 Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NoCillicast podcast, hosted at podfeat.com, a technology podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, December 31st, 2023, and this is show number 973. Yes, it's the last show of 2023, which I'm guessing most of you will hear in 2024. I'm here all by my lonesome tonight without the live audience, but, you know, we must soldier on. Before we kick into the show, I wanted to let the live audience know that we will not have a live show on Sunday, January 7th, because Steve and I will be at CES in Las Vegas. I was kind of hand wavy about this at the end of last week's show, because I hadn't yet looked at the calendar to see where I'd be. I'm sorry about that, and I will miss you. You know I miss you guys. In fact, right now, recording by myself is so lonely, but we'll be back with Tales of Adventure and lots of great interviews the following week. Two weeks ago, Barbu Schatz and I recorded a Programming by Stealth episode covering more queries using the JQ language on our JSON files. We spent so much time working through the challenges from the previous installment that we only made it halfway through his tutorial show notes. So this week we're back with the second half of that episode, Programming by Stealth 158b. But before we got to start learning, I alerted the audience to a significant enhancement to the material we create for this show, and it's going to be interesting for the NoCillicast as well as Chitchat across the pond. I use a service called Afonic to do a lot of things with the audio file when we're done recording, including leveling the audio, adding metadata to it, and converting it to an MP3 and then FTP'ing it up to the server for the listeners to download. Afonic has recently added AI-generated transcripts, which we've had for a while and I've told you about, with Programming by Stealth and with the other shows. The NoCillicast has chapter marks that you can use to jump to content in the audio file, but Chitchat across the pond has never had that. Afonic now adds auto-generated chapters based on the content in the audio file. These chapter marks are in the transcript as well, which allows you to jump to the text of where we cover a specific topic. Not only that, these auto-generated chapters are in the audio file, so in your Podcatcher you can now jump to different sections instead of having to scroll through to find something Bart explained or we talked about in another episode of Chitchat Across the Pond. The chapter marks are not perfect and we have no intention of editing them, but it should give you an easier way to find what you want to re-listen to or re-read. While Bart has spectacular tutorial show notes and there are sometimes notes for Chitchat Across the Pond episodes, the transcript gives you the full flavor of the conversation we have, especially while Bart is teaching me. A perfect example is how we worked through the challenges from the previous week and that was very, very brief in the show notes, but in conversation it was actually quite long, so you might get a lot of value out of going and re-reading the section in the transcripts. Now, it was interesting when George from Afonic first created this method of having these auto-generated chapters, it actually overwrote the chapters in the Nocillicast last week. I don't know if anybody noticed that, but for a brief period it was incorrectly encoded with the wrong chapter marks. But I talked to George and I told him what happened and he said, oh man, that's not supposed to happen. He fixed Afonic and he re-ran it and I was able to fix it in the show, I think. But anyway, whether you got it right or not back then, going forward they will be perfect. Okay, now back to this week's show in Chitchat Across the Pond with Bart Bouchotte. In this week's episode, Bart explains two powerful commands for searching JSON files with JQ. He uses the contains and inside functions. In this context, he goes through testing for containment with strings, arrays, and dictionaries, then he tells us about default containment. Next, he explains how the inside function does essentially the opposite of testing for containment. Finally, he shows us how to use regular expressions with the test function to get as granular as we like with our JQ filters. You can, of course, always find Bart's fabulous tutorial show notes over at pbs.bartafisher.net and you can read the transcript at podfee.com or at pbs.bartafisher.net. I've been talking a lot lately about different methods of running optical character recognition, or OCR, on PDFs using only free open-source tools after George from Tulsa taught us about OCR, my PDF. All of the methods I've described work, but you know, to be honest, they're pretty high on the nerd scale. Instead of having to run a shell script or buy and configure keyboard maestro, what if you could just right click on a file and choose quick action to OCR all your files for free? Wouldn't that be the best possible solution? As you might expect, I want to tell you the story of how I finally made this super simple quick action using shortcuts on macOS. But if you want to just get to the shortcut and not follow along with my adventure, this time I'm actually going to give you the instructions up front. After you download the shortcut from the link in the show notes, read the instructions in the shortcut, or you're going to be very sorry and sad when it doesn't work. The instructions tell you how to download two things using terminal, but after that it should be clean sailing. Okay, I know you've gone over and you've downloaded the shortcut and you've double clicked in it and didn't do anything, because you're not going to read the instructions that I told you to in the shortcut. Here are the first two required steps. If you don't already have it, install homebrew. All you do is go to brew.sh, you copy the command they tell you to copy, and there's even a little copy button for you. Open terminal, paste, and hit enter. Ignore all the glop that flies by on your screen. The second step is to install OCR My PDF. In terminal, type brew install OCR My PDF. That's it. Ignore the even more voluminous pile of glop that will fly by on your screen unless you see some errors. Now once you've got that done, when you try to run the quick action from the shortcut, you may get a notification saying that it didn't work because you haven't enabled running scripts and shortcuts. Simply open shortcut settings and on the advanced tab check the box that says allow running scripts. Now you might wonder why am I doing this a third time, but you may remember at the end of the last story where