by Steve McIntyre. Steve is a former DPL project leader and also a developer who is a part of multiple teams in the project, which are key teams, very important teams in our project. So Steve, the stage is yours now. Hey, how is everybody this morning? So yes, it's awesome to be here in Prizren again. I've trailed this session several times this week, as have other people. I hope it's not a disappointment. There we go. So I'm going to say my usual spiel, this is a boff. I like running boffs because it means I don't have to do all the talking.  I don't have enough material to keep us busy for the full time. I'm going to talk or lay out what I see as the problems we have, options for what we might do to fix them, and then I want you lot to help me work out the right answer. I have a gobby doc, as always. Please, if there are any great insights during the session, if somebody could make sure those are jotted down, that will be great. I will do my usual and promise to, at some point after the conference, I will collect everything together and send out a summary email to various mailing lists. It's something I find very useful and important. So what is the problem with firmware? Well, background. Most hardware needs firmware to work. Hardware typically is very, very difficult to drive direct in software. It may only provide very basic functionality. If you want to have a common class of device, you typically, you will have some firmware on it which will expose the features. It might aggregate some. It might do all kinds of other things. It will be there to provide basic functionality. Some devices have firmware built in and you don't even know about it. Your keyboard, your mouse, disk drives, they all have software built in that we call firmware because then it's not software. You typically don't know about it. You don't have to know about it, but it's there. Some of the firmware is loaded at runtime. So this tends to be for the more complicated devices. Wi-Fi is absolutely the most common. It's common in graphics, some wired network cards. Audio is becoming more common. It could be disk controllers. It could be all sorts. The vast majority of this firmware is non-free. We don't like non-free things. That is a problem for Debian. Hopefully most of the people in this room recognise the thing about priorities. Our priorities are users and free software. That's not ordered. We don't pretend that one is more important than the other. We care about both deeply. We don't want to be shipping non-free firmware. However, our users need firmware to make their hardware devices work. I see that as an issue. So for a long time we've been shipping a non-free section alongside the main Debian archive. We have been shipping as part or to go for installation, you either have a separate firmware bundle that you can have on a USB stick or something alongside your installation media, or we have what we've been calling for many years unofficial installer and live images. That includes firmware. I say unofficial. They are in a separate path on our CD image server. We call them unofficial because we would love people not to have to use them, but they're prepared by the same team. They're prepared using the same software. They're released on the same day. They're signed with the same key. It's a very vague meaning of unofficial here. Jonathan. The unofficial part comes from it doesn't meet our standards. That's why it's unofficial. It doesn't matter who prepared it. It doesn't meet the Debian standards. Therefore, it's not an official Debian image. Sure. I was a person who added the unofficial piece here because I didn't want them to be in the same place, but it's not great. So this is all a bit of a mess really and it's only getting worse. As a quick guide of the people in the room here, how many of you have a laptop that you can use without loading non-free firmware? One, two. Well, I have lots of, all my old laptops become servers at homes and they don't need any firmware to function like that. So as a laptop I need firmware. Well, exactly. So this is the issue. And of course, again, if you go back and think about it, there is non-free firmware on your system. It's whether or not you have to load it at runtime. It's perfectly possible or it has been until very recently to install at least a basic system with wired ethernet on a lot of common laptops, but that's getting harder and harder. If you want to get wireless, you're basically out of luck. There are a few free chipsets, but they're becoming less and less common in modern machines. This is becoming more of a problem that for a typical end user, the official images that we produce and distribute are not actually useful. I don't think that's great. One of the things that we have, I started a discussion about this. I blogged about all of this about what I'd like to do. Ansgar has been awesome and has already done some work for me. For me, for the project, but for me obviously, because he loves me. If I do that, we actually have, right now, supported as part of DAC, we have a firmware non-free section. For those people who haven't seen why that matters, at the moment, if you install firmware as part of your installation, so if you add the non-free section to get at firmware, what you end up with, of course, is that firmware. You may also end up for the rest of time on your machine installing some non-free software without realising it. That may not seem important to you. It does seem important to me. We as a free software project do not want to be encouraging people to install non-free. We would like to be showcasing the best that the free software world has and that's not it. By adding a new section for non-free firmware only, this is a step on the road to making that better. There is no magic with the new component. What people will need to do, and I've checked, no one's done it yet, is you will need to add non-free firmware slash section in your control file for the binary packages. I appreciate that that doesn't actually apply to probably anyone who's here who's been around. I guess not. Probably nobody here actually maintains a package that needs to worry about this. Gunna does, of course. We did briefly consider should there be extra magic somewhere on FTP master to do filtering here, and then Ansgar, I did have a good point of, we don't like special cases. Let's not do a special case. Let's rely on maintainers. There's only a handful of packages that need this anyway. We will need to add support elsewhere. We will need to add it in, or anything that knows about the layout of a Debian archive will need to understand that there is a new section, so a new component. It shouldn't take too long, I hope, to it would. So, what else do we want? So, I want, so, Helmut. Brief question, will there be a transition period for users like being able to pull firmware from plain non-free for a while as well as pulling it from non-free firmware? Like duplicating the packages and two distributions. Is that planned? That was a question. It has been suggested we should do that. I personally don't like the idea too much, but I don't feel too strongly. That's something that we will need to work out before we release Bokwyrm. Gynna. Given it's a few packages that are affected, well, my plan on this was to replace the package for a transition one for a dependency on a package on this different suit. Of course, users will still have to add the non-free firmware component instead of just non-free, but they will be, like, I mean, I haven't really implemented anything yet, but they will be at least prompted that their firmware now depends on something that's not there. And, well, we will see how to communicate these two users. Yeah. Cool. Thank you. So, now we have step one. One... Sorry, I have a quick question. Because non-free packages are not automatically built by the buildee, so I want to know whether non-free firmware will be built on buildee. It's slightly more complicated than that. Some non-free packages are auto built, but we have to set things up so that the buildees will build a certain subset. We absolutely expect that the non-free firmware packages will be auto built for the same reasons. Sorry? Yes, they get built. We expect that they are architectural. We don't actually build any software for most of these. They are binary blobs that we are given by upstream, so long as we can distribute them. So, I have enumerated the possible ways forward. I actually had five options, but since I first suggested this, we now have the non-free firmware section, so I have amalgamated two of them. There's no point arguing on that one anymore. As I said, we currently have two different sets of installation and live images. I can see that we can carry on like that. We could make it easier to find the non-free images. That is something that we haven't been good at. That started off as a deliberate policy. We shouldn't be doing that anymore because we just make it harder for our users. So, we could basically make no major technical change here, or we could stop providing non-free images altogether and go full-on, Debian is free software, free software is all we do. That's an option. It's not one I prefer because, again, that doesn't help our users who need this. We could make the non-free images official and at that point actually push them alongside our normal existing images that don't include firmware. We would need to name them appropriately, label them, give users good guidance as to which one they might need, or do we just declare that actually firmware is a necessary evil, it's part of what we have to do, and do we just stick it into our official images and just move to having one set? Or is it something else that I haven't thought of?  