 Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the No Silicast podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Monday, August 27th, 2023, and this is show number 955. Well the trips we're taking this summer just keep on coming. We ended up cancelling our trip to Houston because I got a cold and I didn't want to take the risk with our new grandson. However, missing that trip opened up our ability after my cold was gone to go to San Diego to help Lindsay and Nolan out when our granddaughter had to undergo some surgery. It's actually great news that she had the surgery and I'm going to tell you all about it soon because there's an awesome tech angle. Now we only moved our trip to Houston out by a few weeks, so now it's actually more times that we're going to be gone than we expected to be, so we will still be relying on the kindness of the No Silicast ways to keep the show alive and not lose our 18-year streak of continuous shows. This week we're going on a hiking trip, as in tomorrow, where there won't actually be any internets at all, not even cellular service. I know I'm kind of getting the shakes just thinking about it. The good news is I've got a couple of recordings in the can from a few other folks, but if you have anything cool you'd like to review for the show or a tech tip or a trick, please grab a microphone and make a recording for us. You can send them to Allison at podfeed.com. This week both Jill and Bart step in with some content which saved the show, along with a really interesting lesson on audio from Andy from New Hampshire. I'll even squeeze in one review I was able to write in between toddler cuddling sessions. A few weeks ago when Bart and I did our test recording for security bits, his audio levels were super low. He adjusted all of the appropriate software settings and nothing changed, but then he touched his mic and its cable and the problem actually went away. We thought the problem was just, you know, a ghost in the machine, so we started recording. Halfway through that recording though his audio dropped again and I just let it go figuring you know what, Afonix leveling would fix it. Unfortunately, when Afonix raised his audio back up for that second half of the episode, the noise came up as well and it sounded pretty terrible. Last week when Bart's audio dropped dramatically again in the middle of security bits, I stopped him because I didn't want another bad recording. Again, he touched his mic cable and his audio popped back up again. Bart said he probably needed to buy a new XLR audio cable for his mic. Now I'm going to attempt to play for you what we heard last week just so you can remember what it sounded like. This may not work because this audio recording is going to go through Afonix leveler, so it might sound like it doesn't diminish at all, but it's a couple minutes of audio here where you'll hear Bart talking and then me and then he'll be talking then all of a sudden you'll hear it drop real low. General Manick was a spin-off out of Apple in the John Scully days that tried to make the iPhone about a decade before the iPhone. And it's where, as someone you may have heard of, what's his name, photo of the iPod, his name was just falling out of my head because I was about to say it out loud and that's how it always goes. You mean Johnny Ive? No. No. I know the engineer, bald head, really, really nice guy. Blanking on it too. Okay. Keep going. You can yell it out in a few minutes when it comes to you. Yes. Anyway, the point being, when you see the people who are in this company and how close they came to doing the iPhone. Hey, Bart, hold on just a second. Your audio just dropped like it did the other couple of weeks ago. We've been trying to chase down an interesting problem where Bart's audio just suddenly drops. Did you just change him? Yep. It's back. Huh. You have a bad audio cable. I wiggled the cable. I'm going to order myself a new XLR cable. All right. I played that for you and I told you all that because we got a fantastic explanation of what is probably happening from an audio engineer who's been listening to the show for at least as far back as 2012. Hi, Allison. Andy from New Hampshire here. I'm an audio engineer in my day job in large part and have been for many years. I heard at the end of security bits on last week's show, the audio drop and the discussion you had about that, I thought that the geekier among the Nestle castaways might like to know why that would happen. Now, let me say that this is all conjecture. I don't know 100% for sure what's going on. But if replacing the cable solves the problem, then I can tell you why. The electrical way we send analog audio signals in a professional audio system is a little different from the sort of basic circuits that we typically think of. If you've wired a battery to a light bulb or something. If you look at an XLR cable, which is the cable we use to connect a professional microphone to an audio interface or something like that, it has three pins. Each of those pins goes to a different conductor inside the cable. So there's actually, in most cases, it's two wires and then a shield. So the two wires which are twisted together are inside a metal shield that goes all the way around it and depending on the cable, that might be foil or it might be wire wrapped around the outside. There are different ways of doing that for different reasons. So the two wires in the middle carry the signal and the shield is the ground. Okay, if you know a little bit about electricity, why do you need two wires to carry the signal if you're using the shield as the ground? The answer is you don't. And old fashioned or home inexpensive microphones are what we call unbalanced, which means there's a signal wire and a ground and that's it. They do something really clever though with Pro Gear because what's the problem we're trying to solve? It's induced noise. So any wire can act like a radio antenna and pick up all sorts of stuff we don't want, electrical noise in the environment, a radio station, radio waves that come out of your refrigerator when the compressor runs, all sorts of things. If the wire can act like an antenna, it can pick that up and it gets mixed into the audio and in the analog world, there's no way to get rid of it. Or is there? So here's the idea. It all depends on something called phase cancellation. I bet a lot of people will have run across this someplace, but in case you haven't, sound is a wave, whether it's a wave of air pressure coming from the speaker to your ear or from my mouth to the microphone or an electrical wave, it's a wave. And the wave has up and down. The thing is we can add waves together. When they run into each other, they can mix. This is huge oversimplification, but it's enough of an understanding I think for this purpose is that if you have, let's say, an up of one decibel, and in this case, you don't need to know what a decibel is. It's just a scale we use to compare how loud sounds are, how strong they are. Let's say we have a one decibel up and a one decibel down. If they add together, then that's a plus one and a minus one, and they cancel each other out. So here's the trick. The diaphragm inside your microphone, the thing that actually takes the airwaves and turns them into electrical waves, or the cone in your speaker that takes the electrical waves and turns them into airwaves, are unbalanced devices. There's two wires coming out of them or going into them. So if we take that signal that comes out of the microphone, let's say, the diaphragm inside the microphone, split it in half and then invert the waves in half of it. So take one half and leave it normal, take