Hi, this is Allison Sheridan with an oscillacast podcast hosted at potfeed.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever-sus-like Apple bias. Today is Sunday, July 26, 2026, and this is show number 1107. Well, it's really fun being in the live chatroom after being gone for a couple of weeks. We will have a live show next week on the second of August, but then we won't be back until August 23rd, right after we get back from our big wild trip to Europe. Here we're going to go to Spain to see an eclipse that apportial because, hey, it's right next to Spain, and then we're going to hop over to Ireland for a few days to actually see Bart in real life. This will only be the second time we've met Bart in real life the last time was 15 years ago. I may be looking forward to that even more than the eclipse. Back in 2024, I taught you about a free, open-source app called Keycaster that allows you to display your keystrokes on screen while you're doing demonstrations. It's a fantastic tool to help your audience understand exactly what you're doing when you're teaching new concepts. Maybe you're in a Zoom demo or you're in a live demo, but it's a really great way so people can see your keystrokes. Around the same time in 2024, I taught you about an app called Presentify, which lets you draw on screen to also catch your viewers' attention so you can draw boxes and lines and arrows and all kinds of fun things. I'm bringing these both up again because they're in very active development and very cool tools, so I decided to teach them both in a ScreenCastOnline tutorial. And that ScreenCastOnline tutorial was finally just released. As always, I learned a lot about the tools I didn't know before, which is why I love teaching through ScreenCastOnline. I've included a link to the preview video of the tutorial to quite your appetite in the show notes, but the usual disclaimer applies. ScreenCastOnline is a subscription service where you can get a free seven-day trial where you can watch all of the current bat catalog. Beware, that will make you want to get a subscription. Sarah Lane of DTNES fame has a show called Live With It where she interviews people about tech they've been living with for a fair bit of time. It's an interesting show because it's not the quick take where used to with gadgets are new, rather it's after the new shiny might have worn off. She recently had me on the show to talk about my thoughts on driving Tesla EVs. I do make a point up front that I don't agree with any of Elon Musk's political views, but Steve and I love the cars his company makes nonetheless. We talk about why we bought another Tesla and all of the things that I love about it like one pedal driving and why we can't really buy other cars because they won't fit our silly garage. I put a link of the show notes to the video interview on YouTube and of course you can find the audio podcast for Live With It in your pod catcher of choice. Let's start off with a really cool tiny tip from Eddie Tancoi. A while back I bought an M1 iMac and I have loved it. I've always been cautious of buying and all in one machine because of legacy concerns, but it was just such a lovely package that I got it. Roll forward to 2025 and I bought a Mac studio effectively making my iMac obsolete. But it's display is incredible and buying a new display of comparable quality would cost more than the cell value of the iMac. I tried lunar display, airplay and other options but was never satisfied. Then ironically whilst testing lunar with a wired connection I discovered something surprising and delightful. Airplay supports wired connections using a USB-C cable. Just really it's right there in the name, airplay. Having decided to share this mind blowing knowledge I decided to get some evidence and whilst I'm convinced I have seen an Apple article mentioning this I'm becoming more and more convinced I'm losing my mind. I cannot find it, chat GPT cannot find it, Claude, perplexity, nothing. So having recorded a 90 second version of this piece I went back to the drawing board and I did a hardware test although see the citations for an after-the-fact update. I have my iMac connected to my studio using a Thunderbolt 4 cable. The iMac shows up in displays in system settings, great. I can choose to mirror or extend to the iMac and that is surprising enough for people. But I'm talking about using a cable so I went to the iMac and turned off Wi-Fi. The iMac still showed up as a display. I then disconnected the cable and the iMac disappeared as a display option. Plug the cable back in and it comes back. So what's going on? I have better display installed after Alison had sung its praises recently I think so I had a look there and it shows the iMac and lists it as an airplay display. Great, that confirms it is airplay but no Wi-Fi. It turns out airplay does not need the air to let you play. Airplay as documented online works over other connections reducing latency. So here are the steps you need. Number one, own an iMac you feel like you want to repurpose. Number two, in system settings on the iMac go to general, air drop in continuity and enable airplay receiver. Optionally connect the two computers using a USB-C or Thunderbolt cable. Then in system settings on the main computer go to displays and down by the bottom right you should see a plus button that lets you connect to the iMac. In my use which has been months it is rock solid, low latency although I don't play games on it. It's good frame rate and high quality image. It looks better than the Dell monitor that remains my primary display. Some citations, there is an Apple support article, extend or mirror your Mac desktop across multiple displays and I did eventually find something online. With the 9-5 article being the most mainstream, links in the show notes. What it says is, send wired or wirelessly. Airplay works both wirelessly and wired using USB. A wired connection is useful when you want to ensure that there is no latency or you don't have access to Wi-Fi. There is also a copy of the macOS Monterey page at webarchive.org that has the same quote. It seems it was planned as a thing for Monterey, then appears to have not really been pushed and exists in a kind of limbo. It works and that will do for me. But perhaps the problem is it doesn't remove latency and Apple just decided it's not enough for them to push. Thanks Eddie. This is essentially target display mode for modern Macs that you know the old one disappeared around. When the 2017-27-H5K iMacs came out, it was such a shame that this one away because all of those beautiful iMacs ended up recycled or worse yet in a landfill instead of living out their lives as spectacular displays. I have to be honest and say that I thought screen mirroring was just what it said on the tin. I use it to mirror my Mac to the Apple TV in the family room on occasion, but I literally never noticed it that you could do it from a Mac to a Mac and that if you chose another Mac it lets you choose extended display. Makes sense since I've done it with my Mac to an iPad, but it literally never occurred to me that this would work. It really blew me away when I first heard this. I was kind of surprised that Eddie said that it didn't get rid of latency. I played around with it a bit and I didn't see any latency between a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air sitting side by side. In any case it's free to try it out so go do it, try it. When I look back on Mac stock 10, I ended by saying that it's the people that make this conference so special. One of my favorite people I got to hang out with this year was Ken Case, the CEO of the Omni Group, you know the makers of Omnigraffle, Omni Outliner and more. We met way back in 2019 at the alt conference during WWDC that year and shortly afterwards I was honored to have a bunch of chat across the pond, episode 614. I just re-listen to that episode and it's fantastic since it's about Ken and his early education. It's an evergreen episode that I think you might really enjoy. He talks about how he started high school, I'm sorry, how he started college at age 14 and how when he went to kindergarten he went to his parents and said, "Yeah, no, I need to go faster than this, these people are not ready for me." Anyway, Ken and I hadn't talked in ages but during Mac stock we got to chat quite a bit. We sat next to each other at dinner one night and I tried out some of my favorite conversation starters to kind of get to know him better. I asked him what he does for fun and he very enthusiastically talked about music. I want to get me too far since I'm not into music so I didn't have much to contribute to the conversation. So I tried one of Ken Ray's starters. He says, "He asked people, he says, "Tell me a toy story." This worked really well because you learned about someone's childhood, their siblings, their parents, and maybe their home. But it turned out that didn't really resonate with him. Finally, I tried one of Alan Alda's seven questions he asked at the end of every clear and vivid podcast. I asked him, "What book changed your life?" Ken thought for a moment and then his eyes lit up when he said, "The Apple Too Manual!" "Yeah, I'm not kidding here." He explained that.
