In this week's Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst of TidBITS joins me to talk about his decision process on choosing an iPhone 17 over the 17 Pro. One of the things I like best about Adam is how, just like me, when he starts digging for an answer which should be knowable, he's like a dog with a bone and won't stop until he succeeds.

The main decision point between the 17 and the 17 Pro is whether someone really does care about the 8X telephoto lens vs. the macro lens. We tried to figure out how many photos we really took with the 5X on the iPhone 16 Pro, but that turned out to be a much harder task than you would think. We tried Apple Photos smart albums, but for reasons you'll hear, you can't really do it that way.

Using the open source command line ExifTool from exiftool.org/... (also available through Homebrew) and his able assistant ChatGPT, he was able to create a script that queried our Photos Libraries to determine how many photos we had taken in the last year using the different camera/lens combos on the iPhone 16 Pro. While you hear us talking he hadn't yet perfected his script but he eventually beat it into submission!

Of course, Adam has written up an article describing this descent into madness and even published the script if you care to download it. You can find his article at tidbits.com/....

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_09_25

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CCATP #821 for September 17, 2025, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. This week, our guest is a real throwback for the show. If you've been listening for a very long time, you may remember this guest as creating the best Honda Bob commercial of all time, where he performed it as a Klingon war commander. He's the man who coined the term for his own podcast, "Making technology work for you." He's brilliant, he's funny, he is, as my father used to say, "drilled off center". Please welcome back to the show after close to a decade-long absence, the one the only, Knightwise.

Knightwise and I have stayed in contact over the years, sending texts back and forth here and there. This week he sent me a message asking for help finding a way to force macOS into letting his client view his MacBook Air's desktop (not speaker notes) while giving a presentation. I dug around, testing some ideas, and didn't succeed in helping him, but when he figured out a solution, he suggested coming on the show to tell us about the creative solutions he comes up with for his clients.

A few links he talks about:

• BetterDisplay Pro on github.com/...

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_09_17

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Support the Show:

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In this week's Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst of TidBITS fame and fortune joins me to talk about recent changes to AppleCare. While the big story of the day is AppleCare One, there have been changes over the past few years (and even this year) to what AppleCare covers and how it's charged. After discussing those changes, we get into the huge pitfalls and dangers in AppleCare One. If you don't pay attention, it's fairly easy to end up with a worse deal.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_08_26

Tage Bushman joins me this week to talk about his career path to become a Professor at Western Technical College. It's a fascinating subject for obvious reasons. The ground has been shifting constantly since he first got into tech, but now with AI, things have gotten even more "interesting.

Tage teaches in the Cybersecurity program and Web & Software programs. Specifically, I teach Cisco 1 (networking basics), Linux Administration, Database Server Administration, and DevOps. I have also taught Web Programming 1, Intro to Cybersecurity, Cybersecurity Essentials, Business Information Systems, and Software Apps for Business.

Tage also hosts two podcasts. He is a huge Disney Parks (specifically Disneyland) fan. He and his friend Teresa host the DLWeekly Podcast and he's also part of The Hub Crawl Podcast, which he calls "a riff off Clockwise" where they bring a Disney question and go around the virtual room.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_08_25

Adam Engst recently wrote a post on TidBITS describing his journey migrating from a 27" Intel iMac to an M4 Pro MacBook Pro. He entitled the article Switching from a 27-inch iMac to a 14-inch MacBook Pro: A Fresh Start.

I asked him to come on Chit Chat Across the Pond so he could walk us all through how he decided on the MacBook Pro (vs. a Mac mini or a Mac Studio), how he made his display migration decision, how he had to modify his desk, and how he's wrong about trackpad placement. But that's not all, Adam chose to migrate no data and no applications! It's a story of a clean install beyond anything I've ever done, so you know it was super fun.

This week, our guest is Adam Engst, writer, editor, and publisher of the fabulous TidBITS Newsletter.

In late May, The Browser Company announced that they are discontinuing their ground-breaking web browser Arc. As soon as I saw the headlines, my heart sank for people like Tom from Ontario, who first introduced the NosillaCast audience to Arc and Adam, who has been one of the biggest fans of Arc.

In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam walks us through a brief overview of what Arc gave us, how he feels The Browser Company treated its fans, and then he explains a little bit about how their next browser, Dia, works. Of course Adam has written all of this up on [tidbits.com/...](https://tidbits.com/2025/06/20/dia-browser-debuts-with-contextual-ai-chat-but-arc-users-feel-left-behind/).

Bart Busschots joins me to talk about his trials and tribulations finding a good bookmark manager to replace Pocket, which he never really liked in the first place. He tells us everything he loves about Raindrop.io. Unlike most Chit Chat Across the Pond episodes, there's a full blog post in the show notes if you'd rather read than listen ... or do both!

On Chit Chat Across the Pond #814, Adam Engst and I discussed the results of a VPN survey he conducted with the TidBITS subscribers. From there, we got into a discussion where Adam challenged the common wisdom that we need a VPN when we're on public WiFi networks. We got a bit mired in some of the discussion, where we almost had enough knowledge to explain our positions.

Networking is a topic on which Bart has a depth of knowledge, and he's here to clarify some of the things we talked about.

The recording you're about to hear was created for the Security Bits segment on NosillaCast #1048, but I felt it was important for the Chit Chat Across the Pond audience to hear it as a follow-up to our discussion with Adam.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_06_08

In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst joins me to talk about two recent articles he wrote for TidBITS.

The first topic is life-changing for me. Have you ever wanted to send someone a link to a specific spot on a long web page? With text fragments, most, if not all, web browsers now allow you to select some text, right-click, and select "Copy Link with Highlight". This link will not only take them to the right spot on the page, but it will highlight the text you selected. Learn the details in Adam's article: Text Fragments Enable Deep Linking on Web Pages.

Next up, we talk about a survey Adam conducted amongst TidBITS readers asking them about their usage of VPNs. We had a fun discussion about how he figured out what four simple questions to ask before he even started the survey. He walks through the results, and we talk about some of the more surprising results. you can read the full article here: Do You Use It? VPN Use Is Widespread

During our discussion, we talked a little bit about Tailscale, and we referred to the article that the great Glenn Fleishman wrote on the topic: Tailscale Gives You Remote Access to Your LAN from Anywhere

This episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond is going to be a bit different. On the NosillaCast #1042 for April 27th, Bart Busschots and I recorded his usual segment on Security Bits, but the majority of it was a deep dive. The subject was whether cryptography as we know it is doomed because of quantum computing. His explanation was so good that I wanted to be able to point people directly to the audio instead of referencing the chapter mark or a time stamp so we decided to make it a standalone Chit Chat Across the Pond.

If you want to listen to the rest of the original recording of Security Bits, be sure to subscribe to the NosillaCast and look for episode #1042.

You can find Bart's shownotes for the episode of Security Bits at Security Bits — 27 April 2025 — Deep Dive into Quantum Computing.

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Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_04_29