Jonathan. Do you think it's a problem that what we call firmware isn't firmware anymore, if you consider the AMD graphics firmware or Nvidia firmware, it's a whole operating system complete with not only firmware but drivers and memory management and file systems and almost anything you'd find in a complete modern operating system these days. Do you still consider that just firmware and that it's just an issue of where it runs because obviously it's got a lot more complicated than that? Well, of course it has, I mean, but then again, firmware has always been a potentially large blob of all kinds of things that we just didn't know what was in there. We now may have a better idea of what might be in there because people have reverse engineered bits or people have told us what's in it. I don't think that necessarily that makes that much of a difference. Whether it was a tiny 8K blob that you might upload onto your network card to let it do pixie or whether or not it is a 100 megabyte lump of shaders and God knows what that you put onto your graphics card, it is stuff that we have no control over. The hardware vendor provides it, it is necessary in their eyes to make the hardware work and it doesn't work fully without it. I appreciate it, it's a difficult line to draw. The typical line that most people would draw is does this stuff run on your main CPU or is it running in some other capacity? Is it running on a separate controller? Is it running entirely outside of the operating systems control? I think the difference comes in where many people still consider it as just like a few kilobytes of initialisation string and it's just an issue of where it gets loaded but it's clearly not that simple anymore and I think people should just keep that in mind too in making decisions. Sure, it's a thing. Christof, regarding the choices you are listening there, I think I would kind of prefer option number four just include stuff but the installer can still ask the question if people want to use it so they still have to make their choice just not at download time where it's way too early and that would even work in the case where they can try without or maybe the installer can just try without and if it doesn't work go back and try with. Thank you for asking exactly the question I was going to move to next. So these are broad descriptions and that is a key point here. One of the things that we will do if we embed firmware more firmly sorry bad pun is that we will make DI more explicit about what it's using firmware for. We will were possible ask the user do you want to use this firmware or not and list the devices that we think need the firmware explain and maybe give links to wiki pages or whatever with more information about them so people can read about afterwards. We would love to encourage people to write free firmware replacements for these things because of course we want more free software that's what we do. It gets slightly more complicated. If you remember I mentioned earlier that one of the latest non free firmware blobs that we have to worry about is audio on the most recent couple of generations of Intel hardware. That is an absolute nightmare for logistical reasons. Imagine you're a blind person and you're trying to drive the installer through audio through the text of speech that we have. If you don't load that firmware immediately on first boot you get no audio. It's difficult to ask people do you want to load the audio firmware without loading the audio firmware for example and I know that's a contrived example but it's one we already have. The other one that is coming is I expect we will have to load graphics firmware on devices that need it soon. If you want to drive for example a high DPI display it's this is not going away if anything it's only going to become more of a problem. We do want to at least however as I said make it clear to the user which firmware that we have detected and we have started to use so they can learn more about it. I was thinking and I'm sorry for bringing this into a probably corner cases that are not that common but I think we should be explicit and draw line towards developers on the use of firmware itself because for example we may find abandoned games from the 8 bit consoles and they are technically firmware that doesn't run on your main processor but you can install an arcade machine emulator and then download from Debian hundreds of old games which are not free software and would be run via an emulator so I mean I think that's a case we we would not like to distribute that. So my argument is that that's not firmware it is that is software in it that is designed to run on a on a machine even if it's not the machine you're currently on. What we're talking about here and I want to be focused on this is we're looking at just the bits of non-free firmware that enable the hardware you have in front of you. Anything else I explicitly want to ignore as a distraction. Thank you for bringing it up it helps. Yeah in the last mailing list discussion Gunnar there was a discussion of what would that firmware component contain and the initial suggestion was all the packages that start with firmware dash and packages that install in libfirmware so that seems like a very reasonable first step to start off with I think. Yeah I mean we don't necessarily have everything nailed down on this but definitely let's not get let that get in the way of useful progress. I really like the idea to include the non-free firmware on the official images and then add a question to the installer do you want and having the default yeah use it or not but since we discuss a lot of corner cases and technical things we should still keep a focus on the end user and I would like to have this question do you want to run the installer without non-free firmware that the end user does not see this question at all because so we have this possibility to enter the expert mode and I'm pretty sure if you ask the end user do you want to run the installer without non-free firmware and still have the information your wi-fi card or your audio may not be working then we will get the end user get scary because the end user then has to decide and he cannot decide because he does not know do I need the firmware or not so it's in my opinion it would be very good to have the default yes run the installer with non-free firmware and don't ask the end user about this. Yeah thank you that's a very fair point so where I want to go with this and you know and I've made no no secret of this is I want the project as a whole to make this decision I am going to take this to a GR apologies I should have had this GR out already life got in the way sorry that was me but I mean I'm the person leading the images team I could have just done this but I don't think that's right because this is a real change to some of our core of our core principles so I want all of Debian all of the Debian developers to make this decision and then equally it's also we have a shared responsibility for it I've already had I won't call it abuse I've had some strong feedback from people who don't like the idea of us including firmware at all and I get that totally you know we are a free software group I've been living and breathing free software for you know nearly 30 years now this really matters to me too it's but however it all comes back to the our users and free software and that's a you know that's a really difficult thing to split. Christof you had a point yeah I totally don't like the idea of not scaring the users but I think that this is the only place or the single place where we have a chance to tell people that non-free software or non-free firmware is going to be run on the systems maybe it's just a matter of wording that message in a way that it's not scary the installer might just display a single pop-up your system is running this graphics card you will need this firmware we will tell you where you can read after it afterwards later so sure or we could maybe we could maybe have us have a screen that says I have automatically installed this firmware um okay and an option to say tell me more yeah I think it's just a matter of making it not not scary there because this is the only chance we have to talk to people later it's Thomas wants to say something you're all right but my impression is yeah we care a lot about non-free firmware but the end user doesn't care at all if he uses non-free firmware or not he just wants to run Debian on his hardware so to be fair some of our of our users do care some of them don't yeah but if we have the focus on the end users most of them will not care about the technical details and maybe not about freedom or whatever they want to run linux but I think it's a very good idea to to keep an eye on the wording and not to scurry the end user so we do need to make sure that we spend time on the messaging and how we label images we should make it clear so people can find afterwards after they've installed exactly which non-free things we have included again I mean there's a yet another example here I'll pick on Gunna again the Raspberry Pi images you know for the older versions of the hardware that rely on non-free firmware to boot so of course we can't ask before we before we run it do you want non-free firmware we can't even start an installer without it but we should definitely make it clear in the description of the image what has been included and once something has been installed it should be easy to find that information too so we can help people to learn about this so currently we say like our official images are without firmware if you happen to need it you can like install it but you're kind of on your own and this comes with a lack of support kind of and if we go include firmware and images it kind of comes with an implicit promise on supporting that I figure it kind of changes the acuation over there so my question here is how many regressions do we experience in firmware that actually affect users and how do we do about that supporting because we can't just fix it is there plans for like letting them downgrade easily or do you have any ideas on the support side of that picture sure so Enrico just behind you I think has an answer that I don't know if it's an answer but it kind of ties together with giving feedback and the feedback can include how much Debian can support it so it even I mean I personally would hate having to click enter once more to acknowledge a pop-up about non-free firmware that always shows up in 99% of the hardware I'll end up touching but there could be a differently coloured background or something where if it's green Debian will fully support running your machine and if it's orange then Debian is one of the components running in your machine and can only do what it can by itself and the other bits in the bus network are outside Debian's control so if you want something completely supported you want a thing that is green and you work to get the Debian thing green and maybe yes so going back to Helmut's question of course there is an option for people to downgrade these packages just like any other package in Debian but it's not something we can really support well or widely I mean there are known regressions that happen as you upgrade firmware if you upgrade your Intel microcode to fit to take