 Alison, Alison and Steve have been continual presence at Max Doc over the last nine years. And not always able to be here in person every year, but certainly here in spirit. The love and support that Alison and Steve both show for Max Doc means the world to me. Thank you so much. I am proud to introduce everyone to Alison Sheridan as our love presenter for Sunday. How do dogs? How many microphones am I on? Am I on? You hear there? Am I on there? No, you've got to get you on. There's one presenter that doesn't need a mic. We got it? Hello? I think I'm on now. There we go. Mike and Barry were the first two people Steve and I told we were having a grandchild because it was the date of Max Doc and we had to tell him we weren't going to be able to be here. If that tells you how much we love Max Doc, that was the first people we told. I sort of feel like everybody's already told my talk already, so I have really any questions. Learned by teaching. Maybe it's an obvious topic, but I thought it would be fun to go through a series of kind of disparate stories that I would loosely string into an agenda. Alright, he got it. Alright, let's bring it on up. Make it go. Let's see. I'm probably more comfortable clicking a button. There we go. Learned by teaching. So what I wanted to talk about was think about there's a lot of different ways you can learn to do things. A lot of people like to take classes and they like to have an instructor who stands up and spoon feeds him the information and that's a great way to learn, but it isn't how I like to learn. People like to read online tutorials and I'm really glad people like to read online tutorials because I write online tutorials, so I really want you to keep doing that. You know, when Rachel was talking about stop consuming so much and produce, no, do not listen to her. I need consumers. I don't want you all producing just to go back and read and listen to what I'm doing here. People like to watch videos to learn and you could watch YouTube, of course, but you probably really want to watch ScreenCast Online. Big disclaimer, I work for ScreenCast Online as well. So videos are a great way to learn, but I actually don't learn that way either. There are some people out there. Anybody out here read manuals? I've heard about that, but it's just not my way. It's too slow. I want to get in and start doing stuff and then get stuck. That's kind of more my strategy. So one of the things that, an example, I write blog posts that are full tutorials of things that I know how to do. And it might be just introducing you to a new app and the way a new app works and I'll go through and explain step by step how it works. They're really in depth. You've noticed I talk a lot? I write a lot. I write about 5,000 words a week. But then the other thing I do is that same content is what you hear on my podcast. And I remember somebody telling me once, why do you let people have the blog posts if that's what you're going to talk about on your podcast? They're going to read instead of listen. And I said, oh gosh, you're right. It'd be terrible if they got the content the way they wanted it. I should stop doing that right away. So I do both. So you can consume it any way you want and pick and choose what you want to listen to or what you want to read and you get both for the same price free. And I thought I'd go through an example of how I learned in order to put stuff onto the podcast. So my friend Pat Dengler, a good friend of Steve Sobo's here, she sent me a link to this app called Shutter. And it's a screenshot app. Well, I've got about 12 screenshot apps. I'm addicted to screenshot apps. I love screenshot apps. And I was really enamored with CleanShotX. But she said, no, no, no. Try this one. At the time it was free, it is now the grand total of $8. Not per month, not per year. $8. Not much this app costs. And I thought, well, how good could that be? It's free at the time. You know, I've had, ah, that's not going to be very good. But I thought, I'll go take a look at it. The first thing I do is I push all the buttons and just go around push because again, I don't read the manual. I don't want to know how to do it. I want to just push all the buttons and see what it does. And I'll give you an example here and you don't need to be able to read what's up on screen there. But that's an example of what CleanShotX looks like. And there's a row of icons across the top. And I take a look at that and I go, well, I see a save icon, a copy icon, a pen. That's all pretty obvious. But the next button over is a piece of paper with like six braille dots on either side. Wonder what that is? And you click it and it turns out it's how you drag images out of it right into another document. Well, that's kind of cool. And then I go, well, the next button, what is it? It's an arrow. So it sort of looks like a selection tool, but it's also got like a little crop symbol. What does that do? Well, it turns out it selects and it crops. And that's an unusual way to do a tool. As I keep going across, you see an arrow. Well, it's going to put an arrow in T. It's going to be a text. I don't care about those. But the next one over says one, two, above a line with like two vertical lines next to it. What does that do? It turns out it's a measurement tool. If you hold down the one key and you drag your cursor around, it tells you the horizontal distance between any two elements on that screenshot. So somehow, and there's probably somebody real smart here who knows how it does this, but somehow it's actually looking at the images and the text on screen. It can measure the distance in pixels. And so if you're a designer that's trying to do layout, it can be really, really helpful. You hold down the two, it does vertical distance. So anyway, I'm just sitting there banging at