NC #1110 Elapsed Time Adder Released, MacBook Neo, Structured, ETENWOLF Air Compressor, Archiving Photos, Noise You Notice, Google Earth Pro

Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the Nacilla Cast Podcast, hosted at Padfeed.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, August 16, 2026, and it's just show #1,110. I know you expected to hear Alistair Janks' dulcet tones introducing the show, and don't worry, you still will hear him during this episode. But I realize that with all of the content that was provided to the show by Alistair Bartjill and Eddie Tonkoi being ready before I left, I could pre-record the show, saving Alistair some work. He's still gonna be publishing it, and he will have published all of the articles that are coming out or came out, I should say, during the week before now. Time travel's hard. Have you ever needed to add or subtract a lap's time? You may not need to do this on the daily, but when you do need to do it, you might turn to a spreadsheet to do this task for you. Spreadsheets aren't designed to calculate a lap's time, they only work with clock time. And that's why I developed and released, I'm so excited to tell you, released my first official app in the Apple App Store. It's called a lapsed time adder. It's free, it runs on the iPhone, iPad, Vision OS, and there's even a proper dedicated native Mac app. Let's talk about the cool features. When you first open a lap's time adder, you'll see at least two rows to enter times. Or if you're on an iPad or a Mac with a bigger screen. You can optionally enter a title for each row, and then you enter hours, minutes, and seconds. As you type in the values, you'll see a real time update of the total time entered, written in human readable form, you know, like three hours, 23 minutes, and 17 seconds. As soon as you start entering times on the second row, the total updates automatically. Sometimes you need to subtract a lap's time. So every row has a plus minus toggle to change whether that row is added or subtracted. Now you're not restricted to typing in times that are within their normal range. By that, I mean, minutes don't have to be less than 60. You could put in 238 minutes, and it'll immediately tell you that that total is three hours and 58 minutes. That alone is worth the price of free, isn't it? You could also enter decimal values like 0.33 minutes, and a lapsed time batter will tell you that's 19.8 seconds. If you want to enter more rows of times, you can tap the add row button. Maybe after you've entered a bunch of data, you'd like to rearrange the rows. Rather than typing them all over again, you can use the edit rows button. That'll allow you to drag the rows up and down, and even delete entire rows. If you've made a dogs dinner of your data entry, simply hit the reset button to go back to the default empty rows. If you've entered your data and gotten your answer, you may want to put the data somewhere else. If you select copy CSV, you can paste a nice comma separated value version of your data into a spreadsheet app. Maybe you'd like to see it in hours, minutes, and seconds format with colons between them. There's a button to copy and paste that way too. If you're on an iPad or a Mac, you get a handy dandy sidebar collapse and expand button, and it auto-collapses if you narrow the window. You can even open multiple windows and lapsed time matter on iPad and Mac. If you're fan a dark vote on your device, it's got that too. If you want to learn more about the app, there's a link in it to a landing page explaining the lapsed time matter. There's a link to email me feedback or questions, but you already know how to do that. If you're of the nerd persuasion, you can submit an issue on GitHub right from within the app. In case you're wondering, of course a lapsed time matter is fully accessible. It supports voiceover, the design elements do not depend on color only, and it works with voice control. But still, people always ask me why not a spreadsheet? Let's walk through a very simple example of how a spreadsheet fails at arithmetic on a lapsed time. Let's say you want to add 23 hours plus 8 hours. That should be an easy layup. It should calculate to 31 hours. But that's not what you'll see in a spreadsheet. Instead, you'll get 7 hours. Remember, spreadsheets think in clock time, not a lapsed time. So the spreadsheet sees 23 hours as 11 pm, and then adds 8 hours after that to get to 7 am. Makes perfect sense to a spreadsheet. Now note that for some very simple calculations, like the one I gave above, you can change the format in Excel of the sum to a custom format. It's square bracket, H, square bracket, colon MM, colon SS. This format allows hours to be greater than 24, thus calculating properly. But you can't enter minutes or seconds over 60, and you can't use decimal values. Under the hood, Excel still considers the times to be clock time, which can be very valuable. For example, it can tell you the time difference between 11 am on 1 date and 3 pm on another date, if you format it properly. That's a very valuable function, but it's not the one that elapsed time matter so elegantly solves. Now that we know the problem to be solved, let's talk about some use cases. I've been having trouble with the battery on my Apple Watch. Apple says, "Oh, you work out too much." Well, guess what? That's why I bought the darn watch to track my fitness. Anyway, I wanted to know if there was a correlation between early demise battery days and a big workout day. I started tracking how much time I spent in multiple workouts a day mapped against how early in the day the battery died. For example, on July 30, I took a 2.9 mile walk that took me an hour, 13 minutes, and 12 seconds. Then I did a 14.52 strength training workout, and I finished up the day with a half-mile stroll with Kepler that took another 16.01 minutes. I popped open elapsed time matter, put in the details I just described, and the app correctly calculated the elapsed total time as I entered the data, showing a final total of 1 hour, 44 minutes, and 5 seconds of workouts. Another example of where I've used elapsed time matter is when I'm editing audio for the podcast. Let's say I bump my microphone while recording chitchat across the pond with the out-of-makes. I instantly scribble down the time it happened, let's say, 32.57 into a 45-minute recording. Now fast-forward to when I record and assemble the no-silicast. Let's say I've recorded an intro, I've read two articles, dropped in an Eddie Tonkoi recording, and then recorded my panhandling for money segment. Next, I drop in the chitchat across the pond music, and finally make a conversation with Adam. I could see that chitchat starts at 46.38, but now I have to find 32.57 later than 46.38 for the mic bumping incident. Easy peasy, I just use elapsed time matter to add 46.38 and 32.57, which gives me 1 hour, 19 minutes, and 35 seconds. In my digital audio recorder, I can scroll directly to that time, and I will immediately see the giant bump in my waveform. Now those are just a couple of examples that I use, but I'm sure you can come up with times where you've needed to add or subtract elapsed time. Now for once I haven't buried the lead in an article, but I do want to back up and give you some history behind this glorious useful and free app. Some of this you've heard me talk about before, but it's fun to have this all finally encapsulated into one article. On November 3rd, 2021, I pushed my first commit to GitHub for a little web app to add and subtract time. For years later, almost to the day, on November 11th, 2025, I was done developing my app and I published it to a GitHub Pages site. You can so use it at podfeed.github.io with a little bit more on the end as link in the show notes, of course, but it's not as fancy as the new dedicated app. Now I wasn't working on this every single day and I wasn't dedicating a lot of time. It kind of went and fits and spurts, and that's why it took me so long. But the existence of a lap's time matter is all because of Bart and the wonderful programming by