on the workarounds for spectre and meltdown for example your performance can go through the floor however it's a security fix which do you want and yeah and okay that's again it's not a contrived example it's one that does affect people every day um but it's a it's a choice and it's something you might there's not there's very little we can do about it um what we can do is point people at the support pages for that for those firmware blobs I hope the packages already have the information that included as part of the packaging anyway if we don't then that's an obvious improvement um one of the things that we want to do and again there was some discussion on the mailing list about do we want to include the non-free firmware component if you've installed things and absolutely we must do because of course once you've installed one of these blobs you want to get security updates for it just like any other package that you have um so the default should be we will always pull in newer versions yes so looks like we've got several reasons for not doing this questioning and display in the debian installer actually the installer could get useless without the firmware most people won't even see the installer because they will get their machines pre-installed even if they did see this in the installer they will probably forget it like in a week so maybe it's better to put this question into the message of the day or into the gnome software banner or somewhere where it is constantly visible and it even could provide some information about the security or supportability status of your system yep definitely we could add this for example add a message about this into the initial you know the first user startup with gnome we could put it we could drop something onto the first user's desktop or whatever with a weed me you know here is more information about your system there's a whole bunch of things we can do here we'll be looking for help to do whatever we think is best uh i just got the idea i think at the very end of the debian installer we say the installer has finished now we reboot the computer and maybe we could put a message there we installed your computer using non-free firmware just as an information and maybe some more words that would be better than asking in the very beginning yeah possibly yeah i second that on having the post factum saying okay we've installed it with the non-free firmware and then write the information about this in something like libfirm where debian installer text file with everything links and everything then you can have it as a reference later and you can also have it in the standard file file format on the pre-installed systems as well so you can always say yeah just look at this file it will tell you what non-free firmware you're running now that's it oh yeah cool thanks so i'm going to ask to do something whiskey and could i ask for a quick show of hands in the room and i know this is not representative which of you here would like option one the most that's conclusive who would like option two best equally zero who would like option three in a make the non-free images official we have a yeah a reasonable number of hands how about option four i've just pulled it all in okay option five should we do something else now jonathan what else should we do you know you're not going to get away without that i've mentioned this on a list i've mentioned it in my talk last month in germany on my dpl talk i just like the idea of having another iso available that has only the non-free firmware installed and on the download page we make it clear that this is the debian image that meets all our all our criteria for what a free operating system should look like and the second image is one that you probably want to use if you have a laptop or a cell phone or a whatever and then a user can easily make a decision on what iso they want without it being too complicated for them and without too many hacks in installers or boot process or things like that i think that's an easy fix it doesn't need too many work before bookworm is released i think it's easily implementable i think it fixes the vast majority of our problems that we have without having to compromise any of our values so i think that's the best of these five options in my opinion but we'll fight it out in the grs so it's fine yes in in the in the least aggressive of ways obviously mike yes i believe graham ask isn't that option number three no the the images with the non-free images wouldn't be marked as official they'd be next to the official images and you can choose which one you want to download no the first one is official the second one is one with some crap on it that you can download if you want but if we are advertising them directly side by side i think the unofficial tag is is kind of a joke then maybe we should move away from that term because it's completely misleading to our users we should make it a the debian and debian plus non-free firmware or something more explicit because if everyone has a different definition of what official means then it means nothing yeah agreed so joey hi um i just wanted to mention you mentioned it very briefly but one example of these firmware packages we're talking about is the intel microcode and the amd64 microcode um and that's and that's security updates for the processors um that's used by by almost every system out there even even servers and things so it's it's not like we have some things that's just for laptops that if you're not a laptop then you wouldn't use this at all so yes thank you and that is a really important one it's also one that actually straddles the divide um because that is um firmware that that is code that runs directly on your main cpu by definition however it is outside of the control of the os you know it is part of the setup does the kernel provide an interface for querying all loaded firmware i'm sorry can you repeat that slightly louder there's a fair bit of noise sorry does the kernel provide an interface for querying all loaded firmware now or will it do so Ben is right behind you and can answer that no but it does keep a list internally it's just not uh it's not just not visible probably so there was one other suggestion which i i don't like and i'll admit i haven't given much airtime to here i wish people would stop making so much noise during a talk um which is to ship free images but also have an extra piece of software that we can get everybody to run afterwards which could tweak and add the firmware as well i think that's a terrible idea because it's a it just it's another step that makes it harder for a non-technical user to even start using debian so i i'm not going to nix it i'm not going to veto it i just don't really don't like the idea i'm sure somebody might speak up for it but i can't see it getting much traction yeah so please no please no extra steps but um what i think we are lacking is some tool that is actually able to tell the user what's going on on their system i have absolutely no idea which of my systems are using which firmware and just having some utility that would print out a list would actually be very very helpful um even just for this discussion or whatever yeah agreed thank you we're kind of running out of time so last couple of couple of points uh just on the point on the same point uh if we are being hopeful and we're hoping that they're going to be free software firmware in the future the same tool could allow you to change it so that that kind of thinking forward as well would be nice definitely um of course that's an important feature here we want we don't just want to be documenting the bad things we want to be helping to to encourage people to develop and use better things since we're designing a new tool i'll add the use case of checking um if the firmware that is loaded matches what is on disk or if i need to somehow reboot the machine to is to to run the new firmware of something like when you install a new kernel but until you reboot you don't get the security fixes i don't know if the fir we the firmware we have the same problem that's a good point yes it's we should we should be able to do the same thing yeah Jeremy i think you'll have to be the last one hi um i'm a bit concerned about having a scary warning about non fully firmware installed in the system um because when people get scary warnings then they want to try to fix the problem and i'm not so sure that there's a problem that needs to be fixed it reminds me a bit of of some lintian warnings that may be maybe badly designed and so some maintainers um not fully understanding the situation try to fix all of those and end up causing more problems to their system yes totally that's a good point we're not trying to scare people we're trying to inform people the wording and the style of what of how we describe things really matters here um oh go on last one right at the back why does everybody sit right at the back is that the cool kids on the bus again sorry about that uh one experience i had been in lots of groups of newcomers to debon mostly notebooks nowadays don't have internet parts so people only rely on wifi anyway they go to download the image for installation they always go to the net install and that's a problem because if you don't include firmware and you do a net install you can connect to internet and then they get only a shell and it they get a lot of problems so maybe we can say there oh if you don't have an internet part please download the image with uh interface with GNOME with KDE so that could be an alternative maybe sure thank you so i declare we are about done thank you for coming along this these have all been useful points i know there's going to be a lot more there will be a gr about this apologies we know grs are not something everybody likes but this is genuinely a technical gr that match it that that i think the project needs to make a proper decision about what we do going forwards um let's have a useful discussion and a useful outcome like i say you can probably tell where my feelings lie but i want to go with what the project wants regardless i will implement or implement in my pieces of the solution whatever the project decides i can promise that today um thank you all i hope you have enjoyed the rest of the day