that when he was a young boy, I think 12 years old, possibly younger, his school got an apple too, but it was at the very end of the year. He went to the librarian and asked whether he could take home the manual set for the summer to study it. And they said yes. His family took a long road trip to South Dakota by way of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, and the entire way there and back that little boy studied that manual. As often as he could get away with while at their destination, he kept studying. He even wrote programs with paper and pencil in the back of the car so he'd be ready to try them when he got back. To his dismay, when he got back, he found out there was only one apple too at the school, which meant each student only got a half hour with it every other week. This was obviously not enough. Now his parents couldn't afford an apple too, but they did buy him an Atari 800, which he still has. I thought this was such a wonderful story of someone finding just the exact right thing at the exact right time to form who they were meant to be. Listening to Ken tell the story was such an enthusiasm was probably my favorite thing that happened at Macstock, but more fun with Ken was yet to come. We're going to get a bit nerdy here to start, but don't worry, it's going to get even worse. I need to set up the next part of the story with Ken. When I was doing my workshop on spreadsheets, one of the methods I taught is called VLookup. I'm going to explain a little bit about how this works because it will be important to the story. Let's start with an example of the problem VLookup solves. Imagine you have a list of users with user numbers and user names in two columns. Let's say some of these users have been involved in a data breach, but all you have is a list of the user numbers for those affected. With VLookup, you can do a vertical lookup of the user numbers you have and return the user's names. It's a swell function, but it's also weird. If you look up, you tell it the value you want to look up, like in our case, the user number of the person in the breach. When you tell it the table array to search, in our case, it's the list of user numbers with their names, and then you give the column index number for the value you want returned. In other words, when it finds that user number in the first column, return the column, the value in the column number to the right that contains the user's names. So far, this makes sense. What do you want to look up, where do you want to look, and what do you want it to give back to you? Pretty easy. If there's one more element to the equation, Excel calls it "Range Lookup", and it shows it in square brackets, indicating that it's optional. I added the look this up because I was going to be teaching it, and in the documentation for Excel, it explains that "Range Lookup" should be either true or false, and if you leave it blank, it's going to default to true. Okay, that's really helpful, but what that doesn't mean. True means that the array is sorted by the first column with the user number. If your array is not sorted by that column, and you leave the default of true, your VLOOKUP will not get the right answer. I gave examples in the show notes where I did a little look up with people from the show, and a whole bunch of them come back saying, "That's Brian Hanson, even though it's not Brian Hanson's user number." So it's getting the wrong answer because it says true. Alright, so if your table isn't sorted, you must add false to the end of the equation. During my class, I expressed how baffled I was at this weirdness in the VLOOKUP equation. When I was done with my talk and I had taken my bows, okay, not really, but you know, made them applaud for me, Ken Kase came over to tell me why there was this concept of a sorted value list in the lookup function. He explained that this comes into play when you're looking for a value to be returned that might not actually be in the list. The example he gave was calculating taxes from an equation. In the United States, we have tax rate tables, and they say something like, "If you make more than 50k, but less than 75k, take them out more than 50k, tax it at this rate, and then add this other dollar amount." The next section in that same table will be for people, say, making 75 to 100k. So let's say you make 52k, which is not in the table. Remember, it starts with 50k. Ken explained that VLOOKUP would look through this table until it finds a number bigger than 52k, and then it'll go back by one. This is properly finding the 50 to 75k section. This will only work if the data is properly sorted. Perhaps this is a complicated example of how true for sorted would work, but at least there was a reason for this crazy thing. OK, I promised it's going to get worse. Now we're going to go even dirtier. Someone mentioned to me after I talked that the first spreadsheet was called "Visicaelk" might actually have been Ken now that I think about it. Anyway, if you'd like to argue the point about whether a Visicaelk was really the first spreadsheet, please visit the Visicaelk author Dan Brickland's explanation at danbrickland.com, link in the show notes. So I'd heard a Visicaelk before, but it occurred to me I'd never seen what it looked like. While listening and watching another presentation, I looked for a Visicaelk emulator, and I found one on the internet archive. The Visicaelk emulator mimics the 1979 software art original by Dan Brickland running on an Apple IIE, even though it was originally written for the Apple II of Ken's childhood. I was so excited to get to play with this. I started goofing around in the emulator, but I couldn't get it to work properly. The main problem was that I had was I couldn't use the arrow keys to move right left or up or down through the spreadsheet. You know what? I knew who to ask for help. During the next break, I cornered Ken and asked him for help. We played around with it a bit without success, and then I wondered whether maybe it might not work properly unless I was using a chromium browser instead of Safari, and sure enough, I was able to move right and left with the arrow keys in Edge. As soon as we got it to work, Ken and I went to town playing with it, but soon the break was over, but we didn't stop there. For the rest of the afternoon, the two of us played in Visicaelk, emailing each other back and forth across the conference room with cool things we'd figured out we could do. It was so much fun. Now Ken remembered a bit about how to use it, so he was able to figure things out just by experimenting. I'll have to admit, I actually read the 1982 user manual I found from bitsavers.org in order to figure out what I could do with Visicaelk. Because I promised we'd get nerder, I'm going to teach you a little bit about how to use Visicaelk. I loved reading the Visicaelk manual because it's written from the perspective of teaching someone who's never seen a spreadsheet before because nobody'd seen a spreadsheet before. Here's an example where the authors explain how to move the cursor. Well, first I have to explain what a cursor even is. The cursor's position marks the point where you can begin writing on the electronic worksheet. Think of it as the point where your pencil or pen meets the paper. Isn't that adorable? Well, they go on to explain that to move the cursor to the right or left, you simply use the right left arrow keys. However, you cannot use the up-down arrow keys to navigate vertically because the original Apple II keyboard did not have up-down keys. In the upper right, you'll see that the letter C, followed by a minus. This tells you that the cursor control is only left to right right now. If you want to switch to vertical movement, you tap the space bar once, and now it will say C exclamation point in the upper right. This indicates vertical movement, but you don't get to use the up-down arrows to do it. You still use the left right arrows to move up and down. Now first this was as clumsy as it sounds, but after a bit I was surprised that I was able to adapt to it. Now, you don't have to scroll constantly like this to move to a specific cell. If you type the greater-than symbol in the menu bar at the top, it will