Stel series. The very first thing he taught us was HTML. That's how I did the layout of the time entry boxes and buttons. Then he taught us JavaScript. That's how the math library gets calculated and delivered to you in the web app. He taught us CSS, which is how the sizes and colors of elements were originally created. The current layout, colors and elegance in the most recent versions of the web app are thanks to Bart teaching us how to use Bootstrap. Finally, Bart taught us how to wrap our code with a technology called webpack. And the single best thing I've learned from programming by stealth was how to do version control of everything using Git. Now I will give myself credit all of the credit for the math module that does the actual calculations. It's not complex math, but it's the core piece of how a lap's time matter works. It takes each row and turns it into raw seconds by multiplying hours by 3600 minutes by 60 and adding those seconds to the seconds field. Then it does the add and subtraction of the rows of seconds, but then it turns it around and runs at the other way and splits it back out into hours, minutes and seconds. It did get a little tricky when rounding negative numbers. I used math dot floor and JavaScript for that one, but other than that, it was just arithmetic. The original web app and the fancy pants dedicated apps both use my original math library, so many thanks to Bart for making all of this possible. Now by this time in this story, I started calling myself a developer, even though imposter syndrome made me feel like a faker every time I said it, Bart said I was allowed to say it. I dreamt about a day when I'd make a lap's time matter into a proper app store app for the iPhone and Mac. That dream would have to wait until Bart learned Swift and then taught it to us because, you know, I'm not going to learn on my own, right? But long came the LLMs in vibe coding. I started dreaming a new dream where an AI agent would help me do it. I talked about it, I'm used about it, and I continued to imagine a world where I'd get off my fan and actually do it. Then, Mike Price, also known as Grumpy in the live chat room and in our Slack, sent me a screenshot of a version of my app that he'd written using an agent to AI. I was amazed and also super sad at the same time. My original code is on GitHub under the MIT open source license, so there was nothing wrong with what he did, but I was sad that I didn't do what he'd done. Because Mike is a stellar human being, he graciously agreed to step aside when I told him I really would. wanted to do it myself. I won't walk you through the entire process, but with the $20 a month version of Cloud Code, not the expensive one, I built the proper App Store apps. This was not a weekend effort as some people seemed to describe, but rather it took me more than six months, again, working on and off. I directed the layout, especially if how it would be different on the Mac versus iOS, while Cloud did all of the coding. I made Cloud build tests, and especially importantly, I made it build accessibility tests. There were a lot of iterations where the tests would fail, and we'd have to go back through and figure out how to fix the code so the tests were quite valuable. Since these AI agents are using all-world knowledge, they make lots of mistakes along the way, and regression was often plagued in the development process. It's possible that I'd used a more expensive bottle. I could have done it better. It wouldn't have made misbending mistakes. I don't know, but it did a really good job overall. Learning how to interact with the App Store itself was a whole adventure of its own. Clouds did buy and told me what to do, but I had to push all of the buttons on my own. One of the harder things involved was making good screenshots of the different platforms. I wanted to make them classy like the cool kids, you know? That involved first taking the screenshots, framing in them with the share shot app from iOS, putting them on a fancy background of the exact approved size. I did that using affinity from Canva, adding a catchy six-word or less explanation, uploading them to the App Store Connect, rints and repeat for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and then the beta testers came back with changes, and I had to recreate the screenshots all over again to reflect the improved design. That's one of the things that took so long as I was depressed by that, and it took me forever to go back and finish it. Speaking of beta testers, they were a huge help. You may think you could test every edge case to your app because you know it so well, but you would be wrong. In particular, Mike Price was amazing at not only finding bugs, like the disaster that was landscape mode on the iPhone Pro Max, but also creating bug reports at GitHub, and it made it so much easier to reproduce and fix the problems he found because he gave a step-by-step every way that he found the problem. It was fantastic. The bottom line is, "I'm absolutely thrilled "of my first app in the App Store. "I hope you'll download a laps time adder "and give it a try and see if you find it useful. "If you want to drop a five-star review into the App Store, "that would be totally awesome. "Tell everybody how it changed your life. "I doubt my little app will get the attention of the masses, "but it would make me feel all warm and fuzzy "if you did give me a five-star review." Now, I chose not to charge for my app from multitude of reasons, but if you do like the app and you find it useful, consider going to podfeed.com/donate and buying me a coffee for my efforts. Okay, now I'm going to let you listen to the dulcet tones of Alistair Janks. (upbeat music) When rumors began circling about a new low-end MacBook, many commentators pointed back to the unique 12-inch MacBook from 2015. I owned one of those. It was underpowered and that single USB-C port was frustrating, but the form factor was sublime. At only 992 grams, it was over 20% lighter than today's lightest Mac, the 13-inch MacBook Air. Combined with the small size, it felt incredibly light on your lap or when moving it around. I loved it for that. Surely Apple Silicon could make this form factor work well. Then the MacBook Neo was announced and many people were mildly disappointed that it was a cheap Mac laptop rather than a super portable one. Me included. Still, the headline features appealed to me. A 13-inch screen, full-sized Magic Keyboard, the same weight as the Air and some interesting and saturated body colors. I had an iPad Mini, the latest A17 Pro model, which I mostly use sitting up in bed in the evenings. I watched video via clicks and YouTube, caught up on RSS feeds in Net Newswire, checked forums and occasionally looked at Slack, mastered on email or family I message conversations. The iPad handled all of that well enough, though replying on forums could be annoying thanks to clever JavaScript that doesn't cope well with touch screens. One thing I rarely used the iPad for despite often wanting to was writing. The only sensible way to write on an iPad is with a hardware keyboard. Besides the bed that might work, but I sometimes want to write elsewhere, carrying a separate keyboard around seemed like a pain. So the thought entered my mind. Could a MacBook Neo replace my iPad Mini? The price was compelling for a MacBook, half that of the cheapest MacBook Air, even if not exactly cheap and absolute terms. I started reading more nuanced previews and came across Stephen Hackett's 512 pixels post, listing the technical differences between the Neo and the Air. The list was extensive. At first, I was put off by how much had been removed, technologies that had filtered down to Apple's cheapest products were suddenly back on the metaphorical table. The two biggest concerns for me were the eight gigabytes of RAM and the small SRGB display. Then I thought harder about my actual use cases. I wasn't planning on photo editing software development or apps like Affinity Photo. My goals were watching video, reading and writing text. I would still keep