the other half and turn it upside down. We send each of those down their own wire in the cable. Then when we get to the other end, we take the normal one and leave it as it is, take the other one, the inverted signal, and flip it again. So now it's right side up again and add the two back together. Okay, what is that bias? The answer is it makes the noise go away. Why? Here's the thing. If we have two wires that are twisted together, and I'm not going to go through why the twisting is important, but it kind of is, then the way the noise gets induced, the way the radio signals get picked up, are going to be the same in both of them. So when it gets to the audio interface or the mixer or whatever it's going into, and that inverted signal is flipped again to normal, now the signals add together and interfere constructively. In other words, they make each other, the total is stronger than either of the two. But the noise is now right side up on the normal channel and upside down on the inverted channel because we flipped it, and that makes it cancel, right? Again, plus one, minus one adds to zero, and so we end up with a stronger signal and much less noise. Now there are other ways noise can get into sound systems, but one of the most problematic ones, traditionally, has been this kind of what we call induced noise that's basically picking up radio waves that are in the air or other kind of stray electromagnetic signals like would come from power cables. So that's why I would suggest almost certainly if Bart shaking the cable brought the audio back, that there's a little break, an intermittent connection in one of those signal lines and it could be either one, you would never know which. And if the cable can get taken apart, generally where they fail is right at the connector and if you're good at soldering, you might be able to put it back together or cut a couple inches off and solder it. Honestly, I think most of the time it's not worth it, particularly if you're using an expensive cable and or don't have a lot of experience with soldering small electronic things. They're not impossible to solder the way some things are. It's not a bad thing to learn on, but a lot of the connectors have plastic bodies and if you heat them just a tiny bit too much, then the thing that holds the pins melts and it makes everything infinitely harder and in some cases unsalvageable. So in any case, I thought that that might be of interest and so I figured I would share it. Well, Andy's explanation of how the phase reversal affects the noise points even more certainly to the cable being Bart's problem. Remember when I said that Afonik when it raises audio levels after the failure also raised the noise? Well, I was curious why that happened because it's kind of part of Afonik's magic that it doesn't raise noise. We now know from Andy's explanation that the induced noise was no longer canceled out if only one of the signal wires was functioning and that's why it sounded so bad after Afonik worked on it. I really appreciate this explanation, Andy, even though it did take me two passes through listening before I completely understood. Hi, this is Jill from the North Woods. I mentioned about how I was using AI to help me make podcasts show notes better. Again, I'm not using it to write my content. I really want to do that myself. But instead I was using AI to get good show notes and get some good hot topics for social media. But I failed to mention I think the very first step in all of this because I'm using Grammarly Go to help me write the show notes which are summaries of my podcast. The first thing I need is a good transcription. At first I tried other services, started reducing my confidence that I was any good at podcasting at all because when I saw the transcription, the words were quite different than what I actually said. Then back in September of 2022, Afonik's, which is the app that I use, Alison uses, to help process the audio file so it smooths it out when it comes to noise level. It comes to loudness levels. It makes the whole podcast better. They came out with an integration of having whisper ASR do its audio transcripts, which means that when you activate that, you get to have a subtitle file, you get to have a transcript, you get to have what is called a VTT file, gives you an HTML file if you want to put it on your website, your transcript file, or a JSON file. But that will allow you to exchange that data with other types of websites and applications too. But that comes with the Afonik's process. That did a great job and it did a little bit better than the apps I was trying to do. Trying to clean up a 3000 word transcription that's not very good isn't going to help me very much. I really need that good, solid transcript to start this whole AI process. But Whisper with Afonik's did a great job and it got me a long way. But then I needed to go through and start doing my older podcasts. I have 148 of them under my belt and to spend transcription time, which Afonik's gives you two free hours a month, to put all my old podcasts into their app would have used up a lot of my time. So I was looking for some other solution that I could do so that I could start dropping those audio files into something and get good transcripts out of it. The history of it is OpenAI owned the rights to Whisper software and it was produced by a fellow named Georgi Gurgenov. According to OpenAI, they use 680,000 hours to initially train this app to do transcription, part of this whole AI movement for sure. And back in September of 2022, OpenAI released the whole Whisper code into open source to be found on GitHub. But ever since it was released to open source, people have been using it because it's so good to make software applications. And I came along an app called Whisper Transcription. There's a few of them out there, so this is the one that I particularly reviewed. I looked at some others and the other ones didn't seem to have as much functionality, tried to charge you a lot more money for something that's open source, but also didn't have the attention that this software has. Interesting to me is the overall score it gets on the Apple Store is 3.8. I noticed that the trend overall is much better. When I first got it earlier this year, some things just didn't work. It had a batch update. That batch update didn't work, but I'll tell you that since May, there have been six updates to this project. Every couple of days it seems there's a new update and something else got fixed. This app is getting a lot better really quickly. The person is taking notes from the people who are using it and making it much better. And after some testing, I found out it did a great job. Just as good as what Afonix was giving me. Makes sense since they're using the same base code and now just adapting it to be better applications. This particular app has a lot of good features. You can drop and drag files into it. You can determine what level of translation you want to get. There's what is called tiny in English, small, base, medium and large models that each basically take more time the larger the model gets, but they also get more accurate. So my podcast, which lasts about 20 minutes, it takes about five minutes to get the transcript. From me, accuracy is more important, but you could also use, if you need a very quick translation, these smaller models. The app itself indicates that all the transcription is done locally on your machine, so it's not being sent up to the cloud and being used in some other way. It has some good functionalities where once you get the transcript back, you can search for words. You can listen to the transcription