these buttons, just poking them to see what they do. So now at this point in the process, I need to take a critical eye and really look at this and see whether, is this something I'm going to want to do a review of? I'm going to want to teach how to use. So my first question is, does it solve a real problem? And Kershyn stole my line there, but yes, that is the line I always like to ask. What kind of problem does this solve? If it doesn't solve a problem, then don't go talk about it. Now the problem can be I'm bored and I want to be entertained. Like I did a review on an app called Clack. Anybody heard of that? It's a menu bar app, and its whole job is to make your keyboard sound like a clicky keyboard. I love this app. I love it. It makes me happy every day. It's the dumbest thing, but it makes me happy. So that solved a real problem. I might ask, is it unique? Is it actually going to do something that I can't do any other way? And you look at Shutter, well not really, right? Because I can do my Clean Shot X. I got all these other ways to take screenshots and annotate them. But maybe it's like something else, but it's better. Or in this case with Shutter, the conclusion I came to was it wasn't better. It was just different. And it was fun. And it was playful. And I really really liked it. So that actually made the cut in that one. So I don't bother doing the review unless it meets that criteria. So one thing I never do, people say, well, you should tell us about apps that are bad. So we don't accidentally buy them. And I say, that doesn't sound very joyful at all. I'm not interested in that. And I'm not going to slam somebody. If I do find a bad app, by the way, I write to the developer and I say, I have a few suggestions for improvement. If it's really bad, I don't bother. But if it's like, oh, you were so close, but you missed the marg. So at this point in my learning, I start digging a little deeper. It's time to just really dig into the app and get into it. So somebody's at the door. So here's another shot of Clean Shot X. And when I was sorry, I keep getting those two mixed up, Shutter. And when I clicked on the blur tool, I noticed at the top it says blur, blur text, erase, and erase text. What is this sorcery? So I selected a region and you can see that there's still a little gear there under the region I've selected, but the text is gone. So right away, I mean, that's eight bucks, right? I mean, to be able to do that. So obfuscating information that's private that you don't want to have shown that you can do blur, you can do the regular kind of blur and it pixelates it and things like that. But to be able to just erase the text and leave the graphics, that's magic right there. But when I get to this point, now it's time to start writing. So what I'll be doing is I'll writing, you know, use the blur tool to select an area, blah, blah, blah, and I'll actually start to write it out at this point in the process. The next thing I do is I just start poking all the buttons and system in the settings and to be honest, I don't poke every button. I may look at it and go, oh, that sounds too hard. So one of the things Shodder does that's really cool is it does scrolling screenshots and a couple of apps do that. But what this one does when you select the region, it auto scrolls. So you don't have to guess like how fast to go, which is really cool. But it has an option here, it says scrolling screenshot max height 20,000 pixels. I have no idea what would happen if I change that to 10. No idea. Never poke that button just something would happen. I don't know if it gets shorter. Does it make it wider? I don't know what it does. So after I've done poking all the buttons invariably I'm stuck. I find something I don't understand. So when I get baffled, I've got something, I've got to figure something out. How does this button work? What am I supposed to do? At this point, I do the unthinkable. I look at the user manual. But I only really like user manuals where they're very specific and great. And I put up the Gold Standard, Audio Hijack from, well, Rogue Amoeba in general is the Gold Standard of basically everything. And their user manuals are spectacular. The best thing in there is there's a search box. So I could search for the thing I want so I don't have to read the manual, which is what I really don't want to do. But they also give great screenshots and that like, have you ever used, oh there's a tool, Dave loves this one, it's a Pixelmator I think. When I tried to learn Pixelmator, they would say, okay touch the color picker tool. What's it look like? And there were like no tool tips back then. There might be now but the user manual is horrible on that. But in this one it's really, really good. But invariably, I don't get to the point where I actually understand how do you use something. So what I do is I contact the vendor, the developer. And you would be amazed how much developers actually like to write back to you about their tools if you approach them correctly. So my approach is so I'm probably an idiot, but I don't understand how to do this. This doesn't make any sense to me. And I always tell them, I hope it's a mistake I'm making because it's easier to fix me than it is to fix software. So if I tell them that then they're like, oh yeah, well you know what you could do is this. And every once in a while you get somebody who's snarky and gives you a snarky answer and that's good to do. But what's fun is you start to get to know them. Have some fun. You know, be playful when you write to them because they can help you and make your life easier and you can make them happier. You know, start by telling them all the stuff you love about their software. In fact put that in the title and then put the part you're mad about inside there. And if you bother