my 14 inch MacBook Pro with M4 Pro, four terabytes of storage, 48 gigs of RAM, usually connected to a studio display for anything more demanding. So I decided I would buy one, but only after getting hands on. I wanted to judge the screen, the weight, and the keyboard and trackpad. With no Apple stores in New Zealand, still, I was reliant on local retailers. Apple seemed in no hurry to get demo units out despite advertised launch times. Days later, I walked into one retailer and initially saw no coloured laptops. A staff member asked if I needed help. Do you have the new MacBook Neo? Yes. A demo model? Yes. He pointed to the citrus model hidden behind a divider from where I'd approached. I was instantly in love with the citrus colour. Keyboard? Good. Trackpad? Good. The physical click feels different to Apple's haptic ones, but not better nor worse. Screen? Surprisingly good. Weight? A little heavy. Then I picked up the nearby 14 inch MacBook Pro. Okay, no, that was heavy. I asked whether they had the 512GB model in citrus. While he checked in the stockroom, I noticed the yellowish colour reflecting in the white areas of the display, something to think about. They only had the 512GB model in silver and indigo. There was only one choice, right? The indigo colour is just about perfect. In use, the aluminium doesn't really look blue, but leave it on a desk in good light and it is unmistakably blue. The downside is the matching keyboard. Because it isn't a backlit, the blue keys can be difficult to see in low light. Bright screen content helps, but it really needs moderate lighting. When I first opened the Neo, the thicker screen borders were obvious, but after a week I barely noticed them. I also barely noticed the lack of a notch, which is nice because I do notice the notch on my MacBook Pro regularly. Once I cloud stopped doing its best to murder the battery during the first couple of days, I settled into charging every second day or so. My usage includes at least an hour of video nightly, the usual social and reading tasks, and taking it to the office daily where it serves as my lunchtime social media machine, occasional personal computer, and dealing with the tasks of a self-employed person. While writing this review, it has also handled plenty of ad hoc daytime tasks without complaint. There is one thing the Neo is not really suited to that the iPad Mini excelled at, showing off photos. I make do with my iPhone 16, but the iPad Mini is almost perfect for that purpose. Easy to hold with a screen large enough to appreciate the image. The Neo screen is great, it's just the laptop form factor that makes it unsuitable. As I finished writing the initial version of this review, the iPad and Apple Pencil Pro were both sitting in their boxes. I hadn't turned the iPad on since the Neo arrived, except to look up some information before listing it for sale. It is telling that it took me weeks to commit to selling it. The iPad Mini is a special device, but selling it secondhand recovered around half the price of the Neo, which is also a special device. Oh, and yes, I have been writing on it. Parts of this review were written and edited on it. - I love this Alistair on two different levels. One, because you're obviously a power user and your description of what it's good for and what maybe you'd use a more powerful computer for versus even an iPad, that's a really, really interesting explanation. You know, I've never really found a use for the iPad Mini. I've bought them twice, and both times I've given them away to my daughter, and she likes them, but I never could figure out what to do with them anyway. So the fact that you sold it makes perfect sense to me. The second level. I appreciate this on is when the MacBook Neo was first announced, Alistair jumped into our slack and said, "This isn't going to be any good. This isn't useful. Nobody's going to want this, especially me because I'm a power user, whatever." I don't even think you said why, but you just said, "This wasn't going to be good." So I had a little grin on my face when I heard you bought one, and I'm so glad to hear that you like it so much. Next up, let's hear from Jill from the North Woods. What if the problem was never that you forget what you need to do, but the problem is that you never know what you're supposed to be doing right now? That was a question I basically reached for my whole life. And what caused me to ditch two apps that I loved very much, and I reviewed them before. Here's the apps that I left. For years, I ran my entire life on fantastical for calendars and to do this for my taskless. And up front, there's nothing else in wrong. They are great apps. They are still great apps, and if they speak to you, they are great directions to go. Those apps are excellent at everything that they do, and they'll get lots of recommendations from plenty of people, so this is not a takedown of these two apps. But the story, for my point of view, is about an outgrowing system that was working exactly as a design and realizing that the design wasn't my problem that I was having. So here's what I eventually figured out that a lot of my thinking, my issues, was that I forgot to do things, or I didn't do things because I was forgetting to do things. My biggest challenge was not remembering what to do. I have a really solid memory to do as is genuinely great at holding a list of things to do. My challenge is what should I be doing right now in this hour out of everything that's on my list? What should I be doing? And that's a different problem. And once I saw clearly, I realized that no amount of tweaking of to-do-us was going to eventually fix it because it was never really built to answer that question in the first place. So there are three kinds of apps, not two kinds of apps, and this is a part I think was the most useful as soon as I figured it out about productivity apps in the last year. So, when we talk about productivity apps, there's usually, like I said, two categories, people think of calendars and tasks. And I don't think that that's right anymore because there are actually the three task managers answer the question, what do I need to do? To doest things and omnifocus, all fantastic apps, I highly recommend all of them. The calendar answers, well, when do I have appointments? And fantastical, the Apple calendar, all really good at that. But the third category that was way down the most was not doing either of those things. It was, what should I be doing right now? And that's what structured is about. The distinction sounds very subtle and you might not even realize it or maybe you don't even agree with me that there is a third subject to ask out there. But it's the whole reason I switched to something that is now working for me when previous apps had not worked for me. So structured, that's the name of the app, enters this pitch that throughout your day is a timeline, not a list. And I'll walk you through about why it matters and why it sounds more important than maybe it comes off when you first hear about it. So a 50 item to do list is a wall of equally weighted demands and you can tag them and sort them and put them in whatever way you want to do it. But every item just sits there staring back at you and they all somewhat feel the same sense of urgency that's there. And so what happens for me is I spend real mental time going, well, what am I going to do next? What am I going to tackle? I have a free hour. What should I tackle? And it spends mental energy, but it also takes up, let's have an hour to get some tasks done. Now I've just spent 15 minutes of it deciding what it is I'm going to work on next. And so it's decision making over and over. And that's the kind of different kind of problem that separates you from the actual work itself. Structured, skips that step entirely. Every task gets placed on a timeline, meetings, errands, exercise, recording, chores, every downtime that I have is all laid out there in order on a timeline. And when I open up the app, the question is what should I be doing right now is already answered. I