say my urine magnesium is low, but what does urine magnesium mean in the first place? So we are giving some educational content. We are showing your history like that. So you can see like if it's going down. Oh, and does it show you what you should eat? in order to fix it? Yes, so we are not providing supplements and etc. We are basically telling you what you eat or what you don't eat to improve your data. So it's basically like we are giving nutritional advice based on your results and some metrics that we asked to you. And basically it's a personalized advice and you can learn your body, what they need, and you can consume your pulse based on that data. This is great. One of my complaints, I always talk about sleep data, is they never tell you what to do about it. You just know, boy, you didn't sleep. But this tells you what to do about it. Now you said this strip has been around for a long time. What is it called?
[2:56]It's called Vivo Wellness Test. It's available. Dance wellness test wellness test sorry sorry for the pronunciation no no problem so basically it's available on like amazon our website on sam's club target we are on retail and online too so basically so these are disposable obviously yes just single use okay all right but now you've got some other products out here that do some of the same thing but not in a disposable strip yes so this year we launch women's health product so basically um there are so much like the period tracker apps on the market and you can track your period you can learn your ovulation levels with the mathematical calculations but also we are providing atom protein test atom ovulation test and pregnancy test it looks like that we are measuring lh uh hg and so this is a very thin long strip yes again you pee on it yes pee on it or pee and dip it and then take a test from here.
[3:58]Like that she's working in the app she's opened up the ovulation test i didn't know that from urine you could find out if somebody was ovulating ah yes of course but think about the pregnancy test it's also urine based too because sure i just didn't know in the urine okay but i didn't know that was true of ovulation i thought it was only temperature and you were kind of a guideline, Basically, urine is like a really good resourceful waste of our body. There are more than like 30,000 biomarkers in the urine. It's just like the need when we develop the measurement methodologies of that hormones, biomarkers, and everything else, you can learn so much from your urine. I've been ignoring it all these years. And it's so easy to use. You have to pee on it like every day about five times. It's not like the blood test. It's so accessible. So, after pion it, you can scan from the app, like that, from here. Oh, she's holding the strip up to the camera on her phone in the app. She's having to do a backwards and blind there, so it's a little tricky. But that step would go through and analyze it to tell you...
[5:12]Like ovulation so you can see your level is it high or low you can see your pregnancy like the is it your negative or positive with the pregnancy test and you can also learn your fertility level based on the at-home test too so it's so it's really important for the woman who wants to pregnant or not to be pregnant both yes both both are important at certain times so uh the fertility level what is that measuring so um it's measuring and hormone and it shows the quality of your ex basically so if you are like the more than 30 35 years old basically menopause is a question or if you want to have a children or something else the quality of the eggs are really important so basically and all in all in the urine yes you just you don't eat and dip it that's all we can do everything else that's amazing okay so what else do you have we launched our smart our first version of the smart toilet like a two years ago so this is the version 2 it look like that. You can put on the bathrooms. On the toilet? Yeah, on the toilet. And then you can click on the test button and then we capture the urine and that's all. You can see your result from the app. You don't have to do anything. Just click on the test button and see your result. So now you don't need to use the little paper sticks? No, nothing else.
[6:31]It looks like that. You can see the water consumption, hydration level from the app. So this is what all of these tests too or it's just for the hydration it's a starting point for us and in the like next years we will develop more parameters too very good very good now you're you're gonna stick me and take my blood now we're done with the easy stuff what are you doing here so this is our first blood test it's really important for us because all these years we work on the urine but this is our first blood test so you can take your blood from your finger like that and she's got a little tiny thing looks like a USB stick and it's got a little prick thing in it. There is a needle here.
[7:11]Uh, so you can get the needle here, put it here and you can take your blood. So with this, she's got another piece here. Yes. Okay. You can open it and put your finger here. This capillary tube, take your blood. Oh, okay. And then you can put it there. These are boxes.
[7:35]And wait 20 minutes after 20 minutes you just scan from the our application that's all so the camera looks at this ptl2 you said yes so here when you take blood uh the disc the blood will like collapse yes based on the inflammation level on your body the velocity is really important because the velocity shows us the your inflammation level it means we will measure the distance here and you can see your inflammation level from an app. Inflammation. Okay, very good. So I've got to ask you about the security of all this data that's floating around. So I've just put in something about my fertility is in this app and I'm living in a state where maybe that's going to cause me physical harm. How are you protecting my data? So first of all, we are following all data security rules like HIPAA. There's a compliance called HIPAA. HIPAA, right. Yes. So we are following every rule about it. We are also following the ICO regulations about data security too. So in our, like the data is the, basically we are dealing with it and it's really important. And we understand how important the health data is. So everything is encrypted and we are basically compliant with the loss of GDPR all over the world. And also state GDPRs like the California Act too. And basically.
[9:00]We are encrypted everything, we are not selling your data, this is not our business model. Thank you. This is not our business model and we are not planning to do that. We are just basically developing more product with your data. Doing the analysis of it? Yes. Basically, when you urinate on the C-trips, based on your urine results, we are giving the personalized advice. So we are using your urine to give you more feedback about it. But that data is still my data. Not your day. It's my day. Yes. Basically, if you are getting that advice, it's based on your day, not mine. There you go. All right, Gildi, this was very interesting. I've never seen anything like this. This is fantastic. So where would people find Vivoo products? From our website, vivoo.io, from Amazon. And if they are in the United States, please go to the Sam's Club or Target stores. We are all over the United States right now. And it's spelled V-I-V-O-O. Very good. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, too.
[9:56]
Are Apple’s Gestures Getting More Fiddly, Or Is It Just Me?
[9:59]Is it just me, or does it seem like Apple has added so many gestures to their operating systems that triggering the wrong thing is a constant annoyance? I'm seeing this gesture fiddliness on almost all of Apple's platforms. Let me kind of elaborate by going through a few of the ones I've logged in just the last couple of days. On the Mac, in the upper right of the menu bar, we have the time and then two little switches. I can't tell you how often I click on the wrong thing. Usually, I'm just trying to get to Control Center to maybe look at Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or something, but I click on the time instead of the switches. When I click on the time, a whole bunch of stuff seems to fly in from the right. I'm not even sure how it chooses what to show me. As I was writing this up, I could see notifications from GPT, mail, and my ring devices with an offer of 11 more categories of notifications. I could see various widgets I have not configured myself, including a calendar, weather, a world clock, and top stories from the news app.
[10:55]If I scroll, I can see even more widgets that I don't care about. Annoyed, I click away and then more intentionally click on the little switches to get to Control Center. Maybe you have no problem remembering to click on the switches rather than the date. Maybe it's just me. I don't know. But lately, Control Center itself is even more fiddly for me on the iPhone. I've been using an iPhone since there was an iPhone, so I know how these things work. Control Center is activated on an iPhone without a home button, which, by the way, is all of them as of right now. Anyway, you swipe down from the upper right. While this worked perfectly for the last several versions of iOS, now I find that at least 30% of the time, I get the notification screen instead. Now, I know notifications is activated by swiping down from the center, not the right, yet I'm getting it anyway when I swipe somewhat on the right. I'm wondering whether maybe they narrowed the area that's considered on the right with iOS 18. I'm not sure what's causing this.
[11:53]But after I see the notification screen that I didn't ask for, I swipe back up in the center to make notifications go away. Even if I swipe down from the far right, my troubles aren't over. When Apple introduced what sounded like a good feature, multiple control center pages, it also introduced more fragile gestures. Now, I was wondering whether maybe I'm swiping too vigorously, but instead of getting to the normal control center items, you know, things like network, volume, brightness, the swipe gesture takes me to the music section of Control Center. If you know me, I never ever want to go to anything about music. Sometimes my swipe takes me all the way down to the home section of Control Center, which is all the way down on the third page. While the home section is more useful to me than music, I just don't want it to look at Bluetooth. I kept experimenting with this gesture, trying various levels of enthusiasm, and it looks like it's not the speed with which you swipe, it's what you do when you come to a stop with your swipe. Before lifting your finger, but after you've come to a stop, you can slowly move your finger up and down to move between the different pages of Control Center. While I'm glad I figured out how to control Control Center, this isn't the most intuitive, easy to learn, or repeatable set of gestures.
[13:07]Now, while I'm not going to make fun of Siri for how simple-minded it is or how it accidentally triggers on all of my devices when it thinks I've called it for help, but I will complain about how recent gesture changes trigger it even more often. A macOS Sequoia, a double tap of the command key, launches Type to Siri. It's a lovely little window that pulses through various pastel shades while it waits for you, and it floats right below the menu bar on the right. One of the tips that popped up right after the upgrade of the OS was that you could ask at things about macOS. I thought, okay, surely it knows what's going on inside the operating system. So I tested it by asking it how to find a particular item in system settings. And it answered by saying it had found some articles on the web about the subject. Seriously, really? You don't even know what's in system settings? Well, none of us do either. Anyway, that was the last time I intentionally triggered Type to Siri by double tapping the command key when I was experimenting with it. But I have to tell you, at least two to three times a week I'll be feverishly typing up an article or an email or maybe a witty post on Mastodon when suddenly no characters are spitting out on my application of choice. That's because Type to Siri has been triggered and has hijacked my keyboard input. It's not that hard to hit the escape key to hide Type to Siri, but I wish I knew what I was doing that makes it think I'm double-tapping the command key.
[14:26]And macOS is not the only place I accidentally trigger Siri. On iOS 18, at the bottom of the screen, there's a black bar Apple calls the Home Indicator. Swiping up on the Home Indicator takes you to the Home Screen. You can swipe side to side to get to other screens as well. But with iOS 18, if you double tap on the Home Indicator, it triggers Type to Siri. Just like with macOS, it pulses in lovely pastel shades. I intentionally triggered Type to Siri on iOS exactly once to test it so I was sure I knew how it worked. However, at least once a week, I trigger Type to Siri accidentally when trying to swipe up to get to the home screen.