them long enough sometimes you get an app like yeah, feeder from a reinvented software. This guy named Steve Harris. This guy is one of the funniest, most snarkiest, sarcastic people I have ever met my entire life. And I ask him a lot of questions so for the people who can't read it from here, in his about me page for feeder it says, thanks to Allison Sheridan for use of her feed and screenshots and for being generally annoying. I had an opportunity, Steve and I had an opportunity to go to England to meet up with Don McAllister and he did a tweet up in Liverpool. Steve Harris drove two hours to come to Liverpool to go to that tweet up and I got to meet him in real life. He was hilarious and I'm talking to him before he left. I said, God, it means so much to me that you drove four hours just to meet you or to meet me and he goes, no, I came to meet Don. Actually, I wish Adam Christensen was still here because he's the one who pointed this out to me. It was up there for two years before I ever noticed it. Steve never told me. So it works. Just get to know people. They're people and they're happy to talk about the stuff they've learned and what they've got to tell you about the tool. Now if I really want to learn something, I sign up to do a screencast online tutorial. There is no better way to learn a tool than to have to demonstrate a tool. That's where you realize that you've been kind of skipping over some parts and just using the parts you know about the screencast online tutorial, you really need to do it in depth because people pay for this service. It's a podcast but you subscribe to this because you're learning stuff. It's a tutorial service. So you can't just do a half big job when you're selling something to people if they're actually paying for the content. So I got to tell you, I did one on Retrobatch which is a really cool tool for image manipulation. Super fun automation stuff and doing the video for screencast was way, way, way, way, way, way harder than it was to do the blog post and talk about it on the show. Because I have to be able to practice it so many times so that I can fluidly go from step to step. Seriously, you can't hand wave. You can't have anything jumping on screen going, oh let me back up because you can't back up. Once you've laid that down on tape, you have to keep going. So when I want to learn it really well, I'll sign up to do a tutorial. And the thing that really brought it home to me thinking about learn by teaching was that if I do a screencast online tutorial on something I already know how to use, I learn it so much better. Audio Hijack is a tool that is just a central of my workflow on doing the podcast. I'm using it all day every day. I couldn't believe how much I learned by teaching it on screencast online, even though I've been using the tool forever. This is a mind map that I did a couple years ago. I did a mind mapping tutorial which I thought. Yeah, it's on my thoughts. It's a great mind mapping app. And what I start doing to do the videos is I start taking notes in just little bubbles and then I start you can rearrange them real easily to tell the story in the way you want to go. Because I like to start my tutorials with, why do you care? Am I ever going to need this? Because I figure I've got about 20 seconds for somebody to go, I don't care about that. That's a banking app. I don't have any money. Whatever it is. I got to catch them. I got to give them a hook. So I work on how to tell the story to get them to go, oh well I might do that someday. I might try that. And so I really work hard to get a story in a cohesive order. And one of the other things you have to figure out when you're teaching it is where do you teach the preferences or the settings for a given application. Because you can bore the heck out of people if you started settings. But a lot of tools, you have to starting settings. And ShotR was a good example. If you didn't set things up in settings you couldn't actually use the tool well. So you have to figure out where do you feed it in. Usually I try to make it at the tail end. Is the end the amuse-bouche? No, that's the middle. Anyway, dessert is where I usually put that in. But sometimes you got to put it in the right place. So I use a mind map to help me learn. And I just, I could not believe how much I learned about audio hijack when I did that tutorial. New story. I'm really interested in accessibility. Accessible tech is so much fun. The people with challenges, man they get some of the coolest stuff. And one of the things I wanted to learn was voiceover which is the built-in screen speaking tool for the blind in macOS and iOS. And I was really interested in this. From a little kid I've always been interested in Braille and things. For some reason Braille just really blew my dress up. I was excited about learning about it. So I had played around in voiceover and I just, I couldn't get the hang of it. I just, you know, I would play with it a little bit. I would just kind of shy away from it. So in a moment of madness I volunteered to do a presentation at MacStock blindfolded. And I love what Don McConn... Sorry, Mac Roll, what'd I say? MacStock. Yeah, no, I'm never doing this again. I am never doing this again. This was the hardest thing I've ever done. Oh yeah, he just goes, yeah. 2024? You were there? Oh, okay, yeah. It was 2012. There we go. No, he just said in... Before I have to do this talk. Oh my gosh, now I don't have enough time to get ready to do it because that was really, really hard. It turns out the iPhone's actually not that hard to use in voiceover because you've got this constrained area. It's only this big. You can't be that far off. And it's always in a little grid. The back button in almost every app is always in the upper left. And the APIs that Apple gives