don't decide the day's plan was already created. And so for me, that does three things. First of all, it's less energy spent deciding on, less time spent on what comes next. What am I going to do next? And second one, this one stings a little bit. I finally got an honest picture of how long things actually take. There are two kinds of people in the world. Most of us wildly overestimate how much we can cram into a day. When we put it on a timeline, we try to force the math to work. Some people do what is called time boxing or time blocking. And they try to schedule out sort of what the perfect day would look like. And if I wanted to add something to it, something has to get moved. And so there's no more pretending anymore with my structured app. I see the timeline. I see how many time I have between gaps. And I know that if I plan on introducing, like I did today, today was recording day. I was going to record all day long, but you know what? My friend wanted to spend an hour and a half helping her niece do something. Suddenly, I'm not recording anymore. And I have to figure out what it is I'm going to do with my time. The third thing is my day stops being a race to zero checklist, you know, try to clear everything off. So everything's clear. It actually is a balanced life, exercise, meals, hobbies are all scheduled inside of these things. Instead of me just hoping I can squeeze some time in here or there, it's just on the schedule. It's right there. And it's because they're a part of the day. But here's where ADHD comes in and I want to be specific about this is that some of you will agree with this because you also have ADHD. And some people, you know, it's a spectrum, right? We all have a little bit of ADHD and sometimes these traits may speak to you even though you officially don't have it. But my brain has never really struggled with remembering tasks. I have a really great memory. My struggle is transitioning from one thing to the next without spinning out somewhere along the way where I get sidetracked and I just go off and do something else entirely different. Structured gives me a path throughout that entire day. It stops me from renegotiating with myself every 20 minutes. What comes next? I have to exercise. Hmm. Should I exercise? Should I not exercise? Now I have a plan and the path exists and I just walk down that path and I take it. So structured has a companion app called a wake and it seems tiny, like you maybe wouldn't even mention it because if you wrote it down on paper, it seems very small. But what it is is an alarm clock app that goes hand in hand with structured. So it will say something to the extent when my alarm goes off. First of all, there's a number of tests in there that you can make yourself jump through or you don't have to. Not just turn the alarm off, maybe you go back to sleep, but actually say, "I'm awake." That's the easiest level. You turn off the alarm or you click it and then you say, "Yes, I'm actually awake." Two step process, right? But you can have it make you do a math problem, you can make you do some pushups or something like that. I want to know you're really awake. Now right now, I don't have this problem anymore, but back when I was in my 20s, I had six alarm clocks because I would shut them off and go back to sleep. A wake is actually making sure that I'm actually awake, but that's not the part that I use it for. The part that really matters to me the most is I tend to be fuzzy in the morning. I don't even know who I am in the morning. What a wake will do is it will say, "Well, good morning, Jill." That's right. I'm Jill. That's right. Today is Saturday, July 18th. Okay. That's the date today. Great. Saturday because half the time I wake up and I'm like, "Am I supposed to be at work? Am I not at work? I'm just really fuzzy in the morning." Then it will go on and say, "We think you slept like this and then you can put in these banners in there." It will remind me your day, your work day starts in an hour and 15 minutes. Okay. Great. It gives me a quick rundown of what my day looks like or what the first thing in my day works like. For whatever reason, like I said, "I am not at all there in the mornings." I even started thinking about some day when I retire. I won't even know a day of the week it is anymore because right now work keeps me knowing today is Monday, today is Tuesday. This is Saturday. It gives me a structure. I'm not going to have that forever. I loved the fact that it will let me know right away in the morning exactly what kind of day I'm having and just kind of remind me of who I am. There's new coming features coming out that they hope to kind of give you more things to remind you. But basically what's going to happen is the two of those apps together, one managing my schedule and the other waking me up, they are from the same developer. They work together, they don't actually feel like separate tools, they sort of feel a little bit duct taped together. And so it feels like a complete system with two different dashboards. It matters to me because right now I'm not toggling between the two apps and trying to ask them to coordinate with each other, they each know each other's business. So Awake has a little idea about my schedule and structured has a little bit idea about what time I'll go to work. wake up tomorrow. So the system is really built for me to live a day successfully. So back to the part of it, I didn't leave fantastical or to do is because they failed me. I left because I actually needed a change. And it was mismatched for the needs that I was having. Fantastical is excellent calendar management to do is excellent task manager. But what I needed wasn't a better system. I needed something that was more visual, more about something about managing my time, the actual hours, and even giving myself room to breathe. So partially the reason I went to this app is it ran up as a finalist for Apple's design awards. And I gave it a shot. I tried all the design award apps to see if they're good because usually Apple has very good taste. But the other part of it too is that chat GPT can be integrated in structured. And this is nice because you can ask chat GPT. Can you find a time on my schedule where I have an hour break where I could go to lunch with someone? You can ask it real life questions. It can read into your structured app and give you some time. So I use this in tandem with notion. You all know probably that I love notion. All my big projects, all my reoccurring tasks are kept in notion. What I do with structured is when I actually have a physical date, I'm going to do it. Like I'm going to mo my lawn at 7 o'clock on Thursday. I know I'm going to do it. The weather is going to be nice. The smoke should be clear. That's the time I'm going to do it. It's on my calendar. It's ready to go. I know that tonight I'm going to stretch before bed so I don't get all crunchy when I get up in the morning. It's all scheduled and ready for me. But what holds it all together for me is the fact that chat GPT can see my notion database and see all my tasks. And they can see my structured list schedule. And I can actually give it prompts in here. Can you take some of those things that are on my notion high priority list and move them over into the structured list? Let's schedule them. Let's get those done. I really need to model on this week. And it works with both my systems integrating my life a little bit better. It has some AI features that because I've connected to chat GPT, that I can ask it some direct questions here. So if your struggle is the same as mine was, if you forget what you need to be doing and lose the thread of what deserves your attention right now today, instead of taking care of like any random thing that's on your to do list, structured and awake might be worth a serious look for you. If you try them out and you've already got your own version of a sort of a three way split between these task managers, calendar managers and time planners, I'd genuinely love to hear from it about it. You can find me an Allison Slack group