This week, our guest is a lovely gentleman named Joseph Nilo. If you’ve been listening to Apple podcasts since the dawn of podcasting, you may recognize that name. He was one of the original hosts of the Mac Roundtable podcast. I first “met” Joseph on July 29, 2007, when I made my debut appearance on the Mac Roundtable with the great Tim Verpoorten and Don McAllister. Believe it or not, the Mac Roundtable website is still up and running (thanks to Adam Christianson), and you can listen to a full decade of shows.

Joseph has been out of the podcasting business for a few years now, but he’s still a fabulous nerd. He’s one of the crazy ones, running the agentic AI software OpenClaw that seems to be sweeping the world by storm. In this conversation, Joseph explains what agentic tools like OpenClaw can do, how he's deployed it locally, what guardrails he's put up, and how safe he thinks it is to use. Spoiler: not safe at all!

You can see Joseph's work at josephnilo.com/... and hilomedia.com/...

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2026_04_16

Most people today get great joy out of buying a new car if they can afford it. Our buddy Ron has a ten-year-old Tesla Model S, and rather than buying a new car, he decided to have Tesla install a brand new battery.

In our conversation, Ron explains what the original battery was and talks about the original range and how it's degraded over the last decade. One of the big reasons to replace the battery was that the older batteries did not charge very quickly at Superchargers, but the new ones do.

While Ron doesn't put a lot of annual miles on his car, he does go on very long road trips, including an 1,800-mile drive just this year.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2026_04_01

In this fascinating discussion with Adam Engst, we discuss how he used to think that reading added information to essentially a database in his brain. Recently, though, he has started to think about his brain as a large language model, and that instead, reading is changing the weights of the model to include new information.

Here's a link to the article on tidbits.com/... where Adam explains this concept in full detail.

The charming Adam Engst joins us to talk about his vision of How Siri Could Become the Mac’s New Help System. His vision is that since Apple knows everything about macOS, it doesn't seem a big leap that we should just be able to ask Siri how to do things on our Mac. It could access all of the developer documentation to do this without breaking a sweat. Of course, we wandered off the reservation into talking about how apps could do this too, and of course, we had great fun together noodling this idea.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2026_02_27

You may know Jason Howell from his work hosting Daily Tech News Show with Tom Merritt, or his work on the All About Android and Android Faithful Podcasts, or hosting Tech News on the TWiT Network. Over the last two decades, he’s been the voice translating complex technology into clear, human stories that connect with real audiences.

In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Jason joins me to talk about the state of smart glasses. He talks about the different approaches, including simple microphone/speaker/camera glasses, those with monocular or binocular screens for projecting information onto the real world in front of you, and those that provide a full immersive experience in a pair of glasses. We talk Meta, RayNeo, Infinix, Even Realities, XREAL, and Lumus, the waveguide technology company behind Ray-Bans.

You can find Jason at YouTube.com/@JasonHowell

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Adam Engst of TidBITS joins me this month to talk about the wonderful world of macOS Tahoe's menu icons. You may not have noticed, or you may not have upgraded to macOS 26 yet, but nearly every menu item in every dropdown menu on nearly every application now has a tiny icon next to it.

In this discussion, Adam and I go through the fabulous blog post by Nikita Prokopov entitled It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons where he shows examples of the problems they cause. From indecipherable to inconsistent, there are a lot of problems.

In this rather propeller beanie episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart Busschots explains how to configure your DNS records on your server to ensure you can send email from your domain. Like I said, it's nerdy, but we know a fair number of NosillaCastaways host their own servers and will enjoy learning how all of this works. Or maybe it's just that I really wanted to understand more about MX Records and such, so it was fun for me!

This episode also has a full written explanation written by Bart, so you'll have it as a reference when you're done listening.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_12_30

In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst joins us to valiantly attempt to explain to us how the new Phone app is supposed to work in iOS 26. He'll demystify the Classic and Unified views and even help you figure out how to call someone from the calls list in the two different views. Of course, he's written up several articles on the topic for your later reference:

Hidden Setting Controls What Happens When You Tap a Call in the Phone App

Comparing the Classic and Unified Views in iOS 26’s Phone App

How to Set Contact Avatars and Posters on the iPhone

I want to make sure that you realize TidBITS is predominantly reader-supported (93%). The fine folks (and especially Adam) have been writing long-form, thoughtful content about the Apple world for 35 years. If you appreciate Adam being on Chit Chat Across the Pond once a month, be like me and support the work at TidBITS by going to the Membership page to sign up for as little as $20/year.

There are some people who are part of the fabric of the NosillaCast, piping up from time to time over many years to provide valuable insight to the show when a topic tickles them. One of these people is Andy Dolph, who’s been sending in content and chatting with me in the background since 2012. You may remember a few years back when Bart had a curious failure with his microphone, and Andy gave us a tutorial on how XLR cables are constructed that explained the failure.

After all these years, we finally decided to sit down and have a chit chat about his work as Special Events Coordinator for Learning Space Technologies at the University of New Hampshire.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_12_13

• Condenser mic from Earthworks (Sweetwater)

Referral Links:

As always. Adam has a full write-up on TidBITS in his article entitled, Can Agentic Web Browsers Count?