[15:05]Remember when Steve Jobs was so adamant about having the fewest number of buttons on devices that were designed by Apple? When customers complained that the Apple mouse only had one button instead of two, they sarcastically gave us a no-button mouse. While that purist perspective is problematic for usability, it's far easier to go too far the other way. The iPhone 16 now has five buttons where it used to have three and one toggle. While the functionality and choice we have now are in some ways improvements with these extra buttons, it's now much easier to trigger the wrong thing. I was pleased when they added the action button on the left above the up-down volume buttons with iPhone 15, replacing the simple mute toggle. The action button is user-definable, which gives us great freedom to use it for what we want the most. On the iPhone 15, I assigned it to launch the camera app, while others used it for triggering a shortcut, and still others set it to give them the mute switch they still needed. When the iPhone 16 came out with camera control, don't call it a button button, I changed the action button to launch ChatGPT, so now I have a button for launching the camera and one for ChatGPT. It's great!
[16:14]But now I have a gesture problem. I use a spy belt to hold my phone flat against my belly when I'm exercising, washing my car, doing other kinds of chores. If I need to turn the volume up on my podcasts say while I'm using my leaf blower or my power washer to clean off the driveway, I'd rather not have to pull the phone out. I've learned to always put the phone in the spy belt oriented in the same way. I put the screen facing my belly so the zipper opening and closing can't scratch the display, and then I have the top of the phone is always to my left. This means the volume buttons are always across the bottom so I know where they are.
[16:49]But now there are three buttons, so I have to feel each button, count them, and then identify which one's the middle or right button to go volume up or down. It's not hard, but it used to be easier when there were only two buttons there. Now let's talk about camera control. It's a great idea, but it's probably the fiddliest set of gestures anything Apple has invented of late. It's supposed to be a reasonably quick way to take a picture. If the phone is asleep, you click it once and the phone wakes up with the lock screen and any notifications visible. Click it again, and it launches the camera app. Click it again, and it finally takes a picture. Now, you might think if you hold the camera control down instead of clicking, you'd be taken right to the camera app. But that doesn't work. Instead, a long hold on camera control launches something that looks like a camera. But it's called visual intelligence. And by the way, this only exists if you have Apple Intelligence enabled. You can have it enabled, and you have enabled it in Settings, Apple Intelligence, and Siri. So if Apple Intelligence is on for your whole phone, this visual intelligence thing exists. So I said it looks like the camera because you see your surroundings from the camera and it has a familiar shutter button. But it also has on-screen buttons on either side that say Ask and Search. You can take a picture with visual intelligence and then choose Ask or Search, or you can select either option without taking a photo. Ask will ask ChatGPT what the camera is seeing.
[18:16]I want you to remember some of the marketing about Apple Intelligence. Remember they made a big deal that if you asked Siri a hard question and it needed ChatGPT's help, it would always ask you first for permission to talk to ChatGPT. Yeah, well, with Visual Intelligence, it doesn't ask permission. It just does it without asking. I don't personally mind that, but you think having something in the camera's view being sent to ChatGPT would be possibly something even more private than something you asked with your voice? I mean, I don't know, am I misinterpreting that? Don't get me wrong. I am a fan of visual intelligence. I wanted to replace an appliance the other day. I pointed my phone at the old appliance, held down camera control, and tapped the second button that says search. This launched a Google image search and shows me several linked images where I could immediately buy the product. I tapped on the Amazon link, tapped buy now, and a few hours later, the replacement appliance arrived at my house. Talk about instant gratification. it could not have been easier.
[19:17]My point is that it's a very cool feature, but I can't tell you how many times I want to take a picture of our adorable new puppy, Kepler, and instead I've accidentally held the camera button down too long and evoked visual intelligence instead. It's frustrating and a bit confusing when you just want to pop open the camera to take a spontaneous photo. I tested turning off all of Apple intelligence, and that does enable the camera app to be launched directly with a single click from an unlocked iPhone. But I don't want to disable Apple intelligence, so instead I live with the camera control long-click confusion. Now camera control has a lot more tricks up its sleeve. If you're very gentle and very intentional, it is possible to very lightly double-press the camera control button. You'll feel the teeniest bit of haptic feedback indicating changes in the camera modes. Initially, it pops up a little menu to switch between exposure compensation, depth of field, continuous zoom, cameras like 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 5x in the front-facing camera. It also switches to styles and tones. If by some chance you successfully bring up this menu without taking an accidental photo of your foot, sliding your finger along camera control lets you choose one of those modes. Slide gently though. Let's say you choose the continuous zoom option. At this point, you can slide your finger again to change the Zoom.
[20:38]Let's be realistic. By the time you've gone this far into the menus, you will have at least 11 photos of your feet. It's far, far easier to tap the on-screen buttons to select exposure compensation or to drag your finger, say, across the camera options to get that continuous zoom wheel to come up between the different cameras. It's much easier to mess with styles by dragging your finger around on the little grid than it is to try to invoke styles and tone as independent numerical values in camera control. Every single one of these controls is easier to invoke using the on-screen buttons, and you will get far fewer photos of your feet. I say hardly any photos because even though I don't use camera control to get all these nifty features I just described, I still get pictures of, I don't know, the inside of my jacket, the carpet, or my feet. I try to blame them on Steve because we use shared photo library, but at least 70% of the photos we have in our shared photo library of feet are taken from my phone.
[21:34]Now, I do realize that in accessibility, you can make some changes to exactly how hard you have to press and whether you swipe or light press, and I have not found a way to make any of those make it less fiddly for me. You know the side button that with a single press puts your phone to sleep and wakes it up? That's always been the most reliable button on the iPhone. I don't even mind that it does double duty as a way to invoke Siri with a long press. What I do mind is how often I try to put the phone to sleep and I accidentally squeeze and that causes the volume up button to get on the opposite side and take a screenshot. I don't even try to blame those on Steve.
[22:14]Well, I was going to complain about the iPad because I was afraid maybe it was feeling left out, but I have very few quibbles with it. I do have one app that doesn't respect the top center of the screen where those three dots are. The three dots invoke a menu to go into split screen or slide over. I never intentionally use them, so I'm always surprised when I accidentally invoke that drop-down menu when I'm just trying to scroll up in that one app. But I don't think I can blame iPadOS for that since it's only the one app that misbehaves for me.
[22:43]Now, the Apple Watch is not going to get off that easy. In watchOS 10, gestures have gotten even more mysterious than they used to be, and they've always been kind of mysterious. Unless you have an Ultra, the Apple Watch only has two buttons so far, the side button and the digital crown. The number of gestures is baffling, and I blame it on the simplicity of the buttons. So I'm honestly not sure if having fewer buttons is a better way to go right after I've complained about too many buttons. The gesture fiddliness that's been hitting me lately has to do with when I'm in the middle of a workout. The watch face is happily, the workouts app is happily showing me all of the metrics for my current workout. Then I see a notification and I don't tap it in time to read it. I should keep concentrating on my workout, but usually my curiosity gets the best of me. For ages, I would simply single click the digital crown, which would take me to the clock face. Then I could swipe down to see my notifications and tap on the one I wanted to read.
[23:39]Now if I single-click the digital crown while I'm at a workout, it takes me to a screen that shows the time and date on the top half and a set of little flippable cards for my open apps on the lower half. This screen is called the Smart Deck, which is also available by sliding up on the main clock face with your finger or rotating on the digital crown from the clock face. Now, I'm not against the Smart Stack as a concept, but why am I seeing it when a single-click on the digital crown used to take me to the watch face. I tend to be flummoxed by this for a moment and just stare at it wondering why I got this, and eventually it occurs to me to try clicking the digital crown again to the watch face. So to recap, if I want to navigate to a notification while viewing a workout on the watch, I have to click the digital crown once, then I have to click it again, then I have to swipe down, and only then can I tap on the notification I wanted to see. It's one extra step inserted for no reason that I can discern. Now, just to ensure this is intentionally fiddly, if you open workouts, but you're not actively running a workout, hitting the digital crown does take you directly to the watch face.
[24:45]Well, all right, bottom line it now. I know this was just a big old 15-minute wine fest, and maybe it's just me. But I suspect others may be falling into gesture madness, too. If you've got gestures that are driving you bananas on your devices, I'd love to hear about them so I don't feel so alone. After I posted my article on the fiddliness of Apple gestures, SumoCat on Mastodon let me know that you can remove items from Control Center on iPhone. I think I knew that, but I didn't even think about trying to remove the music option, and it worked much better than I thought it would. When I went to the music section, I also realized it's actually a now playing widget, which also includes podcasts. I still don't need that, though. To my delight, after I removed that widget, it, the entire screen with the little music notes also disappeared. Yay! Thanks to SumoCat.
[25:37]
CES 2025: xTool Desktop Laser Cutters/Engravers
[25:41]So I just ran into a good friend of the show, author of his own show, The Digital Media Zone, Richard Gunther, and he is at the X-Tool booth. But first, I'm going to say hi to Richard. How are you doing, Richard? Hey, it's great to run into you again, Allison. So he told me that one of his passions is engraving and 3D printing, and Kerry Young is going to talk to us about what Xtool is. I've never seen anything like this. Okay, so Xtool is a laser company. We have several different laser modules. We are considered, or Xtool is considered, a desktop laser, which means you can put it on a desktop, a workbench, something like that. We have everything from a CO2 laser, diode lasers, and fiber lasers. This laser right here is a diode laser and a fiber laser, so this is a dual laser. Now, why would I care about two different kinds of lasers? I understand that they are different, but why would I want one over the other? Different laser types to different materials. So, it depends on what you want to do to what type of laser you want to do it with. Okay. So, the box we're looking at is like maybe a double height Keurig size is the way I'd describe it. There we go. This is an audio podcast as well as video. So, it's a glowing green box here, and there's nothing inside, but I see a bunch of really nifty stuff down on the table. Can you show us a couple of the things that have been made with this? All right, so this machine right here, we have done a two-tone leather bookmark.
