Chit Chat Across the Pond

In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst and I discussed his October 24th article entitled [Exposé Reveals Ongoing Smartphone Location Tracking Threats](https://tidbits.com/2024/10/23/expose-reveals-ongoing-smartphone-location-tracking-threats/). He explained how much easier it is now for your precise location to be determined because of your online activity, in spite of the safeguards Apple has instituted in an attempt to anonymize your data. Adam gives chilling examples of what's possible today.

Adam doesn't leave us with doom and gloom though, he arms us with some tools to fight this tracking as best we can in his article, [Protect Yourself Against Location Tracking Abuses](https://tidbits.com/2024/10/27/protect-yourself-against-location-tracking-abuses/).

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Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_11_12

I had the pleasure of interviewing Sam King, chief revenue officer for eSIM provider GigSky. As an unwritten policy, I don’t generally interview people who sell products or services, but since it’s my own guideline, I can color outside the lines when I want to, and this is one of those times.

We do a fair bit of international travel, and I have always chosen my eSIM by going to esimDB and choosing the best combination of data and length of time of my stay for the price. On our last two trips, GigSky met our needs the best. But I didn't understand something pretty fundamental about choosing an eSIM provider.

Sam explained that most eSIM providers are simply resellers. That matters because if there are any network or installation issues, these companies have no way of fixing the problem and lack any accountability.

It turns out there are only a handful of eSIM companies (including GigSky) that are network operators who supply their own US-based eSIMs. He went on to explain that network operators actually can fix network problems, including automatically moving you to a different local provider with that same eSIM. I highly encourage you to listen to the interview to understand the subtleties of Sam's explanation.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_11_03

During our conversation, we started talking about how eSIMs are generally just data, and the various ways to maintain your own cell number while on travel. You may not care about making phone calls, but you may need to receive SMS messages to log into certain services, such as banks. This very problem happened to Steve on our trip to Africa when everyone was using WhatsApp but he hadn't installed it on his iPhone yet. He had to receive an SMS to authenticate but he didn't have his home cell number enabled for fear of getting huge roaming charges from AT&T.

And that's when Sam told me about an interesting hack that he says will allow you to use your US phone number with your data eSIM for SMS and WiFi calling.

Disclaimer: I have not tested this process, so this is exactly as written by Sam to you. I definitely plan on trying it before our next international travel.

Sam's process:

1. Purchase a data plan from an eSIM data provider (like GigSky :)) Make sure your eSIM from your preferred provider is installed and the plan activated before you take off from home (this is my night before my flight routine).

It turns out that a cellular connection over the eSIM works exactly the same way! So you'll see in the status screen (what you see when you swipe up on an iPhone) Top SIM: GigSky LTE & Bottom SIM: Home Operator e.g. Verizon using cellular data. For all intents and purposes you can continue to use your phone as if you were in the USA...

Verizon treats it as WiFi calling from a billing standpoint; you can send SMS, make voice calls, get your voicemail, etc. at no additional cost because Verizon thinks you're at home using WiFi calling even though you're in Europe!

Calls to European numbers are still long-distance for Verizon so you might want to get a Google Voice number to make calls within Europe but that is a fairly small incremental cost.

Below is what your phone will look like when it is set up correctly:

In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst of TidBITS joins us to join in the fun conversation about limiting your iPhone's charging to 80%. He wrote up an article entitled Does Limiting an iPhone’s Battery Charging to 80% Increase Lifespan? in which he references an article by Juli Clover of MacRumors. Juli used her iPhone 15 Pro Max for a solid year with charging set to a max of 80%.

Juli freely admits this was not a terribly scientific effort to determine whether it helps because there are far too many variables at play and not enough data points to form any conclusions. That doesn't stop me and Adam from pretending to do science with her results, Adam and my results charging normally, and even more anecdotal data collected by Nick Heer on Pixel Envy. I even threw around a pivot table I made with this "data" which is well known to turn anecdotes into scientifically derived proof. On top of that, I nerdily referenced Battery University that sheds a wee bit of light on the subject.

Before we kicked into that topic, we spent a few minutes revisiting our topic from last time, the annoying monthly popups to allow recording of your screen and microphone. Since we last talked, people have hacked the plist that contains the timing of the nagging, and Jordi Bruin has even written an app called Amnesia to help you hack it. I suggest this proves it's security theater if you can bypass it.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_10_02

Referral Links:

Adam Engst joins me again, this time to talk about the patently wrong decision by Apple to include repetitive permissions requests for screen recording in the macOS Sequoia beta. As he explains in his article on TidBITS.com entitled Apple Reduces Excessive Sequoia Permission Requests, Shifts to Monthly, changing from weekly permissions requests to monthly is 4 times less wrong, but still 12 times per year wrong.