and tell me what you're running. I love reviews from Jill because she thinks about things so differently than I do. It never would have occurred to me to look at this problem in such a different way and find a tool that fit her needs. I just love everything she does. Now, there's one thing Jill isn't good at and that's marketing yourself. Did you hear her mention her podcast or her website where you can find all the podcast she does because she does a whole bunch of them? Nope, she did not. So I'm going to do that for you for her. I'd like you to go to Jill from the northwoods.com and find everything she does. Everything is fantastic. Brought here with a review for you. So a few years ago, I thought it might be a good idea to buy a home air compressor. I had two problems to solve. I needed to inflate my car tires while they were cold, because that's the target pressure in the manual, cold tires. And I need to maintain my bike tires that they're recommended high pressures of 65 on the mountain by a can 75 psi on the hybrid bike. And I'd like to do it without too much elbow grease. So what I did when dipping my toe on the water was my usual trick of buy a cheap one on Amazon to see if actually this is a tool that is genuinely useful to me. And I bought a compressor it really wasn't fancy. Let me set a target pressure and I could power it from these cigarette lighter socket in cars as well as from the mains power socket. They worked fine, cheap and cheerful for a few years actually, until one recent afternoon when I was, well, the thing literally sprung a leak. And it let all of the air out of my tires instead of pumping air into my tires. So elbow grease was definitely needed that day. Now that I know actually compressors are great thing to have, rather than buying another cheap and cheerful one, I decided now's the time to actually invest in a genuinely quality compressor from a real brand instead of some on brand thing on Amazon. So I did a little bit of research and I ended up choosing what I think is an American one called the Eaton Wolf Zephyr S3. The key differences this got me were first off, it's rechargeable rather than directly powered. So you charge it over USB-C, way nicer screen in UI, different inflating modes for different types of vehicles. So it pushes air at different rates for bigger and smaller tires. It has a USB-C port for charging and powering smartphones, which is potentially useful as basically battery pack or other camping equipment. And it includes a really nice carry case, given that the thing is portable now, why wouldn't it have a nice carry case? So I've had my compressor for a few, oh yeah, it's also bright orange, sort of iPhone 18 Pro or 17 Pro orange, which is kind of nice, you're not going to lose it. I've been using my new compressor for a few weeks now and I'm pretty just delighted that I chose to invest in a real one this time instead of going cheap and cheerful again. So I felt the difference really the moment I opened the box. Someone actually designed this thing with some actual care. So the compressor ships inside a carry case inside the box and at the moment I grabbed the handle side and you could just feel it was quality, the thing was made well. The case looks and feels really nice, it's also bright orange. And as soon as I opened a case, it was more pleasant surprises, all the parts of logically sensible homes in the carry case and it holds everything, cleanly, easily. And the compressor was really easy to lift in and out of the case because it's been designed with a perfectly placed, well everything, it is just very well designed. And the build quality just couldn't be more different than the cheap plastic on my previous generic unbranded model. The design is practical, robust feeling and you know something, maybe the style, it's a little showty of a style but it's actually beautiful and elegant in my opinion. The holes coiled around the back of the compressor and their little clips right there for the different adapters and I'm using it as just so easy. I never opened the manual which is an interesting test I always find is this UI good, did I need the manual, I didn't so I guess it is. Buttons are nicely arranged either side of a nice screen that's at the top of the device right we're looking at it and the power button is really obvious. So I pushed that and it came to life. Display was very intuitive, you see two pressure numbers, the current and the target, there's an obvious unit icon next to one of them so you know whether you're viewing in PSI's or whatever, mine wasn't showing PSI's, it was showing some sort of other unit so there was a button with the label unit. So I pushed that a few times and hey presto I am now at PSI or PAN per square inch which is strange enough is what we use here in Ireland even though we're metric from almost everything. Little leftover British Empire I guess. And next I noticed the car icon written above the numbers, okay that's clearly the mode. There's a button labeled mode, so I pushed that button and there were obvious side bicycle icon was one of the next ones I saw so stop there that's what I want. So I connected my tire as soon as I did the number went from zero to a new number. So that must be the current pressure as I expected tapping on or pressing and holding the obvious plus and minus buttons moved the target and tapping the power button again the compressor started pumping and the current pressure started rising. And I'm sort of used to the you know my cheap and cheerful woman to go and then as soon as it was it was you know it would just count suddenly but full powerful powerful back bunk and stop. Well I was a little surprised that as this one got to within one PSI of my target value it backed off and it started to gently add the air instead of pouring it in at full volume and it landed exactly on the target pressure didn't even overshoot by a fraction of a PSI it was just spot on. So I was I was a little nervous about buying it because it's battery powered but on in hindsight I shouldn't have been nervous about that. I've now been using it for three months to top up both of my bikes every weekend and my battery from its first ever charge is still on three out of four bars. So yes it's a bicycle it's nothing that much work but nonetheless this thing is obviously going to last for a while. And I generally don't like to be a hundred percent completely positive in every review but I'm somewhat struggling here to find a reason to be cranky about us. It's not even that it's like spectacularly expensive. Right now, the Edenwolf's site is listing this, so the Edenwolf's FRS-3 Heavy-Gee Tyron inflator air compressor, short and snappy name, is currently listed here as 82 euro and 95 cent straight from the manufacturer. I actually picked it up on Amazon, so I think I've got a little slightly cheaper price in them, but there's your straight from the manufacturer price. So that's not excessive, link in the show notes to the website where you can see the description of the device and everything, a nice photograph of it. Also have some photographs in the show notes of the carry case, with its luminous orange front and its Edenwolf logo, and it's really very nice handle. And of the device in use, pumping up my bike. So you can see the very obvious buttons, you can see that it's approaching, it's pumping on my bicycle, the bicycle icon is up on the photo, target a 65, current is 5.58.5, you can see four bars of battery at that time. And it's just working away, and it's not particularly loud, it's actually quite a bit quieter than the old one, but it actually pushes a lot of air. And it says it can handle basically everything from my bicycle and even footballs, all the way up to a great big American style SUV, and, you know, I drive an EV, so my car is a little on the heavy side, it needs a fair amount of pressure, so not all home compressors can actually handle an EV with that extra weight on stuff, but any home compressor that can handle an American SUV can handle an EV, and this one will happily do even big American