[27:05]So what it does is it engraves off the leather top and it reveals the silver or gold underneath. These are the anodized aluminum business cards, so they're really, really thin. And it's got a dragon on it. This one has a dragon on it. That's really cool. Do you have one of those, Richard? In fact, my engraving business cards are made on those. Wow, that is not a plant. Well, it is, but I did not know he would say yes to that. Okay, I see a really cool like Christmas scene back here. All right, so this is a wood layered item. So what you do is you cut out each of the different layers and then you place them together and glue them for a scene. So then you get a multi-layered 3D look scene. I see. So the back layer, say, is this light brown wood and then you've got some reddish wood of the trees that are in front. You got a little white reindeer out in front. That is really, really pretty. That's all done with this engraving tool. It is. We also have slate coasters okay and so there are two different kinds of engraving on slate so you have surface engraving if you change your settings you can get different shading.
[28:16]And then this one is considered embossed so it's basically a relief engraving that takes a higher power laser and that is the one that will take the fiber laser oh okay so fiber is the highest power? No, so every type of laser has different levels of... So this one is a 20 watt. This one over here is a 10 watt. Okay, oh, you've got a littler one behind you. I'm going to sneak around. Steve, can you see this little bitty one back here? That one is more the size of a small Keurig.
[28:49]Measuring everything, right? And I have that at home. You have the little one. Okay, and that's 10 It's a 10 watt diode and a 2 watt, IR or fiber laser. So what you're getting the ability to do both of those things. You can do stuff like slate, you can do stuff like plastics, which you can't normally do with many lasers. And that's one of the things that's really great about that IR laser that's in there. Okay. So does it make a terrible noise when it's engraving slate? Is it like, ah? No, actually all of our laser engravers are fairly quiet. Our loudest one I would say is the P2. That is our CO2 laser. That one does acrylics, slate, glass, wood. It's a bigger machine. So it's not a function of what you're engraving that makes it loud or quiet? Not really. It's usually the laser itself, the enclosure, your air purifier, what else you have going on with the machine. I got you. Okay, so I think you said we could do a demo. So how about if you go behind the computer and we'll have Richard tell us what you're doing? No, that's frightening. Is it? I think it'll go I think we do it. Come on, Carrie. Come on, Richard. We've just, we've just teamed up here. So I'm going to go over here. No, you stay here. Okay. Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to do a leather bookmark.
[30:05]So she's taking a, looks like it's an already engraved. It's already engraved though, right? We're going to put a name on it. Oh. We're going to put a name on it. So she's just placed this leather bookmark down on a, oh, don't put your hand in there. Steve says pod feet P O D F E E T so this is black with silver framing so we're gonna frame our design on and so if you can see right now the blue is where your design would be and you can see it's a little bit too big so we are going to.
[30:41]Shrink that down so that it will fit onto your bookmark and now I'm doing everything upside down so you're gonna have to tell me when it is centered where you want it, is that perfect all right so what we're gonna do now is i'm gonna hit process and then i am gonna close our safety glass so with this safety glass you do not have to have an extra pair of goggles this is your eye protection right here is there anything to keep you from opening it when it's running open it it will stop good answer safety feature that stops okay so now i am going to let you do this since you are all excited. You are going to press that green button one time. Here we go. I'm pressing the green button. And there we go. Wow. Laser's going. It's going back and forth. Oh, I can see it coming out. Oh, that's really cool. Wow. All right. And so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to reveal it. So go ahead and get your camera right back down there so you can get a good shot of it. Ooh. Nice. So is it hot? Nope. Go ahead. Take it. Oh, it's sticky.
[31:47]Wow, look at that. That was really, really cool. That was fast. It is fast. So this is one of our faster ones, especially for the leather, the slate, and your metal. This is very exciting. So this is the 30-watt X-Joule. How much does this cost? This one is 20-watt. So it's a 20-watt diode and a 20-watt fiber. And how much is this one? This one with the machine, the air purifier, which is right down here. So that keeps your smells and all your fumes and everything contained and cleaned. The rotary tool so you can do tumblers and your conveyor belt so you can do batch processing all of that together is only five thousand dollars okay a tumbler you mean tumblers like like mugs uh yeah the stanley's the yetis all of that so basically the anodized ones the ones that have the coating the colored coating on it it'll pull the colored coating on and reveal the metal underneath and if you have just a stainless steel one it will actually mark on the stainless steel So this one does metal. If you can see my necklace right here.
[32:52]Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. So that machine right here will do the metal. Now $5,000 is too rich for my blood and I'm more like Rich right here. And I want this little one. What is this model called? This one right here has $1,200. This one is the S1.
[33:07]This one comes with just the machine for $1,200. If you want the air purifier, you can buy that separately. if you have the ability to vent outside you don't need a purifier so I have a shop that's separate from my house so I have everything venting outside except my F1 Ultra and my F1 Ultra I do run through the air purifier. So how much is it to add an air purifier to the F1? So the F1 with the air purifier and so with the air purifier the rotary the machine the cutting panel and the slide extension. This one would be $17.99. All right. That's nice. And there's such a wide variety. This has been really fun. People want to find out more about Xtool. Where do they go? They can go to the Xtool website or they can look us up on Facebook. It's xtool.com. And you can look at us up on Facebook if you want to join any of our Facebook groups. We have lots of help from other users. We have tech gurus in there that are helping. They'll help you with everything from the software to settings to materials to get their great, great, great communities to join. That sounds super fun. I'm just going to call Richard when I get stuck with mine though, right, Richard? Absolutely. I'll be there. All right. And again, we're joined by Richard Gunther from the Digital Media Zone, and we've been talking to Kara Young from X-Duel. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you.
[34:30]
Bodie Grimm on Insta360 Link Al-powered 4K Webcam (no blog post)
[34:33]Well, I'm delighted to have Bodie Grimm of the Kilowatt Podcast back on this show with us yet again. How are you doing today, Bodie? I'm good, Allison. How are you? I feel like we just talked minutes ago. It was, I don't know, 20 minutes ago, for sure. 20 minutes ago. All right, we're recording a two for today. And let's start with, so you do a lot of podcasting now, more than just the Killawatt podcast. You're on Beyond the Post with Rob Dunwood, right? I am. One of my favorite podcasts to do. And the problem with Rob is that he keeps up in his game in the camera and lighting world, and it looks like maybe you had to start to up your game. Is that the problem you were trying to solve here? Yes and no. I want to put out a disclaimer that I will never reach Rob's level of lighting and cameras. Rob is going to beat me every single time. That's not a war I'm willing to fight. Plus, he's really pretty. So, you know, he's got all that going on. You can't beat the beard.
[35:36]All right. Right. So what was the problem you were trying to solve here? Rob records in 4K. So I wanted to have a camera that would record in 4K as well. I was using my iPhone 14. And before that, I was using a Logitech 920.
[35:49]C920. Yeah, the classic. Yeah, that one still is amazing. I gave it to my kids because they had tutoring and a bunch of other stuff that they had to do for school. So I just gave it to them. That is such a solid camera, man. That thing just keeps working. Yeah, I can't even tell you how long I've had it, but it's been a really long time. No issues right so but you wanted to upgrade to 4k now logitech sells a 4k camera but you didn't go that route no so i thought about going that route but then i was listening to mac break weekly and alex lindsey he recommended this camera and i had never heard of it and i was like well if alex lindsey says it's a good camera and there were there's two versions of this there's the old version which is the one i have and the new version he said you don't even need the new version. He's like, just go out and get the old version. Now, when I hear Alex Lindsey, I know on MacPake Weekly, they measure a unit of price is an Alex and it's $600. So are we talking a kidney here, a couple of Alex's? What are we talking about? You probably have to cut off two or three of your toes to be able to afford this, but it's not a whole foot. It's $179.
[36:56]Oh, okay. That's actually not bad at all for a 4K camera. So let's stop burying the lead. And what one are we talking about here? So this is the Insta360 Link webcam. So there's some action cams that are Insta360. This is the Link webcam. So it's got a little, it's kind of like a little plinth that the camera actually sits on. And around the plinth is this really nice looking light. At the moment, it's green, but it does change it to different colors.
[37:24]And by plinth, so there's the little thing that sits on top of your display, and then it's got like a leg across the back that supports it, right? Right, so the camera is actually on a gimbal. So that's one of the really cool features about this camera. Nice. No, no, it's kind of hard to explain. It does a lot of things. It'll do this mode that we're on right now, which is just a static camera, right? It does desk view. It does overhead mode view. You can set some camera presets up. It'll track you. So what do you want to talk about first?
[37:57]Well, I guess the sexy stuff is the tracking. But let me ask a question first. desk view and overhead view sound like the exact same thing they are very similar and i don't use it and i would show you my desk but the moment it's is horrific so i it's not a not a thing when i showed rob it pointed basically down at my crotch so that's another reason why i don't want to uh risk it okay and which one is that is that desk view i think that was desk view rob's like oh it's got desk view and i said it does and i went into the camera software and i put it on desk view and it just, you know, I was wearing clothes, but I was like, oh, that's inappropriate. So. Okay. All right. Well, I'm glad you're not sharing that, but it's got another mode, desk view. And what would you call the other one? The other one's overhead mode. So it's supposed to be like, and you, I think you set overhead mode in one of the presets, but it's like, if you were, if you wanted to write something down or whatever, it just kind of, if you were teaching a class and you wanted to show, if you were doing a math problem and you wanted to show people that you could use that.
[38:58]Oh, so it probably does some flipping around and upside down and reversing and stuff to make that make sense. Yeah, yeah. It's got some cool stuff. Are you old enough to know what an overhead projector was? I'm 50, so absolutely. Okay, good. So it sounds like it does that. Okay, I guess let's talk about the sexy stuff. What's the, why would you need it to track you? Do you move around a lot? Well, I do because I have some anxiousness and I tend to move around. There's a software component to this which is the insta 360 controller which is windows and mac and i don't know there might be one for linux and it just has a bunch of things that you can set up, for the tracking you can do smart composition so you can have it uh kind of focus in on your head and face or you can go like half your body or if you're doing like a tiktok video or whatever and you want your full body in it it will do that as well but i have it set up on my head so alison if i move back like this it should zoom in it's not but it's not zooming in looks like come on turkey, oh and this is also an audio so he's moving himself in and out okay so he's just moved farther away and unless i think oh i gotta turn this on okay let's try now okay he's doing it again so he's moved away oh and it zoomed in okay so that's kind of freaky with he's got a a background of kind of like a window frame sort of thing and it's kind of freaky.