David Roth was finally able to run the keyboard maestro macro to OCR his files and I then asked him, is there anything else you'd like? That's when he said, I don't normally run keyboard maestro. Could I do it in a more native way where I didn't have to run keyboard maestro? Well that's when I decided to try to do it with a quick action, which is what Mike Price said I should do way back at the beginning. As I go through my story of discovery, I'm going to actually explain two paths I went down, both of which create a quick action where you could just right click on a file, but the shortcut method is actually the easiest method I think for the normal user. For my first path to create a quick action, I use the application Automator. While Automator isn't the shiny new kid on the block for automation, it can still get the job done. I've mentioned before that Apple have been terrible about changing the names of things and not doing a thorough job of it so you end up with half old names and half new names. That becomes very obvious in working with Automator to create quick actions. The inconsistencies can get very confusing. When you launch Automator, you'll see a set of eight different file types to choose from, including workflow and quick action. You want to choose quick action because the resulting file will automatically be saved into the correct location to be opened as a quick action, so that's handy. But I mentioned workflow because when you save your quick action, the file type will be getthis.workflow. To access quick actions, you right click on a file and finder and you choose quick actions. But in the not so distant past, you used to right click and choose services. Guess where quick actions are stored? They're stored in a folder called services in your home library. Seriously, Apple, could you just pick one name and just stick with it or at least change it everywhere when you do this? All right, I'm going to stop whining about that. With quick action chosen as the document type in Automator, we can drag in what are called actions from the center column and build up a little workflow. The main basis for a quick action will still be the little bash shell script that I wrote. You'll remember that the basis for all of the methods I've worked on so far to create an OCR of a PDF is the shell script that runs the open source library, OCR my PDF that we learned about thanks to George from Tulsa. I dragged in a run shell script action to my workflow in Automator and I pasted in my shell script. The shell script will try to run OCR my PDF. So just like the previous solutions that we talked about in the other episodes, we need to tell Automator the path to find this homebrew library and all of its dependencies. On my Mac, homebrew installs in the directory slash opt slash homebrew slash bin. So I hard coded the path to the command OCR my PDF with that path. I thought it was very clever until I stumbled across a tiny tidbit of important information. Evidently the folks at homebrew made a decision to have homebrew install libraries in a different location on Apple Silicon Macs than on Intel Macs. On Intel Macs it installs the libraries in slash user slash local slash bin. Well I had a choice at this point. I knew how to get it working for Apple Silicon Macs so I could abandon all of my Intel owning friends and not let them play along with OCRing their PDFs for free with a quick action or I could try to figure out how to run it. Maybe an if-then statement in my shell script that checked which type of machine was running the code and to use the appropriate path to the homebrew libraries for Apple Silicon versus Intel. I quickly found several solutions on Stack Overflow for how to query the system to find out which processor was inside the Mac running the shell script. Kloss Melbourne was even kind enough to put in the put the command inside an if statement so it was all written for me. I gotta tell you I love the internet and especially the open source community. The terminal command to determine your processor is pretty easy and kind of cool. It's fun to play with. It's simply uname-p. If you're on an Apple Silicon Mac that command will return arm and if you're on an Intel Mac it'll return something a little more specific such as i386. I created an if statement using Kloss's beautiful example that checks to see if the command returns arm and if it does it sets the variable homebrew path to slash op slash homebrew slash bin for Apple Silicon Macs. Otherwise no matter what else spits out from that command uname-p it sets the variable homebrew path to slash user slash local slash bin. At the end of my script where I actually run OCR my pdf I can slap that variable name I created homebrew path on the front of the end of the command and no matter what kind of Mac you run on this should work. This would be a much cleaner way to run my keyboard maestro macro too so I probably should go back and fix that. We'll see if I do. So I said it should work and it did for some Intel Macs and all Apple Silicon Macs that I had people use to test. However when Dorothy tried to run it on a 2015 Intel Mac running Big Sur which is no longer supported the OCR my pdf library simply wouldn't install. The error was pretty curious. Remember I said that installing the library OCR my pdf would install lots of dependencies? One of them was downloaded with a mismatch of the SHA256 encryption. I think I understand what this means it could mean with if it's not matched that something has gone wrong like it could be that the older library required for the older Macs had some bad stuff injected into it or maybe it's been moved or the name has been changed but we really don't know what's wrong with it so we really couldn't have a path forward to make this work for Dorothy's older Mac. I also tested it on my 2015 Macbook Pro Adorable which is an Intel what is it it's some really awful little processor and I got the same error. Now it's not the age of the Mac that makes it not work because Stephen Goetz has a Mac mini that's 2015 but it is supported up to I think it was Monterey and it does work but going back to the Macbook Adorable and Dorothy's 2015 iMac the homebrew installer sent this clarifying message. It said warning you are using Mac OS 11 We and Apple do not provide support for this old version it is expected behavior that some formulae will fail to build in this old version. It is expected behavior that homebrew will be buggy and slow. Do not create any issues about this on homebrew's GitHub repositories. Do not create any issues even if you think this message is unrelated. Any opened issues will be immediately closed without