say go to "coord", and you can simply type the cell coordinates you want to navigate to, say B2 and hit enter. To enter a formula, you don't put in an equal sign. Now, you think about what do we have to put in an equal sign? If you start typing a number, why can't that be it? But anyway, in "Visicalc", you just type in, say, 25 plus 75. Visicalc indicates in the menu bar whether you've typed a label, that's text, or a value, numbers, or a formula in a selected cell. It does this by typing L or V in parentheses at the top. You can, of course, do calculations such as 0.6 times B1 to calculate 60% of the value in B1. If typing the cell coordinates is tedious, you can navigate with a cursor to sell B1 while you're typing the formula. With all the space barring required to toggle vertical versus horizontal navigation and having to remember that the left arrow goes up if there's a C exclamation point in the menu bar, I find it quite a bit easier to type in the cell value. But you know, if it was far away, maybe need to get all the way over there to see where it was. In the manual, they explain with great enthusiasm how changing the value of cell B1 changes the calculation result in 0.6 times B1. Again, it's adorable. An interesting feature of Visicalk is that it executes certain commands you type the slash. This is where Ken spend his time experimenting to remember what each of them does. When you hit that slash, it will print command colon and then a series of letters. It says B-C-D-F-G-I-M-P-R-S-T-V-W-Dash, and that's all up at the top. Each of those letters is a different command. For example, if you want to erase the value of a cell, slash B will blank out the cell. I have to say, I was jealous when I read in the manual that you can edit a cell by typing slash E, but there's no E in that command list on the emulator. Evidently, edit in cell was a big enhancement added between 1979, the date of the emulator, and 1981, the date of the user manual I found. Now, in the manual, I found a handy, dandy tree diagram that explains exactly what each of these slash commands does. I say handy dandy in air quotes, because this diagram is so crazy complicated and hard to read. Also, I found a typo in it. at one point it says integer but it's
spelled "interger". I fully planned to write a strongly worded letter to the authors about that. Now the diagram was well-intentioned but difficult to reference, so I asked Claude to make a simple mark-down reference table for the commands which I've included in the show notes for your pleasure. Even though I told it to use the 1979 version of Visicalc, it was also only be able to find the 1981 manual. I marked in the table with an asterisk the two commands that won't work with the 1979 version of Visicalc/e/l. Now I definitely am not going to go through all of the slash commands mostly because I haven't learned them all, but I distinctly remember the joy in Ken's email when he told me during the conference how with /f you can write or left justified by adding r or l to the command, so /fl would be left justified. Isn't that wonderful? Now remember much earlier in your life when I explained how V-Luck up works and how Ken explained why you needed to add true or false at the end of the formula to indicate whether the data range was sorted by the left column? Your reward with sticking with me this long is that now we're going to walk through an example exercise from the Visicalc manual that illustrates what Ken explained to me. I knew you'd be excited. I was too when Ken told me it was possible in Visicalc. The example in the manual is a list of the first 10 entries in the periodic table of the chemical elements with their atomic weights and atomic numbers. I put a screenshot in the show notes of how they tell you to create the table. It looks arcane, but once you get the hang of how they write it, it actually makes perfect sense. They do things like they use the registered trademark r to mean the return key and parentheses s is for the space key and big fat arrows to the right, meaning you're going arrow key to the right or to the left. Anyway, it does actually make sense when you learn how to read it. It was great fun falling along with these arcane instructions because I learned about the r function, which lets you replicate a function to another set of cells, think like fill down in a modern spreadsheet. Rather than typing 1 through 10 for the atomic number, the instructions start by showing how to create the formula to add one to the number above it. Then to replicate the formula to a range of cells, you enclose the range between slash r colon and colon r. Now that we've got our fancy periodic table bill, we can finally play with the lookup function, which is essentially v lookup. We can't type lookup directly into physical because as soon as you type the letter L, it'll interpret that function as a text label instead of a formula. Instead, we put the at symbol before the word lookup, so it knows it's a formula. Our formula to do a lookup in the range b2 to b12 for the atomic weight 10 becomes add lookup on parentheses 10 comma b2 dot dot dot b11. Close parentheses. So that dot dot dot is how you tell it the range. By design with this sorted list, lookup will try to find 10 as a match. And if it doesn't, it will search until it finds a number bigger than 10 and return the value from one earlier in the list. So let's say that more specifically, lookup searches through our atomic weights 1, 4, 7, 9 and then finds 11, which is the first value greater than 10 is then backs up to 9. By design, lookup returns the value in the column 1 to the right of the range. You don't get to decide where. So it's going to look in the column to the right to the right of the atomic weight. And our table is atomic number 4 for barilium. It worked. Now I played around with lookup to see if I could get it to return the elements name instead of the atomic number. I rearrange the columns by learning how to insert column. How cool was that so that the element name was to the right of the weight instead of the atomic number. But visit Calc return the value of 0 when I re-entered the equation. Sad trombone. Now getting lookup to work was great fun. And now I'll never forget why we have to put false at the end of our V lookups in modern spreadsheets if our lookup values are not sorted. I will also think fondly of Ken case every time I do. The bottom line is that I had a blast getting to know Ken case even better during this trip. And I had a blast learning how to use the very first spreadsheet by playing with a visit calc emulator on an Apple 2 through the browser. Even though approximately 0.2 percent of you will be interested in doing this yourself, I have included links to the emulator and the user manual for visit calc for your learning pleasure. Now I'm off to learn how visit calc can execute net present value calculations. As you may have suspected it's not inexpensive to host podcasts like the ones we do here at podfeed.com. I try to keep the cost to a minimum but sometimes I do have to spend more than I like. A few years ago with Bart's encouragement I put my domain behind Cloudflare so they handle my DNS and they do that for free. This did a lot to protect the site from hackers. Then late last year my web server started to get hammered by some bots. With tags help, we've returned on a rate limiting rule and the Cloudflare interface to stop those bots. Everything was fine until back in June of this year when I started getting emails from my hosting company DigitalOcean that again my site was getting hammered but this time it wasn't my web server rather it was my managed database server. The emails were titled DigitalOcean Monitoring Triggered CPU is running high and then maybe 45 minutes or later or more I'd get another email titled DigitalOcean Monitoring Resolved CPU Running High. Now because it would resolve itself it gave me the luxury of simply putting my head in the sand because I didn't have the time or the knowledge to figure out what was wrong. I continued with this brilliant strategy until someone sent me a note telling me that podfeed.com was completely down. I wish I could remember who it was to thank them publicly for telling