अक्स्टाए अग्स्टाए, नदार कोग्ट्मागः, इसकिवाख्र आपसे लितप आताई, एक leadership अताई क्षuttaाई अख्ट्माग अख्ट्मागः इक्याग zast région.章िस्चट्टाः, weakest कर perfection ॐ, अर्वा क्रणित walked पät trabaj उर्वा नजट्टारत क्योगल ख microbौराा कास्ट इंक्र्ट करने का बाय्स बनते थे अक्सिटन्स आल्द फोट लीटिंग कासिटन्स अफ देत फिर जुनार्टिः स्वेट साफमायद का अक्सिटन्स अफ खास्ट का ही जाफर का बाय्स नहीं है बलके देत का भी बाय्स बन रहे थे after heart attack disease, cancer and stroke heart attack, you know that it can happen at any time and cancer related issues can be created and stroke can be created this ranking is based on all types of accidents including motor vehicles, accidents, fire, fall, neutral, etc although deaths from natural disaster tends to be more news worthy than work place death their actual impact is substantially less in this slide if you see the point is very important is that the death in the organizations the issues that are being created in the organizations the incidents that are being created in the organizations how and why they are suffering we have to see that point the natural disaster in the country earthquake or any other kind of stroke we don't have to cover that we have to talk about organizational impact in which accidents are being caused we take an example natural disasters in the United States cause fewer than 100 deaths per year on average work place accidents on the other hand cause more than 10,000 deaths every year in the United States of America if we see the comparison between natural disasters or the organizational developed disasters or any accidents which occur in organizations so it is 10,000 and the natural disasters are 100 how can we compare? ratio is 1 into 100 if there is death of one person in the organizations for some reason so 100 employees are getting killed because of not managing the organizations properly so from here also we get the justification of this topic that if the organizations control the environment then things can be in a better way and the mortality rate of the employees can be reduced the important point is this is the overall cost of accidents in the United States is approximately $150 billion this means that approximately annually we have to bear the cost of accidents these costs include such factors as lost wages medical expenses insurance administration paralated losses motor vehicle property damage and indirect cost these are the costs which 150 billion organizations are suffering in the USA now the United States volume is more GDP growth is more infrastructure is better as compared to under-developed countries now this is because of the literature of the United States of America so they have given an example you can see this from the Pakistani under-developed countries now the important thing is that there are many reasons for the cost of accidents in the organizations or the health and safety issues of the employees are major causes in the organizations work health balance which is called life work health balance work life balance in the organizations your employees will be more healthy if your employees will be more healthy then automatically they will perform in a better way in your organization as compared to other organizations now we see the cost of accidents here according to their particular amount motor vehicle accidents 72 dollars this particular figure is given in particular billion workplace accidents 48 home accidents 18 public accidents 12 this figure is given this data is from 2010 because in our last slides we have seen the last figure was touched by 2010 if you see the latest data of 2021 then this figure may be changed statistically accidental deaths in the united states of america accidental deaths in the united states of america from the variety of causes which includes motor vehicle accidents fall poisoning drowning piloted injuries here we have written different examples now the purpose of all the examples is that because of these things in the united states of america there are many types of deaths but from all these we have to see what has happened in some organizations as written here transport accidents if there is a business transport of an organization and it becomes an accident then this is a failure of the organization why the safety measure is not adopted why the mechanism is not developed in the organizations because of which the accident can be saved organizations say that when you are traveling then you should travel at a safe distance whether you have maintained the distance and then there are reports we will discuss the reports of accidents but the most important thing is that because of the injuries and accidents the health of the employees gets lost which is irrecoverable which is unbearable now this loss is unbearable then there is no change in it in the organizations these things are lightly in a decent way by the legislation accidental death in the united states this is a pictorial effect like death per year 49% because of motor vehicles because of the falls because of the poisoning if you see this this is a understandable form motor vehicle accidents 47,000 per year 13,000 per year fall poisoning 7,000 per year similarly these figures are given here you can see all of them manually now here the figures I have mentioned to you students their purpose primarily was basically the organizations if an organization is making a poison then it is dealing with the poison and because of that poison if a person dies then who is answerable that organization is answerable why that organization didn't sell the poison to the right person or the right organization who is developing a product related to the poison or why they didn't sell it why they sold the person or the female who is misusing it to ensure this is the responsibility of the organization and above that why the government didn't legislate that why the poison is being sold freely so these were our main points I have explained one of them similarly the falling the drowning like in foreign countries if you go somewhere on the beach there are people who save life who save you from the drowning who save you from the drowning you have insured that if a child or an adult or an old age sex goes there then how to save his life so with these kind of steps you can save people's life with the help of different sources accidents versus other causes of death United States of America the data shared with you in this the accidents 27,500 deaths have occurred because of accidents and this figure if you look ahead 20,300 motor vehicle 16,500 and this is happening fire related issues which are 900 now if we see this overall then it is that in the United States of America when an incident happens then a proper enquiry report with the help of the enquiry report it is seen how to ensure that next time the activities don't occur so that the causes of death are done with a perfect angle in every way stoppage is applied on it and it is ensured that the activity in the organization doesn't occur again


Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chit Chat Across the Pond. This is episode number 776 for November 2nd, 2023, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. Back after a long hiatus that I can't even explain why it happened, this week our guest is one of my favorite recurring guests, Adam Anks, publisher of the long running internet-based email newsletter, Tidbits, you might've heard of it. It's great to have you back on the show, Adam.  So by definition, you are across my pond. Perfect. We've also been known to accept alcoholic drinks as ponds. The definition is fairly liberal. Well, a few weeks ago, you published an article in Tidbits entitled, iPhone Recommendations for Senior Citizens. Now, my audience knows I'm an advocate for accessibility of technology in all forms, and they also know that I bristle at the suggestion that people past a certain age aren't good at technology. If you throw in gender along with that, such as a phrase I hear all too often, it's so easy. Your mother could do it. The top of my head pretty much blows off. So I got ready to read your article with a desire to learn any tips you could provide to making the iPhone more accessible to seniors and ready to jump down your throat if you applied that elderly people cannot be technically competent. And I have to say, I was delighted to find that you pushed none of my hot buttons and you gave terrific advice. So can we start with how you explained that this wasn't downplaying the competence of folks over a certain age, like maybe me, I'm a Medicare now for crying out loud? Yeah, yeah. So it's terrible because you're absolutely right that there's no requirement that people over some age somehow like cease to be able to like know how to use a mouse or whatnot. But simultaneously, we have to acknowledge that there are physical and cognitive declines that come with age for, well, pretty much everyone sooner or later. And so it really comes down to individual situations. And so one of the things I was, I tried really, really hard to do because even in the discussions that had sort of triggered this article, people were doing that, you know, well, I'm 75 and I have no trouble, blah, blah, blah, blah.  Or tremors, right? I mean, like arthritis in the hands. It can make using mice and tucky boards and stuff difficult.  Well, yeah, you can do that but you may need to do it a little bit more. And again, not to say that someone who's young might not need to do that too, but it does happen. And so it really just came down to, you know, be sensitive about the fact that there's no guarantees, no nothing that's like gonna be true of everybody but it is worth talking to the person and seeing what they're having trouble with and honestly comparing it with what you know about them. I mean, like, I mean, this was really aimed at people who are helping friends or family. And so, because I mean, let's face it, probably the people who are reading tidbits fall into that category. Well, frankly, they're reflirting tidbits. They're on the older end of the spectrum because they've been doing it for 33 years, just like us. But when you're helping someone, you tend to know what their strength and weaknesses are. You know, that I've been helping my parents and my in-laws for years now with various tech things.  