as it's playing so you can make sure that it's accurate. And you can also do copy and replace, edit your document so it's even more accurate once you've listened to it. And now, since the batch process has been fixed, you can also put a lot of files in there and it just chugs away and gives you those transcripts. The file types you can upload into Whisper Transcription are MP3, WAV files, M4A files, MP4 files, and MOV files. And you can export it in a variety of different ways. And one of the biggest reasons now that I switched to Whisper Transcription for every podcast, not just the old ones, is because it allows you to export in to one giant paragraph. With Afonix, I got timestamped individual lines or lines without timestamps at all, but each section of the words I'm saying was put on a separate line. This squishes everything into one giant paragraph. And it does a pretty good job of determining where sentences begin and end. I had some trouble with it in other software I tried, but that might be my Captain Kirk style talking too. Really pretty great. The free version of Whisper Transcription lets you do the tiny and base model. They're very quick. They're pretty darn accurate. I ran both of them and it did a good job. There are in-app purchases for this app. To get a year subscription, it was $9.99, which meant that I had pro features, which we'll talk about in a moment, to make the app even better. If you bought Whisper Pro, which is $27.99, you get it for light. If you're deciding whether or not you want to try the pro features, I started out with just doing the single year and decided I loved it so much I got the Lifetime Pro membership. And your in-app purchases also includes family sharing. You can get the full transcript, which is all the sentences mushed together in a single paragraph, the SRT, VTT, CSV, outputs, the sentences, which are just each individual segment of what you're saying without the timestamps. It even will do multiple speaker paragraphs. So if you're doing another podcast with someone else, you can upload the two voices and try to split it out. I haven't used it, but I believe Allison has and I'm not sure what kind of job it did for her. But if you want the HTML, PDF, the Word document, something called adult file, which is distributed open transcription environment, it looks like a file type that is just open source. So if you're looking for the timestamps and your text, you can get an SRC file, a VTT file, the CSV file, and the PDF export. All of those include the timestamp along with the words you're saying. If you're hoping to get the transcriptions without the timestamps, you can use the full transcription. That's where it's all squished together in a single paragraph. The sentences export, which puts every segment of what you're saying. They're not necessarily sentences. The speaker paragraphs, that's for when you have more than one person talking. The dot export, which I said is an open source version. The DOCX, which is the Word export and the whisper export, which puts it into a dot whisper file, which is proprietary for this application. Again, it depends on what you're doing with the software. The HTML, PDF, Dote, and Word DOCX files are part of the Pro package. It will allow you to transcribe while you're recording a podcast or while you're doing a Zoom meeting. I haven't done that yet. That sounds pretty helpful if you do need transcripts for your meetings. I can tell that it chugs away on my M1 Mac. I know that Mac is really powerful. So when it starts using up a lot of resources, I can tell this is an intensive process. And if you need something that needs transcribing, whether you're using it for AI or not, I hope it helps. And if you have any questions about it, please feel free to look me up on Allison Slack channel or her website and put a comment in the blog article related to this particular review. Thanks so much. Have a great week. Well, Jill, thank you so much for this. This was always great. Everything you do is fantastic. And I really, really enjoyed this one. And I got a lot out of this because Jill turned me onto this software a while ago and I discovered a couple more things that I wanted to mention. In the Mac App Store, the tool is called Whisper Transcription, which is what she calls it. But when you download it, it's going to be called Mac Whisper. So I'm glad that Jill detailed some of the export options because I actually dislike the massive, smushed paragraph export that she really likes. Different strokes for different folks, right? I prefer the export paragraphs options, which makes small, easy to read paragraphs. When I see a giant paragraph, my brain just shuts down completely and I can't even edit it. I think it's great that Mac Whisper, also known as Whisper Transcription, has options on export, options for pricing, and even a free model. Now, I ran the app through my voiceover test and I didn't find anything that was inaccessible. The flow was a little bit odd, like on the editing page, the progress bar on playback revealed itself before the play button itself. But that could easily be my lack of skill using voiceover. One button wasn't labeled, which visually was two opposing arrows and it turned out to be a search and replace tool. Other than that, it seemed to work well with voiceover. Now, remember, I'm a high novice level user voiceover, so give it a free trial first if you're interested. Now, in a very meta moment, I actually used Whisper Transcription to transcribe the article of Gilles to make the blog post. That made for a great experiment in seeing how good it was at transcribing Gilles' voice. Now, it didn't make any outright mistakes, even with the small model that comes free with the service. I also used Whisper Transcription or Mac Whisper to transcribe Andy's recording that he gave us all about the audio file. So if you want to go reread what he said, you can read the transcription as a blog post. I definitely give Whisper Transcription a high review as well. In his case, for his recording, I did bump it up to the higher level version, you know, the one of the bigger models. And that did a much better job at transcribing what he had to say. We have three heroes of the week this week. First of all, Ian Prinsan and George from Tulsa, both of these fine gentlemen used PayPal to make one-time donations to show the value they get out of the PodFeed podcast. They've also been listening to the show for ages, and I consider them friends. What they each wrote on their donations also made me smile. Ian wrote, quote, long-time listener, long-time lurker, cheers, and happy feet. Isn't that cute? He always writes to me with happy feet at the end. But George from Tulsa really took the cake when all he wrote in the PayPal donation was stifling ennui. Now, for those of you who didn't take four years of high school French as I did, or being a French teacher like Sandy, ennui is the French word for boredom. I really think the next set of PodFeed t-shirts we make should simply say, PodFeed podcast, stifling ennui since 2005. In any case, my heartfelt thanks go to both Ian and George for the generosity in financially supporting the PodFeed podcast. If you'd like to be a hero like these two fine gentlemen, head over to podfeed.com slash PayPal and make a donation of your own. Now, we do have a third person that I want to thank. During the live show last week, we were joined for the first time by Tectonic Chris. They said they were a long-time listener, first-time attendee of the live show. But even better, they said they had a great time and would definitely be back because the live show audience is really fun. But then