you in developing tend to make it automatic to label the buttons. But when you go over the Mac side, it's free range. I mean, you don't know where anything is on the page. You don't know what window you've got in front. Don't even get me started on how the web is to navigate because every developer is designing everything differently. So I think I rocked the iOS part. I crashed and burned when I did the Mac part. How many people know the rule? Never change anything in your presentation at the last minute? I moved my presentation to the desktop right before I went on stage. And I got it stuck to me. And it was like I was like this. I was going around in a circle with this thing stuck to my foot and everybody could see that I was everywhere I went the presentation was just following me around on screen. But I didn't know I actually had to take the blindfold off and I was crushed because I had worked so hard to do it perfectly. I'd practiced it a thousand times and I didn't get it right. But what I liked was the audience said to me afterwards they said, no, no, you showed us how hard it is. If that's what you were trying to teach you definitely got that message across to us. So another fun story about that I enlisted a bunch of blind friends. The cool thing about podcasting is blind people can listen, right? So all these blind people listen to my podcast and I talk about accessibility in the middle of mainstream podcasting. And so I have a lot of blind friends and so I enlisted them all. How do you do this? How do you do this? And I remember I called a shy who's a blind audio engineer who has a studio out in New York. And I called him up and I said, do you think I can really do this? And he goes, oh Allison, it's not that bad. It's great. You're going to be able to do this piece of cake. I called him afterwards and I said, you liar. And he says, yeah, I know, right? It's really hard. Why did you do that? He says, why didn't think you'd do it if I told you how hard it was. All right, so that was really fun. I enjoyed doing it. Again, I was crushed that I didn't just nail the whole thing but the audience was very nice. I believe you guys were very forgiving afterwards. But learning that skill because I did that tutorial is now what I can do is I can test apps for accessibility. So I try to remember every time. I don't remember every time. But when I'm going through an app, about three cores of the way through I'll go, ooh, I wonder if it's accessible. And I know enough to stumble my way around to tell you if it's inaccessible. I can't tell you if it's great but I can tell you if like, nope, nothing's labeled here or you can't navigate this at all. I came across an app recently that I won't call out but they came out with a new version and the old version was accessible and the new version isn't. Like, nothing was labeled. Couldn't navigate. I mean, train wreck bad. And I wrote to the developer and I got an email back in 17 minutes and the guy said I didn't do it before the new version and I'm going to work on it now. I take personal responsibility and I'm ashamed that I didn't do it right. Now, that's almost as good as if you'd done it right. This tool makes me real. Actually, in case you know anybody Bear is the software. Bear 1.0, Bear 2.0. If you know anybody blind, do not let them upgrade to Bear 2.0 because you can't go backwards either. So until they get it built in, they literally can't use the tool. So that was rough. I also found out recently that Mac Tracker Mac Tracker is not accessible. It's just a table. But on the Mac you can't use it at all. There used to be a web version but that's gone. But the iOS version is pretty good. It's not bad. That's what I'm talking about. On iOS stuff is a lot easier to be accessible. But I use this all the time and what I was able to do was write a tutorial for all y'all to learn how to do it. I walk you through. Okay, hold down these buttons, do this arrow key and I give an example of how to walk through and try to do it. And actually Mac Tracker is the one I call out in there because I was really surprised that it was it. It's been around for 140 years. I thought it would have been. Older than the Mac. Older than the Mac. Yeah, it's got all the iOS stuff in there too. So, new story. Steve and I got solar panels and then shortly after we had solar panels installed we had a whole home battery system put in. And we found that a lot of people are interested in the topic. They want to know and they're usually like, oh, it's never going to pay off, is it? Well, batteries aren't for us. But the solar panels will in seven years. But we had a lot of people asking questions. How does it work? How do you manage it? What happens? What are the different scenarios? And we started thinking about, well, okay, if the sun is out and the grid is down, what can I use in my house off the battery? Because when you get the battery you get kind of a budget of, I don't know, amps or watts or kilowatts or something. Steve would tell me. He's a double EM and ME. And so you have to decide what circuits are going to go on the backup battery. In our house our electric vehicle charger can't be on the battery and our oven can't be on the battery. So those two are off. But everything else in our house can be run off the battery. Well, we started getting these questions about how it worked. And so one of the tools I used to teach is I create diagrams. I'm always giving Dave a hard time. I'm always saying, hey, could you diagram that for me? I'd really like to see that. So you don't have to understand anything on here. This is just a representative of what we do. We probably made, what, 25 versions of this, Steve? I think as we went through, we made like 25 versions of this because we couldn't figure it out. We realized we didn't understand