[40:28]Alright, he's moving all over the place now. So if I move left or right or if I stand up on a ladder or something, it's going to look up at me.
[40:34]I do have to say, it's a lot smoother than center stage. Bart uses center stage on his studio display, and it's real swoopy. It's very violent how it moves, where if the camera catches the focus on his hand or something like that, it'll suddenly move. This is a much more smooth translation in moving in and out of the camera. Yeah, and the camera is actually moving itself. It's not doing anything in software. So if I move to the right, the camera moves to its left. Okay, so the full 4K, it's not zooming in and out on 4K and cropping and stuff like center stage does. I believe so. Yeah, the zooming is definitely. Okay. I can't see that being done, but I would assume that's how it's working. Okay. They said something about AI-powered 4K webcam. Yeah, so that's this part. It's just keeping me in the frame, which I feel like it's a little distracting for folks who want to watch this, watch me on actual video.
[41:29]One of the other things that it does, the plinth that I was telling you about, if you touch it once, it should activate the tracking. Okay, it's tracking him right now. He just reached his arm out, I think. Yep. So if I touch it again twice, it goes three centers. Okay. Again, once I have it set up for beyond the post, I have all this stuff turned off so that we don't have any accidental, inappropriate shots when I touch something. But the other thing is, it's got gestures. And gestures, this is super cool. So if I want it to track me, I'll focus on my hand.
[42:10]He's just showing the palm of his hand. Wait, now he's got his hands with his finger spread. What is it doing now? That's activating AI tracking. Okay. Because there's three different gestures. There's showing the palm of your hand, there's giving the peace sign, and there's giving the loser sign. So if I do one of those that are too similar like the peace sign what I was doing was too similar to the zoom okay so if I come up here and I say I give it the loser sign so he's basically got his index finger up and his thumb out giving me the loser sign what's it do so if I point up it zooms in if I come down as long as I have my hand in here.
[42:50]So, he pointed up and it zoomed in and now he's trying to get it zoomed back out. Oh, there it goes. Yeah. So, he's moving his whole hand up and down and it's zooming in and out. Right. And on that plinth, like I said, there's an LED and it starts flashing blue when it recognizes your gesture. Okay. And there's a third one if you do the peace sign. Okay. And that sets up for whiteboard. So, if I had a whiteboard behind me, which obviously I don't, if I had a whiteboard behind me it would lock in on these little stickers that you put on the whiteboard they're like little uh l shapes or corner shapes okay and it locks in and it will focus entirely on the whiteboard if you have these four stickers on the whiteboard okay so some of the demonstrations i've not used this but some of the demonstrations i saw some people were using like a like a regular size classroom whiteboard right and that allows them to write and everything stays in focus it doesn't matter if you come across the camera or not, it's going to focus on the whiteboard specifically.
[43:53]Okay. So the problem would be if you didn't have those stickers in this camera, it would be doing what instead? It would just be like, it would catch you in focus and then the whiteboard and then you and... Yeah. So I have here some notes that I made with when I was talking to Rob today. So I'm going to put those notes up and you can see how quickly that zooms in on that, right? Oh yeah, that focused really quickly. I'm looking for something I can hold up to Bodhi. Actually, I don't look in focus in my camera at all for some reason. It doesn't look good in zoom.
[44:24]That focuses pretty quickly, and I'm using a Logitech 4K camera. Yeah, I would say that's about the same speed. In the previous interview, Bodhi was talking about a lavalier mic with a controller, and it had a very bright display. And when he first held it up, it was all blown out, so I couldn't really tell what was going on. But you backed up a little bit, and you were using this camera, right? The Insta360 Link. And it all of a sudden color corrected, made it. It was super crisp, and I could see the color green. You know, it wasn't blown out and all white. Absolutely. And again, I don't use this camera for what it should be used for. You know, I don't use all the features. It is simply a, you know, regular webcam that just looks really good.
[45:07]You can also control this camera from your iPhone if you want to. I found that to be unnecessary for my use case. It's got a monitor clip that hangs off the side of your monitor. Or if you want to put it on a tripod, it's got a tripod mount as well. Oh, that's good. That's good. And so I'm looking at their webpage for the Insta360 link, and they show AI tracking being useful, like you're filming somebody dancing around on the floor, on a dance floor or something. You're trying to make a TikTok video. That would be a really good use case for that. You don't move around that much as sitting at your desk, that that's a huge feature for you, right? No. And there was a couple of weeks ago, Rob and I were recording. And I, when I take a drink, I try to be respectful and I'll just kind of move off camera a little bit and I didn't realize it was on. So it just kept following me. Rob didn't say anything. And I think we were doing an interview with Chris Browning. So hopefully Chris didn't see, I can't remember which, which recording that happened to be on, but yeah. I can see that would actually be a real problem for me. Cause I'll, I'll do that. Like when I need to blow my nose or something, I'll, I'll try to lean over and just try to get out of the line of vision. that would be an issue. Yeah, yeah. Especially if you're like picking your nose or something, it just draws more attention to it.
[46:25]All right. Well, this is pretty cool. So from a quality perspective of the really, really crisp video, it looks fantastic. Now you're pretty well lit, not Rob Dunn would lit, but you're pretty well lit up and you look really crisp. And like you said, holding some text up in front of me, that was super clear. I'm really intrigued to see what the desk view and overhead view would look like with somebody using it for real. I'm a little disappointed you're not showing it to me, but then again, if it didn't do what you expected it to do, I think that's probably good. This is the desk view. Oh, there we go.
[47:02]Okay. I see the problem. Yeah, it does look like you need to move the angles around a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. It's not something I use all the time, so it's not something I'm too concerned about. But I could see people wanting to use that for demonstrating something. If you could put, you know, be holding your hands out there and hold something to demo it out there, that would be pretty cool. Yeah absolutely i could like my son has a uh a math tutor that lives in north carolina, i'm not going to buy one for him but this would be great for him to be able to, point down so that he can you know show her what he's how he's solving a problem, and you know if she uses an ipad so but um if you know if she decided to use a computer this would work just the same so she can show him how to do a problem and that way you don't have to hold the iPad out or set it in just the right position so that you can, the student can see what the teacher's doing. Right, right. That's interesting. That opens up all kinds of fun questions. Well, this is pretty cool. Is there anything else you wanted to tell us about the Insta360 Link webcam?
[48:08]You know what? You can do some effects with exposure and HDR and all that stuff. I'm not doing any of that stuff because I'm not good at that. The lighting that you see right now, the sun is going down. It is now five o'clock here in Arizona. The sun is going down. My light is this Govi light off to the side that's showing the blue and my monitor and everything else is the camera.
[48:30]Okay. So it's really good at exposing and maybe not, it's not challenging light, but it's not studio lit. Yeah, it's way nicer than even the iPhone camera when I was using that. Well, this sounds pretty cool. I think people will want to go check it out at insta360.com. And you should all subscribe to Bodhi's podcast, the Kilowatt Podcast, and look for Beyond the Post, which is a fun show about how creators do their creating. Is that a good way to describe it? yeah yeah we we have recorded uh cory gums for season three uh with the black podcasters association uh chris browning with popcorn finance and charlotte henry just recently just today actually so this is these are all going to be edited and season three starts in the middle of january all right very good and they would find that at uh pod feed no yeah everything good starts with PodFeed.com. He fell for it. I promote your stuff so often. No, you go to beyondthepost.fm or Rob and I's show and then just search Kilowatt on your podcatcher of choice if you're interested in EVs. Who isn't? It's the best show ever. Thanks a lot for coming on, Bodhi. Thank you, Allison.
[49:46]
Support the Show
[49:49]Well, you know who's cool? Daniel Sieber and a lovely black lab named Gracie. You know why they're cool? Because they both use the donate button to buy me a coffee. Yes, they took their hard-earned dollars and they went to podfeet.com slash donate and chose a number of coffees that represented the fun they have listening to the content we produce here at the Podfeet podcast. I highly recommend you also donate because you know what? You'll feel good and I'll feel good. It's happiness all around.
[50:18]
CCATP #809 — Adam Engst on Writing with an Editor and Grammarly
[50:18]Music.
[50:25]This week we have the delightful adam angst of tidbits back on the show welcome back to talk to us again adam nice to be here good to see you again always delightful well obviously people read tidbits because of the quality of the content and the perspective not found elsewhere were by you and other fine authors there. But another aspect to me is how well written the articles are. I consider myself a pretty darn good writer, but you're like a cut above on that. And in a recent article, you pull back the curtain a little bit on one of the tools that you're using, and it didn't make me respect you less. It made me respect you more. Okay. I know you were worried about that. Forget him now. He's a hack. But before we dig in on that, without these tools, what made you become such a qualified writer? How'd you get good at it? I believe the answer is practice, practice, practice. So, I mean, I have been doing this for almost 35 years now. So, 10, 15,000 tidbits articles, an entire shelf of books.
[51:37]Hundreds of thousands of email messages. Right. That's what I do. And there's There's no question that I'm a different writer than I was back in the day. But, you know, I was I think I was decent to start as well. What I don't have, unlike you, you mentioned your recent other recent guest, Jason Snell. I mean, Jason obviously has an incredible amount of experience and professional experience as well. But he also has a J school degree that, you know, he went to journalism school. Oh, journalism. OK. Yeah. Yeah. And similarly, my wife, Tanya, has a communications degree from Cornell. So, you know, she learned, she was trained on some of this stuff, um, as was Jason. Um, I, on the other hand, have a, a double major in hypertextual fiction and classics. So, uh, um, yeah, so, yeah, so, so everything I've learned, I've, I've sort of learned on my own or from, from watching other people or from seeing how editors, um, edit me, things like that. And so I don't have kind of the formal training that certainly some people do. But, you know, realistically, the formal training is mostly to get you off the ground, that the only way to become a good writer is to write a lot. And I frankly think to be edited a lot.