they did something extra. They became our latest patron of the work we do here. How terrific is that? Well, you can be terrific like Chris and decide to support our work financially by going to podfeed.com slash Patreon and pledging your support if you'd rather do that. Hi, folks. Bart here with something I don't do very often, a review. And being a good student of the Allison School of Podcasting, I'm going to start with the problem to be solved. So in theory, when everything's working well, when you use the Apple Watch to track a workout, it'll take your heartbeat at regular times, it'll display them, and it'll accurately calculate your calorie burn, right? Now, in an ideal world, of course, it would take your measurement very regularly. But it can't do that because it's a teeny tiny little watch. And if it did that, it would run out of battery far too quickly for long-duration workouts like cycles, which can go on for hours. You know, same is true of the hiking. So when you choose your workout, one of the things the watch does is adjust how often it takes a heart rate reading. And for cycling and hiking, quite a long pause between readings. So cycling is my thing. And I really care about how the watch handles workouts. And when the watch succeeds in making, you know, taking heart rate measurements, the frequency is fine. It's not great, but it's fine. What you will notice, though, is that if you come to a big, sudden hill or if you decide to start a sprint, your heart rate on the watch will lag by up to, like, a minute or two. And then I'll just jump straight up to the higher rate. So what that's telling you straight away is that it's not reading very often. If it was reading often, you would see a ramp instead of a jump. I mean, my heart isn't beating slow, staying slow, and then jumping right up to really fast. It's been much more natural than that. And where things break down for me sometimes is the assumption that the watch is able to take accurate measurements at all while I'm cycling. Sometimes when it breaks down, it does so very explicitly. The later the most recent value would manage to get a showed grade out. It's like a stale value. And if it manages to take another reading, it'll go white again. Or if it fails for a very long time, it'll eventually go to two dashes. And so that's it explicitly failing. But sometimes it does something even worse, where it thinks it's succeeding, but it's talking absolute garbage. So on a very bumpy road, I have a times seen it give me insane readings like 240 beats per minute. I'd be dead, I think. And sometimes implausibly low values, like 72, as I'm, you know, or something on the road at full speed. That's just not right. And as best as I can tell, that's actually off by sort of roundy numbers, half, two thirds, one and a half, or double, seems to be where it is, because my normal rate tends to be about 105 to 140, depending on how hard I'm pushing. So 72, plausibly about half of a correct measurement, 240 is about double of a correct measurement. And I also sometimes see 180, which is about one and a half times, and sort of high 80s, which is about two thirds. And that really often seems to fall in those sort of regions. And yeah, I'm just pretty sure it's misreading by a factor. Anyway, I find it's fine when I'm walking. The only caveat I'll put in that is, assuming I'm not wearing a band that's just too loose, so basically no solo loops. And then it's fine when I'm walking. So I think the poor performance when I'm cycling is down to just the physics of cycling. So when I'm out on the bike, my wrist is actually quite a crowded place because I have the watch obviously in the, trying to be there and trying to get a good reading to have a snug fit on my arm. But there's always going to be the Velcro strap for my mitts or gloves, depending on how cold it is. Then there's going, you know, that's below the watch. And then above the watch is going to be very often the cuff of a long sleeve jacket or jersey. So if the glove manages to work its way under the watch on one edge, well, that can loosen the skin to contact while lifting the watch up a bit. If the sleeve cuff does the same on the other side, well, that can loosen the contact or if it happens at the same time, it can just completely lift the watch off my wrist, which certainly isn't going to help. But even if there's nothing lifting the wrist, lifting the watch up, like, you know, I move my wrist around a lot when I'm cycling, but it's often where it's like upward bend, not a huge upward bend, not RSI level upward bend, but it can be an upward bend, especially if I'm feathering the brake or whatever. And that will tend to lift the middle of the watch up a little bit because my wrist is curved up. Then there's the fact that particularly in winter or whatever, there's a cold wind very often blowing across my wrist because I'm moving, there is wind, it's Ireland, it can be cold. And the way your body tends to react to cold is by pulling the blood back into your core. So I think there's actually less blood flow in your wrist for the watch to pick up when these kind of horrible cold winds. And there's vibrations like crazy, you know, a well-inflated tire on a rough road, look at your watch and watch how much it jiggles. It's terrifying. So, oh yeah, and rain, doesn't think it can happen. Because there can be literally water running down my arm. Now, if it's cold enough and raining that I can wear waterproofs, I will. And then the watch will actually be in better conditions than normal. But in the summer, it can be 20, you know, low 20 degrees Celsius. You can't wear plastic in that condition because you'll melt. So just get wet. And in which case the poor watch has literally has water running over it and it's trying to take accurate measurements. So, you know, I'm not entirely surprised that it sometimes gets it wrong. In fact, thinking about it logically, maybe I should be surprised that it ever gets it right. So clearly it would make sense if I want to get accurate readings that I should really have an external heart rate monitor that cooperates with the watch and sort of the watch can offload the heart rate monitoring. And I probably should have done this years ago, but I've always been afraid that a device like this will prove to be fiddly to use Alison's favorite word. And the last thing I want when I'm, you know, in my routine to get out on the bike, it's usually after work when I'm in a rush to get back to podcasts or something. The last thing I want is faffing about in the middle of my routine. And also, there was just so many choices that when I got over my fear of faffing about and went to actually look at what I should buy, I just got completely overwhelmed with all of the different options. And for years, those two things together have held me back. But I eventually did actually buy a tracker, hence there being a review. So before we go into the specifics, the first decision you need to make when you're faced with this wall of possible products is basically what type of tracker do you want? And by type I sort of mean where on the body you want it to go. So there do exist wrist-based external trackers, which I think they only really make sense for someone who is trying to get a device to work with a phone. To get a device to work with your watch when the problem is that your wrist isn't a great place to measure it, well then adding another wrist monitor doesn't seem make sense at all. For a start you'd have to wear it on your other arm or it'd be really, really, really crowded on your wrist. And so basically I just eliminated those. I'm sure they're useful to some people, but they