But on the other hand, there's a few things I know. Yeah, I don't expect them to be able to do X, Y, or Z because it's just not something they're gonna be good at. One of the things that I was thinking about when you were saying these are probabilities that these declines will happen to you if you're lucky enough to live long enough. And one of my blind friends says, he says, think of yourself as currently abled. Yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. No, actually my wife works as an editor in the, oh my God, I think it's the whole name. The Yang Tan Institute on Disability in the Workplace at Cornell. And so basically it's a group of researchers and outreach people and they, you know, they do tons and tons of stuff about disability in the workplace. And that's one of the things that they're very big on that the disability is really, really widespread. And the one that, there's only one really interesting disability that isn't considered one, which is vision. So you can wear glasses and you get perfect vision. That's not considered a disability.  Oh, okay. So you're saying realistically, if you can get perfect vision with glasses, then it's not a disability. Precisely. That's right. One of the things that bothers me is that if you get glasses, nobody looks at you as less. Right.  You know, you're falling apart. And I think we need to get past that. Or like my father-in-law was very resistant to, even using a cane and eventually he wouldn't use a walker. But my mother was like, well, wait a minute, if I get a walker, I can walk faster and more securely and not fall down. Why wouldn't I do that? And if we can get into that mindset, then it's like, maybe she's not disabled because now with a walker, she can walk perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah. So any of that, it is absolutely the case. And as I said, the simple fact of the matter is that some people will be lucky enough that they don't suffer from arthritis or hearing loss or tremors of any sort of that kind of thing. That's absolutely fabulous, but a lot of people do. And so- And if we can learn about how to solve those things and if it ever does happen to us, we're ready to go, but we can help other people. Right. So you had early experience in this area with your grandmother and grandfather, grandpa Bernie and grandma Estelle. Yeah, yeah. They're my grandparents in New York City. And yeah, long, long ago, we gave them an SC-30 and they had a modem and- Oh, actually, did they have a modem? Yeah, they must have had a modem. Boy, that's just gone back a long ways. And the SC-30 was not new. Let me tell you, this was probably back in, no, I don't know, the Performa days or something like that. But yeah, so they were never significant computing people. And but they could do a little, they could do an email and things like that. And that was about it. And then we switched them to one of the gumdrop IMAX when those came out. And that was about the time we got an IMAX from my other grandmother, who lived much more close, and then sort of watched them honestly be able to do less and less.  I mean, she did not have mental issues in the slightest in terms of declines. On the other hand, she was physically a disaster. I mean, she couldn't turn on light switches. So, you know, typing completely was right out. You know, she could use the phone if she had memory buttons to push one button on a phone.  But that's how they'd been driving for years. This was like, that was their relationship. I mean, boy, I don't know that everyone could do that. But that, you know, she'd been telling him how to drive and how to navigate for decades. So, you know, this is how they worked. They were a team. And, you know, eventually when, you know, when he died, she was obviously no way that she could use the computer ever again. So, you know, she didn't. And then my other grandmother, she started to have, you know, started to have dementia. And, you know, it turns out computer use is pretty early on the things to go. You know, that was like she just couldn't figure out how to use the, couldn't remember how to use the computer. This is back in early days of macOS 10. So she could still damage it in ways by moving things around accidentally. And so eventually we just sort of, you know, took it away. Yeah. So again, very sad, but, you know, nowadays, in some ways it's easier because I think iPhones and iPads are more obvious to people who maybe, you know, don't have either the history of just like technology being built into their bones or they, you know, it's more obvious because you're that direct manipulation. I have always said that there's something about the iOS interface that is tapping into our DNA, not learn stuff. And the two examples I'd like to give is hand a very, very small child, like two years old, an iPhone and they'll eventually figure out how to get to photos and start looking at pictures. Likewise, a friend of mine's mother had dementia and they would bring an iPad to her and open up photos and she would look at the photos and zoom in and zoom out and smile and laugh. And it was intuitive to her. She didn't learn it because she couldn't learn anything at that point, but she was very happy with that. And so it's tapped that, you're probably right. It's that direct interface, not the indirect connection that really makes a difference.  How do you get to the home screen? I'm like, these are not intuitive in any way, shape or form. They're completely arbitrary, completely nondiscoverable. There's no way you'd guess and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, some aspects of the touch interface are great, others are truly maddening.  So, you know, someone who's had a touch ID phone for some years, well, the question becomes what happens when they need a new one? What do you get them? Yeah, now, you know, I went back and forth on this particular, we're kind of jumping in the middle of our agenda, but that's okay, we're fine, we're fine. So there's pros and cons to this. So you've got somebody who's used to touch ID and I'm gonna do what I said I hate. I'm gonna generalize and say that as we get older, we become less plastic in our willingness to accept change. I think there's something to that, but I would also suggest that I think society in general is becoming more resistant to change. I've been seeing this in younger people as well, just like don't want to do it, you know, too much is too much going on. So, yes, I think that's not, it's not an unfair characterization of older people, but I think it's also hitting people at a younger age too, yeah. Well, the example I was gonna give was, my brother had a touch ID phone and he needed a new phone, it was very, very old and he was trying to, I was talking to his wife and his daughter and they were saying, no, we've gotta get him a touch ID phone because that's the only thing he's gonna be able to use because he's not very technically savvy. Bro, you got no mental difficulties at all, but just set in his ways, man, doesn't like tech, doesn't want new tech. And I said, the problem is, look at his age, he's too young, he's gonna outlive touch ID phones and he's gonna have to learn someday. Will he be better at learning that later or today? Maybe he's resistant today, but that is not a curve that's gonna get better over time. Precisely.  You know, this one's good for me. Yeah, yeah. And like, yep, that's fair, but wow, if you're 72 or something like that, probably gonna be multiple iPhones in your future. You hope you're gonna outlive that. Yeah, precisely. You started this out by talking about the approach you do when, or you would suggest that we do when talking to somebody about a new phone. What kind of, what is your approach on that? Well, I mean, certainly familiarity is a big one and there's nothing wrong with familiarity. Obviously, given your caveat of the, well, it's gonna happen sooner or later and it's gonna be harder in the future. But the other thing that is worth thinking about is that, I mean, right now, Touch ID phone means an iPhone SE. And, you know, that's basically Apple's smallest phone now. And so one of the other trade-offs that you get that becomes possible when you buy a new phone is you can get a bigger screen. And so simply one of the big advantages is, well, if the screen size or what you can read on the screen is also being an issue, switching to Touch ID or Face ID might be require learning some new stuff. But here's the benefit. Big advantage of that, yeah. Here's the big advantage of that in terms of. I know two women who bought Apple Watch Ultras because they've refused to wear bifocals. Yeah. They're like in their late 40s, early 50s and they don't wanna wear bifocals and they can't see the screen on the smaller watches. And they love it. They're like, look, I don't need glasses. Like, did you see the size of the font on your, you can get a lot more on that screen, but they're perfectly happy. So I should leave alone. Yeah. And people who do that usually have these tiny, tiny wrists and the whole thing's like sticking out on the sides. It's like a ham radio tape to their arm. Yeah. Whatever works, whatever works. So yeah, no, I think that's sort of what's important. And that's kind of why I was emphasizing that, oh wow, it's really important to like talk to the person and see, think about their strengths and weaknesses in terms of like, you know that they're having trouble seeing stuff, then here's one of the reasons why you could encourage them to move up to even one of the big phones, you know, the pluses of the Pro Maxis, you know, that that might be when you, because one of the things Apple does a pretty good job with in accessibility is making, you can make stuff big. Big, and you talking in your article about how to turn on bold text too. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was a big one. For me, honestly, you know, for a long time, I was using wearing contacts and then having to go with reading glasses or computer glasses and distance glasses and sunglasses. And that's why I gave up the contacts because I'd have so many glasses involved. Like I could just wear a pair of glasses. I did the same thing. I did the same thing. I was wearing glasses and contacts and I was like, wait a minute. Why am I doing both again? I did it for years before I made that connection. It took me a long time too. But now I have these, you know, infinitely progressive lenses and blah, blah, blah. It all just works much more easily. But before then, I was really getting into that, you know, I can't read stuff. I was bumping, I was going to the bold text. I was going to bumping up some of the sizes and things like that. And so I get it. Like I know how frustrating it can be when you just can't quite read the damn thing. I have one suggestion. I didn't see in your article, when I started to lose my close vision, I noticed it at work before I noticed it at home. And I realized what was going on. I was using this horrible PC laptop, not horrible being redundant, but it was a terrible HP display and it was super dim. When I came home, I was using an Apple display and at full brightness, the brightness of the screen contracts your pupils. And if you know anything about photography, you know that a smaller aperture gives you a longer depth of field. So more is in focus.  Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but it makes sense. The one thing that I have also run into, which I find fascinating is again, as this happens in middle age for a lot of people, is sensitivity to light either high or low. Right, it can go the other way. That can be a terrible thing. So I like things to be bright. I do not like dimness, whereas my wife's the exact opposite where she does not want stuff super bright. And I'm often coming into the kitchen and turning on a second set of lights because I can't quite see, but she's obviously comfortable that way. And so we're often different in that regard. Josh Senors, who used to work with on tidbits, same thing, he really did not like bright things being super bright. So I guess that's the list of questions, right, is to say. Precisely. Let me turn the brightness up for you and see whether that helps you see better or does it bother you? Right, right. That would be an approach to take. I do find it interesting because Apple keeps pushing how like, we're making this brighter every time. I'm like, well, I'm sure some people appreciate that, but really that's not my issue. What about other things you talked about, arthritis, motion problems? So well, before that, the funniest one that actually that someone, a woman said that her parents had run into as they got barely significantly older was their skin stopped working with touch interfaces. So it's a capacitive touch interface. And like, I can't even quite envision what's involved with that. Maybe sort of a dry certain kind of dryness.  So yeah. I can't pay with Apple pay without licking my finger. So face ID for the win there. Right. Precisely just gets you one less thing you have to touch. And less licking of my screen and stuff. Do not be licking the screen. It's not sanitary. I'm sure. I wash my hands a lot. Well, what was it that, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think, one of the, one of the books they had, they'd sent off the telephone sanitizers. It was a whole class of people. Job that they had. So yeah, so I think the, yeah, arthritis, you know, that's an interesting one because the, again, you never quite know what's involved. And so that's one where I think you'd not just have to ask someone, but you'd have to like watch them and see what they have trouble with. Are they moving? Yeah, precisely. I could see different kinds of keyboards and pointing devices being better or worse, but I can't predict what they'd be, you know, like. Steve's dad has neuropathy, so he can't, he doesn't have a sensation in his fingertips.  So that's out of the picture. But when he's on his Mac, it's really tedious to watch him type and he's a dedicated, dedicated one password user. Just like he's done testimonials for the show. He's 86 now and he's just as happy as he was at 80 with it. But he, we were watching him, we were replacing his Mac and Steve said, you know what, I'm gonna buy you, I'm gonna pay for it. I'm gonna buy you a new keyboard and you bought him a Touch ID keyboard and it took him quite a while to get, understand how to do it. He has to hold one hand with the other hand and lay it down. He is in love with Touch ID because now he doesn't have, we gave him a 75 character password with a goat in the middle of it to make sure it's secure. And now he doesn't have to type it and he is so happy. So that's where maybe somebody with arthritis would actually be better off with Touch ID as long as they don't lick their finger first. Well, and also I would say it is actually worth investigating other keyboards. So I'm a big, big, big clicky keyboard kind of guy. I like my DOS keyboard.  Like I don't, I don't, I get the impression that like man, keyboards have gone seriously niche. You can get them with, you know, 17 different switch types and LEDs under them. And, you know, they can pulse and all that kind of stuff. I don't do any of that stuff. But, but just like that big, old Apple extended keyboard feel might be better for some people than the really low, low travel key is that and are all of Apple's keyboards now. I can actually feel it. Yeah. I did something funny. I installed a menu bar app called Clack. Starts with a K.  And I swear it makes a difference. I use it on my MacBook Air because the keys are a little too mushy for me. I want it to be more clicky. And now I can make it sound clicky. I swear it's easier to type on now. You know, it may be one of those things would be interesting to do some true like human factors research on that sort of stuff, but it's entirely possible that there's just a little bit of an auditory pathway. That there's somebody, two different MacBooks, one with this Clack thing installed, one without same identical keyboard save. We're testing these two different kinds of keyboards. Which one are you more comfortable typing on? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I find tricky with like, taping speed is like, typing speed is all one of those like, oh, type this passage. Oh, I don't know how to do that. Like, that's something from high school. You know, where you would actually type a piece, you know, type something from a one piece paper into a two paper. So like, I compose. Like, I can never tell you how fast I type because it's how fast I'm thinking about what I want to say at that particular moment. So you're like, I'm a fast typist, I think, but I don't really know, you know. So, so yeah. But again, all the variables. So, you know, mice versus trackpads. There's some funky, funky stuff still out there. Trackballs are still available. Not very many, but they still exist. I use this thing called a contour designs roller mouse, which is a bar that goes slides back and forth and rolls. I saw that ages ago. Yeah. It's been around forever.   Use that for the first time. But it works, works fine.  So you're not going off to the side to use something else. That's, that's my thing. It actually like laptops better.   I'm a huge trackpad fan, but it's because I have an external one. So it's more comfortable out than, than kind of trying to bring my fingers in front. But let's, let's go back to focusing on the pun intended on the, on the iPhone. So you give specific, specific instructions on how I like to increase the, the tech size and bold text and you've got great screenshots. Of course, this whole article is linked in the show notes. You, you got into one for, you talked about reduced transparency and increased contrast. Talk, talk a little bit about what those do and why those are important. So increased contrast is, it's again, one of the, one of those things you just sort of have to see to believe.  And this is actually important that this guy who used to write for us a while back, Charles Moorer, he and his wife are, are vision specialists. He was a photographer. She's actually a researcher in vision stuff. And, and so one of the things that he pointed out in some stuff was that the human eye is designed to see contrast. And we actually care about contrast more than detail.  You know, you look at two photos, one with more detail, one with more contrast and you're gonna, you're drawn to the one with more contrast. So for any kind of scenarios where you're like, your vision isn't just not as sharp as it should be, bumping up that contrast to the increased contrast switch can make the whole thing a lot easier to see. Cause Apple likes to feather stuff. Like they like these smooth transitions between, between objects and stuff like that. I just check it on and I like it. See? Yeah. So just anybody who's playing along and not looking at the show notes right this minute, it's settings, accessibility, display and text size.  Increase contrast. I'm sorry, increased contrast. Yeah. And it basically just makes the light gray a little darker gray and the dark gray, a little darker gray and the text a little darker. I might leave that on for a little while and see what I think about that. Yeah. So what is reduced transparency do then? So reduced transparency is another one of these things that Apple likes doing. Or like, oh, we wanna pretend that all these things are like sort of translucent pieces of plastic. And so that when you have one thing over another thing, you can kind of see through it. And that can be a problem again, just it just kind of muddy stuff for some people. And it doesn't really, in my mind, it doesn't really ever improve anything. That I don't believe in the iPhone interface that it's actually helpful to believe that you're on top of something from a functional standpoint. I don't think it's helpful on the Mac either when it comes to how to do it. No, I don't think so. And I turn it off. I actually turn it off all the time because I take screenshots, right? So it's screws with your screenshots because- Oh my gosh, I never thought about that. That's exactly what I need to do. Yeah, because I want my screenshots to be gray in the background or whitish, lightish color anyway. Whereas who knows what it's on top of, the screenshot is on top of, it could be half yellow and half blue. Right, right. Just because that's the window that's behind it. So yeah, reduced transparency, I actually encourage people to turn off, certainly for documentation purposes, but just see what you think because I think the whole thing just looks a little crisper in terms of not having whatever bleeding through. I'm looking for it on the Mac now.  Turn it off right now. Reduce transparency, boom. Well, let me increase contrast while I'm at it. Ooh, that's a little- On the Mac, it's a little OS7-ish. Yeah, yeah, the bar is there. It's a little excessive. The one thing you'll notice immediately reduced transparency is the menu bar stops being, it just gets a gray background. Oh, you know what? I'm not gonna do it because that's gonna ruin all the cool new features in bartender five that let you have these different colored tints of your menu bars. At least until I'm done doing my screen cast about bartender five. Yeah, so in any event, so those are two that I actually, increased contrast depends, reduced transparency, honestly, I think it's worthwhile shutting off for most people. I don't think it adds anything and it just makes the whole interface a little bit, I don't know, coherent in some ways and unpredictable. You know that this is always gonna be this color rather than, well, whatever's behind it's now changing the color. It's not bad enough that they made every window look identical, but then they make it look different just based on what's behind it. So you really can't recognize it. One of my favorite things, oh, go ahead. I was just gonna say that I noticed I'm always amused when I'm seeing someone writing something that has screenshots and the screenshots are like bright pink because I think they just don't know.   