how it worked. So what this, if you could see it and if you cared, it tells you what happens when the grid is on and the grid is off. Is the sun out? Is it nighttime? How much battery is left? How does the energy flow? The energy always flows to your house first no matter what. And then it tries to full the battery and then if it's got excess it sends it back to the grid. But if the power is out, if the grid is out, you actually, we can't use our oven or our cars. However, well, we can use the cars. We just can't charge them. However, we discovered in drawing this diagram that if the grid was up we could use the battery power and keep from using grid power. We're like, whoa, that's interesting. But we figured it out. We learned it because we did this blog post and this diagram and wanted to teach how it worked. So that was a really great example of learning by teaching because we learned something we actually didn't know. I also test drove this on some friends of mine who are real smart but know nothing about this. And their questions were really invaluable because they're like, well, what's that line mean? Oh, if I made it dotted, maybe that would help. So I love doing diagrams. This is done with the free diagrams.net is a website. You can also download it locally and it's got a different name but I won't confuse you with that. Really good free diagraming tool. I use it all the time. New story. So we do my show live on Sunday night. Steve produces it and I'm the on air talent as it were. But what it really is, it's not like Mac Geekab where you're actually getting to see the real show. You're seeing the making of the podcast. So I stop and start and chat with the audience and goof around and they pay no attention to me in the chat room at all. Marty, I'm looking at you. Where's Marty? Yeah, that's Drunk Nick Nolte in our chat room. He's definitely trying. Oh, and John, where's NASA night? He's really annoying. Did John Lee? Oh, there he is. I can just get a creepy feeling when he looks at him. So he's always making snarky comments. But anyway, these people and Jill is on team Allison so she's one of the good ones. There's Jill. She says she learned how to podcast by watching my live show. The setup of this is somewhat complex because we're piping a lot of different things around. So again, I diagrammed it to make sure I learned how it worked. So at the top you can see that my audio and my video both go into Streamyard, which goes to YouTube for the video, but also my recording software called Hindenburg, which gets a lot of laughs every time you say, you expected that would work out well. It's actually a great application. But anyway, I need to learn it better so I really need to do a screencast online tutorial about it because I don't know how it all works. I taught Jill how to podcast. She's teaching me how to use Hindenburg because you know what she does? She reads the manual. I was like, Jill, how do you do this? I don't know. She'll help me. That was another thing I was going to put in here is just get friends of yours to read the manual and tell you how to do stuff. It's a great way to learn. You just have to find the right people. But separately we pipe Steve in and we've got the video and audio going different places and Discord has the audio but not the video and so piping all of that all around is difficult. So I keep diagramming and I put down all the settings. This is Audio Hijack and Loopback and like I've got a button there important to be unchecked. I can't hear the audio from Hindenburg if I forget that one button and I forget that button. Sometimes it gets flipped back so I diagram that and I took diagrams of what the way Hindenburg is set up and the way Streamyard is set up and once I've done these diagrams that in the heat of the moment we're trying to get ready. It's three minutes to five and man, there's heck to pay if I don't start at five o'clock on Sunday nights because that's what time we start. If anything goes wrong I can just flip up these charts and go, oh, okay, there's the button. I didn't check that. I didn't check that. Something got flipped the wrong way. So I find diagramming things to be a really good way to document it, learn it and then you have it as a resource to go back to when things go wrong. I used to use a different piece of software that had literally a 15 page document to go through things. Don't use it anymore and I'm so happy we're on Streamyard. So much simpler. Now I'm going to flip over to doing examples from other people. I wanted to learn to program when I got out of, when I retired. I thought that would be fun. So I talked to a buddy of mine who was a programmer and I said, I want you to teach me to program. He says, I'll get you a book. I don't want to read a book anymore and I want to read a manual so I'm not going to learn that way. So I was talking to Bart Buchatz out of Ireland who's a programmer, cis-admin, security specialist, and he does a segment called Security Bits on my regular podcast, the no-silla cast. And he said, well, I'll teach you. What if we do it in an audio podcast? That sounds like a really silly idea. An audio podcast to learn programming. Imagine reading shell scripting out loud. You will hear that, but that's a dense language. But what he does is he writes perfect tutorial show notes. So you can choose not to listen to us at all. You can read his tutorials and go along. Or it's even better if you hear him explain it. And the value he says I bring, and I argue with him all the time that I don't bring much value because he does 98% of the work, is I'm that idiot in the front row going, I don't understand. Can you repeat that? I don't get it. And he says, that's where you make me step back and I have to explain it better. And that's the tiny contribution I make other than