just didn't seem useful to me. So I just took the wrist monitors off the list. And then for years and years and years, every recommendation that seemed to come from people I trust with a high level of confidence was always for chest strap. And I'm sure they're very accurate. If you think about the physics of it, it seems extremely likely that plopping it over your heart would be accurate. But I wear a lot of layers, especially in winter. It just seems awkward to have to put this thing on and turn it on while you're getting dressed and then you can't see it or adjust it or do anything to it until you've done your exercise and you're changing again. It's just so awkward to have it under all of your clothes. So I really was turned off by the idea of a chest strap. And then recently I've noticed reviews of a different type of device which goes on your lower arm near the elbow. So on the bottom of your arm near your elbow. And that's actually an easy place to get to. Even if you have a long sleeve jersey on you just pull up the jersey a little bit. You don't have to go over your elbow, which is always a tricky bit. You know, it's below the elbow and you would imagine, well, I can tell you for a fact, the vibrations your wrist feels versus the vibrations near the hinge of your elbow massively reduced, massively reduced. You do not see it jiggling about. You know, a nice thing of course is you have a lot more flesh between your skin and your bone on your lower arm than you do on your wrist. So getting a comfy fit is actually a lot easier. And in mine, I don't know if this is legitimate or not, but in my mind there's way more tissue there. So there's way more blood there. So there's way more of a chance of the thing getting a good reading because it's just more for it to read. So all in all, lower arm straps just seem sensible to me. Now there are upper arm straps and most of the lower arm straps can also be worn on the upper arm. I have in all of my life never managed to find anything that's supposed to go on my upper arm that actually stays on my upper arm. I just ends up around my elbow, always. And I'd like to tell myself it's because my biceps are too big and I flex them too much and that just wiggles it down all the time. But it's probably not because they have really big biceps. It's probably just because, I don't know, I don't think it's a really good, it's a good place to put stuff. Now do you see joggers managing to keep their iPhones up there? Never managed to do it. So anyway, long story short, I have no faith in upper arm. I know the wrist doesn't work. I really, really have no interest in the chest strap. So lower arm it is then. Okay, great. One choice mate. Second choice then is your connectivity options, right? So there exists now standard Bluetooth APIs for health devices. So in the same way that there are standard Bluetooth APIs for keyboards and for pointing devices, which means that if you take a Bluetooth keyboard, you don't have to install a driver for it because the Bluetooth standard has these APIs. You just need a device that understands Bluetooth keyboard. And now we have these Bluetooth health APIs and they're pretty done widely supported now. So what that means is if you buy a tracker and that supports the Bluetooth health APIs, then you don't need a third-party app, which means a lot less faffing about. Now the Apple Watch, the iPhone and the Apple TV all support these standard Bluetooth APIs. Therefore that's what I wanted. Now don't confuse the standard Bluetooth health device with something fancier, which is GymKit, which is Apple's own sort of extended version of these health APIs that is designed to integrate with gym equipment. It basically allows your watch to talk to gym equipment. That's really cool if you're into going to the gym, but I'm not. So I didn't factor it into my choices at all. But if you are a gym rat, then you may want something which is both standard Bluetooth, so it'll just work. And also does GymKit so you can have fun at the gym too. Anyway, I was basically ruthless on this criteria. If it didn't implement the standard Bluetooth stuff, it was off my list. If it required some sort of third-party app, I wasn't, no. I don't mind if it had an optional third-party app that you could use. I just didn't want to need one. Really didn't want to. And do I have any other requirements? Well, I guess so far my list of requirements is really short. So that makes it hard to know how to list down, right? I want a low-round shop and I want it to be Bluetooth. Hmm. Oh yeah, well actually I do want a bit more. I would like a high measurement rate please. So at the very, very least, don't be any less frequent than the Apple Watch. But you know something, if I'm gonna buy a dedicated device whose one and only job in life is to measure my heart rate, actually, it should be better. You know, the Apple Watch does 20 billion things. It fits in a tiny little package. It's amazing. I want something the same size that does one thing so it should be better. So I guess, yeah, I want it better. And the other thing of course is because this device only has one job, I also expected a better battery life because again, you know, Apple Watch has a one-day battery life, but it does so much. So this yolk has way less to do so it should give me a longer battery life in my opinion. Now, I was prepared to tolerate anything that would work for a sort of a day-long road trip. So in the summer, I might, you know, spend an eight-hour day on the bike. But really, you know, my normal routine is two to three hours for daily use. So what I'd really like actually would be that it could just charge once a week. So three times seven would be 21. So, you know, eight at the very least so I can do an all-day big cycle on my summer holidays. And 21 would be ideal so I can only charge it once a week. And I guess I should also say that I was getting cranky enough for this day that I'd actually mentally put aside between one and 200 euro as my budget. So with all that said, what did I actually choose? Well, I chose a device called the Wahoo Ticker without an E fit. And it turns out my budget was way too big which is a good problem to have. So it was, I think it was 79 euro and something. Let's just say 80 euro. About 80 euro for this device. Not bad. So what do I get for my 80 euro? Well, it's a lower arm strap, just what I wanted. It comes with two different Velcro adjustable straps depending on the size of your arm. Don't know what it says about me that both of them fit my arm. So the big one fits my arm near but not quite at its smallest size and the small one fits my arm near but not quite at its biggest size. Like I'm wearing the small one because it gets less doubling. But I guess my arm must be perfectly average if I fit both straps. The data flow is impressive. Whatever the lag I see, I'm pretty sure is a biological rather than a technological lag, right? Because when you start to sprint or you start to go uphill your heart rate doesn't ramp up immediately. Your muscles hoof a little bit more oxygen out of your blood and then your heart takes a wee while to know. It's like, oh, hang on a second. There's very little oxygen coming back to me here. And then it starts pumping faster to make up for that. So, you know, I would expect you start doing more exertion and then within 30 seconds or so you'd expect to see the numbers starting to go up and that's exactly what you see. The other thing that very strongly implies reading with a high temporal resolution and low latency is that the numbers go up in really small increments very often. So you can literally watch it go tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. So you can see 105, 106, 107, 107, maybe jump to 110 or whatever but whereas the Apple watch would jump, you know, 105, 125. And it would take ages to do that jump. It's almost like a speedometer, right? It's just clocking up and clocking down nicely and very little time between readings. So it appears to be very high resolution and very low latency, which is great. The other thing is the Bluetooth connectivity works like it's supposed to. So basically it says it supports the standard health APIs and it does. It also apparently supports gym kit. It says it does, I don't have any way of testing that. So I just have to take his word for it but because it supports the standard APIs it will work for my watch, my iPhone and as well an Apple TV. So if you pay for that Apple fitness subscription thing I'm above, you can pair it to your TV so that it will show your heart rate right on the television while the actor tells you to do whatever they're telling you to do. The other thing is it has a 30 hour battery life which is well above my 21. So yay. There is an optional app but if you're happy to have a read of the manual once you can do everything you need to do with the one physical button on the device getting feedback from the one LED which is an LED that can blink at different speeds and different colors. So it's one LED but it has different speeds and different colors which allows it to communicate a lot of information. So there is an app, it does exist. I have not installed it. I have never needed it and I have absolutely no intention of installing it. I haven't missed it, I haven't, no app which is just what I wanted. So okay, there's no app. There's one button and one light. So how easy is it to set up? Well, press and hold the one button until the LED light does that. There's something about Bluetooth pairing mode on all devices. There seems to be a certain cadence of flashing that just says, oh yeah, that's Bluetooth. It did that. I then opened up the settings app on my watch, went to the Bluetooth pane and it showed and I hit the button to pair it. That was it, done. So now when I wanna go out for a cycle, I press and hold the one and only button until the light gives a gentle blue pulse. So not that flashy, flashy, flash, flash, flash of I'm in pairing mode but just a gentle pulse, pulse in blue. Tell you it's on Bluetooth. And that tells you that it's powered up and has successfully started to talk to your watch or whatever it's powered with. Out of complete paranoia, because I don't trust Bluetooth, I tend to open the settings app on my phone and just go into the Bluetooth pane and verify that I see the nice happy little connected next to the device. And so far, 100% of the time, that is exactly what I have seen. So I think this is, I think there's no need for me to check this, but hey, I'm a creature, how about I'm used to it now? Well, for now, I still check it every time. And then you're good to go. Now, you can immediately tell whether or not it's working, by the way, because literally the moment you start to work out, you get an immediate bright white reading. Whereas on the Apple Watch, the first thing I'll do is it'll sort of spin for a bit, and you're like, oh, I'm off to take my first reading, I'll be back to you in 30 seconds or so. Whereas this thing's just straight away. Here's your reading. And the other thing, of course, is if you lift up your watch a little bit, there'll be no flashing green LED because the watch turns off its own sensor because it has the Bluetooth one to fall back on, which means you save some battery life on your watch too, which is also nice. So there will be no flashing green light underneath your watch if this thing is properly paired. So because I read the manual, I know that if, actually, sorry, I should also say that when I get home, I press the one and only button until the LED flashes red, with that same sort of cadence as the turning on flash, but in red instead of in blue, and then it's powered down. And that really is all there is to it. Because I read the manual, I know that if I see a flashing red light when I'm not pushing any buttons, that means batteries low, please charge me. I have never seen this, but academically, I know it exists. The reason I've never seen it is because I have used the AmazingDew app that runs my life to set a weekly reminder to charge the tracker every Wednesday at around about the time I get home from my cycle. And so that basically means once a week it gets charged, and that's enough to keep it happy. It has never complained of me, and I have never charged more than once a week. In fact, I went initially, the first time it was at a weekend and I wanted the charge to be in the middle of the week, so I used it for nine days, and then used it for eight days, and then went on to my seven day cycle, fine. Not an issue. I've never seen a battery warning. It's pretty cool, actually. If I want to be cranky at it, just because you can't only say nice things, I'm mildly cranky that the charging cable has a custom magnetic connector on the tracker's end, and it's a really picky one as well. Like it's circular shaped, but it can only go on in one exact position. So you have to line the tab A with slot B kind of thing, and it's a weirdy connector. And then the other end is USB-A, which is really old fashioned now because my house is fully USB-C because that's where everything else is. Like I say, I'm really just looking for things to be cranky about. It just works, it's nice, it's comfy, yeah, I'm happy with it. So anyway, how is it working out for me? Well, really, I just have another review here perfectly. Just works. And there's also a photograph in the show notes of my view when I'm cycling these days. So you will see the Wahoo tracker is on my lower arm, and then at the bottom of my arm, next to my glove, now completely not caring whether the velcro strap with the glove notches the watch is my watch, which is paired with perfectly and showing me a nice accurate reading, which is 121, I think I can see it saying there. Anyway, yeah, it just works. So I have never had it fail to connect. I turn it on, it pulses the blue lights every single time I check, is it connected? Yes, it is. When I'm out and about, I have not seen a single gray reading since I started wearing this thing, not a single solitary one. It's also so comfy that it has happened a few times that I've been come back downstairs and after having gone up to get changed and then gone, oh, there's a thing on my arm. Look at that, power it down, put it away. So yeah, it just works. And what kind of surprises me is I knew it would be convenient not to be constantly checking to see is the reading grayed out? Okay, it's grayed out. Let me wiggle the watch on my wrist and hope I get a clean connection. Wait two minutes because the watch is so slow to read. Is it so grayed out? Yes, is it grayed out? Okay, try again, readjust again. Is it faffing about, right? Didn't like it. That's all gone, which I knew would be cool. I also have never seen it make a reading that's nonsense, so no 72 beats per minute. Well, horse and then it ordered full speed and no 240 beats per minute, which tells me it should be in the ER, right? It's just giving me completely plausible readings every single time I've looked. And what I didn't anticipate was how much better it would make my workouts. So because I can see exactly when I'm putting in the perfect level of effort to keep my heart rate in what I know is the range that feels good, I'm spending way more time with my heart rate where it should be, which means I feel better while I'm on the bike. And