That's right. Now I'm wondering if you've been mocking my screenshots all these years. Well, anyway, moving on. In this category, I've talked about this on the show before, but one of my very few changes I make on an Apple TV is in accessibility, display, focus style. You can turn on high contrast and that puts a white box around whatever's been selected. You ever look at the Apple TV and you're like, I don't know which thing I've got selected?  Some of these apps, right. You just can't tell. Like they make it enough bigger, but the Apple TV app in particular is terrible. I'm like, I have no idea. I mean, I'll actually literally move so I can see something change. Absolutely, it puts a white box around it. So accessibility, display, focus style, high contrast. Yeah, and I think one of the lessons of this is that everyone should go into accessibility settings and just play. Turn them on, see what happens, because oh man, some of these are just better. Like we are not recommending this focus style thing on the Apple TV because oh, we're old or we have bad vision or anything like that. It's because it's a bad interface. Yes, yes. I mean, it's as simple as that. They did a bad interface and it is not clear enough to people who are highly technical and completely aware of what's going on. That's a hint, that's a hint that you did it wrong. That's a good idea to do that. On the other hand, make sure you tell them to leave, I don't know, four to five weeks open in your schedule to work your way through all of the accessibility settings. Yeah, right. I know you remember when I did my iOS 11 settings mind map, that was like 80% of my graph was accessibility. It is insane. I thought about doing it again, but I don't have that much time left. I'm 65, I'm not trying to get it done in time. You certainly wouldn't finish it before iOS 19 or 18, whatever the next one. Exactly, and on my post I promised I would never update this, so I gotta stick to that. So let's see, oh, one of the other things that intrigued me that you talked about in the article was rearranging the home screen and making that more simplified. And I had never thought of doing this for somebody. Yeah, so this is again, I think a little bit more of frankly a help for someone who was having some cognitive declines, but maybe not necessarily. So one of the problems you run into an iPhone is that there's just too much. Like there's a lot of stuff there, even if you don't have a ton of apps and let's face it, anyone who's been using the iPhone for a while probably has a fair number of apps even if they didn't really want to. And I do, I'm seeing pushback. People don't want to get another app, you know? I mean, I've kind of, I'm kind of done. I'm like, yeah, I've got so many apps, what's another one? I don't care, you know? I did a keen install on my iPhone this time. Oh. And I've been downloading them when I need them. And I can't really tell the difference. Yeah, the app library was brilliant for just like, yeah, fine, they're over there, whatever. I search for everything anyway. So, yeah, so, think of it as, I think the home screens is dashboards, right?  But there's some things that you use all the time. The top four should be on your dock. iPhone, I guess you can have more, obviously you can have more on the iPad. But that's the point of it. Like it's always there. Those are the most popular, you know, the most common things to use. And you want to make sure- So if you go out with the person uses the most. But if they don't ever use it as a phone because they have a landline, then take the phone out. Take the phone off, precisely. And, you know, but maybe photos or messages, we know whatever it is they use, totally fine. And then sort of the next level down is the first home screen. Because those are the things that you see every time you unlock the phone. And so, that's a fair amount of space. You know, you can definitely put, the things the person probably use it in. For many people, that may be all that you really need. You may not need to get into a second screen. But, you know, if there's those secondary apps that, yeah, oh yeah, I need this every now and then because it's how I access my bank or, you know, I have to use customer support to get to the cable company or something like that. Those kinds of weird little apps that you need every now and then, those are the kinds you could put somewhere else. And it's probably still good having them visible. They don't have to go search for them. I think search is generally not a good thing to rely on when you're helping someone else.  Yeah, because that requires learning that gesture and figuring out where to type and typing and knowing the name. Right, right. And sometimes they change the names too, you know, like every now and then apps. Yes, the one you downloaded is name something else on the app. Right, right, precisely. So I really like the idea of doing that. And then within those spaces, thinking about what organization makes the most sense. And it could be by location. It could be by name. Or, you know, this is one that I, it's a little funny, but my wife thinks this way completely, which is by color. You know, my blue apps are over there. It's a blue app, you know? I'd love to tell the story. My friend, Narajah and I were working on some web development together and we were in different offices and we were constantly on the screen sharing calls. No, we weren't screen sharing. We were just on the phone. And we realized after like a year of working together that he and I think completely differently about finding something on screen. He said to me, he was telling a story about his father and he said, I told him to click on Eagle Mail. And I said, Eagle Mail? What are you talking about? What's Eagle Mail? Look at the, it's not true now, but the Mail icon had an eagle on it for many, many years. I literally never noticed it. And the way I think is in Cartesian coordinates. So when I was talking to him, I would say look in the upper left-hand corner. And when he was talking to me, he'd say look for the blue icon. Neither of us were communicating at all. So we had to go, okay, I need to talk in color. You need to talk in Cartesian coordinates. Yeah.  And, you know, and they're like, I'm just like, I don't see them. I literally don't even see them. I could not tell you what they look like. Without the words. Yeah, like I only need the words. I don't think in pictures at all. And so, you know, so like, again, everyone's different.   Which one of these is male and they say the blue one, then you know they're Tanya. And if they say the one that says male under it, then they know it's you. Precisely, precisely. And, you know, I mean, and that's partly like why I do actually search for some things, because I'm enough of a word person that I think in words and it's not really a big deal for me to type a couple of characters and get the word to come out.  You have no idea what the app is called? Like it's just gone today? Not with apps or things that I'm doing like that. Where I have that, and I'm actually quite put out about this, is playing music on a home pod. I cannot think of artists' names, album names, song names, basically at all. Like I don't, I don't, I can't, there's so many of them that I can't pull them out. And like I don't, I don't, I don't even know like what I want to listen to necessarily. So you have to go with a genre like 80s rock or something instead? Sometimes that, what I'll more do is like they'll be an artist, I'll be playing certain set of artists regularly and I'll default to one of those, because they're the only ones I can remember.  And I needed those kind of memory aids to say, oh yeah, I do want to listen to such and such, who I didn't, like I didn't think I wanted to listen to it, but I, once I see it, I know. Oh yeah, Peter Gabriel will be perfect right now. But like, you know, like I couldn't- Tomorrow Peter Gabriel will come to you. Not in the slightest, not in the slightest. So yeah, so it's, it's really kind of a problem. And of course the problem is, is that the more that I can only think of the certain set that I'm listening to, like, oh man, I'm really bored with these ones, the only ones I listen to. My solution is I put on a podcast, so. So yeah, so it's a perfect, it's a perfect example though of like how different people's brains work or don't work with a retrieving data. Yeah, yeah. So you did, you did some other things on simplifying the home screen. I was really intrigued with being able to create buttons for who somebody wants to call or text. How did, how did you do that? Well, so yeah, this is another one where this goes back to the whole like visual interface, right? That knowing kind of where to find something when it's moved around. So think about messages, you know, if your message is anything like mine, I don't know how many hundreds of conversations are in that list, right? So you only really notice the ones at the top. Right, right. And if I have to go down more than a scroll or stew, like I'm just gonna start typing and like try to find it again. Hope it works. So that's, you know, that works for me, but for someone who has just ended up with these things organically, but they don't really have that spatial sense of how to search this list visually, you, in messages, you can pin certain people or groups. And that's a really nice thing to do. So that, you know, I have Tanya pinned, so she's always in the upper left corner. The only problem with that is, is that you have to make sure you then know to look at your people because they're not in the list. Where's Tom Merritt? Can't find, oh yeah, I pinned him. Now I can't, there he is. Precisely. So, you know, so it can be good. Many people change their profile photo and then you can't find them again. That could be an issue too. I'm, yeah, I'm, yeah, precisely. You never know, like, oh, that's right. But so I think that, you know, again, trying to keep things in predictable places is a big help to some kinds of people. And so, pinning stuff in messages. So I thought, well, that's kind of cool. You can pin stuff in messages. Maybe you can pin stuff in mail too. No, you can't. Or in contacts, or in anything else. Like your favorites, but that's emails from those favorites, not them. Right, it's not, it's not, yeah, precisely. So, I am completely, I'm actually not even a big fan of shortcuts. I don't really like shortcuts. But we've already decided we're gonna do a whole episode on everything we hate about shortcuts, right? Yes. But I was like, this has got to be something shortcuts can do. And, and so, you know, so like, yeah, it turns out it is actually really easy to make a home screen icon that could be just, you could just do one per person if you wanted to get, you know, if you only had three people total or you could do just one for, you know, like make, create mail. And then it pops up a list of the people and you tap the name and then it creates a message to them. The people being the people you write to the most often.  