response. Do not ask for help from homebrew or its maintainers on social media. You may ask for help in homebrew's discussions but are unlikely to receive a response. Try to figure out the problem yourself and submit a fix as a poll request. We will review it but we may or may not accept it. Now here's a fun little tidbit. After this happened Dorothy and I chatted quite a bit about what some solutions would be for her to get a new Mac and she sent me a photo of her new Mac mini just the other day. Now I did ask Ed to buy us and as I mentioned Stephen Goetz to try installing on the more recent Intel Macs running fully supported OSs Monterey and the installation of OCR MyPDF worked just fine. This was great news. I now had a script that ran successfully on both Intel and Apple Silicon as long as the operating system was fully supported. Now I like to document my programs and I mentioned you that in Keyboard Maestro there's an action you can drag in called Comet and it lets you add documentation. What I really like is you can even color code the actions so I've got the requirements being that you've got to do some of these things like installing OCR MyPDF so I made the comment section red so people would be sure to notice the importance. Sadly Automator doesn't have any actions designed for commenting your work. I went on the hunt for how people put comments into Automator because I figured they must and I found all sorts of recommendations. Sounds funny but most people recommended using shell script actions but making every line of the shell script a commented outline of code. Talk about a clumsy workaround. I went down a slightly different path but it's pretty close to just as silly. I used the action set spotlight comments for finder items. That gives you a free form text field so you don't have to sit there putting little double slashes or hashes or anything to make commented outlines so in that free form text field you can put in your comments. It works but this also does what it says on the tin. It puts these comments you've written from Automator into the spotlight comments for the input file. I didn't want the input file to be changed at all so I came up with a hacky way around the problem. I noticed that this action had a little checkbox to allow you to append your text to existing comments and that gave me a workaround idea. First I wrote out my requirements and my setup instructions in one set spotlight comments for finder items action but then I followed it with another set light spotlight comments but I put no text at all in it. By unchecking the append existing comments checkbox I knew it would erase what the first action wrote. I felt rather clever coming up with that idea. Now technically I am touching that input file and maybe you don't want that because now the modified date has changed but it was a workaround I say. There's really not that much else to my Automator workflow quick action other than setting a few things at the very top of the Automator workflow. They're not critical to be set this way but I set the workflow to receive current the current PDF file in finder.app. I gave it a little image icon and I set it to pink. I'm not sure why that's an option because everything is pretty much in gray scale in macOS these days so the pink is kind of a lie but it made me happy for a minute. The last thing I added was a sound to be played when the quick action completes. When I didn't have any success finding a play sound action in Automator I turned to the Google's as one does. Imagine my delight when the very first hit I got on my query was to BartB.ie and a post he wrote on August 30th 2014 entitled play a sound in Automator. I distinctly remember him writing this because he'd been teaching me something in Automator in boy it must have been taming the terminal back then and I wanted a sound to notify the user when it was done so he wrote this blog post after he figured it out. The basic trick of it is you tell Automator to get specified finder item and drag in one of the built-in system sounds like glass.aiff that's the sound things usually make when they're finished. Once Automator has the sound you want to hear you run a tiny bash shell script that I'm not going to read out loud here because it's just going to sound like gibberish but you can see it in the show notes. I saved my quick action and now when I right click on a PDF in the finder and I go to quick actions I can see my OCR my PDF quick action. It's a lot of quick actions here but you follow what I mean. Anyway my quick action turns for a bit and then a new file appears with dash OCR appended to it to identify the new searchable and accessible PDF. The only thing left was to find some guinea pigs to test my shiny new quick action. David Roth was the one who asked for an easier way so he was giddy with excitement when all he had to do was right click on a PDF and choose OCR my PDF from the quick actions menu and the magic happened. You know his happiness is what I live for. Now if you'd like to use the quick actions built by Automator here's the steps you have to follow and it's going to be a little more complex than what you're going to hear when we talk about the shortcut version. First of all you have to install homebrew as I described earlier you have to install OCR my PDF those are going to be the requirements for any of these paths. Next you have to download and unzip the workflow that I've put in the show notes and you have to put it in your user library services folder. I'd also open it in Automator to make sure it's legit and of course if you open it in Automator you can see the instructions that I've given uninstalling homebrew and OCR my PDF. Next go to system settings privacy and security full disk access and make sure that Automator shows full disk access toggled on. Now when I looked for it I didn't see Automator under full disk access so use the plus button to add it if it's not there and then toggle it on. Next select a PDF and finder right click select quick actions and then select OCR my PDF. You may not see OCR my PDF in your quick actions if you don't select customize from the quick actions menu and you'll be able to add it so that it shows up in the menu it's kind of cool because you can turn these quick actions on and off their visibility I should say so that's kind of a neat feature. You will also get a pop-up when you run this saying that Python 3.12 would like to access files in your desktop folder evidently Python gets installed and is part of this process but I'm not entirely sure why it surfaces now but if you want to proceed you're going to need to click OK. I've mentioned several times