when I get home, you know, sometimes I accidentally overdo it and I end up coming home and feeling like over exerted and drained as opposed to what you should have after a good workout is positive exercise endorphins. Now, pretty much always positive exercise endorphins and never that feeling of, oh, that was too much because I can see in real time, no two minute lying, no inaccuracies, no messing about. I can just always see, oh, where's my heart rate? Oh, 10 too high, back off of it. Oh, 10 too low, up a little bit. And I can pretty much like within seconds, oh, I need to push a little bit harder and you watch and you go 105, 107, 110, 112, good, okay, grant. It's just, it has proven to be way more game changing than I thought it would. So the only regret I have is that I spent so long in covaching about what to get. I should have done this years ago. But thanks so much for this, Bart. That was, that's really an interesting device. I'd never heard of the fact that they had them that went on the inside of your arm like that. It looks really comfortable in the photo that he showed anyway. And that does seem to solve a lot of problems. I asked him whether it might also increase your battery life when working out because when you're running the Apple Watch doing exercise, it actually uses a lot more battery. I mean, if nothing else, it's doing the green LEDs and taking your heart rate and everything. But if it's just getting the heart rate signal through Bluetooth, that might be less energy used, I think, and he thought that it probably does do that. So that's a really, really cool tool. I don't have any of the same problems, but if I did, I would definitely try out the Wahoo Ticker Fit Heart Rate Monitor. I distinctly remember the day my brother showed me this really cool new website ages ago called the Internet Movie Database at imdb.com. It was amazing. You could look up any movie or TV show or actor and find out everything about it or them. I loved using it for a long time. And while I never became a member, I did go out of my way to always buy my movie tickets through IMDb so they would get some money because of my participation in use of their tool. But over the years, the ads on IMDb have become untenable. It's nearly impossible to find what I wanna know and I hate every minute of the experience of going into IMDb. There's good news. Casey Liss, one of the hosts of the Accidental Tech podcast, has just released a delightful alternative. It's an iOS app named Callsheet. This app has no ads. It has no tracking. It doesn't even require a login. You can do your first 20 searches for free to see what it's like. And after that, you can subscribe for the grand sum of a dollar a month or the bargain basement price of $9 per year. Now I had the opportunity to beta test Callsheet over the last few months. Even in beta, I knew this was a great app and I'd be buying it the minute Casey released Callsheet. Now Callsheet is a necessary tool for Steve and me because we are terrible at names. We'll see an actor and start yelling, that guy, that guy, he's the one. You know, the one and the thing with that woman where they're in that place. Remember, you know the one I mean. In other words, I use Callsheet every single day. Let me use an example to explain how I use Callsheet and I'll tell you about the awesome features. So Steve and I are working our way through very old TV shows we used to watch and right now we're watching Family Ties. We are watching an episode entitled Best Man. In this episode, Alex P. Keaton, played by Michael J. Fox, has a best friend named Matt Gilbert who decides to get married. Steve exclaimed that he knows that guy. He thinks it's the same actor that plays Danny Concanon in the West Wing. Well, whenever one of us makes a claim like this, it's important to verify the claim so that appropriate credit can be bestowed. As it turns out, we're also in the middle of watching the West Wing, this one for the first time and if it's the same guy, he was 17 years younger in Family Ties so this would be a great poll if Steve was correct. In Callsheet, I needed to find Family Ties, find the name of the actor playing the young groom to be and then see if the West Wing is amongst that person's credits. Well, Callsheet features a prominent search field where I was able to search for Family Ties. With Family Ties page selected, there are two tabs, one for the cast and one for the crew. If you're looking for one of the main characters, this is where you would look to find the actor's names and more about them. But it's not a great way to find a character who may be only in a few episodes. To find the actors in a specific episode, Callsheet provides a scrolling roll of horizontal buttons that scroll across for each season. We knew we were watching season three, episode nine from 1982. I scrolled across to season three and then I could see a list of all the episodes by number and name so I could go straight to episode nine. Now just being able to drill right down to the episode makes me love Callsheet. Since the actors that are always in the show are listed in the front page of the show, the episode actors are a small list to scroll through. The second actor listed was Timothy Busfield playing the character Doug. Now I could tap on Busfield's name and then opened up his entry in Callsheet with all of his credits. I tapped on his image and it came up full screen, allowing me to see his 66 year old portrait and confirm that this was probably the actor who played that young character in Family Ties. From his page, I could scroll down to the late 90s when the West Wing was on. Sure enough, on Busfield's page, the West Wing was listed and it said he played the character Danny Concanon in 26 episodes of the show. This workflow is intuitive and responsive and as I said up front, it's just delightful. If what I just described was all Callsheet could do, it would be worth the price of a buck a month to me but there's so much more. You might wonder where Callsheet gets all of its yummy data. The database behind Callsheet is from themoviedatabase.org. Now Callsheet isn't yet available on the Mac but you can directly use the movie database from that URL. It's not full of ads so it's a much better experience than IMDB is now. I'm really hoping Casey does release a Mac version though even the iPad version on Apple Silicon would be fine. Now back in my day, we only had NBC, ABC or CBS and you even knew what time the show was on. 8 p.m. on NBC was always the best time. In today's world, the number of services to watch TV and movies are seemingly endless so we need some help figuring out which service is playing the show we wanna watch. In Callsheet, when you look up a show you wanna watch, you'll see a big button that says more. From there, you'll see several options one of which is where to watch. This information uses another terrific service called Just Watch. Even within where to watch, there are options. Depending on what you wanna watch, you may see up to four different tabs, free, ads, buy and subscription. This allows you to say check first to see if it's on a service you're already paying for and if not, how maybe you could buy it or even get it for free. In that same more menu, you can read the parental guidance information but unfortunately that's exposed through a link to IMDB. So you literally cannot see past the ads to read the information at first glance and I'm not joking here. When I go to see the parental guidance on IMDB, I can see the IMDB banner, the title of the show I requested and then the bottom half of the screen was an ad for Vitamin B1 and an invitation to get the IMDB app. Now