me always tell me if you find podfeed.com down but the person's name is slipped my mind and I really wish I could thank them publicly. Anyway it seemed to be time to stop with the head in the sand approach. Instead of bothering Bart or Tag I decided to see what Claude and I could accomplish together. After it helped me get my site back up by restarting EngineX the web server we started on a journey to look at log files. Armed with a nice interactive graph from DigitalOcean I could use my cursor to easily pinpoint exact times when the CPU passed 90%. Claude was able to narrow the search in the log files. After literally thousands of words exchanged between me and Claude we determined as you would suspect that bots were attacking my site. Unfortunately the free version of ClaudeFlare only allows one rate limiting rule and Tag and I had already written one. So Claude suggested I add a second one to rate limit bots in general. It also suggested ClaudeFlare's superbot fight mode which sounded really cool but that was also not included in the free ClaudeFlare plan. So I warmed up my crutch my apple card and shelled out 25 bucks for a month's worth of ClaudeFlare Pro so I could enable these features. I'm not going to go through the gory details of the configuration or of the tweaks we added so my own work created blog posts from the admin panel wouldn't get blocked like they did at first but I will tell you that for the past two days the CPU activity on the database server has been quite a bit calmer than it has been in the last two weeks. Not only if there not be any 90+ percent spikes in CPU load the curve is much more stable hovering around 35% to 40% or before it was jumping to 50% or more pretty often. I don't want to declare victory just yet since it's only gone two days without a spike and it's done two days without a spike in the past but I have to say I'm cautiously optimistic based on the much less noisy graph like it looks right now. And why have I told you this whole story? One is because it's nerd fun but also because if this works I'll be changing to the annual plan of 20 bucks per month for ClaudeFlare Pro protection which is another 240 dollars of cost to run the podcast. So if you have some mula laying around that maybe you could spare and you find the content we provide here entertaining or educational I mean hey you just learned how to use visit calc for crying out loud. Please consider going to podfee.com/patrion to help defray the cost of providing this valuable service. Well it's that time of the week again it's time for chitchat across the pond this is episode number 839 for July 23rd, 2026 and I'm your host Alison Sheridan. This week our guest is Adam Angst of tidbits. Back in April we talked about his first long road trip with his new Hyundai Ionic 5 electric vehicle. It's been a few months and with the aid of some tools he has a new strategy to talk about in planning extensive driving adventures. Welcome to the show Adam. Thanks for having me and you know like every time I'm going to drive the car I now have to think about this like what am I going to do next? What's Alison going to ask me? Well now it actually planning extensive driving adventures what you really want this to be is not an adventure. I mean it was an enjoyable trip. It actually was not an adventure there were no there was nothing dramatic about it which is in fact the goal. Yeah yeah that's what you're looking for. So when last we left our hero you had gone what 700 miles with your EV? Yeah something like that Ithaca to Arlington, Virginia and the second trip was to Boston so roughly similar distance about six hour drive if you just drive straight through which of course no one does because well well because we're old sorry. Yes I find that handy. Oh I have to stop to charge my car. Not me at all. Not me at all. It's the car. I don't know. So what was what things did you dislike or want to fix that happened the first time that you wanted to improve on this time? Well so the
First time, there was, it was kind of a mistake, but it was an unavoidable mistake. Well, it was avoidable, but almost, anyway. I had planned my trip assuming I would start at 100%. But then I got really sick two nights before and assumed I wasn't gonna be able to go, so I stopped the charging, so the car wouldn't sit at 100%, if I was gonna be sick and bed for a week. And therefore, when I felt enough better to go on the morning that I needed to leave, I restarted charging, but only it was able to get to 90%. So I was 10% too low for my assumptions. And then the result of that was, is that I got to a point in the trip where I was like, I need to stop and charge now. I cannot get to the point where I'm getting or I'm planning to go. Possibly at all, or certainly without it being stressful. As it turned out, I would have made it that one of the things I didn't quite understand was that the point where I stopped to charge from that point on to my eventual destination for the charging point was entirely downhill. It was like an hour downhill driving out of the mountains of Pennsylvania. And so I got so much better efficiency going down the hill that I would have made it okay. The numbers were correct. I just didn't trust them. - Right, right. - And wave and stress. - But I still would have gotten there. - You need to trust the car and what it's telling you is one of the hardest things. I spent a lot of time in denial going, no, I know better than my car. And our friend Rod Simmins kept saying, no, trust the test app. If it tells you to stop here for 10 minutes or eight minutes, just do what it says and you're gonna be fine. I'm like, no, no, but I need to blah, blah, blah. My only argument is you gotta stop me where I can have a snacky. So that's the only hard part. So basically this time, well, the big thing I did is I subscribed to a better route plan or a pro. And so by getting the pro version of the premium version or whatever they call it, that adds a few features that make it significantly better for this kind of planning. Has problems. - Let me in real quick. - Oh, sorry. - And remind people a better route planner is a piece of software that you put on your phone. And you tell it what kind of car you have, what kind of charger you can do. And so it tailors things to what you wanna do. And at least when we first started using it, it was the only way we could tell it, we wanna arrive with a certain amount of charge. Like when we get to Fresno, we don't wanna be at 5%, we wanna be at 50%, because we're gonna drive around as soon as we get there. And that was the only way we could do it. We could do it in our car, we can now. But so it's a way of tailing your drive to make sure you're gonna hit the kind of chargers that work for your car. I mean, that's getting simpler with Nax and everything. But, and it's also, it's a situation where it also knows things about the chargers on your route so that you can say, it can say, oh, you're not gonna wanna stop here because these chargers are out of service or even as you're doing, as you're driving, you can say these chargers are full, you don't wanna stop here. We're gonna reroute you to a different one. So-- - So is that so? - Soundsourced or? - Yes, I mean, I think it is, 'cause when you stop at a charger, it actually asks you if there are various, you can ask you questions about the charger. So, and of course, if you're actually, I think following its plan, then it's, I think to an extent, it is assuming that you're charging successfully. - Okay, yeah. - All right, and it's gathering all that data so it can keep everybody else informed. - Precisely. So yeah, so the premium version adds car play support so that it can just appear on your screen and sort of take over for Apple's Maps. It's basically the same mapping in my experience, although not quite as good. And so we were able to use it, but the main thing that that does is it also can get another premium version as it can get real-time data from the car. And it does this in two ways, which can be one of or combined. One of is there's this service called, what was it called, is ENODE? Something was a funny name, yes, ENODE. And that allows you, ENODE can connect to, for the Ionic 5, the