that quick actions are available by right clicking on a file but there's another way to execute a quick action. If you happen to like the column view and finder and you should like that view because it is the best view when you select a file you can see a preview of the file and below that you'll see some tools one of them is a quick action button and if you don't have other quick actions that have to do with PDFs and finder you should see OCR My PDF as a simple button this saves you from all that tedium of right clicking after my success using Automator I sent my fabulous new quick action to Ed to buy us to show off after he played with it he created a shortcut instead to run the OCR My PDF command ah dang now but I was ready to declare victory but now I had to learn how to do with a shortcut too well I'm compelled to thank him for sending it to me and coming up with a better name than mine to be honest his script was a single line hardcoded to his machine it didn't have the elegance of my solution but it did give me a kind of a framework for how to write a generic shortcut for you though this was crucial because I find shortcuts baffling and I've literally never gotten any of them to work on my Mac the first step of Ed's shortcut was to tell it to receive the file well that seems like a reasonable place to start the action he used said receive PDFs and apps input from share sheet comma quick actions all right I searched the action list for receive to find the one that Ed had used guess what not one single action in the entire list of shortcut actions has the word receive in it this is what I really hate about shortcuts after a lot of time searching the net messing around shortcuts I had an idea since the second action will be to run shell script maybe the script itself triggers the creation of the receive action so I was able to find a shell script action and when I dragged it in it informed me that I had an enable scripting actions in preferences not settings if I wanted to actually add or even run a script I mentioned this when I described how to run the shortcut at the beginning but this is where you may need to know about it if you have to write your own now I mentioned that it says preferences but when you open it it is of course called settings thanks apple all right once I had allowed scripts in shortcuts the run shell script block changed magically to create a little hello world script among a few other drop downs one was for input with the selection helpfully set as input as soon as I changed the input drop down to shortcut input an action was inserted before my run shell script called receive while I was pleased I'd figured it out that was awfully unintuitive the rest of the receive action includes changing what to receive where the input should be coming from and what to do if there's no input now that I had the receive action I needed to narrow down the types of files it would accept by default it had 19 different file types with selected checkboxes I hit the select all button hoping it would change to a deselect all button which it did and that allowed me to just select pdfs as the input type input from was the next field to change I wasn't sure what it meant until I selected it and then I learned it was how to allow you to run the shortcut this opened the details tab with the info pane on the right hand side there are a lot of good options here and I saw no reason not to give you as many as seemed useful I checked pin in menu bar show and share sheet and use this quick action both from finder and from the services menu the share sheet sounded fun because think about it right at the point when you've opened a pdf and you realize it's not searchable you could go to share and choose the shortcut and create your new ocr version of the pdf having never left the file having in the menu bar sounded like fun too well I'm going to spoil your joy here while the share sheet option appears to run the shortcut up to an including playing the sound to tell you that it's done doesn't actually create a new file that's been ocr'd the menu bar option is even worse with the pdf selected in finder using the menu bar method to get to the shortcut causes it to fail asking you to select a pdf like it's lost the focus somehow for now I've disabled it for both the menu bar and the share sheet but if anyone knows the solution to get it working I'll fix it and put those options back the last piece of the receive action gives you the option to choose what to do if there's no input I chose stop and respond and set the response to please select a pdf you would like to ocr remember I just said that using the menu bar ask it to select a pdf that's where that question comes from all right now I can finally work on the script part of the shortcut after pasting in my script I set the shell drop down to bash I changed the pass input drop down to as arguments this was critical so that my file name that came in from the receive action would actually be available to the script for manipulation and running the ocr my pdf command against it I've gone into a little great level of detail as I always do so let's describe succinctly the simple steps I followed I dragged in a run shell script option and I ensured scripting was enabled in shortcuts next I changed the input to shortcut input in the run shell script action I changed the auto created receive input actions to accept the file types desired and I wrote the response if no file was supplied I changed the shell script this is getting hard to say I changed the shell script drop downs to correspond to the shell I was using and how to handle inputs at this point my shortcut actually worked but of course I didn't stop there remember I stressed earlier the importance of documentation with comments in automator I had to hijack a nonsense action to put in comments but in a sign that shortcuts is in more active development there's actually a comment action you could drag into your shortcut it wouldn't let me change the color the way keyboard maestro does but it's still better than automator even though the shortcut was functioning I still wanted to have that little sound to tell the user that it was finished in automator I had used Bart's instructions to play the sound glass dot aiff from the system library using a tiny bash script I could have done the same thing here but my goal in this exercise was to use as much native functionality of shortcuts as possible so I searched for sound in actions I was rewarded with a play sound action since glass dot aiff is a system sound I expected that I'd be able to simply point the play sound action to that file and finder but play sound