We discuss the types of applications this will affect, from screenshot utilities like CleanShot, to menu bar modifiers like Bartender and Ice, as well as apps like Photoshop that simply use an eye dropper to let you choose colors outside of the app interface.

Adam has a no whining policy in his community, so this isn't just a big complaint conversation, he explains some ideas he has the Apple could implement which might give users the desired security protections without causing them permissions fatigue.

Even in this rather fist-shaking episode, Adam is a delight and we had a lot of fun chit chatting.

This week our guest is the venerable Adam Engst of TidBITS.

Adam wrote an article recently about his solar inverters that ended up being a story about troubleshooting. That inspired me last week to tell you our troubleshooting story about our home network. We thought it would be fun to go through Adam's story and pick out ideas for troubleshooting and where our own weaknesses are.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_08_06

CCATP #793 for July 9, 2024, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. In case you missed the announcement, Adam Engst of TidBITS is now a member of the Podfeet Podcasts family as a continuing contributor to Chit Chat Across the Pond.

In this week's episode, we talked about why Adam believes we need persistent calendar and reminder notifications. Adam is hyper-focused and when he's writing it's not uncommon for him to easily dismiss a notification of an upcoming event.

Articles referenced in the conversation:

* A Call to Alarms: Why We Need Persistent Calendar and Reminder Notifications.

* In Your Face Provides Persistent Notifications for Events and Tasks

* Just Due It: Persistent Notifications for Tasks - TidBITS

* CalAlarm app Adam is testing for iOS

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_07_09

So ... I made a wee mistake this morning when I accidentally told the NosillaCast feed to move to the Chit Chat Across the Pond feed! I thought I fixed it right away, but then Louis Trapani told me that he was seeing all of the NosillaCast content slopped into Chit Chat Across the Pond! Evidently, the fix didn't "stick".

Overcast subscribers are fine because the RSS feed is ok, but Apple Podcasts subscribers may not ever get the NosillaCast again unless you resubscribe.

I can't believe I did this on the day before my 1000th episode and I'm very sorry and sad! I sure hope you see this and you'll resubscribe and get all that NosillaCast goodness - especially the 1000th episode!

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_07_06

Well hello there, this is Alison Sheridan and I have a very special announcement for July 5th, 2024, to the Chit Chat Across the Pond light audience and the Programming By Stealth audience.

If you were subscribed to the Lite feed, you may have noticed that your Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite logo changed into the Chit Chat Across the Pond logo and that you see a whole pile of recent episodes that are all Programming By Stealth. As a Programming By Stealth learner, you won't have noticed a difference yet, but you also care about this.

I've decided to make some changes to the podcast, which I'm pretty sure will benefit everyone. There will be a full explanation of all of the changes in the NosillaCast on episode 1000, but let's talk about you first.

The first change is that we've stopped publishing Programming by Stealth as part of Chit Chat Across the Pond. If you want the Programming By Stealth content, then you'll need to subscribe to the standalone podcast that we've always had.

Since Programming By Stealth won't be in the regular Chit Chat Across the Pond feed, that means it IS the Lite feed.

I've done a fancy redirect thingy that folded the Lite audience into the "full fat" Chit Chat Across the Pond feed so you don't have to do a thing to get your regular Lite content. I will be publishing Lite episodes more often with a HUGE guest! If you want to read about the new guest and all of the changes and why, check out this post: Changes Coming to the Podcasts — All Good News!

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_07_05

In Programming By Stealth, we've completed our series on the jq language and now Bart Busschots brings us a two-part miniseries about the YAML data format. He takes us through the history of data formats we've "enjoyed" such as fixed-width text files, Comma Separated Value files, through to JSON and XML. All of them had their place in history but also had their downsides. YAML promises to be human-readable (yay) and computer-readable (also yay.)

Once we're bought into how YAML is the data format of our dreams, Bart explains that there are only two kinds of data, scalar,s and collections, and that collections can be sequences or mapping and all of these data types go into a document. Luckily this is all of the jargon we'll have to learn and there are useful synonyms from other languages (e.g. sequences are really just arrays).

I found this lesson enjoyable and not too hard on my little brain so I suspect you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_06_22

It was actually bittersweet for Bart and me this week as he taught the final installment in our series of Programming By Stealth about jq. As Bart says partway through our recording, he thought this would just be a few episodes but it took 13 episodes to go through everything Bart thought was fun about this deceptively simple programming language.

This final installment in the jq series covers querying nested data structures with the `recurse` command. One of the really fun parts of the episode is when he teaches us how to dramatically simplify our code, a concept that's often called syntactic sugar. We get to do `if` statements for the first time, where I wondered why he didn't let us have them earlier! I was cross with him for holding out on us with `try-catch` too because it would have made our coding so much easier. But that was the real theme of this installment – we had to learn the way everything works before learning the shortcuts.

In the finale, he gives us a few of what he calls "honourable mentions" – little tidbits that came in handy at times.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_06_07

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!