EVs. You know, literally I have nothing to complain about, and that makes it sound like somehow I haven't given this thing a proper shake down what I really have, and it just works, and I'm fairly picky, and I still actually really like it. So if you're in need for a nice portable, chargeable air compressor that has doubles as a battery pack when you're out camping or whatever, I can highly recommend the Ethan Wolf Zephyr S3. I have to tell you, the minute I read Bart's article and I listened to his audio, I put this on my Christmas list. It really looks fantastic. We've always bought, you know, not super cheap and not name brand, but this one looks so much cooler than the ones we have. Remember at the beginning of the show, when I gave you the incredibly exciting news that Lappes High Matter was finally a proper app in the app store? Remember how I suggested that when you realize how life changing this app will be for you, you could go to pivvy.com/donate and buy me a coffee. I'd tell you what, if you could go do that to help me pay my cloud code build, that would be awesome. Over the last Christmas holidays, I saw a tut on Mastodon from Ruby Carmo saying that Apple Photos had dreadful exporting and archiving features. He thought there was a better way, and so he wrote a Mac command line tool using Swift to address what he saw as the shortcomings. Reading the instructions on GitHub, it seems as primary concerns are around the file names and the metadata. This tool writes each file using a timestamp for the name, and optionally outputs a JSON sidecar file with key metadata. While I did like the idea of the timestamp file names, the rest of it seemed overkill for my purposes. If you think it sounds like something you might want, check it out over on GitHub, linking the show notes. However, listen on for how I had already been doing my own archiving. Mine is a little more involved, but for a periodic task, I don't find it so onerous. First, what is my problem to be solved? Put simply, my phone photos live only in iCloud Photos. If that gets host or if access is lost and I am primarily thinking of when I'm gone, then the photos are probably lost. For my DSLR photos, I have long had a rigorous, multi-layered archive process including accessible versions, small, medium-quality JPEGs, of all photos. I wanted accessible versions of my iCloud photos too. The first thing I did was work out how to incrementally ring fence the photos that were yet to be archived. This was achieved with a smart album, which meant it had to be done on the Mac. Instically, I think however this task is done, it'll have to be on a Mac. I had specific requirements on what I wanted to be included, or more specifically what should be excluded. My smart album criteria say to match the following. Camera model starts with iPhone. This excludes imported copies of my processed DSLR photos, which, as previously mentioned, I archive in other ways. Photo is not hidden. I have a few medical images in my library, which are hidden for good reason. No need for those to be preserved. Photo is not video. I don't take many videos and I decided the amount of space taken up by them isn't warranted in this archive. Photo is not screenshot. I take far too many screenshots for various reasons. Again, these are not required for posterity. And finally, date added is in the range. This last entry is what I update each time I perform archiving. Generally, I have been doing a month at a time. In fact, after being reminded of the task as a result of the tut, I decided that from 2025 onwards, I will split them up in two monthly folders. So this will now always have a range of dates from the first of the month to the last of the month. Once I have updated the smart album to select a new month, I simply select every photo in it with command A, then export originals with command option E. I select a special folder in my pictures folder called exports. Using export originals means I get both HEIC files and the accompanying MOV files for any live photos. Originally, that was the full export process, but with many old photos from old phones, I'd ended up with duplicate file names that MacOS would suffix with numbers. My decision to segregate months would have addressed that, but Ruby's post got me thinking. Now, the export's folder is watched by Hazel, the automation app from NoodleSoft. Hazel runs a couple of rules that rename each file based on the date and time they were captured, addressing the duplicate name issue, and then sort them into year/month folders based on that. Once Hazel has done its thing, I move them to a folder on an external hard drive that is included in my backblaze backup. That's it. I have the photo successfully grabbed from iCloud and placed somewhere more accessible. It generally takes me less time to update the smart album and select everything for export, then it does for photos to actually export 50 to 100 photos. It's easy to keep track of the last time I did the archiving task too, because the smart album definition will show the last month I processed. Maybe you prefer Ruby's approach, or perhaps you'll prefer mine, or perhaps you'll come up with a hybrid approach, or even your own, but please do come up with something that makes your photos more accessible. There have been many words written about the impermanence of digital media over the years. We owe it to future generations to make it as easy as possible to access our recorded history. You make a really compelling point there, Alistair. I've always depended on the fact that I back up the full-resolution photos to my Synology and they're in the cloud. My Synology is then mirrored over to another Synology Offsite, and I have Offsite backups with backblaze, but none of those is changing the format of how those are stored. If for some reason Apple Photos ceased to exist, I wouldn't have access to those. And I think that's what you mean by accessible versions, so I've got to give this one a good noodle. The noise you notice, trains, birds, and the myth of silence. Hi, this is Eddie Tonkoy, the in-house nerd for everything behind the scenes, and my wife Jern's character-driven queer love stories, including audiobook narration and production. Just think about a quick experiment to start. Now I'm going to record this as my neighbour uses a lawnmower to cut some grass which seems oddly suitable for today. Imagine you're listening to a narrator in a quiet room, and underneath the voice there is a faint something, not loud, not obviously bad audio, just a little texture. Now imagine that texture changes every 20 seconds. That little moment of checking is the problem this episode is about. Not noise in the abstract, not noise as a meter-reading, noise as attention leakage. The tiny part of the listener's brain that keeps checking. What is that? Is it still there? Did it change? Audio books are odd because the bar is not sounds fine for 10 seconds, the bar is "can someone live inside this voice for hours without being pulled out of it?" So the first thing to let go of is the myth of silence. There is a story people tell themselves when they start recording. I need silence. And then reality happens. Trains exist, motorbikes exist, air conditioners exist, neighbors cutting the grass, exist. And in Thailand, certain birds have apparently decided that human speech is the perfect backing track for a solo. So silence is a myth. Or at least, it is not a production plan. The useful goal is different. Make the noise boring, make it stable, make it non-noticable. Or failing that, make clean decisions quickly and keep moving. So what does that mean in a real session? Here is what my sessions look like in practice. I am Fussy and I am Fussy on purpose. I would not be recording an audio book with that backtrack. If a train is going past in the background, I will often just stop and wait. Same with a motorbike. I use the pause to read ahead, reset my posture, check my mic position and re-enter the scene. It makes recording take maybe 20% longer than it technically needs to, but it saves time later