Bluelink service, and then the Bluelink service gets the data from the car and then ENODE gets it from Bluelink. And so that gets the exact charge level, but it's not, it's one of those slightly tenuous network connection things. And so the other way that ABRP can get real-time data is via an ODB scanner. And so that's the one of your diagnostics port that you may have access to if you have that kind of car. - Every car has one, as far as I'm-- - No. - No. - Mine does not. - Really? Oh, but you have a Tesla and they're just freaky, so. - But not all cars do. For a long time, EVs didn't, I think they're bringing it back 'cause it has value. - I would say my understanding was they were very common, but I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't aware that there were that many good inconsistencies. Any event, yes, it's a relative, it's a little scanner. They're not very expensive, somewhere between like 20 and 100 bucks depending on capabilities and quality and things like that. And one of your lovely readers actually had an extra one that he didn't need, so he sent it to me. And so that saved me the trouble of having to actually go and find one and buy it. And so by plugging that in and connecting it to ABRP, the, it could get real time charge data from the car. And so basically what it was reporting was the same as the car at all times. And this was useful because before I would be looking at, okay, I have 200 miles to go and I'm at this charge level looking at the car and trying to kind of figure out in my head or asking tattoo to do a car play. How far, how like what percentage I was going to be at when I arrived, basically trying to do all that math. And that's what ABRP Pro does for you. Is it cool? - Hold please. - Hold please. If Gemini is to be believed, Tesla's BMW i3 Polestar 2 and 4 Volvo EX30 and Lucid do not have a OBD two ports. - Hmm, okay. - 'Cause apparently it was originally built around monitoring tailpipe emissions and internal combustion components. - Oh, so what a dashed acting car. - So gas cars would have it, but EVs less so. - But it sounds like it's making a comeback. - Yeah. - Okay, so this is gonna let, so you're saying this is less stressful for you because the app is now monitoring that where you don't have to ask chat GPT to figure it out for you. - You're not trying to do that juggling of the numbers in your head of, I seem to be going down, using power at this rate and I had this far to go, is the estimate correct, right? It's constantly updating the estimate. And so that thing one, that just makes it less stressful. Right, you don't have to do any of the thinking about it yourself trying to decide at all times, is it doing a good job? - I do wanna make another interjection there. What Adam is experiencing is exactly what we experienced early on and which we never experienced later because we began to trust it. You've gotta, it has to build the trust. You don't automatically assume that the car's gonna be able to do it right for you. And so when you're early in your EV experience, you tend to test it a lot more. Well, take a look, like it'll tell us that it expects us to arrive with 23%. And we watch that. We do that every once all, go down to AST, if you'd drive a little too fast, we're at 71. No, no, no, now I'm going down hill. Oh, it's 74, you know, whatever the numbers are. But it's just a little game. It's not a, I need to know this right now. I'm never gonna get there. I might not arrive kind of a thing. - Well, and interestingly, I think the one variable that ABRP, ABRP, boy, you say this too many times, it starts to lose meaning, doesn't know is how you're driving and what you're driving. - Oh, do those speeds are? - I don't think so. And the reason I say that is because we said, we want to arrive at this place with 30%, you know, 30% left. Every time we arrived with 36% left, or, you know, we said, we don't know, we expect us to arrive with 40, and we'd arrive with 44% left. So basically, it was always, it was less accurate, but in the good way. - Okay, and the way that I think is is that it didn't know that I was in eco mode with level three braking, driving exactly the speed limit at all times. - And that's why it said you were gonna get there with less than you do because you drive the speed a little better than expected. - Yeah, yeah. By the way, the OBD port does provide speed information. It may be better out plan or it just isn't picking it up. - Yeah, yeah, it may not be. - And it certainly can't detect, I mean, it could presumably, I mean, I guess if it's talking to the car, it should be able to detect efficiency, but like it can't tell if you're into a headwind. - Yeah, yeah, and it may know that there's a wind in theory in the area from its weather data because that is some of the things that another version of the premium, another benefit of the premium version is it can actually know more about the weather. - Yeah, and as another interlude to the ice car drivers, The reason we care about downhill and wind and speed is because
as electric vehicles are so efficient that well over 90% of the energy that you're consuming from the battery is going into propelling the car forward. So any effect on that like wind or going uphill will affect your actual range. Whereas in a gas vehicle, you're on the other end of the scale. You've got such low efficiencies that those effects, while they do affect your efficiency, they're so small compared to how much loss there is to heat that you don't need to worry about them. It's an upside down equation, but it's actually because it's doing a better job than those affected. Yes. So in any event, so the overall upshot of this was it just worked. It was really easy. And another thing that I did do that was different was that we were going to stay with a friend. And I wanted to arrive with enough power at our friend's house, that we did not have to worry about charging right away, because we were staying overnight with our friend. And then the next day, we had to go do various family things. We were going to a Bob Mitzvah, and there was a ceremony in the beginning morning, and then there was a party in the afternoon, the early evening, and we might want to do something in the middle. And so I basically, what I did is I said, oh, okay, I'm going to plan out the entire thing as though it were one trip, which actually confused a BRP a little bit, because it went over a day. I couldn't do it in one day, and so I was like, it was weird, it was weird a rival times and things like that. But I was saying, basically, I know I'm going to drive here, I'm going to go to this next spot, I'm going to go to this next spot, and then I'll go back to the friend's house, and then we'll leave the next day. So by doing that, it allowed me to figure out charging such that I would have enough for the driving around in Boston, like without having to think about charging what we might need to get to an event at a particular time. I would do the same thing. But that felt weird. I mean, it felt unusual, you don't normally think about that. So but it was just, and then again, maybe once I have more familiarity with the car, I'll know that yeah, if I'm at 50% or 40% whatever, I've got enough power to do anything I want for a weekend. Yeah, yeah. You know, like I'm driving in a city, I can't possibly go more than 40 or 50 miles for the weekend, so it's not an issue to think about it. I think about how I'm still not great at that. Steve needed to go pick up the dog, a doggy daycareer, and it's like seven miles away, and I said, oh, have you checked your charge? 