Chit Chat Across the Pond

Latest Episodes:

CCATP #831 — Adam Engst on Reading Trains Your Internal LLM Mar 18, 2026

Show notes

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.

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CCATP #830 — Adam Engst on How Siri Could Become the Mac’s New Help System Mar 05, 2026

Show notes

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

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CCATP #829 Jason Howell on Smart Glasses Feb 03, 2026

Show notes

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

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2026_02_03

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CCATP #828 — Adam Engst on Menu Icons in Tahoe Jan 23, 2026

Show notes

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.

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CCATP #827 — Bart Busschots on Understanding Email Sender Validation Dec 30, 2025

Show notes

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

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CCATP #826 — Adam Engst on The Phone App in iOS 26 Dec 21, 2025

Show notes

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.

CCATP #825 — Andy Dolph on Remote Production of Events Using Zoom Webinar Dec 14, 2025

Show notes

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

Links from our conversation

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CCATP #824 — Adam Engst on Can Agentic Web Browsers Count? Nov 20, 2025

Show notes

This week, our guest is the ever-delightful Adam Engst of TidBITS. In this episode, he explains what agentic web browsers are and what they are designed to do for you. Adam put five of them through their paces. I don't want to spoil the story, but he uses phrases like "full cuckoo", "daydreams in class", "hapless third graders", requiring "academic integrity referral", and "like a scared, insecure intern". In other words, it doesn't go well.

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

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CCATP #823 — Adam Engst on How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface Oct 18, 2025

Show notes

This week Adam took on a subject I'm guessing pretty close to 100% of the audience will care about; how to tame Liquid Glass on OSes 26. We go through macOS, iOS, watchOS, and even tvOS. This conversation must go hand-in-hand with Adam's article on TidBITS where he has screenshots of everything you'll hear us talk about. I have to say, the most impressive thing about the article IS the screenshots. How he managed to keep such consistency whilst applying each setting is amazing.

How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface - TidBITS

As we were going through tvOS, you'll hear me mention an article I wrote with a tip for how to improve contrast on Apple TV, especially to help you to be able to tell which item is selected. You can find those instructions here:

Tiny Tip – High Contrast Focus Style on Apple TV

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_10_18

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CCATP #822 — Adam Engst on Choosing iPhone 17 Oct 01, 2025

Show notes

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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