producing the show. But the interesting thing was just a couple of weeks ago, he told me, like I said, we're doing the shell scripting section. He said, Allison, what you don't understand is I am one week ahead of the class understanding this. I am learning as I'm going. So he's been doing shell scripting forever. But he knows that if he has to teach it, and I'm in the front row and I'm going to ask, he said, you're going to ask the wrong question. I said, I would say I'm going to ask the right question. But that can really throw him off his game. If he, he's not like me. He's not just going to make something up. He has to, he's like all factual and writing stuff. And so he tells the exact story. He has to know exactly how it works in order to teach the class. And so he's been learning more and more about bash programming that he ever knew before. A funny thing about this show is I was just telling somebody over here today, the people who take this class are mostly programmers. People who already know. And they end up going back to try to refresh their memory and get deeper into it. Which is really depressing for me because I'm the junior programmer going, I don't know anything. And these people are like, well, I've been doing this for 38 years and I just learned this. But the good thing is I have a whole bunch of people to help me with my programming. So it's good for me too. Last example, my friend Linda was just telling me a story. She wanted to get this teaching job and it was like earth sciences, something like that that she was going to teach. And in the interview they asked her, do you know what the tectonic plates are? And she says, yeah, those are those dishes I keep in the top of my cabinet for company. And she said they thought she was just being flippant because it was such an obvious question. I had no idea what the tectonic plates were. But she faked her way through by being funny. But what she said was she was one week ahead of the class, just like Bart, reading the book, understanding it and then being able to teach it to the class. Because of course they're probably not reading the book. But it was just another great example that I learned by teaching. She said, I know all about the tectonic plates now because I had to teach the class. The final thing I wanted to say is that as a result of the work that I've done to teach other people, I have over 3,200 blog posts. So when I need to know something and I go out and I Google it, I cannot tell you how many times the answer is at podfeat.com. And I know it's because I'm logged in as me for a long time. I thought, oh, I'm famous. But then I logged out of Google and it was not nearly as exciting. But I stay logged into Google. I can always find the answer because it's at podfeat.com. And it's like, well, I knew how to do that at one point, huh? Well, that's good. It's in here. I'll just figure it out. So I learned by teaching and then I got documentation of that. And then I can go back and I can learn it for myself. So learn it again because memory is bad. So any questions? You learned everything. See, everybody wrecked my topic ahead of time. They told you all the answers. Come on up, Mike. Mike's following me. That one may not be on. I've now learned that I should pay attention to who's carrying the microphone. Wilson, in 3200 blog posts, what was the hardest thing that you had to learn? What was the one that almost broke you when you sat down to try to figure it out? That's got to be voiceover. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, voiceover was... I probably worked on that for like a good six months where it maybe take me a couple of weeks to write one of my regular blog posts or a week and a half, something like that, to build it out. Learning how to use voiceover was really, really challenging. And especially on the Mac, I forget what the keystroke is, but you can bring up the help menu and it's maybe 20 things long, but you drill into each one and there's 20 things below that and 20 things below that. I am a mere novice at using it and I've been trying to learn it for years. So, yeah, that was the biggest one. I'm trying to think of anything else. What was the most fun one if you were going to recommend one of the most to somebody who'd never listened to the show before? Wow. Well, there's an interview I did. Can I go sideways and ask me, what does my shirt mean? Does anybody know what my shirt is? Oh, Steve says, what is my shirt mean? I'll give you a hint. SO2 is my favorite star. A woman named Dr. Andrea Gez is an astrophysicist up at UCLA and she studied the center of our galaxy and determined that this little star, SO2, has a 16-year orbit around the center of the galaxy and it proved that because she was able to map the entire orbit of that star that there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. She is the fourth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in physics. For women total in history, there's two alive right now. It's the first time there's been two alive and I got an interview with her on my show. I interviewed a Nobel Prize winning physicist. I really should have done a mic drop. I was just like, I'm not going to beat that. But I do want to tell you, it is really accessible. It is she is so good at explaining it. Like a couple times I threw an analogies and she brought it down to an even simpler analogy than the way I was going to explain it. Now I did have the advantage of I had heard her speak four times on the same topic. So here's a little secret, how I do my interviews. People go, wow, you're such a great interviewer. I take notes from, or I can get the people to write it so I know what question they want to answer before I ask it. So I had a list of things to ask that I knew exactly what she was going to say next. And