[52:57]See, that's something I have the great joy of having never had anybody edit me. And I cannot, for a while, Sandy Foster checks me for typos. And for a while, she started kind of trying to edit. And I was just saying, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the way I say it. And I wonder whether that makes me a worse writer. I feel like what it keeps is my authentic voice at all times. Don't you feel about losing that when you have an editor? A good editor knows how to keep the voice and so um so so my my my my best example of uh not a best example necessarily but one of the things that i noticed was reading the harry potter books and if you look at the harry potter books on a shelf you know the first one's this thick the second one's a little thicker the third one whomp the you know and then they just get like massive.
[53:49]Gee you think jk rowling didn't have an editor after that in any significant way because one of the jobs of an editor is to say this isn't necessary it might be okay there might be nothing wrong with it but it isn't necessary and so um you know those books just got huger and huger because they were such massive bestsellers who's going to edit jk rowling in you know in a strong way and you know and i i have no inside information so perhaps i'm completely wrong and there was a huge editor greater like oh you should have seen you should have seen what we did um but, nonetheless um a good editor is you know has a different perspective on text than the author Um, the author in, I would argue, most nonfiction, um, is more concerned with conveying information and fiction. Clarity. Um, yeah, uh, clarity in multiple ways, both in like wording and, um, in explanation and, uh, providing background when needed, explaining terms that may not be familiar, making sure everyone's on the same page. In longer things, in books, providing navigation. In essence, where are you in the book? That kind of thing.
[55:17]Obviously, in fiction, and certain authors are just wonderful, of course, there's certain nonfiction authors where the sentences are just like, wow, that person's really good. They know how to craft a sentence. Yeah. And I am a good writer in that regard. I am not a great writer.
[55:40]I have written very small amounts of fiction very, very long time ago. That hypertextual fiction major at Cornell, I did have to write some fiction, and I continued on that for a little while. I never published anything outside of Cornell magazines. um but uh but it's one of those situations where that's a different a different skill because you're looking at each word and saying does this word convey the emotion i want or does this this reflect the character or you know does this this this scene for advance the plot those kinds of things in where it's it's less structural and more um i don't i'm not using the term negatively but decorative yeah right right right and so did you paint a picture of the scene that made me feel it or smell it right and so i don't do that in a big way i do it in a small way and you know and i try to set scenes i i i write with a very specific voice i tend i write very much in the first person and keep in mind when i started doing this 35 years ago tech writing in the first person wasn't done. It was considered poor form. Everything should be in the passive voice. You didn't insert yourself into things because it was factual. So your opinion was sort of irrelevant.
[57:00]I mean, early on, this is like early 90s, I actually took some criticism for that. But I didn't have the formal training that told me it was wrong, so I didn't do it that way. Thank goodness. Yeah, and obviously now I feel like the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that I'm a little... I won't say stodgy exactly, but, you know, I try to write correctly. I don't use slang a lot. I'm not throwing in obscenities every third word, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, like I got nothing on, I mean, bloggers are now old and I certainly got nothing on, you know, social media posts, you know, the hot tics. Sure.
[57:45]And so, you know, so be it. You know, there's just- Well, let's call it thoughtful, not stodgy. But thoughtful and fact-based and researched, and so you know that if Adam wrote something, he knows it to be true. I don't think – I'm fairly factual, but I'm also willing to just pull something out of nowhere that seems like this is probably the case. But I feel like it is fruitless to try to find places where you got something wrong. I mean, it does happen. Don't get me wrong. Sure. Yeah. But it's a lonely hobby. Right. I mean, yeah. And I try. I mean, part of it is that I try. You know, like this is, you know. Yeah, you care. Yeah. I come from the age when if something was in print, it had been edited probably not just by one person, but by possibly two or three.
[58:37]Okay. I still remember the first article I wrote for Mac user, maybe. Um it was a short review of some connect except forgets what ram doubler maybe some maybe copy one of the one of the connect um yeah yeah great but it was short it was like 600 words and um my editor gave it back to me and this is and you know it was in word format so it had a lot of you know had change tracking on it and um and she before she gave it to me she said don't pay attention to the amount of red basically everyone changed words because they couldn't find anything to disagree with and so what at the time every article went past like two or three editors and so everyone had to make it look like they'd done something and so they went and tweaked a word here or there or something so i get this 600 word right back and it's like all red i'm like oh you changed everything and she's like well not really though because like if you look at it you know like everything you said is still there it's just it's just that we changed a lot a little a lot of the words to slightly different words that meant the same thing.
[59:45]I was an engineer and doing mechanical drawings in my earliest years, and we had to pass our drawings through check. And I worked with a guy who would purposely put in absurd mistakes so that the checker had something to change and wouldn't mess around with what was really important. Well, and, you know, back when we were doing Take Control, Joe Kissel was our star author. And Joe writes brilliantly. He's a very, very good writer. And I remember, you know, Tanya saying, you know, she'd get a chapter from him and she's like, I'm so happy I found three things, you know.
[1:00:21]And part of that, it's voice, and she's trying to maintain his voice and everything like that. So she's not changing things unless it needs to be changed and whatnot. But she wanted to make his shirt look like she'd actually done her work, too, and read the entire chapter and was passing it back. I'm like, yep, you got this wrong.
[1:00:37]But there'd be five mistakes in a chapter or something, and that was the extent of it. It was beautiful to edit, Joe. Other people, on the other hand, who shall remain nameless, their facts were fabulous. They knew what they were talking about like you wouldn't believe, but oh man, every freaking sentence, you're like, okay, I've got to wade in and rewrite this sentence. This sentence doesn't actually say- Right, because it's not going to get us there. It doesn't say what it wants to say. It doesn't say what it means. And so that kind of thing. And so, yeah, so there were people who we edited very, very heavily, and most of them, the vast majority, and this is how you know a professional writer, in my opinion, were happy that we had done so.
[1:01:27]Because a good writer knows that's what a professional writer is. That's the ego problem to me. It's like, how dare you think that I didn't write it perfectly? I just, I don't think I could do it. As I said, you know, at some point, you're a professional writer, you're like, you know, I mean, and you can just, I mean, people can disagree. But what we find is, is that if an editor is doing a good job, authors disagree with very little. Professional authors. Okay. People who were professional authors and were a little too wedded to their terminology or not to their phrasing. They're like, oh, yeah, okay. Well, honestly, they didn't last because we edited them hard. And what really happened, honestly, was very quickly we learned with Take Control that writing a book with someone was like getting married. And you really didn't want to do it because someone said, hey, I'd like to write a book with you.
[1:02:27]And so we started basically saying, hey, that's great. We're so happy you want to write a book. What we'd like to do is have you write some tidbits articles first and we'll pay you for the tidbits articles and all that, but it gave us a chance to work with them and see how they wrote and see if we could work with them. So have a first date.
[1:02:43]Yeah, precisely. And that also, you wouldn't believe the number of people that also just made go away because they weren't actually capable of writing a book or even an article and turning it in on time. And so it was a great strategy to, because if you just said, oh, that sounds like a great book, we'd love. And these were people who'd often written stuff in the past. It was like, they had a track record. We weren't just some random person. But that didn't mean that they're still in a state of life where they can turn something in on time. And so if they went away and said, we're going to write a Tibbetts article and never turned it in, well, well, that was neat. we were not married, we were not joined at the hip for the next 10 years, the royalties, so, you know. So nowadays, with Tidbits, do you have an editor or are you using tools to do this for you? So, um... I have three people I can turn to for editing. Glenn Fleischman, who was a great editor. Glenn is, he's a really, he's a really fabulous editor. And he's the person I use when, like, I'm a little uncertain about what I'm saying. And I want, you know, or it's a topic where I think he knows more about it than I do. Oh, okay. In some background way. And Glenn will edit hard. And, yeah, I mean, it's like, don't get me wrong.
[1:04:00]You know, there's a little bit of ego. you're like really you changed all that um but uh but nonetheless you're like yep you know he's making it better you know the goal of we call it laddering up um so every edit pass should make the text better and okay um and so a lot of times because there's it's not usually one edit pass there's usually multiple edit passes because you know you know the author writes something the editor takes a pass on it and that's usually a big pass yeah author responds to all those things some of which require new writing and then the editor goes back and again and said in the second pass or sometimes even the third pass are much lighter um so so so glenn glenn um is is who i turn to for you know really really deep stuff a lot of the time um jeff carlson and agon schmitz um also who are also tidbits authors and have written for us for years and close colleagues um they also are are really good editors um although they're much more um they're much more looking for actual mistakes and um and adding only things which they are truly expert in so like whenever i write anything about photography jeff has to edit it because he's a he's a professional photographer he knows vastly more about it than i do but even still he's not a rewriter he's he's much more of a like you know this sentence is actually slightly incorrect because of this thing you don't know. So I'm going to rewrite the sentence, but the rest of the paragraph I'm not going to touch.
[1:05:30]I see, I see. And so, and at this point, I mean, there's certainly, there are simple mistakes that happen, but not that many.
[1:05:39]And part of it is the tools, which we'll talk about, have eliminated many of the stupid mistakes that you used to rely on editor for, you know, the doubled words, or you decided to rewrite a sentence or half of a sentence, and then because of that, the subject and the verb don't match anymore. You know, they used to match. It wasn't like you don't know the subjects and verbs supposed to match. It's just that, you know, you changed the verb because you've done some other work on the sentence. So those kinds of mistakes are less common now. And so that's why I think fewer of them, and certainly like spelling mistakes, no one should be making spelling mistakes at this point. You know, that ship should have sailed. It puts them back in for you.
[1:06:25]Those are not spelling mistakes. Those are different mistakes. Yes, if autocorrect is a problem at times, I mean, Apple's autocorrect in particular, sometimes you're just like, what the, where did you come up with that? Well, I'm convinced that it's changing things after I write it that I didn't catch it doing at the time. I know the difference between ITS and IT apostrophe S. And yet I'll go back and my editor Sandy will say oh IT apostrophe S Allison is a contraction of the word it is and she tells me every time it's like I know I didn't do that I'm sure I didn't do it unless I'm losing my mind so.