one line says certification and if you click through that, you can see the MPAA and UK Parental Guidance Info. I gotta tell you, I just felt like I had to take a shower after I've been on IMDB. After plowing through all those ads on IMDB, I did notice a far easier way to get some of the info, at least for US users. On the main page of the show you selected in Callsheet, it actually says the MPAA rating such as PG-13. That's all you need to see, then you don't have to go into IMDB at all. Now back to our more menu in Callsheet, there are selections to take you directly to the Wikipedia article about the actor or show and the website associated to your search. Now if you're watching a TV show that has a lot of seasons or a lot of characters, you'll likely be looking up actors for that show pretty often. This is where Callsheet's pinned items feature comes in really handy. If you pin a show or an actor, you can see it in a horizontally scrolling list across the top row of the app so they're always available to you without doing a new search. Speaking of search, if you tap the little book icon in the upper right, you can see your search history. I seem to have the short-term memory of a common housefly, which means I often need to do the search again for something I just recently searched, so this is a really handy feature for me. And let's say you find a show or an actor that you wanna tell someone about, you can share a link to it right from within Callsheet. It shares the link in the movie database so they don't have to download Callsheet to see your link. If you like trivia about actors and shows, you can tap the little speech bubble icon, but I gotta warn you, it takes you to IMDB for the trivia. The speech bubble icon is actually called the quick access link, and in settings, you can change what you see from quick access, and the choices are where to watch, Wikipedia, or the webpage for the show. I'm not big on trivia, so I set mine to be where to watch. Now, before I start watching a movie, I wanna know how long it is. Callsheet exposes the runtime right on the front page for movies. Now, that requires math to figure out if I start watching the movie now, will it be done before my bedtime? I follow Casey on Mastodon, and in one of his posts about Callsheet, he gave us a little hidden trick. If you tap on the runtime, it'll tell you what time it will finish if you start right now. How cool is that? One of the most interesting things Callsheet can do is hide spoilers. If there's, say, a beloved character in a series, and you notice that she's in far fewer total episodes than the rest of the main cast, then it might be a hint that she's gonna get killed off unexpectedly, which might not be what you wanna know. In Callsheet, you can hide cast, episode counts, and cast character names. Evidently, there's some shows where actors surprisingly play more than one character in a series, and that would be a spoiler. You can also hide episode titles and episode thumbnails. I love this one because I remember finding out that a character who'd been unable to conceive was gonna have a baby just because of the episode artwork. Now, as you're selecting each of the spoiler toggles, Callsheet shows you a little preview of what the shows will look like as you hide each type of item, putting a gray box covering the now hidden information. These options to hide spoilers are saved on a show-by-show basis, so you can tailor Callsheet just the way you wanna see each show. Now, I've been mostly focusing on how Callsheet displays movies and TV shows, so let's briefly walk through what it presents about people in the industry. You do see their profile photo, and it's displayed pretty big, but as I mentioned before, you can also tap on it to see it nearly full screen. It's just beautiful. You can see when they were born, and again, Casey saves you the work of doing the math and tells you how old they currently are. I'm not sure it shows this for every person, but there are two tabs on many people's pages in Callsheet, one for cast and one for crew. If an actor's turned director, you'll find that listed under crew, which is pretty slick. At the top, it tells you what the person is known for, acting, directing, et cetera, and then a list in chronological order of all of the TV and movies they've been involved in. What you don't see in Callsheet is a short visual list of what they're most known for. This is a feature in IMDB, and I didn't notice it was missing from Callsheet until my daughter Lindsay showed me that it's the primary feature she uses IMDB for. So that is something I really wish that Callsheet had. Now, if you're lucky, the person's bio and Callsheet will include a list of known for projects, but the visual list is a lot better on IMDB if you can find it in between all of the ads. Now, I'm happy to say that my testing for voiceover support was successful on Callsheet. As always, my disclaimer is that if I can tell, or I can tell that there's obvious failures, but there may be some more advanced voiceover tricks that I'm not able to retest, but from my testing, it was accessible. Now, I immediately put Callsheet on the front page of my iPhone because I use it that often. The only thing I would have changed about Callsheet is actually the name itself. I'd never even heard of a Callsheet before learning about Casey's app, so I had to look it up. According to Wikipedia, a daily Callsheet is a filmmaking term for the schedule supervised by the assistant director and crafted by the second assistant director. It's really specific. Anyway, they use the director's shot list, the production schedule, and other logistics considerations. It is issued to the cast and crew of a film production to inform them of where and when they should report for a particular day of filming, usually no later than 12 hours before the start of the next workday. Well, maybe you knew that, but I sure didn't, so I worry a little bit that people won't know what Callsheet actually is, but hopefully now you do know what Callsheet is for. Casey Liss is a really nice guy and only recently has struck out on his own as an app developer. I think he hit it out of the park with his fantastic app that answers the question, where have I seen that guy? It's really fast. It's really simple. It's accessible. There are no ads, and there isn't even a sign-up process. Nine bucks a year to not have to wade through the number and size of ads on IMDB is a very easy buy for me. Well, that is gonna wind us up for this week. There will be a live show next week. I have some content stacked up, again, thanks to the Nocella Castaways, so I'll be able to go off and go hiking without worrying about the show, but there will be a live show. Did you know you can email me at alisonapodfeed.com anytime you like? That's where you should send in questions or suggestions. Hey, maybe send in that review I asked you to do. You can follow me on mastodon at podfeed at chaos.social. Remember, everything good starts with podfeed.com. If you wanna join in the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeed.com slash slack, where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely Nocella Castaways. It's a great place to have conversations. It's chatty, but not too chatty. You know, just enough. It's really, really fun in there. Remember, you can support the show at podfeed.com slash Patreon like Chris did, or you can do a one-time donation at podfeed.com slash PayPal like Ian and George. If you wanna join in the front of the live show, head on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic Nocella Castaways. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.