that really helped me put it together. I think I saw a question over here. Wait, wait, microphone. I was going to ask if you asked her what a tectonic plate was. Oh, the snarky comment from Ron in the audience was, did I ask her what a tectonic plate was? She would probably know. She's incredibly well rounded and awesome awesome person. She's absolutely delightful. She chooses to teach undergraduate astronomy. And I asked her in the interview, why? And she said, because I want to be seen by the men and women of that age group that I'm up here, you know, that I'm doing this. And she loves teaching so. All right, we have a question from not Charles, that's it. Did not say George. No. So most of this is involving learning initially, and especially learning by working with it and using the program. What did you say to do about retention for actually remembering all of the stuff that you remember? You go back to the 3200 blog post and you find the answer to the thing you can't remember how to do. My memory is definitely not my strongest suit. I don't, I really should have started keeping a tally to how many times Bart would say, Allison, I taught you that last time. Because it comes up a lot that I don't retain a lot of information. So once I've written it, it's like I've gotten it out and now I can go get it. I know that it's there. And to me it's sort of do you need to know the answer to everything in your physics textbook or do you need to be able to know where it is in your physics textbook, you know, to learn it. So it isn't a big concern of mine because I don't think I'm ever going to crack that code. One of the reasons I do learn so hard, there's a woman named Dr. Mary Ann Gary who's been on my show a whole bunch of times on Chichette Across the Pond. She studies memory and she's a horrible person. She studies, she calls herself Crusher of Dreams. She teaches, what she does in her research is they induce memories in people. So she can get a group of about 30 people, she can get over half of them in two weeks to tell a story of their childhood that never ever happened to them. She loves to mess with it. She goes in front of the ethics board all the time at her university. And why did I bring that up? My memory family. Oh, there we go. So she's had me read some, Alzheimer's is rampant in my family so I'm terrified of that. And there's been research that correlates, don't know any causation, that learning to do things that are really, really hard for you mentally has been correlated with not getting Alzheimer's. And so when they give an example, like if learning to play the guitar is hard, don't get up to, you have to be master it too. Don't just get up to where you can play. Mary had a little lamb, you've got to be able to master that. And so that is one of the reasons I started programming is it's really hard for me. And whenever I'm like, bam, I head on the desk and I'm in frustration. I don't get it. I sit back and go, okay, it's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard it wouldn't be preserving your brain. So that's how I'm trying to do some retention. But see previous comment about Bart saying I told you that last week. Any other questions? Back here with Mike. And assistant Brian. So sort of related, do you have any sort of system or cue for the things that you want to learn or is the goal just always be learning something? That's a good question. I'm a little bit more of a just in time podcaster. I mean, I know Jill will stack up like seven episodes to get them all queued up and then press the button or automate the production. I haven't started writing this coming Sunday show. I don't know what's going to be in it. I've got a couple of ideas. But now I think it's just continuously learning and I think I just love learning tools. I just love learning applications. I love learning what they can do and finding out what they do. The really depressing thing is when you get like halfway through working on a screencast online tutorial and it was like, this app is not going to make it. I can't do it. It's not good enough. And to have to start over when you've got like a week and a half to go, that's brutal. Well, you know. And everybody who's worked for screencast online has hit that wall where you go, uh-oh! This is not going to happen. It's unstable in some way and it's not going to get it through. So yeah, I don't think far enough ahead. I'm pretty much just learning everything as I go. I do have that panic moment when J.F. says, okay, what are you going to do next time? I'm like, oh, I've got to think up something. There definitely is not a Q. Yes? Rachel Smith has a question too. Oh, let's see where... We'll come over to you. We're good with that mic, right? Oh, sorry. That's good. So I think most poscasters know that consistency is key. What do you do when you get behind? And I mean, just a little bit behind on one episode, but kind of that perfectly you're just kind of missing production dates. I have not missed an episode in 18 years. And now, that comes with a caveat is that I have a little help from my friends. There are people in the audience here who have contributed to my show when I'm going to go on vacation or I'm going to go to MacStock and I knew I was going to lose the middle of this week the entire weekend and so that meant I had to get the show out by Wednesday and then this coming weekend was going to be more of a challenge because I don't get back into the office until Tuesday is I ask for people to make contributions to the show. So I definitely have help. Then what do you suggest to say your top three suggestions to keep your podcast, not necessarily your podcast, but anyone's podcast consistent? Have an obsessive personality that likes a streak. So if you're good at it with your Apple Watch, like once you've got