[1:07:06]I don't know quite are you doing any of this with dictation, no I've tried and I can never get into the rhythm of it so I play with dictation in the iphone in one in one particular use case i don't do tidbits articles that way because it doesn't work for me but i have noticed that with dictation it will sometimes go back and change words earlier in the sentence yes yes i've seen that which which is good in some sense it should be because once the sentence becomes more clear you're like oh well that can't that that word i guessed at before can't be right it's got to be this other right um right but so yeah so text so so you're so so you're absolutely correct actually though we on the one hand we have the tools that just fix all the stupid mistakes simultaneously we have tools that that cause new ones um and they make your text a little indeterminate because there are times similarly where i've had um things again same thing was like i didn't write that um you know where did that come from um the most embarrassing one that happened recently uh this is just terrible um i have been playing with voice input more and i've been using i find um the voice control on the mac to be much better than dictation.
[1:08:20]Um and voice control which voice control is the accessibility feature, okay it's where you can you can have it like open and close windows and do commands as well all right um and it has a dictation capability yeah anytime when you're in a text field it'll it just takes what you what you say and and and types it the problem with that is is if it's turned on and and the cursor ends up in a text field it just catches whatever is said i actually had a tidbits article where like some text got in i'm like what the oh my goodness you know like it was just like literally dictating into the middle of this article because i happened to be editing it after the fact and there was a text field open yeah i was i was not pleased with that one i was like oh like it got published that way, Temporarily. Oh, man, I wish I'd been reading that day.
[1:09:09]Our lovely Japanese translators caught it. Oh. But luckily, it was sufficiently random text, and in a particular spot, they read it as a quote, and they didn't understand it as a quote. And I'm like, that's really not right. It was in the Apple Financials article. And I knew that it was completely spurious text, but they didn't. So other people probably didn't notice either. But I got an email from them asking, because whenever they don't understand something, they ask me, which I love, because usually it means trying to explain some idiom or, you know, what I was trying to get at so they can better translate it in Japanese. But yeah, I saw that. It was actually like, it's 10 o'clock at night, and I'm like, must go fix.
[1:09:56]I can't go to sleep knowing this one's happened up there. No, that's for sure. You know what, I think I might want to try, I've been messing around a lot with MacWhisper for doing transcripts for the videos that we've been producing, and I noticed that it's got a dictation feature, and I bet that's pretty good because it's using Whisper AI. Might give that a shot. So have you compared MacWhisper to Audio Hijack's Transcribe? Audio Hijacks Transcribe just spits out a giant blob of text. Yes. And what I'm trying to create is two different things, an SRT file for the subtitles that actually go, or closed captions, whichever, I always confuse what it's called, into the video. So those are time-stamped, and they're little segments, and that's a particular skill. And I also want a transcript that has, by voice, who said what, put it in bold, make it a separate paragraph, and, you know, give me those names and spit it out in Markdown. And that's not something you can do. I mean, I could do Audio Hijack, but I'd have to pipe it. It just isn't. Yeah, yeah. It isn't there yet. I am curious. I'm working on an article to where I'm comparing transcription accuracy because that's what, like, Notes does it, right?
[1:11:12]Notes on the iPhone and the Mac. And so that was a question. It was like, you know, what does it? And you're right. The main problem with Audio Hijack's version is that it's a big blob. Right. Where I've found that to be unproblematic is, for instance, recording Apple's financials call. I don't really care who's talking. I mean, it's just sort of irrelevant. Sure. I mean, I can find out easily enough. But could you make me some paragraphs or something? Yeah. They're aware of it. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure.
[1:11:44]But basically being able to search in that blob of text to get exactly what was said is vastly helpful. Right. And so, but for various reasons, I didn't trust one of them over the other. And so I recorded both times. I'm like, oh, this one seems better than that one. So any of it, I'm working on some stuff. I think we've talked about this before. But I need to try Mac Whisper too. I've done it with... Is notability where I'm taking my notes and it creates a transcript at the same time, or it's creating the transcript because it's also listening. So it's got the audio recording, it's got the transcript, and it makes a note of when I wrote my notes. So I wrote something, and then I can play it back and say, did Tim Cook actually say that? And I can hear it, and it goes right to that spot. And that's been, and then again, I can actually just search the transcript for when did he talk about the price on the iPhone 16 Pro and pop it right up and hear I haven't tried Notability. There was an app called PairNote that did that a long time ago and it stopped being developed. But I thought it was brilliant because it was the same sort of thing where you could – and you could also take photos, I think, with it, and they would be time-stamped as well. Oh, that's cool. But I don't – it turns out I'm not very good at taking notes. You probably listened. Well, no, the problem is I try to take too many notes. I write down what's sad. Yes.
[1:13:09]I'm convinced that's why I didn't do as well in school as I could have, is I took notes because I would transcribe everything they said instead of paying attention and listening and understanding what they were trying to teach me. I think if I'd never been able to take notes, it would have been better. Yeah, yeah. But any of it, I mean, so a lot of this stuff, you know, in terms of getting text right, I have been relying on editors less because the tools have gotten much, much better in the last even couple of months, honestly.
[1:13:42]Wow. Okay, so we've gone 23 minutes and we haven't told them what you actually use. Not even going to start. text um so i'm a little i was a little surprised to discover this but since 2016 i have been subscribing to grammarly and like actually paying for it actually paying real money real money 100 and actually it's it says it costs 144 but for some reason i pay 132 i'm not sure why um you can see my i can see my annual bills um but still not trivial money um then again this is my profession right you know like i will if i paid an editor that would get me you know at the rate i pay my editors that would get me you know an hour and a half so whatever right you know i pay my editors well because i want them to do a good job and so you know so so compared to paying a person it's trivially cheap um right right but so grammarly i started using it because.
[1:14:42]I really didn't I didn't want people wasting their time catching things like the the, Or, you know, there's two spaces after the, you know, between these two words. And it'll do that for free, because I do that free part. Right. And I think at the time it did not. Again, it's been so long, who remembers? Right. And I don't remember, you know, what, you know, it may not have had a free version then. It may have been, you only got 30 days. I forget. but um but basically they got so that they were catching enough stuff even in the stupid links the typos the spelling mistakes the you know the the the double double spaces double words all that where i'm like i have to pay for this like this is necessary for me you know it is too embarrassing for me to have those kind of mistakes showing up in tidbits and just because an editor read it It didn't mean those mistakes were necessarily caught either, right? There's no guarantee. No, no, it's real hard to see. Especially when it breaks across a line, just devilishly difficult.
[1:15:50]So that's the kind of thing where, that's how I got started with Grammarly. And a couple years ago, they started to get into AI. And at first, I thought they did it kind of lame, you know, in a really pretty unimpressive way, where they were getting into the summarization and the rewriting just in little bits and pieces, but it wasn't easy to use. And I could never see what the point was, kind of in the like, but I wrote it once. I don't need to rewrite it or I don't need to summarize it. A summarization is one of those tools which I very, very seldom have any use for.
[1:16:28]But some point late last year.
[1:16:32]Oh, and actually I should say, the other thing that's been great about Grammarly is it works everywhere. So I mean, whatever app you're in, it works. There's a Mac app, it works in Google Docs with an extension, you know, with Chrome extension, things like that. And so it's a little bit like, you'll still hear people bemoaning the loss of Spellcatcher, which was a wonderful little spelling app. I don't even know how many decades ago um that i forgot exactly what happened the author may have died i forget the details but um but it was it was one of those things where it was the bet by far the best spelling um spell spelling spell catching app um that there was at the time this was before apple had any kind of spelling built in and um so so grammarly uses the the sort of the underlying concept um and made it very easy to see mistakes and fix them and then it also had the step through things. I wanted to add one more thing. When you said it works everywhere, the best part of it is you can tell it not to work in specific places. Yes. I don't want it to work in visual studio code. That is not where I need my typos checked. Or in, I mean, it was really terrible in places like numbers because, you know, it's like, it puts this little, this little button over your text. It's always like always over something. And like, I'm in a spreadsheet. I don't, I'm not typing anything. I'm not writing numbers, you know, just go away.
[1:18:01]So, yeah, it's very good about going away. And once it goes away, it doesn't pay attention in that app at all.
[1:18:06]So, yeah, so what they really, they initially had like the underlining thing and the step-by-step mode, we know where it's like a dialogue that pops up and you see a mistake and you decide to accept or reject and move on to the next one. And over, you know, in more recent years, they've added an autocorrect, which, again, it's basically like Apple's autocorrect, except for it's really pretty good. Um and it actually you can revert its autocorrects um so if it does do a wrong thing it's sort of like it it underlines it very temporarily so you see that it's done a little thing and then if you hover over that word later it knows that it's still it was one that it corrected and we'll put it back i never do i do make those mistakes but i do love that when you hover it's it's actually faster to hover click than it is to fix it yourself. Yes. Yes. And so it's super fast to go, yeah, you got that right, got that right, got that right, skip that one.
[1:19:04]And so, you know, so like there's a lot of times when I have made a mistake just because like I'm not a perfect typist, you know, my finger stumbled and I misspelled a word or something. It's not that I don't know how to spell it, but it underlines that. And I'm like, yeah, fix it.
[1:19:18]Like, again, I'm not doing anything I don't know how to do. I'm just doing it faster. The other thing that they added quite recently is what I call tab to correct. And basically at the end, you get you're sort of at the end of a sentence and it's underlined a couple of things that you've made mistakes you've made. You can just hit the tab key and it fixes them, you know, like three or four of them all at once. It's really great. And, you know, again, in this case, you don't get to see what it's going to do. But if you know what you're writing, you know what it's going to fix. You know, like, yeah, you forgot an apostrophe there. You know, there you lost a, you know, you doubled the whatever. You can see and then it just fixes. But, of course, you can go back and, you know, it will put it back if you want. It doesn't show you what it's going to correct, though. Not in the tab to correct. You have to take it on faith. I got to see it. I got to see every line. You don't. Because you know what the mistakes are, right? If you just, because it's underlined them, right? You know, they're red. Oh, they're underlined. Yeah, yeah. They're underlined in red. Oh, okay. You can see what's wrong. You just can't see what's wrong. Okay, gotcha. I just missed, you know, I dropped a letter in this word, you know, satisfaction, you know, there's something else, something wrong towards the end, you know, right? So it's just, right. It's just going to fix, it's just going to fix the word and put it back the way it was. I thought you meant you didn't even see what was wrong, and that was kind of scary. No, no. You can see what words are incorrect, and you can't see what it's going to change them to, but you know because they're just misspelled or stumbled.