didn't have that option my options were select variable clipboard current date device details shortcut input detail let's see shell script results and clear how those are sounds I'll never know it was obvious I would have to work backward again I played around with several of the options like select variable but none created an input action before the play sound action I took a chance and I set the play sound action to shortcut input and then I dragged the glass dot aiff file in from finder and I dragged it before play sound this was the trick to telling play sound how to play the correct audio file now it works perfectly it looks a little bit weird it shows the full path to the file which is system slash library slash sounds but then it says the sound file is called glass dot aiff dot aiff I have no idea why it's just another weirdness in apple land I guess at the end I named the shortcut ocr it which is stealing Ed's name that I like better and then I was able to easily copy an icloud link to share with you the bottom line is that I sincerely hope nobody else thinks up another way I should solve this same problem but don't be surprised if I end up enhancing the bash script to allow you to have as the input image files that could then be converted to ocr pdfs I'd like to thank everyone who helped me test and gave me ideas and boy when I do this I'm always afraid I'm going to forget anyone and if I did it was not intentional I want to thank Ed Tobias, Stephen Getz, Joe from the Northwoods, Matt Clerk or Dorothy and Mike Price for their testing and ideas, George from Tulsa for showing us ocr my pdf in the first place and David Roth who actually needed this done though many of you would think that this was too nerdy I had a lot of fun learning how to write the script how to work with that pesky path thing how to work in keyboard maestro and automator and even how to finally beat shortcuts into submission in the very end well it's that time of the week again it's time for something with barpoosh shots but it's not security bits and it's not programming by stealth how you doing today Bart? I'm going to ignore the pain in my leg and think from my waist up I'm great wonderful oh no no no biking is hard well anyway um you're here to tell us a story of um I guess it's a cautionary tale would you put it that way? That sounds fair yes um so I think we've titled that the world's most expensive sour raisins it will have a little subtitle to give a bit more meat to it but basically you and I talk a lot about security and one of the things I tell you is that everyone falls for things it doesn't matter how much you know you will eventually fall for them and one of the things we've mentioned a few times is something called dark patterns and this is like the you know studying the dark arts in Hogwarts of a part of computer science I absolutely adore called human computer interaction HCI it was one of my favorite courses of my degree because like learning how to make computers not confused the bejeeba set of people is really hard like making good interfaces is hard why why am i a mac lover it's because apple are good at HCI and if you understand how to make computers easy for people you can take that knowledge and twist it and you can design interfaces that are really good at tricking people so you take everything you learn those skills for evil using those skills for evil yeah and so we call a good idea a design pattern so you use like ideally speaking you use existing design patterns because then you don't confuse people because it works like everything else works that's a design pattern with the name like the back arrow and an iphone like the back arrow and an iphone is always in the upper left exactly exactly they're design patterns and that we tend to have clickable things be raised not lowered lowered ten the design pattern for lord is you have done this already the design pattern for you can push this as i am sticking up oh yeah graphically making it look like it sticks up that is a design pattern yeah yeah yeah yeah so you know and the name we've given the evil twin is dark pattern and they change all the time of course but their aim is to use science to engineer things so that humans are likely to do what you want which is probably not in their interest in fact by definition it's not in their interest that's what makes it dark if you're trying to you know trying to help if you're trying to help the user it's a pattern if you're trying to defraud the user it's it's a dark pattern and so i know about this i studied it i love it it's one of my favorite parts of computer science so you would imagine that i am immune to such things no i am not because these are designed to trick humans and i am a human so you and so is everyone so the best we can do is stack the odds in our favor by keeping ourselves aware of these things but we're all going to mess up sooner or later and when it happens rather than hiding away in shame i prefer to just say okay teachable moment i'm going to take it on the chin and i'm going to share because that makes the probability of others falling for it a little bit lower so basically i fell for a dark pattern it cost me quite a lot of money and it has something to do with sour raisins something else feels sour as well that is not the raisins um so i guess it's a slight diversion one of the one of the biggest things i've learned in my health journey over the last decade or so is it's not about not eating things it's about portion size and actually this is a design pattern as well so if you want to do something it needs to be the default it needs to be the easiest possible thing to do the right thing so i buy snacks in one person one portion packages i don't buy a pack of biscuits i buy a bag of bags of little mini biscuits meant for babies well for kids all right i buy fun size treat size but they come in a portion which means i really know when you're done i know when i'm done i have i take a bag a little bag out of the big bag and then i have my portion and i just eat it and i do it without thinking and i go oh it's empty but at least there's no more there if there were more there i would not think right so i remember when they came up with personal sized uh microwave popcorn i always thought the original bags were that was personal size because that's how much i'm that's how much popcorn i eat well if you're gonna spread on something there's a lot worse than popcorn there's a lot worse than popcorn um i think my worst ever was watching a movie in the dark dangerous with a bucket of ice cream that was definitely not meant for one person i'm just engrossing the movie engrossing the movie