14 miles? Yeah, I mean, he'd be on the last few electrons, and he could go 14 miles. That is not something he goes, yeah, but I'll say I'm at 60%, I think I can make it. Yeah, right. But it is funny that miles of range, you know. You still think that way for a little bit, and you know, and what I think there's also a little bit of, it's a precision problem with an EV, you know exactly what percentage you have. Yeah. We don't actually know if it's accurate. We know that it's precise, right? Who knows if it's accurate? Because with gas cars, you're like, I got a quarter left, I'm fine. Right. And that thing is just so irregular, the dial for gas, that's the least precise thing we have on our cars. Yes, you have absolutely no idea. But that's 37. You have no idea with a gas car how much you can really drive. I mean, yes, they all calculate various things now, but it's still based on that, you know, kind of like, well, the gas system. It's not linear, too. I always enjoyed that, you know, it's sand full for like the first half of tank, and then Olsen start dropping like a stone. Yeah. Yeah. So any of it. So that really, that helped me also is to do more planning for the route and then coming back. And then, you know, just for, I won't say for giggles, but it worked out this way. We ended up stopping. The first trip I had taken was electrifier America stations, just happened to be the ones I used. And so it was all one experience and the way home, and it was electrifier America on the way there to charge. And the way home we ended up stopping at a Tesla station and an EVGO station. So two people. We got to experience three. Yeah. And so it was interesting. I mean, the Tesla station was very much more after than, you know, there was no controls on the thing at all. Whereas EVGO would have perfectly happily taken a credit card and not known who I was at all. Okay. It was easier to just have their app. So electrifier America, the last time I used it was a couple of years ago, we rented an EV in Texas and, you know, maybe that's not the friendly hysteria for electric vehicles. There are a lot of Tesla superchargers, oddly enough, in the Houston area. But our experience at the mall was horrible. You know, two of the three were broken. We had to call support on the third one. And it was, you know, the cable was dirty and broken and it was really yucky. I assume it was a better experience now. Yeah. I mean, I've done what? Three electrified, so it was, yeah, it was three electrified America stations so far now, two in Virginia and one in Massachusetts. And they were fine. Like how many chargers at these six, okay, six to eight, okay. And yeah, none of them, none of the places I went had much more than that. Even the Tesla station was somewhere in that range. Really? I don't think I've ever seen, okay, yeah, I've seen them as small as 20, but I've also seen them with like 60 and there's an outlet mall. We go to on the way to Fresno. It's just, they're just as far as the eye could see. Yeah. Really lots and lots of them. Oh, yeah. No, none of these have been, I've never seen one with more than eight while you're talking. I'm going to double check that number because I might be like, I never, I make things up all the time. You bitch. Are you like an AI? Sorry. Oh, that's harsh. That's really harsh. I make things up all the time. They don't even know. So yeah, realistically, the experiences were very similar at each one of them. You know, that there was always a little bit of, yeah, you had to figure out that Tesla was nice because they used the Nax connector. So I didn't have to get a pull up one of my adapters. I was wrong. There's 76 at that charger, 76. Oh, my. Can you just imagine the amount of power that goes in there? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. So, yeah. So that was, so you know, I said, the specifics were different at each place, but the overall thrust of it was the same. And I do feel like having the apps and having the apps set up makes things easier. I think if you arrived somewhere without having any idea, you know, oh, I'm at the EVGO station. How do I deal with them? I think that would be more stressful. And certainly if you just assumed, oh, I don't have to do anything special and you got to a Tesla station, you'd be dead in the water until you got your Tesla app. Yeah. Some of the places we've gone, there hasn't been a good cell signal either. So that would be problematic. We ended up getting an EVGO and I think the electric fire America, they give, we got like little cards and we just stuck them in the car. Just in case there's a situation where we had to, we had a weird experience where it was in a parking structure so there was no signal there. And if we hadn't had that little card, we wouldn't have been able to do it after it. Yeah. Yeah. So, so anyway, it all worked fine. The places we ended up were in shopping mall areas but calling some of these, I mean, they were not the nicest of shopping malls. I mean, like one of them had kind of like a big lot store and a grocery store and that was it. Okay. Tesla one. And so it wasn't a lot to do there and there were bad terms in the grocery store but you know, it was a little weird going and finding them. And the other one was some kind of big mall and somewhere in rural Massachusetts that was a little down on its lock. You know, there were bunch of empty stores and things like, you know, when it was all outdoors, it was not a, not indoor thing in any way. The point being that it was, it wasn't the nicest of places to have stopped. So, you know, we could, neither, and neither one could we have gotten food without going somewhere, like walking a little further than might have been comfortable. Now, if you were comparing it to a chevron station though, find. Yeah. I mean, get right. Gas stations like the upper bathroom usually, but you maybe a mini-mart if you're lucky. Yeah. Right. Mini-mart if you're lucky. And you certainly not, I mean, you don't spend much time at gas stations but with these, you know, it was nice to be able to get out and walk around because, because we're old. And but there was not much to see or do there and APRP is pretty good about telling you about amenities. It doesn't really do a, this is not the nicest of places to hang out, you know, it doesn't have a, doesn't have an atmosphere rating. One thing I was surprised to see in your, in your right up was that you purposely were charging like 80 to 100%, which is one of the reasons you cared about having something to do. We don't ever charge beyond 80% when we're, when we're stopping. We tend to do more frequent stops because you, you want to be on the low end of that charging curve because it's linear from like 20 to 70, but once you hit 70%, 67%, it rolls off and it takes longer and longer, it takes forever to get, we used to, when we first got the car, we would go, we got to get to 100% or 95% whatever and now we don't. So this seems to be somewhat car related, because it never
It feels, I mean, I've done some research this too. It does seem like the ionic five slows down above 80, but it doesn't slow down enough that it seems to feel like it's worth another stop. - Okay. So it's battery physics that says that it's-- - It's a battery management system, no two. - The battery management system's gonna control some of that. - But the physics still tell you that you can't fill it as quickly when it gets towards the top. - I'll send you an article from Battery University that drives it and shows the curves. - The other aspect of it seems to be that the ionic five charges faster from zero to 80 than most cars. - Okay, but that is the sweet part of the curve. - Right, but it's still, I mean, it's a rather bold architecture. - Oh, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, that matters. - It is a very fast charge time. I mean, I think it's, I think, I don't know, 20 to 80, they advertise it like, I don't know, 18 minutes or something like that. In no case has charging to a 100% or above 80 felt like it was in any way an imposition in terms of time. - Okay. - It's an extra 10 minutes, 15 minutes, something like that. - We stop, eat a sandwich, go potty, come back and whatever it says, that's, we're beyond what it want, what it said it needed because it's gonna give us another little quick pit stop right before we get up to Fresno, for example. - And part of it is-- - It all depends on the infrastructure around you too. - Right, precisely, the other thing is it feels to me like there's a cost to stopping. Like just, you have to get off the road, you have to drive some distance to find the charger, you have to plug, you know, figure it out, plug it in all that, my mind, that almost always takes more time than just another 15 minutes of charging. - Yeah, we always choose ones that are like right at the off ramp. If