and keeps the performance cleaner. I would rather keep momentum in the story than keep momentum in the waveform. That sounds like a small distinction until you are 40 minutes into a chapter and getting impatient. At the same time, I have learned that not all noises are equally dangerous. A distant train can be surprisingly survivable if it is low, smooth and consistent. It may be there, but it does not always demand attention. Some noises are different, Asian coals and magpie robins for example are basically recording breakers for me. They are not just loud, they are patterned, bright and attention grabbing. They do not sit under narration, they compete with it. Then there is the equipment side. I disconnect the air purifier because it can shift or cycle or change character. I keep the aircon on, on its quiet setting, because it is more stable and stable noise is easier to live with than heat, sweat and irritation. I make worse decisions when I am uncomfortable. All of that leads to the useful distinction. The useful distinction is stationary noise versus intermittent noise. Stationally noise is steady, a consistent room tone, a quiet fan, a stable aircon, whoosh. Intermittent noise starts and stops or changes. Trains come in going, birds calling motorbikes, the neighbors door, the lawnmower, the distant voice. The psychoacoustic trick is that intermittent noise often reads louder than it meters because your brain treats change as information. A steady low hiss can vanish into the background. But an intermittent chirp, even if it is not technically very loud, grabs attention because it is new, it has edges, it has meaning. That is why bird calls are so destructive. The whole job is to be noticed and annoyingly, they are very good at it. In an audiobook edit, the danger as well is the bed changing. The practical issue is not only the noise itself, it is what happens around the edits. A bed changes when the noise floor or ambience shifts between cuts. You remove a noise event and suddenly the room underneath the voice changes. You might hear it as the background popping cleaner for a moment. The room tone, changing colour, the space subtly collapsing and reopening. It is one of the easiest ways to break immersion without immediately knowing why. So the question is not simply, can I remove this noise? The better question is, can I remove it without creating a bed change that is more distracting than the noise itself? So here is the decision tree, retake, mark or leave it alone. I use this to keep sessions sane. First, is it intermittent and noticeable? Horns, a single clunk, a voice, a slap of wind. Defore answer, retake or wait. If it is noticeable once, it will probably be noticeable later. And if I try to remove it surgically and may create bed changes or artefacts, I would rather pay for a clean retake while I am still in the performance, than pay for a fiddly repair later. Second, is it stationary and low? A stable quiet aircon, very low-distant ramble, consistent room tone. Defore answer, usually, leave it. Trying to erase it can do more harm than good. Heavy denies can shave life off narration. It can smear consonants, mess with breath texture. Or create that slightly fuzzy underwater sound that screams processed. Third, is it predictable intermittent noise like a train? And that is a grey zone. If it is strong enough to be noticed, or if it changes the bed, I wait it out or retake. If it is far away, smooth and I generally need to keep recording, it might be workable, but only if continuity survives. My default is still to wait. Waiting is clean, waiting preserves tone. Waiting keeps the edit boring. This is why I am careful with heavy denies on narration. Denies feels like a magic wand. The trouble is that narration is full of low-level detail that makes it sound human. Breath texture, tiny consonant transitions. The air of the voice, micro-dynamics. Aggressive noise reduction does not only remove noise, it can remove some of that detail, or replace it with modulation artifacts. That might not be obvious over one sentence. Over a whole book, it can become tiring. So denies is a tool, but in this context it is usually a last resort, not a default setting I use, just because the waveform looks untidy. So let me try a bit of a demo. At the moment that lawnmower is going off, well, it doesn't seem to have really stopped. So I am just going to carry on recording, and I am going to at some point remove the noise. So I am removing the noise for this section, and hopefully you won't really notice the lawnmower noise anymore, but you might notice some difference in my voice. Now I am going back to how it was originally, and we have the lawnmower noise back. And well, it's up to you to decide which one you think is better. The practical trick is marking the problem without breaking flow. So by this point the decision rule is simple. Intermittent, attention-grabbing noise gets retakes, or I wait it out. Steady, truly low, non-modulating noise usually gets left alone. And to avoid breaking flow, I use a simple marking method. I can drop a marker in the door, clap once or say a quick low mark, and keep going. The important thing is that the mark is not an invitation to start editing while I am still recording. It is a breadcrumb for later. Because that method is less important than the behaviour, do not stop to solve the problem mid-performance, flag it, and move. Because speed does not come from pushing through every noise. Speed comes from not shattering focus every time reality makes a sound. So where does that leave us? Noise is mainly a focus problem and a continuity problem. The wrong noise pulls the listener out, the wrong repair creates a new thing to notice. So the aim is not perfect silence. The aim is stable, boring audio that lets the story stay in front. Next time I will deal with the other small problem that becomes enormous over hours. Clicks, breaths, and plosives, and why prevention beats repair. If you want to know more, come and ask me over in the Slack community at podfeet.com/slack, where I and all the other lovely nosilla castaways enjoy friendly, positive online conversations. Feel free to message me, Eddie Tonkoy, if you have any thoughts, questions or techniques you are using, it will be nice to share ideas. And you can find our work at jerntonkoy.com where you will find Jern's character driven queer love stories, audio books I produce for them, and bonus material for our subscribers. I'll be back soon to talk through some more of my work flow, bye for now. for now. Happy recording and happy reading. He's still going with that lawn mower. Well, a lot of people have been writing me that they're really enjoying Eddie's segments, and I have a little bit of commentary here. I'm listening to the original audio that Eddie sent me, and I cannot hear that lawn mower at all. And I know that after the audio file goes through processing Arophonic, if it was there, it would have been removed. But like I said, I can't hear it, but I think we still understood everything Eddie was talking about. Again, another terrific segment. You almost certainly know about Google Maps. Did you know that there is a related tool called Google Earth? Maybe you did, but if not, it's a more project-focused version of Google's mapping tools. You can access it in a browser at earth.google.com where you can build your own maps with all sorts of capabilities like custom shapes, lines, markers and more. Did you also know that there is a desktop app called Google Earth Pro? I've known this for years, but I kept forgetting about it. Don't worry about the Pro in the name. You can use it completely for free. There are advanced features you can pay to use. You can download the app directly from Google when can the show notes. The one thing that keeps me coming back to Google Earth Pro is my AV Geekery. Let's take a little detour in that direction by way of explanation. Term AV Geek is short for Aviation Geek. According to Google Gemini, it originated as a niche affectionate term for passionate aviation enthusiasts gaining