and i heard thunk oh no the bottom of the the bottom of the big giant pot of ice cream it's like i've just eaten a liter of ice cream oh my god have you ever heard of uh father rodrick he's a podcaster but around since very early days he's a catholic priest and he's he does wonderful podcasting stuff but he was talking one time about how he said you should never watch the harry potter movies and i thought oh man he's gonna be all luxury and all this and he says because last night i watched a marathon of them and i ate an entire family size bag of dorito chips oh that's a lot of that's a lot of corn yeah anyway it happens all of us okay so good anyway portion size okay and one of my absolute favorite afternoon snacks is sour may our sun made sour raisins from your part of the world i've never even heard of them well i think they're from georgia like say your part in the biggest sense sure your continent um so they're they're they're they're dried raisins which have been dried they've been infused with a syrup of a flavor and then dried and so they you can have them in watermelon flavor raisins or strawberry flavored raisins they're my two favorites oh and they come in a little bag and they're 60 calories free little bag and they're a perfect little portion for just snacking away at mid afternoon when you're a little bit peckish and so i have gotten into the habit of having a little bag of sun made sour raisins every day and i could buy them in our supermarkets and it was great and then a few about two or three months ago they started disappearing they went from one supermarket and then another supermarket and then they're only in one supermarket so i bought loads of them because they keep their raisins they're in a little plastic bag uh but then they just completely disappeared and they never came back and my supply started to run out and i sort of assumed they'll come back into stock but they never came back and i started getting more and more desperate and i said well i'll buy it online this keeps i can buy it in bulk i'll buy a box of boxes of little bags fine you know buy it in bulk that way the shipping won't be twice the price of the raisins and i googled and i searched everywhere that's reputable that i've bought stuff before and nobody sold sun made sour raisins they were all out of stock out of stock out of stock but every search engine kept sending me to one site i don't know what it was but something about the site didn't look right to me and i didn't buy it and i didn't buy it and i didn't buy it and once a week every week i had a little reminder of my phone see if you can find some sour raisins and i never found them and so eventually in desperation i went oh i guess i guess this has to be the site and they did have a .ie domain name which initially made me think oh they're irish and then i noticed they have a .be and a .co.uk and a .com and a .de and a .f or they basically bought one everywhere so they're pretending to be everywhere and i later found out i know exactly where they are they're in the united arab emirates well outside the european union and all of my consumer rights uh oh yeah that's not a good start first first little takeaway here but anyway i i you know they had what i wanted they even had a choice of flavors i you know they i could buy a box of 10 boxes and it wasn't too expensive okay fine i was squeezing this in on my lunch time walk i was on my phone small little screen bit of a rush had a meeting straight after lunch i was a bit cranky fine bye check out okay take okay uh oh shipping two buttons giant big button with the word free actually that was the second button the first button was a giant big button with a very big number in it in euro and it was twice the price of the raisins oh wow and next to it was a giant big button labeled free with no price or anything on it and some small text underneath that was very small and a little bit gray and i was in a rush and i went free okay free click and i think i thought it was slower or something i presume i thought or maybe i didn't think anything at all either way i clicked on the giant big free button didn't read the small print and my raisins arrived i paid with apple pay and as soon as i saw the apple pay i went oh that's grand then no need to worry about anything here i've paid with apple pay this will be fine they can't steal my credit card and sell it to other people which is true but that doesn't mean i didn't have a problem so i gave them my payment details and i face i did to prove it really was me so i got my raisins they took about a week to arrive and i was initially quite happy because they're very tasty and they were perfect and i still have quite a few left because i bought a lot of them and then 30 days after i placed the order i noticed well 30 days and six hours i noticed sitting in my inbox with an email saying uh if you don't cancel your free trial within 24 hours of receiving this email we will bill you for the first year at 189 euro 189 euro for what for one shipment for a pro membership no for free shipping for a year basically the equivalent of amazon prime from this other site that is most certainly not amazon they call it a pro membership that's why i got the free shipping because i took a one month trial on their pro membership that's what the small print said that i didn't read no and it comes in increments not of a month but of a year so you're kidding yeah so i immediately opened up my banking app because it was 24 hours and six more hours it was about 30 hours and i opened up my banking app and lo and behold pending transactions there it was 189 euro so it was like oh but it's pending i'll ring my bank i will tell them it is fraud and the lady in the bank said we're actually pending just means that it's been approved and it just hasn't finished processing so it means it's work in progress not that it's not approved so actually the transaction has happened it just hasn't you know the money hasn't gone all the way from you to them but it has happened so we actually can't stop it i said but it's fraud and she went well i can see here that you bought something from them 30 days ago um i did you give them your details like well yeah and since you used apple pay and you used the biometric yeah so you gave this company your details and you bought a product and they shipped you the product yeah it's not fraud but i didn't sign up to this well you say you didn't sign up to this but from visa's point of view and from all of the credit card companies because they all follow the same rules it's those rules those rules that give you that security standard everyone has to abide by those same rules