[1:20:47]So I'm not sure I have hardly ever reverted the autocorrect or the tab correct. It's that good. It doesn't make stupid mistakes. In my writing, I often have HTML URLs, and it is constantly telling me something's misspelled in a URL, and it's like .com or something. You know, it's like, leave me alone. Stop that. Those are, I mean, any time you bring in Cody-like things, it's going to have trouble. Yeah. Because it's not text. It's not words. Mostly I use Markdown, but with my figure, images and stuff, that's where it gets really annoying. But I can skip over those. But that's why I was worried about tab correct if I don't know what it's going to do. It could actually break the code. I don't think it would do that.
[1:21:38]Okay, so that's all the stuff you get for free. I literally don't know what's the difference between free and not free is because I paid for it for so long. It's the rewording of sentences and saying, I could tighten this up, or you've used really. It never wants you to use the word really. Never. An editor will flag that 99% of the time, too. Um okay but the yeah so the the new feature that popped up late last year which it actually went away briefly um because like it's it's cloud software right so you know they can make they can add and remove stuff at will as and basically i got it i'm like oh this is amazing this is great i started using it and used it for i don't know three weeks or something like that it goes away i'm like i'm writing to support going where did you put my feature where i want the feature back And they're like, you know, and then we were saying, oh, you know, we're so sorry. Like, it wasn't working right. We had to pull it away. And so, and I'm like, no, no, you should put it back. Why don't you at least tell me when you put it back?
[1:22:44]I think I noticed it was back before they told me. I mean, it was that. But so, yeah, so this feature, basically, this works in almost all places. Certain text environments in web browsers somehow seem to stop it. But basically you select some text um paragraph at a time is usually easiest um and a button sort of a weird looking button with a little menu and a little drop down triangle appears on the left side of in your margin you don't even have to click it you just hover over it and grammarly puts up a little dialogue above or below your your selected text so right above or below so You don't, you're not distracted by anything else and it gives you a better version.
[1:23:28]What it thinks is a better version or at least an alternate version it actually has two modes you'll see the button on the left turns is red if they're like we think there's a real problem here you should you should fix this or blue of well we'll give you some alternates you know blue means probably no no actual mistakes but we think we could do better and and you can in that in that little window that appears with it's all it's kind of it shows you clearly highlighted what it's going to change so you know deletions are shown um addition deletions are shown in gray with a strikethrough additions are green and and you can click on each one of those you don't want to accept because there might be there might be five or ten in a long paragraph right you know it's not it's not going to be this isn't this is actually like making suggestions so you can go hey no that's wrong i like mine better oh that's pretty good that's pretty good that's pretty your paragraph with what, you know, what you've let it do.
[1:24:29]And so what I found is, is that again, I do the same sort of writing day in and day out. A lot of my sentence structure and terminology, just really hard to keep, to vary it up. You know, when you've, I mean, how many times have you written, have I written about, you know, a new version of macOS? You know, like it happens, it happens like 15 times, 20 times a year. So like, there's only so many ways you can say things. And also, I'm working quickly. Apple released new versions of all the operating systems yesterday afternoon. I had to write those up for tidbits in relatively short time, figure out what there was to say and do the writing and all of that. There wasn't time for me to obsess over my wording.
[1:25:15]You know, I had to get the information out and had to get it done by this time. And this lets it obsess over your writing. It's got a vast array of alternate ways to say things. Pretty much. And what's fascinating about it is that you can go down the rabbit hole. So each time you click that button, say you click it and it makes five suggestions, you take them all. They're all fine suggestions. Like, okay, that makes my paragraph better. Then you select the paragraph again and click and hover over the button again. it will make more.
[1:25:47]It will sometimes even change its mind and reverse the other ones. Because keep in mind, it's an LLM. So all it's doing is saying, what are possible other words that could fall in this place or other ways of saying this? And there's always multiple ones. And you might've come up with one and it came up with another. There might be a third. it might go back to the first one you know so you you you have to really learn to not keep going down the rabbit hole or you could spend all day like looking at this going wow do i want this word or that word do it again yeah do it again what are you gonna be this time um so so that's the that that's like the hardest part of the whole thing so but what i really like about it is i i will often i don't usually do this until i'm done with an article um is i will go through paragraph by paragraph and go and look at its suggestions and some i take some i don't um but you know just like an editor sometimes it makes the text better sometimes not you know i mean like you know it's it's it's not as good as a you know a really professional editor but it's a tool right you know and it also doesn't argue with you it doesn't argue with me and i I can just say, no, no, no, no. Yeah, good one. And it doesn't take offense because I said, no, no, no, no, no.
[1:27:13]It's interesting that it makes better sentences for you in some cases because my understanding of the way large language models, LLMs, work is that it's a predictive model of the most highly probable next thing that would be written, be it a letter or a word. And so, you would think that it would dumb it down to the highest probability way people say this particular thing. And you would think that would make it boring. So, I think what people are not realizing, and I've only been kind of coming to this myself to understand this myself, is that that's the theory. The reality is that you only get something out of an LLM with a prompt and with context.
[1:28:01]Oh, right, right. So we don't actually know what the prompts are. Grammarly doesn't expose the prompts. They just say like our best version. But they do have like you can click the rephrase button and you can get, you know, formal, friendly, shortened, right? Right. And so those are different prompts that give you different results. But you know what else? Your text is part of that prompt. Your text is the context. Right. Precisely. Right. Yours is going to be different than mine. I could be describing the same thing and I would get a completely different version of it because of the prompt. I mean, this is a huge thing to realize about LLM. So, you know, all these people like, oh, it's a glorified autocorrect. Well, it is, but it's really glorified. And this has changed vastly over time.
[1:28:52]So the context in which an LLM operates is the prompt and your source text and all of that, like all that stuff put together, right? And it works on number of tokens. Token is sort of roughly equivalent to a word. Not quite. I don't quite understand that yet. Um nobody does but to give you an idea um i have to ask my son who actually like studies this stuff but um but the the gemini 2.0 which just released and i actually find gemini to be the by far the worst of the chatbots it's just terrible as as google has implemented and everything all their tools um but i just saw the stat the gemini has a two million token context.
[1:29:36]So, in other words, it can take whole books as context for answering a prompt. Wow. So, the more context you feed an LLM, the more that's going to adjust what the output of that glorified autocorrect is. And so, again, with Grammarly, one of the other options in that is to enter your own. and basically that lets you enter your own prompt of what you want to have it do with that paragraph. I never use this. This is not actually useful to me as a writer, but that's where you can say, turn this into a limerick. And because that's, you know, you're talking directly to the LLM at that point. What you're using with the interface- And you don't so much do limericks in tidbits usually. Not a ton.
[1:30:29]Long ago, I did actually, I did think about doing poems, about news events because they weren't really interesting to write up, but I thought it might be interesting to do them as free verse. Never went anywhere.
[1:30:45]When people go to read your article, by the way, he does include a limerick for us about tech, so that's a lot of fun. Yeah. So, yeah, so, but this, but so in other words, we don't know quite what grammar list prompts are, but if you didn't like it, you could always put in your own. So what I find is they're pretty good. And, um, you know, in terms of like, I want, I basically want my text, but I want it spiced up a little bit. You know, I want to, I want it a little, I want to, I want to make sure to like the sentences flow a little better. Sometimes, sometimes I'll, I'll have written a sentence and I'm like, oh man, that's just a little horsey.
[1:31:24]Um, I know you like that. Um, visually horsey is different. Um, but, uh, but so the, you know, so, so like there's times when I'm like, yes, I could spend five minutes. Trying to think about how to readjust this, or I could just click, you know, hover over this button, and Grammarly will give me a rewrite on the sentence. And I'm like, that's a better way to adjust the clauses. You know, it just moves the clauses around or something like that. That's especially useful for when, there's days when you're writing and it's just singing. I mean, you're just kidding. It's just your sentences. They may look like garbage the next day when you look at them, but it feels like it's really good. But then there's other days where you're trying to write a sentence and you cannot figure out how to write it where it's not passive voice and just so boring you want to shoot yourself, much less the poor person who has to read what you're writing. Right. I mean, writing is one of those skills that it doesn't, I mean, like, yes, it comes, quote unquote, naturally after a while, but that doesn't mean it's always the same level of easy.
[1:32:27]It's kind of like running, right? There's days that you feel like you could run a thousand miles and other days you're like, you can't get to the end of the block. It just doesn't want to go. Exactly like that. And the other thing that I run into is that I've realized I actually am like an LLM. I don't usually know what I'm going to write until I've gotten there.
[1:32:50]So I don't do outlines. I have an idea for an article. I write the title. I reserve the opportunity to go back and change the title completely. And then I start the article. And I write through to the end. And I don't move things around. I don't go back and rip chunks out and that kind of thing. Hardly ever. I mean, I am a linear writer. And then basically, one of my quote-unquote problems is I'll start writing something which I thought was going to be short, and it stops being short because, like, well, I need to say this now. But if I do that, then I need to explain where that comes from. And, ooh, I wonder what the stats around that are. And before I know it, I've written a thousand-word article, you know, when it was supposed to be a, you know, one-paragraph pointer at someone else's cool, cool thing.
[1:33:43]I think that's one of the reasons we get along. I am the exact same way. Well, that's what my articles do tend to go on and on and on. And I keep thinking I should do an outline because I feel like my articles would be better if I structured them and said, these are the points I want to get across. Here's each of the headings of what I want to say. But I try to do that and it never works. I just start barfing words onto the page and eventually I figure out, oh, that's the story I'm telling. I didn't know that's where that was going to go. I can do it for books. I mean, when I've written books, I'm pretty good at outlines. Because you have to be i mean like you just it's just too much you know and you've got to know where you are and what you're doing and all that but but i mean this is i as it turns out.
