Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite Podfeet Podcasts

In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Bart Busschots joins us to talk Dyson vacuums. I know that doesn't sound too technical but you'd be surprised how advanced the tech is in the new devices. I share a few of my Dyson stories too and we both talk about our love for everything Dyson. Hide your pocketbooks before listening because all Dyson products are super expensive!

This week’s Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite is a stretch to the word “Lite”. I’d call it a crossover episode of Lite and Programming By Stealth. Helma van der Linden joins me to tell the story of how she has successfully started the new version of Bart’s fabulous xkpasswd password generation service. xkpasswd.net was written in perl ages ago and depends on very old and outdated libraries. Bart spent many months teaching the Programming By Stealth students the tools we (and he) would need to port the code over to JavaScript. His plan all along was to have students help him make the new version of XKPASSWD a reality.

It turns out that Helma is an extraordinary student and has done most of the work to make it a minimal viable product, all without Bart’s help. In this conversation, we’ll talk about how she did this without getting _too_ nerdy. Some nerdy but not too nerdy.

If you’d like to give the very beta version of the new tool a try (without knowing any coding), check it out at bartificer.github.io/xkpasswd-js/. In a few days, Bart will have it up as the beta version of the _real_ xkpasswd at beta.xkpasswd.net. This beta version is not feature-complete, but it allows you to create 1-10 passwords that use the default preset from the original xkpasswd. You can’t choose different presets, and you can’t make customized passwords, but at least it does create long, strong, memorable, and typable passwords. And it’s REALLY pretty!

We end with the call for others to come help work on the code. The GitHub repo is at github.com/bartificer/xkpasswd-js. (https://github.com/bartificer/xkpasswd-js) If you have or create a GitHub account, you can contribute to the project. If you don’t have programming skills but you have feature requests, it counts as contributing if you use the “issues” tab for the GitHub project to post your feature request.

Helma is great fun and we had a blast talking about what she’s accomplished so I think you’ll enjoy the conversation no matter how nerdy you might be.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_02_03 (https://podfeet.com/transcripts/CCATP_2024_02_03.html)

In this week’s episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Jason Howell, podcaster and producer for the TWiT network (https://twit.tv), and musician (https://open.spotify.com/artist/5bgXcI3jGHMp8N97Ib08ZK?nd=1&dlsi=50d38517395a4ea9) joins me to talk about what it’s like to use an Android phone with a Mac. I live in an Apple-centric bubble, so I am very curious about how he works with these two operating systems.

We talk about his origin story on the Mac and his Android hardware of choice. We talk a lot about how he manages his photos, and what messaging is like in this mixed blue-bubble/green-bubble environment.

Jason is great fun and introspective and we had an absolute blast chatting. If you’d like to find everything Jason does, go to [raygun.fun](https://raygun.fun/) - it rhymes _and_ it’s fun (as Jason pointed out).

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_12_04 (https://podfeet.com/transcripts/CCATP_2023_12_04.html)

One of the great joys of Mastodon is that I’m meeting new people with a cross-section of interests that overlap with my own. By following hashtags like #programming and #technology and #knitting and #crocheting, I can find fellow nerds who are also into the crafts I enjoy.

I discovered this week’s guest, Angela Preston through these hashtags. She’s a knitter and she created a website by hand that explains how she built a font for knitting at [sites.google.com/…](https://sites.google.com/site/kauriknitsfont/kauris-knitting-font). The best part is she created the font with an open source tool called [FontStruct](https://fontstruct.com/).

The conversation bounces back and forth between explaining what knitting is, how traditional text-based patterns are written, how diagram-based knitting works, and then flipping over to how a font is created in FontStruct. Angela is fun and interesting and I think you’ll really enjoy the conversation even if you’re not a programmer or a knitter.

Angela’s font is called Kauri Knits, where Kauri is a name from the book series “Dancing Gods” by Jack L Chalker (https://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Gods-Part-River-Demons/dp/0345402464/?crid=1E7QQ19TIYYZU&sprefix=dancing+gods,aps,157). (It’s also the Māori name for a cool tree in New Zealand.)

If people want to follow Angela on Mastodon, you find her at @AngelaPreston@toot.site (https://toot.site/@AngelaPreston).

After a long hiatus for which I have no excuse, Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite is back with a fabulous interview with Adam Engst, publisher of the long-running Internet-based email newsletter, TidBITS (https://tidbits.com). Adam’s been on the show a few times and he’s always a delight.

This episode focussed on an article he published in TidBits entitled, iPhone Recommendations for Senior Citizens (https://tidbits.com/2023/10/12/iphone-recommendations-for-senior-citizens/).

My audience knows that I’m an advocate for the accessibility of technology in all forms, and they also know that I bristle at the suggestion that people past a certain age aren’t good at technology. If you throw in gender along with that, such as a phrase I hear all too often, “It’s so easy your mother could use it”, the top of my head blows off.

I read Adam’s article with a desire to learn any tips he could provide to making the iPhone more accessible to seniors _and_ at the same time I was ready to jump down his throat if you implied that elderly people can’t be technically competent. I was delighted to find that he pushed none of my hot buttons and gave terrific advice. In our conversation we talk about how to approach senior citizens on what their needs are, and to understand where their limitations might be. Do they lave low vision? Arthritis? Cognitive issues? Dry fingers?

We talk about the pros and cons of Face ID vs. Touch ID as it relates to the different challenges each person might be facing. Adam even gives some cool suggestions on how to rearrange their home screen on the iPhone including a Shortcut he created that might make communicating with just a few people easier.

I’m on a roll with scientists on Chit Chat Across the Pond. This week my guest is Professor Jason Briner from the University of Buffalo. Dr. Briner joins us to tell us tales of adventure as he and his team go to Greenland to study the polar ice sheet. I never thought of geology as a sexy, exciting field of science, but after learning about Dr. Briner’s work and the incredible importance of that work to climate science, my view of geology has been turned upside down.

Dr. Briner is serious and funny and engaging and fascinating and I really enjoyed talking to him on the show. I’m really glad we got to know Dr. Briner on our trip to Antarctica where he was one of the brilliant scientists lecturing on the university alumni trip.

You can find photos and videos from Dr. Briner’s very recent research trip to Greenland at [www.glyfac.buffalo.edu/…](http://www.glyfac.buffalo.edu/Faculty/briner/2023nwgreenland/2023nwgreenland.html). Might be fun to follow along with the images while listening to him describe the work.