but basically from the point of view of the rules if i gave my details and the vendor sent me the product then if i demand my money back i'm defrauding the vendor then i am actually the source of the fraud oh wow whereas if someone had stolen my card and used it and it wasn't me then it will be an instant refund because that's credit card fraud but if i give them the details it's completely different so then the only option is a you can contest the charge it's a term and to contest the charge you need to provide proof that they didn't do what they said they would do and that you have raised your concerns with them and that they have refused to help you and if you have those two pieces of evidence then visa or mastercard or whoever will consider reversing the charge so what are the two things you have to have proof that they did something that was not it that they said they would do x but they did y and that you have raised it with them and they have refused to refund you and have you raised it with them well yes but i would at that stage i started to go back to their website and take a close look at all that small print and stuff and as soon as i opened up a chat with their support people i explained my situation and within far too little time for any human to type it i got back five screenshots annotated and a giant big paragraph of pre-written text they obviously give to everyone because it's a dark pattern lots of people fall for dark patterns basically explaining how well actually if you'd looked here under that big button in the small print that says that you're agreeing to a one month trial it will automatically build unless you cancel within 30 days and the period is one year and so this you know they had it banged to rights technically speaking had i read all the small print it absolutely said that they would do what they did so there was no point in my even wasting my time going back to visa because i failed on both counts so anyway what's so sad about this is that your spidey sense was correct it was i know now i actually had i had three chances not to fall for it so the first chance was the small print under the big free button so they offered me exactly what i wanted and there was small print that i was too busy to read and i was on a cramped phone and it was awkward well if i had read it would have said exactly what they were going to do so chance number one when there's small print read it don't assume because you're up with paying it that you're somehow magically safe you're absolutely positively not you are safe from them losing your card through incompetence or selling your card through crime but if you give them your details to enter a transaction with them that is not credit card fraud so and they didn't lie and they didn't lie so read the small print is the first lesson a few days after i bought the raisins and after they sent me the notification saying they had shipped them i got another email from them which i assumed was the typical post-purchase spam you get from every company you are silly enough to give your money to my inbox is full of stuff from amazon who think well you bought one thing so you'd like the exact same thing again or from 12 south because i love their docs and stuff and i bought a few but they seem to think i want to buy stuff off them every day and so knows because i have a bunch of their speakers they think i need more and tefika who make the lovely watch bands i adore they just keep sending me emails too and unfortunately they've convinced me to buy more watch bands so they're going to keep sending me those forever that kind of worked actually oops you could unsubscribe from those those do stop yeah from legit companies yeah so i got one from this crowd who sold me the raisins and i i just filed it away under oh yeah well now i'm going to be spelling by you forever because by spidey since it got off i was expecting these people to to to hang on to me like a bad smell so you know yeah whatever what did it actually say what it actually said was welcome to a pro membership club you get the benefit of free shipping small print again small print in the bottom of the email if you did not unsubscribe by blad date we will bill you 189 euro was there it was well hidden again you might as well buy a lot more raisins from them oh well that's the thing well yes because i then contacted their support and i went i would like a refund now technically speaking so that she gave me back the the whole big click you know buying my okay fine so okay so technically speaking i entered into this contract it has now been one day i would like to cancel the contract and like a refund pro rata i would like to have 364 days worth of a refund please and i can cancel your contract immediately you will never be billed again your membership will expire in 364 days so can i get a refund for the outstanding no but i can cancel your membership immediately for you and you won't be billed again that is good because you don't have to remember in 364 days to cancel it that's that's a way like the apple subscriptions do it right if you cancel now you sign up for a service on a a free trial or something like that the first thing you do is cancel it yes you'll get the full the free trial length but that way you have to remember when to when to cancel it yeah so that is that is definitely something you should do so yeah so no refund so yeah you're right i'm going to order a lot a lot of raisins because i get free shipping for the year free no not as much as you hate to give the money you might as well at this point right i yeah yes well yeah right that they have it so they already have my money i need to get some stuff out of them and actually they sell basically anything american you can't buy abroad so pardon me thinking i may want twinkies i don't think i do but maybe i do maybe they're delicious i don't know but what i'm worried about is these are going to leave a sour taste in your mouth oh god yeah get what i did do you hear what i did actually rhesus rhesus do really good stuff well i might buy a lot of rhesus chocolate doesn't always travel well peanuts though peanuts but yeah well i mean rhesus is mostly peanut right i mean what makes rhesus amazing is the peanut the chocolate is american chocolate so it's pretty ho-hum but the peanut on the inside is ah anyway so quite a few lessons to be learned out of all of this um so first off don't buy things when you're in a rush because everything i needed to know is in front of my nose i didn't see it because i was in a rush probably don't buy things on screens that are too small to use comfortably a lot of people do that i ended up sort of