[1:34:27]I have distinct memories of high school grade school not sure exactly where of of like not understanding paragraphs you know it's just like but i mean and actually no i take it back paragraphs is even later than that where i'm just like that's looking a little long i'm gonna hit return in the, middle you know like like that's like that's how i don't i tend to think in this this kind of stream of consciousness and can put it out and it makes sense but that doesn't mean it's well visually designed and these paragraphs exist for a reason um and um ancient greek did not have spaces or paragraphs by the way just so you know um and that's why i why i like them but uh um and i and i do remember like again in high school you know like when we were forced to do outlines i was like but, but, but why? You know, like, and, and to this day, I will often write an article that has gotten longer than I thought it was going to be and gone back in and put in subheads.
[1:35:26]Put in what? Oh, subheads, basically an outline level. Oh, okay. Headings. Yeah, for me, H2s, right. You know, I've been, you know. Yeah, H2s. H2, H2, H2, H2. By the way, do those. Those are really important for the blind, for voiceover and other screen readers is they can jump from heading to heading without any headings, they've got nothing to navigate. Well, and see, the problem is that, Mostly, I write to be read linearly. This is ironic given the fact that I majored in hypertextual fiction. But when I'm writing an article, it's not long enough to provide navigation. You should not be jumping around in my articles. You will be confused. They are meant to be read from start to finish. and so so it is relatively uncommon for me to think oh i should you know i should have a new section here um and you know putting a subhead and then it's the next section so the you know that's really you know again that that's that's one thing that you know i find i find an interesting an interesting just difference in the way different people write so you know so i tell you what adam Tom, let's jump to your heading level two where you wrote in this article, what about Apple intelligence's writing tools? Why don't you use Apple intelligence? Yeah, that was definitely added after the fact.
[1:36:45]So, yeah, so partly this article came out, I have been meaning, I've been subscribing to Grammarly for, you know, eight years or something, right? I'm a little embarrassed that I've never written about it and tidbits. So that was sort of the initial thing. but then i'm like well you know how does apple intelligence stack up you know and and to be, brutally honest and it doesn't stack up in the slightest because i'm still working on 2020, so i can't use it on my main macintosh okay but my m1 macbook air i can use it um so obviously i do know i do i have used i do know how to use it um but it was interesting to me because apple's you know, sort of makes a big deal about its writing tools. You know, it can do proofreading and rewriting and, um, and summarizing us again, what's with all the summarizing, but, um, but the, If you use it in mail or notes, it's pretty good. Messages technically, but who writes enough in messages to do much? And that's it.
[1:37:52]Initially, Apple's like, oh, it will work everywhere. And I'm like, well, that's great. Good on you, Apple. And then I tried to use it. And the version of writing tools that works everywhere is completely worthless. It is so hard to use and so badly designed at an interface level that it is unusable so the mail and the notes versions pretty good um you know they actually did a decent job you know you get this little little controller it's easy to bring up it highlights the words it's going to change you can see what it's going to change them to all those kinds of things that grammarly does pretty well it's it's good it's not great but it's good um and whereas if you are just using the universal writing tools options um it's completely and utterly unusable um you know that like it puts up a suggestion with no indication of what's changed in the entire paragraph um that it's proofread supposedly and it puts the dialogue over your text you can't even like visually compare so it's like tab to complete i'm not going to show you what you had i'm not going to tell you what i changed good luck good luck all you can do is click replace replace or copy so copy which means you have to go paste it somewhere then go word for word to figure out what it changed.
[1:39:13]So totally not going to do that i mean part of the reason why um i have become so fond of grammarly is that it's so fast to use that if i have to be doing any kind of like visually comparing like looking at these two paragraphs to see which one looks different from the other and how and then manually making the changes right what if i only want to take half the changes it made like right you know brain blows up there are people who are not good at writing at all, and where this is like whatever you wrote yep bet that's better than what i wrote sure i do i do know people who use these tools that way it's like i just know i i stink at this i'm good at this other stuff i'm not good at this you go girl but that's not you and me fair fair enough but you know the fact that apple put a real interface into notes and mail says to me that They know this sucks.
[1:40:16]My suspicion, and I haven't talked to a developer about this, my suspicion is that the apps have to be rewritten to support that Apple intelligence interface. That Apple simply can't do the same thing in any random app without the app itself being aware of it. Okay okay well so which means over time it was done right oh right it's still in beta.
[1:40:50]Well compared to some of the other things i don't know it's maybe not as bad as some of it right they've done recently so i don't yeah i mean i actually i'm not particularly perturbed about you know i i find that the beta aspect of it is like yeah it doesn't work perfectly whatever um you know it's not like any software necessarily works perfectly uh but uh but more that um uh if you're going to go and turn it on for tens of millions of devices maybe it's not you know by default um as they did in in the 0.3 updates maybe it shouldn't be in beta then, yeah maybe maybe i mean it is that primary marketing feature right you know like this is all apple talks about right yeah i'm not quite sure why they did that that doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm going to close this off here, and I'm going to make a commitment that I will pay for Grammarly for one month and use it with anger. No, in anger. In anger, that's the way they say it, which means for reals. I'm going to use it and see if I can stand it and see if I think it makes my writing better. I will make that commitment on the air right here today. I even I can give myself a reminder.
[1:42:02]Yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see, you know, how you like it or don't like it. And, you know, it may be one of those things. It's possible their default prompts are too far from what you feel your voice is. And so, you may be like, oh, you're changing too much, and I'm not benefiting enough from it.
[1:42:24]Clearly, that's not the case for me, that I'm just like, yeah, that looks good, that looks good. I mean, it's not that I'm accepting everything, don't get me wrong. Sure, sure. But there's times I'm like, oh, that's a much better word than the one I chose. I have a feeling what it's going to be better at is being more concise. I tend to, if I write an article and then I don't publish it right away and I wait until the next day and I edit my work, I'm like, man, you took like three sentences to say what you could have said in five words. You know, that can be much better. So I know that I get too flowery and long and I could tighten these things up. It probably won't do that at the paragraph level. It works at the sentence level mostly. So you'll see it saying like, you know, such and such over the years. It'll take out over the years or suggest taking that out. You're like yeah okay i get it you're like you know that doesn't probably wasn't instantaneously, yeah right that doesn't necessarily mean anything and you know and as i said in the article it has certain words it just hates like really and very and actually and both and own um do you let it take those out no um most of the time no because i because i'm a professional writer when i use them i mean them uh yeah yeah that's what i can say no i i want them to go no i mean really it's different yeah and so, And like, again, very is a bad one. Like people very needs to come out in 99, 99, 98% of the time.
[1:43:51]But, but actually you're often really setting up a dichotomy between this thing that is true and this thing that you thought would be true. And it's not just one on the other. No, actually it's this other one. And so that's the kind of thing or both where I'm really implying that these two things together are problematic. It's not just and so there's a lot of that sort of stuff or own you know like you set up your own domain name if you take out own you set up your domain name, it does not have the same meaning right? No.
[1:44:30]So you need that's the kind of thing where you know after we talked about this I actually reported these to Grammarly Support and to be fair they got back to me and basically said, you know, we're passing this on to the dev team. We can't promise anything, but, you know, they'll take it into account because this is, you, like, there are certain words where you can't, you just, like, you can't say, stop suggesting this. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was glad I also, I treat it like a tick. Writers have ticks, editors have ticks. They make these mistakes all the time. Sure. Adam and I talked about one of my questions was why Grammarly always wants to hyphenate open source, when I say open source software, and the Open Source Foundation actually wrote an article explaining, no, it doesn't have a hyphen, and it's called a lexicalized noun? Is that what it was? Yeah, it was. Something like that. Not a compound noun, which would be.
[1:45:26]Was it lexicalized compound noun? Was it both words together? He's hunting for my email. Yes, it was a lexicalized compound noun, not a compound modifier.
[1:45:40]There you go. Okay, so compound modifier would be, well, actually, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head. But I sent that to Adam, and you were so happy because you now had a way to say, no, this is wrong, stop correcting it. And you sent that over to them, too. and and that one they actually said um you know uh i have forwarded your text to our development team for investigation for reference your ticket is such and such it will work on resolving but likely take some time to get to the bottom of it in essence this wasn't the oh thanks for your suggestion they're like oh that's an actual bug having having having the the source of this phrase be owning it and saying no you're doing it wrong right you know that's like this is and and so So, like, because, I mean, things like, you know, complaining about my use of, you know, your own domain name, that's not wrong. It's preference, you know, and I can back up what I'm saying, but it's not actively wrong to take it out. Whereas hyphenating open source has been, is, you know, grammatically incorrect. In this case, open source reporting, I think that would be hyphenated. That would be a compound modifier. But open source code, because open source means something else. Right. Well, we don't want to get too much into the details of that, but this is, well, we could go on for days, but this has been super fun. I love the combination of pedantry about correctness combined with getting to use geeky tools, Adam. This is a lot of fun. Nothing like pedantry.
[1:47:09]The automatic pedantic. Yeah.
[1:47:13]I got to think about this. There's got to be like an auto pedant. Automated pedantry? Auto pedant. That's what we want. We don't want auto correct. We want auto pedant. Well, actually... Well, on that note, it's going to wind everything up for this week. Did you know you can email me at alison at podfeet.com anytime you like? You should write to me and tell me if you're running into fiddly gestures or whether it's just me. If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. You can follow me on Mastodon like Sumo Cat, and you can do that by going to podfeet.com slash Mastodon. If you want to listen to the podcast on YouTube, where do you think it is? Podfeet.com slash YouTube. If you want to join the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com slash Slack. And there you can talk to me and all of the other lovely Nocella castaways. You can support the show at podfeet.com slash Patreon or with a one-time donation at podfeet.com slash donate with Apple Pay or any credit card like Gracie and Daniel did this week. Or you can do it through podfeet.com slash PayPal. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, you're going to have to wait until March 2nd to 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.
[1:48:27]Music.