it's down to six blocks, we aren't gonna go that far. We're gonna pick a different one. But it might be the luxury of where we were going, where we tend to do it. - It is possible that, you know, particularly when you're, I mean, so between Ithaca and Boston, there's a lot of country and, you know, there are definitely urban areas and that's where you charge, but is, you don't get a lot of choices. - Yeah, and the test app is often telling us, stop for eight minutes. I cannot stop the car, plug it in, go potty, and get back in eight minutes, it just doesn't happen because they go, "Ooh, look, coffee." You know what I mean? (laughs) - Yeah, I mean, a lot of the time it really feels, just feels impossible. I mean, you know, like thinking toward, we stopped for the Tesla charger. Again, let's just like figuring out that there were, oh, there were the two stores. You know, what's in this one? Oh, that's really cheesy nasty stuff. We don't even wanna walk around, it's not that amusing. And then going to the grocery store, like anyone that didn't seem to have a bathroom. And then, well, grocery stores usually have bathrooms somewhere, but you gotta find them. So it took a while, you know, so like just doing that. So like, yeah, it was not eight minutes. I mean, it was a good 15, 20 minutes before we got back. And so it was not really a problem to have gone up higher. - No, that's good, that's good. - So I do feel, I do wonder if that's a little bit of that, just like style of driving, that there are people who don't mind stopping from shorter times more. And then there's people who just wanna do it, like, I just wanna fill up and go, and stop by us. And it's not like we're trying to drive straight through, and we know we can't do that, but we don't wanna stop more than we need to. - Sure. - And someone awkwardly on the way home, because of the, like when we left after lunch. So we, and so we, in fact, were like almost all the way home before it was time for dinner. It made no sense to stop on the road. And we actually did have dinner before we got home, but we did it, you know, like 20 minutes from home, because we remembered that we had no food in the refrigerator. (laughing) I'm like, whoops. - So that better-up planner didn't have that in the app. Do you have food in the fridge? - Yeah. - Or didn't tell you that either. That's interesting. - Clearly our AI appliances are not talking to each other. - So when you are at home, are you still doing your wee tiny little trickle charge? - Yo, where do you go around the corner to get a little better charge? - Yeah, it's been in it, and you know, it has not been an issue in the slightest, except for we had a couple of longer trips such as the kind of like car was, and then I had to go pick up my son in Syracuse. And so my sister's house next door has a double two charger. And so I was like, oh, like this is probably fine. It was again that like, I know how far it is and all that, it should have been fine, but like, I'm just gonna go next door and charge up because the 10% I can add at home before I have to leave tomorrow morning does not get me to a point where I'm super happy about. - Happy, yeah. I am much more in the, I wanna be comfortable not worrying about it. Like I like getting home with 20%, even though I've got a charger at home. I don't like coming home in lower than that. Our friend, Rod Simmons, man, he told a story of where he had to keep going slower and slower and slower because the car was saying, you aren't gonna make it. In person, he's going like 45 on the freeway to get in with like 2% when he drove in. I would have had a heart attack. I would not have been able to stand that. I would much rather wasted time, but he's a real like stop for 3%, 7%, 8%, along the way kind of a guy. And much more of a comfortable with the risk. And I'm more in your camp. Let's just make it comfortable. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, with our Nissan Leap, which has very slow range. We only drive it around town. We once had a situation where we were on fumes coming home. And that was a combination of like, Justin hadn't plugged it in the night before. So, back when he was in high school and then we took it somewhere. And then, I made a mistake. It a track meet had to run home to pick something up and I took that car rather than the other car. And so, like, Tonya's driving home after this track meet and the car's just, it's like, it's just freaking out. It's like, panic, panic, panic. You know, shut everything down. I mean, like, it actually does. - Tonya, see off. - Yeah. - Oh wow. - I think it does. I think it turns it all off for you. - Wow. - It's like, I am shutting off the radio. - Yeah. - We are. - We need, we need to have every electron. - It's like in, what was that? Not the right stuff. What was the, oh, Apollo 11. When they're doing the calculation of exactly how much of chart power they have to get home. It's the same kind of thing. And I am intrigued by that because I don't, because I don't wanna ever be in that situation. I would do everything possible to avoid that kind of risk. - Well, and it was, it was a whole bunch of things we hadn't thought about it in the slightest. And I didn't even know the car hadn't been charged the night before. - Right. - You know, so it was starting from 100%. And then I hadn't driven two of the, you know, I only drove one of like the four trips that were involved in that charge. And so yeah, it was, and none of them were that far. Like they were all, you know, eight, 15 miles or something like that. So it was just like kept adding up. - What is the total range on the leaf? - When it was new, it was about 90. - Okay. - And so it's a 2015 model. So it's not new anymore. - We do not know what it is now. - We need another word for driving on fumes. - Yeah. - Driving on electrons doesn't work 'cause you're always driving electrons, right? Driving on trickle charge. - Trickle charge. - Low on electrons. It's a, it fumes. You know, and you weren't really driving on fumes either because that wasn't gonna explode much. But. (laughs) - Exactly. So is there anything you would do differently on your next long drive? - You don't think so. The, we do have another long drive. We have a family wedding to go to in Vermont in August. And so we'll be doing this again soon. And I think the main thing is probably that as I get better at this, I will probably get less specific. - Yeah. - You know, it's like, "Oh, it really is okay." Or, you know, again, I wasn't 100% certain how far I could trust those percentages and the estimates, the myelogestimates and everything. 'Cause I don't know, and then the Nissan leaf, you know, so this, you know, 11 years ago, they were calling it the Gesso meter in terms of, in terms of how far you had left to go in myels. And I guess that's still true. You know, you know, I mean, in, the ionic fiber is you three guesses. - Oh. - Yeah, no. - It's like, literally has, it has like a maximum, you know, if you're gonna, like, under perfect conditions, you could drive to the moon and back. You know, the reality is 260 miles and the middle range and then, you know, the, the well, if you're gonna be doing it in the worst possible conditions, it's gonna only be 190 miles, something like that. And so-- - So before you leave, you don't have any idea. But what you've told the car-- - Well, you start. - You want to go? Doesn't it tell you the estimate? - I don't, I don't tell the car the route I want to go. I'm only working in ABRP. - Oh. - And I don't think it would, I don't know if it would change its estimates or not based on it doing the navigating. - Oh, 'cause, well, with the Tesla, we're always going through the Tesla app and we tell it where we want to go and it tells us how long we should stop and charge and it tells us how much a charge will have when we get to our destination. We are never, well, I won't say never. We did run in one problem, come back from Vegas, we had some real high headwinds that it couldn't account for but we ended up being fine. But the, we did have to slow down a little bit. But it,