popularity via online forums in the early 2010s before becoming a mainstream hashtag for plane spotting and industry fans. I've been an AV Geek since long before the term was coined. I pay for a gold subscription to FlightRadar24 where I watch all sorts of aircraft flying all over the globe, though mostly in my local area. It's a great tool for aviation photographers, like me, to know what's nearby and what scheduled flights are expected. Okay, let's start turning this detour around. There's another thing about me. I am a passionate personal historian. I love all sorts of history but I'm quite fanatical about tracking down facts and stories about my early life and about the lives of my immediate family. This all started after my father passed away in 2017 when we started to hear stories about him that we hadn't heard before. I've certain sat down with my mum and an audio recorder between us to be sure I get all her stories while she is still with us. Right, we're almost out of the detour just a little further. Part of my personal history includes what's happening now and in recent memory. There's no sense leaving it to my children to have to chase down all my stories later on when I can tell the stories myself. Some of these recent memories concern travel, travel on aeroplanes. Do you see with this fits together yet? Perhaps in general, but let's dig into the point of this rambling tale. After I have taken flights outside of New Zealand, I go to the history section of FlightRadar24, afforded me by my subscription and I download a replay of the flight. This takes the form of a KML file. KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language and is an open standard for sharing geospatial data. One of the most well-known users of KML files is Google Earth. Okay, we landed and yes, that pun was intentional. Once I have downloaded a KML file for each flight, all I have is a file full of coordinates and timestamps. It's not very exciting. However, loading it into Google Earth Pro allows me to visualize the flight path. Okay, before I go on, let me wake some of you up. This doesn't have to stop at flight data. Maybe you like hiking or cycling and track your progress with a simple app like GPX Tracker or the popular All Trails. What better way to impress people with your hill climbing abilities than by showing the trail on a 3D map? Yes, Google Earth is natively in 3D. Although Google Earth primarily works with KML files, it can import GPX files too. You just have to tell it how to do the conversion. A step I will leave for the listener to experiment with. Let's look at what's involved in visualising a KML file. When you open Google Earth Pro, it will show you the entire globe and then spin it so your current location is in the center, assuming you allow it location permission. From the menu bar, select File then Open. Navigate to the KML file and choose it. You will see the root plotted on the globe and the globe will spin to make most of it visible. It looks pretty ugly at this stage, but we can fix that. Notice in the left side bar under places, then temporary places, there is now an entry when presenting the file. If there's a title in the KML file, it will appear here. There is also a disclosure indicator. Click that to expand the tree one level. At this level, you will see two entries, root and trail. Click the checkbox next to root to uncheck it. This will immediately improve the display. The gray you saw at the start was the potentially thousands of waypoints on the root. Turning those off lets us see the underlying trail. In the case of a flight radar 24 trail, the colour represents the aircraft altitude, the same as you see in the app. Now it's time to become artistic director, either using the controls in the top right of the view or by using trackpad or mouse gestures. I won't explain all of these so experiment to see how they work. Be sure to work with position, zoom, viewing direction and elevation to get the view you want. It can take a bit of experimentation to get what you want as all the variables interact. One quick tip, you can fairly accurately move the viewpoint forward, back, left and right, using the arrow keys on the keyboard too. I find this to be a useful last action of fine tuning. Now you can capture a screenshot of your viewpoint but don't use the OS tool or even your favourite application. Above the view is a toolbar. The third to last icon here is titled Save Image. Click that. A context toolbar appears below the main toolbar with a handful of settings. One of these is a map option, drop down. On this you can turn off various overlaid features and choose the style of the landscape, full colour, muted colour or monochrome. Your track will always appear in colour so this choice can help make it stand out. Next to the map options you can pick the dimensions of the image. It defaults to the current size of the window but you can select from various standard sizes. Do note that selecting a size that is a different aspect ratio to the window will crop the view so you might need to cancel out, use the X in the context toolbar to adjust. You can adjust with the mouse while in this mode but I found it jumpy. The arrow keys still work well though. Finally click the save image button. You will be shown a standard macOS save file window where you can choose the location and file name and also choose between JPEG or PNG format. I've put a saved image in the show notes that shows our arrival into Singapore in 2025. It's a fairly low angled view where you can see the flight path pop up over the distant horizon then perform a series of turns before a final curved approach to land. In a follow up article and that will be some way off. I'll show you how to go to the next level when visualising a trail. Beyond 3D to 4D. You know I really need to take a look at this slowly and carefully rereading your notes in your blog post about this because one of the things I struggle with in doing my diagram for my great worldwide adventures is a lot of times it's really hard to draw a diagram of where all the places are in relationship to each other on a map like going from Los Angeles to Keto Ecuador out 600 miles off the coast to the Galapagos then back over to Lima, Peru and down to Machu Picchu and back. That was that was really really hard to picture and I think maybe using Google Earth Pro might be the way to go. Thanks for that Alistair. Well that is going to winus up for this week. This show absolutely would not have been possible without Alistair Janks. First of all volunteering or maybe strong armed into doing it but he did step up even though we ended up swapping chairs for a bit of this. Without Bart, Jill and Eddie this also would have been really short or I would have had to do more work. I can't thank the community enough for all this work to bring you a great show. Now did you know you can email me at AllisonPodfeed.com anytime you like you could write to me and tell me how my new elapsed time matter up changed your life. If you have a question or suggestion you can send those on over to. Remember everything good starts withPodfeed.com. You can follow me on mastodon at podfeed.com/mastodon. If you want to actually see Steve and my podcast work on YouTube like the cool video tutorial of using spreadsheets from last week you can go to podfeed.com/youtube. If you want to join the conversation you can join our Slack community at podfeed.com/slack where you can talk to me and everybody else you heard on this show and all of the other lovely no-silic aster ways. You can support the show at podfeed.com/patreon or with one 10 donation. at Potfee.com/donate where you can buy me a coffee for that really cool app you just downloaded. If you like PayPal, we've got that too. Potfee.com/papel. And if you want to join in the front of the live show, you will have to wait one more week until August 23rd to head on over to Potfee.com/live on Sunday nights, 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic noselicaster ways. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed. [BLANK_AUDIO]