kind of doing it again when trying to get a higher car because i was again i i needed to get it done i didn't get deflated or anything but it took me five or six goes to make the transaction work because there was so much scrolling involved they kept on missing the checkbox that says i agree to your terms and service because i couldn't see it it was lost in the scroll and it did that thing where when you click a button it autoscrolls and so i didn't know whether i was up or down i didn't know where i didn't know where i was anymore i think i'm scrolling up and down um and then i actually crashed and ended up having to do it on my computer later anyway and ended up buying it from a different company that for 50 euro less never think about it so on the whole that actually worked out quite well so let's assess number two lesson number three if there is small print thou shalt read it if if it is there and they went to the bother of making it not big they're hiding something read it that's an interesting thought yeah the other thing is if you get a follow-up email don't just assume it's spam at least give it a cursory read probably more than a cursory read if it contains small print see your both statement about small print yeah maybe the first follow-up email yeah or whether it says the word welcome it's probably a dangerous one actually you should probably look at anything that says welcome welcome to one uh understand that apple pay does protect you from a specific set of really bad things that you really do want protection from but it is not a magic wand if you enter into an apple pay transaction it is no different to any other banking transaction you are giving them your details it's not fraud you may dispute the claim if they end up if you can prove they'll like you but it's not credit card fraud because they didn't steal your credit card number you gave it to them so that is i i now understand way better it's still good and i'm still always going to use apple pay when i can but it's not quite as magical as i sort of hoped it was and in case anyone's confused i was confused when barton i first talked about this this is uh everything he's talking about is apple pay not the apple card i don't think apple card would have saved you either but i don't think so because at the end of the day they're backed by a bank you're all part of this wishing the payment something or the payment card association or something PCI is the standard that they've invented for security and those same people set all the rules and they all they're all the same like whether it's a master card or a visa or whatever it is all the same um and the last thing is just because a website has your country's top level domain now this isn't a big deal for you americans because the whole world uses dot com but a lot of us who don't live in america are used to having a warm fuzzy feeling when we see our own country in the top level domain because we think oh we're buying local yeah look a little deeper because this company had a dot ie why aren't irish they weren't even vaguely irish they weren't even european and in terms of your consumer rights i mean ireland simply implements EU law so there was no difference between between an irish company and a french company english company is now different because they've started off from the EU and they don't like regulation anymore so i don't have the same rights to buy from the UK as i used to which is important for me to remember but you know we europeans are used to seeing a dot f or a dot be or a dot de and feeling all warm and fuzzy yeah it doesn't really matter where the domain is that's not where your legal rights come from your legal rights come from the country that the corporation is registered in if it had been registered in ireland what do you what process would you follow what would be different so in the european union there are laws that outlaw dark patterns it would not be an open and shut case it would not be a slam dunk but i could make the argument that this was an example of and therefore it breached this law and i don't know if i'd win but there will be a ground to have a go yeah yeah well i'm sure sorry this happened to you bart uh i i definitely sympathize the the only dark pattern i know i consistently fall for is there's been a couple of websites out there in the past that help you find um find applications to run like i want to say alternative to might be one of them where like people are looking for an alternative to an application on the mac but it but they're running on windows so you can go there and you tell it i want windows and i want it to be free what are my alternatives that i can choose from and there's almost always i i hate it if i i hope i'm not accusing the wrong company but it's one of these and it has a big button that says go in blue after you do the search and that go is to an ad it's definitely not to the thing that you're trying to do i think it was download.com used to have giant big green buttons in their ads that's it it's download.com yeah yeah and you went to a place called download.com and there's a giant big green button to download on you that's not it that's the ad that that's what they're tricking you yeah and it works every time yeah oh yeah for so many times yeah yeah well i appreciate you uh you making a lesson for the rest of us to pay better attention and and uh maybe you kept one or two of us from falling for it but i think it is a good lesson to say that you probably will fall for something and don't shame yourself tell other people what happened and hopefully it won't happen to them. Exactly yeah you know pay it forward and if everyone else says it then you might get the advice you need from someone else. There you go all right Bart I appreciate you coming on and telling us this story i don't i don't know that you have an official tagline to say goodbye with but goodbye happy purchasing well that's going to wind us up for this week and for this year did you know you can email me at alison at podfeed.com anytime you like if you have a question or a suggestion just send it on over you can follow me on mastodon at podfeed.caos.social remember everything good starts with podfeed.com if you want to 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 you can support the show at podfeed.com slash patreon or the one time donation at podfeed.com slash paypal and if you want to join in the fun of the live show you're gonna have to wait until january 14th when you get head on over to podfeed.com slash live on sunday nights at 5 p.m pacific time join the friendly and enthusiastic nocella castaways thanks for listening and stay subscribed