It tells us the mileage when we get home and it's usually spot on or pretty close, even though the original range might not be the right number, what it says we'll have when we get home has been right. So, the Hyundai app does not do that as far as I'm aware and the Hyundai app and the car stuff, honestly, well, mostly the app is bad enough that I don't trust it. It's a bad app and so that is one of those situations where, no, I'm not going to have a lot of stays in what this app has done because it's so janky to use that, you know, it's actually really interesting. The interface of the app is so bad that I don't trust the calculations underneath it, which may be entirely misplaced. Interesting. Do you get over the air updates? Yeah. To the car, yes. Yeah. Okay. So, it could get better. Yeah, but see, again, like I don't want to sit in the car and plan this out. Right? Right. I want to use my phone to plan it out in the house before I leave, you know, weeks before I leave, potentially, you know, just so I know what's going to happen. And so, like doing it in the car feels really weird as far as-- We get in the car. We tell it where we want to go and it tells us where to stop and then we fight with the interface to say, no, we don't like that charger. We like this one because it has a subway next to it where we can go get a sandwich. And then we tell it that and then it goes, okay, here you go, this is what you're going to do. See, see, the other problem with that is if we're actually doing this when they're driving, that makes me absolutely crazy because I have opinions about what should be, you know, how it should be used, but I can't use it because Tony is in the passenger seat and she can actually do it because she's not driving. Right. Right. It causes marital strife. If the purpose is low stress, that is not the result that you were looking for. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, if you can just, I mean, if you can just click, if you're just driving, if you just need directions, if I just need directions, yeah, fine, you get in and you plug in the address and you go. Okay. But if they become decisions involved and root, then that's not a case where I don't really want to depend on the car to do that because it becomes an inflexible interface for making changes. Yeah. As you say, you have to fight with it because, oh, I don't like that stop as opposed to, you know, like, yeah, if you just, if you just have to choose between three routes that's showing and it's showing on second on screen for five seconds, that's easy. Yeah. Yeah. I think it'd be nice if you had, I should check in this. I wonder if I can like, asterisk it, though the charge I like, so it'll stop trying to get this other one that's like five miles off the road and has no food next to it. It always likes that one. I don't know. I don't never want that one. Like I want a negative star of that one and I want to pick this one. I don't offhand know this, but ABRP does know what chargers have amenity wise and I believe can, can, you know, include or exclude them based on that. Oh, okay. Yeah, that'd be cool. So again, but then you're using the ABRP app and not Tesla. See, that's, I mean, to an extent, I mean, it's a little too bad because if the cars manufacturers did a good enough job at this, we wouldn't have things like ABRP. Exactly. Didn't means we do have ABRP and now ABRP is doing a better job than getting better, but that's got a lot more capability than it went bad the last time we looked at it. We used it briefly when we first got the car, but then eventually we began to trust the Tesla app. I talk a big story. We drive to Fresno and back, San Diego and back, Fresno and back, San Diego and back. That's what we do. We don't go anyplace else. So there's not that much mystery and I talk big story like we got it all free. I have we go to Vegas once while that's been a little more challenging, isn't it? Yeah. So if you're doing the same kind of trips, you do figure that out. I remember driving with my grandparents 40, 50 years ago and they had the stops. They always made going from New York City to my parents' house, and it was different stops in different directions because of how you got off the road and everything like that, but they had, it was exactly the same every time. I am your grandparent. But they knew this place has food, good bathrooms, and there's a little picting table where we can eat lunch. So it wasn't worth their time to figure out anything different. This was also, again, the 70s, so once you figured it out, you weren't going to change anything until the place closed. I do remember one of the places closed at some point caused no end of heartache to find a different place to stop. All right. Well, I think this has been fun. I like hearing your journey of learning and it'll be interesting to see whether you have a new update in a few months from your next vacation, whether you find out new things and what you can trust. And of course, everybody should be reading tidbits at tidbits.com. You should sign up for the newsletter. I literally read no newsletters except for tidbits. I get tidbits and I go, "Oh, there's always going to be something fun in here." This time I had a bunch to choose from of things Adam had written. You recently, in your most recent one, you wrote up the hardware requirements for OS 7 and it's a lot of words, but then you put it into a table too going, "If you've got this, you can do this. You can do this." And that is gold right there. That's one of those articles where I started doing this. It's called the real system requirements back. We've been doing this for, I don't know, five or six years now and the reason was Apple used to have all of these apps, like the footnotes that Apple has and all those packages. It used to be, "Oh, and this feature requires this hardware and this feature requires that hardware." And so it turned, basically, we'd say, "Okay, the system requirements are relatively straight forward, but then it's all these gotchas." And so that's always very beautiful. If your device didn't have metal, that was the one I really, like, metal messed everything up. He's like, "What is metal? I don't even know if I have that." Right, yeah. It was crazy. And so I keep redoing this article every year and Apple has gotten significantly better. Apple Intelligence was the big one. You know, where it's like, "Okay, is this huge schism in what hardware supports Apple Intelligence or not?" And that's not a one zero. It's a, "Oh, but this piece of it, you have to have this and keep this piece of it, you have to have that." And then there's weird ones, like, I don't even know what this is, but Apple Music sing on the Apple TV, I think that's karaoke stuff or something, like requires a Pacific Apple TV model. Which is fine. Yeah. I mean, like, no one would ever guess that. I mean, you have to, you only find it out from the. You would just think that you're an idiot and couldn't figure it out because you're in your menus going, "I don't see that." Precisely. And so that's the point of this article. And then, honestly, for me, later on, for the next year, I will go back to this article periodically. Because I was like, "Okay, God, what is it? Which iPad does it support? I don't remember." I think that it is one of the great values of writing the way you and I do, if I compare myself in your classes, that we have these reference manuals of what we knew, but we don't know it tomorrow. So, it's really, really handy. There's search for that. We had some friends who called their brain, their blog, the backup brain. Oh, that's good. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I have people say, "Hey, do you remember when you talked about the answer was going to be no?" But I can search. All right, Adam. Thanks again for being on. This is a lot of fun. I like watching your journey from a distance here and reading along on tidbits. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Allison. Well, after all that fun with Adam, we're going to wind things up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allocentipodfee.com anytime you like? If you have a question, suggestion, a dumb question, just send it on over. Remember, everything good starts with podfee.com. You can follow me on
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