an exercise streak going, you don't want to break it. If you can't get obsessed by that, I don't know that there's any hope for you. And now at this point, the whole audience is invested. Guys, we've got to keep the streak alive. Come on, give me some content. Everybody's like, okay, let's get the content in there because we don't want to break this streak. We don't want to be the ones to let it die. So that's probably the, I don't know how to make you an obsessive, you know, keeper of schedules, but I've just always been that way. I'm not, once I start doing something, I'm going to a hairdresser. I've been going over 25 years. I don't even like her. But I've been going for 25 years. What am I going to do? Stop? I mean, find a new one. I have the same mechanic for like 30, 40 years. I only had one mechanic until he actually passed away. And that's the only reason I bought a Tesla instead of a Honda. It was because I couldn't, I'd lost my mechanic. So yeah, no, be obsessive. That's my recommendation. Dave says have a production partner, but you have to have a production partner who is also committed to that. A lot of times partnerships, they don't work because you're dragging the other person along. I actually wasn't even talking about the two of you. I remember when Katie Sparks and David Floyd said they were going to do Mac Power users together, and I said, what did I say? Katie Sparks and David Floyd. So on that retention thing, George, anyway, when they said they wanted to do Mac Power users together, I just said no, don't do it. Because you're depending on another person. I never want to be dependent on somebody else to do it. But I got lucky with Bart. Bart is rock solid. Bart never misses. So, you know, you got to have a commitment to another person. Yeah, there are people, and Jill actually talks about that on her fabulous podcast, Start with Small Steps, is that if she commits to somebody else, like if she commits to a trainer, she'll work out. But without the trainer, she won't. So she has trouble committing to herself, but she's good at committing to somebody else. So if you are that kind of person, yeah, that would actually be a good way to go. Good shot, Dave. Is that because you're not good at this and you need people to help? Okay, that's good. Rachel, and then Jill coming out. Okay, Rachel. Alright, I have always been willing to teach, even when you don't know it, because I feel like a lot of people would not teach in this room. I can venture to guess. A lot of people in this room would not want to teach unless they've mastered it. So have you always been going to teach something and figure it out on the fly, or was there a point in which that changed for you and you were going to do that? So I think I would answer that question a little bit sideways is that a lot of people in my career tried to get me to care about something. You need to learn this and care about this. And I didn't. I worked in a systems engineering or a software engineering organization that wanted me to care about the interactive development environment they were working on and I didn't care. I do now, but I didn't then. And so learning that was not something I wanted to do. I have to care to learn it and be an independent podcaster. I get to pick. Nobody gets to tell me, but I have people all the time telling me, you should teach this. Screencast online is a good example. People will say recommend tools and it's like, I don't do online financial planning. I'm not going to do a financial app because I don't care. If I cared, I would take it on as a challenge. That's probably the delineation. I don't learn something from scratch like you said, like you described, unless I care. Because I want to learn it. Alright, Jill. I'm not that obsessive person, so I have to find ways of getting around it in part of the discussion. Because if I recorded my Thursday and edit it on Friday, that means I have to read the book on Monday and have my show notes ready on Tuesday. So I back everything up and so I use scheduling. So it can help me because I am not that obsessive person. And then you're right. I also know that when people depend on me it motivates me. And when I first started seeing a trainer, she says I will know when you don't exercise. And she said never tell me if that's true or not. She will take me exercise forever. You have to be willing to follow your own schedule, I guess. And I'm sure there's people who can manage to not do that. Knowing the live audience is coming on Sunday night, that is another thing that really helps. If I'm going to miss that, I mean I had to tell them I'm not going to be there this week. I'm really sorry, but we're going to skip over a week. I do the show early most of the time, every once in a while, a couple of days late, but I always keep like a mental balance of I'm not overly late, I haven't actually lapped myself and missed an episode or anything like that. But having that live audience there really helps me do the show. And you might think it sounds really bad to hear somebody read their blog post, but there's two things. I write the way I talk. So my blog posts are in my voice, so it comes out pretty naturally. But when I'm talking to an audience, I'm going like this and I'm telling stories. I'm waving my arms around in front of a microphone. And it doesn't matter, but the live audience is there. And like I said, John's paying no attention whatsoever. And it doesn't matter because I feel like somebody's out there listening. When I did it originally for a long, long time, more than a decade, I was just sitting by myself in front of a microphone and I'd sit there like this. And it's gotten a lot better, I think, since the live audience. It helps. Anything else? I'm probably out of time. Oh, 10.02. I'm out of time. Thank you very much.