You know, like, there was just, this was not, they weren't doing email per se. This was, you know, writing to this person, to that person and, you know, and that was it. You know, these relatives. So, and you know, they might conceivably receive mail from someone in reply, but that was, they weren't ever going to initiate more mail to that person or that address. So this was just trying to make it very easy to get back to the three, five, eight people that they would ever want to actually initiate mail to. And that screen, that shortcuts thing is in the, in the tidbits article and it's super simple and easily modified by literally you really can figure it out. I don't know. Even if you hate shortcuts. It's not on the Mac, right? This is on the phone. This is on the phone. I might have a chance on the phone. I've never gotten a shortcut to work on the Mac yet. I will admit not me either. We will not go into the particular problems we had, but yeah, you're telling me all this, you can't get the shortcut. I'm like, oh, well, don't use it on the Mac. That never works. Yeah, he was like, I don't understand. I've got this thing working. Then I said, it was a Mac. He goes, oh, never mind. So now we do highly recommend downloading executable code from the internet, from any source you find and installing it on your devices. No, but we know Adam and we know it's gonna be great. I'm definitely gonna try that. Yeah, it's worthwhile. And you know, again, very specific use for specific people, but something could be, you know, could be, and the idea behind it again is a simple one, but it's the provide me a menu of actions. And you know, that might actually be not a terrible thing to do in certain other cases too. So I could imagine that, you know, someone just not like getting the concept of like finding apps or whatever, and you could actually give them a menu. They could tap one thing and it would just list out the names in a text menu of the apps. Maybe I need that for those days. I can't remember the name of an app when it disappears on me. Well, that's because you don't see by color. You know, if you just looked at the blue apps, you'd be fine. I'd be fine, but Adam, be fair, all apps are blue. So, you know. But it is true. I have looked at that and man, there should be some more variability at app icons and colors because they all look. You get a green one. You're like, oh, I can see it.  I liked was editing their address book to simplify it. Yeah, so this is something that, I mean, it is, again, probably increasingly a problem, honestly, because, you know, people were professionals. They retire. They take their address book, which includes every person they ever communicated with during their busy professional life. And suddenly they, you know, are now only talking to friends and family. And, you know, 10 or 15 years later, they've still got this address book with, you know, 500 people in it. All of whose addresses and phone numbers have changed anyway, because, and they were work colleagues or contacts. I'm positive that I don't know 1,263 people today, but I have that many contacts. Precisely. So, you know, like, it's a little bit like going through, going through, I mean, I don't know. I've had this a number of times where my family would tell me, like, they need to clear up space on their computer. And so we'll go through their files or we'll go through their photos or things like that, because people often end up with, like, mega duplicates of photos. And so this is a little bit like that. You can think of it as content gardening. You know, so you're just going through and it's like, oh yeah, I am never, I don't even know who that is. I am never going to talk to so-and-so again, you know, so-and-so passed away. You're like, all of those kinds of things, get them out of there, because it's not going to help you.  No, probably not. So, you know, like take the time and clean up your, clean up your contact list now, and then you'll be able to work with it more fluidly in the future. Do you change people's names, like change it to Sun, or? I don't usually recommend that. Abigail Van Buren. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I would actually always recommend making things familiar, but probably, you know, but usually in such a way that you're not going to lose the search. So, you could actually mess around a little bit with like the, there's the nickname field, or, you know, or ways like that, you know, like, Abby versus Abigail, that's not going to be a problem.  You know, that's, that's enough of a change where someone else would have no chance of ever, ever figuring out what you meant. Right, right. Now, let's talk about text input. You, you talked a little bit about dictation. I'm a big fan of dictations. I mean, it's one of those things, the only problem I have with dictation is that as a writer, I want it to be perfect. And it just, it just does things. So I'm like, no, I would never say that, you know, and I would punctuate correctly. I have to turn off the punctuation because it does the punctuation just wrong. So the latest version on, I dictate on 15 Pro and on my Apple Watch Series 9, and that's where it's supposed to be doing it and on device now and everything. And the punctuation is just bizarre. I mean, it's, auto punctuation, I don't think it works at all. I mean, it'll just like put a full stop in the middle of a sentence that is now it makes no sense. Right, right. You know, like I don't, I don't get it. One of the things that is absolutely the case, you don't see this so much when you're dictating in messages because you tend to do short things and then just send them. I dictate sometimes in an app where it's just like free form text and like it's more like I'm dictating for three or four minutes, kind of a journaling kind of app. And I will see it go back and fix stuff. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty fun.  And I'm like, but I'm gonna like, I'm gonna wait because you'll get it right. You know? Yeah, I've been trying to give you a steve of that is if you give it a minute, a lot of times it'll go back and it's like, it picked up the context and went back and fixed it. And that does work really well. But a lot of people are really resistant to doing dictation and other people. Yeah, and I don't, I mean, I don't know why they're resistant to it. I mean, some of it is that it just never is, it's never exactly what you want, right? It's always gonna make some level of mistake or like I was communicating with someone in messages, using dictation last night and it used the word gunna, G-O-N-N-A. Oh, it did. Oh gosh, I would never type gunna. Like if you wait, it pained me that it used the word gunna. I didn't quite notice earlier. And I'm, you know, I mean, like yes, I probably said gunna, but I meant going to, you know? So.  That's just the worst thing ever. So in any event, so yeah, so I think there are people who like to, but I really do encourage the use of it because even for someone who's a fairly good typist on an iPhone or an iPad, the dictation is just gonna be a lot faster. And. The one problem I'd worry about with recommending it for someone with any kind of motor control problems is that if it does make a mistake getting the cursor back to the right point, even by pressing and holding on the spacebar and using it as a trackpad, it's still dicey. Yeah, yeah. It's not easy. Yeah, editing is editing is tough, but is it any, but the problem is, is you're gonna end up doing that anyway because all, if you've got motor control issues, you're gonna be making a ton of mistakes. Yeah, you might make them in the backup and fix them right away instead of having to move the cursor. And then you got to remember, now that the dictation stays on, you have to remember to put the cursor back at the end of the sentence in order to keep going. The other thing that I see people struggle with is knowing which of the microphones to use. So like, if you're in messages, there's a microphone right next to where the text field is, but there's another one in the bottom right of the screen. The bone in the bottom right of the screen is dictation. The other one is record audio. So I see people make that mistake. Is that, is that audio when still there in the iOS 17? I sort of want to. I'm looking at it. You're looking at, okay, I'm using my iPhone as a camera, so I can't look at it. The, yeah, the audio messages and messages have always bugged me, you know, like that just strikes me as sort of, you know, that's wrong, don't do that. Hang on, hang on, this just in. Sorry, I'm dictating. If you tap the microphone in the text field now, it enables dictation. Oh, okay. So I'm going to hold it to record. Let me see. I don't think so, I think it's just a tap. Okay. So that's the thing is like, so now they kept it there. So you get two of them, but they do the same thing. That might help. And the other one where you, other place we get two is in Safari, because you can do the voice search in the search field, or you can type, you can do dictation, which inserts into the search field. The difference is whether the voice search automatically enters your search as well. So you're saying if, oh yeah, because you have a microphone in the search field. Right. I'm sorry, in the search slash URL field. And then the one in the bottom right, you're saying the one that's in the search field, it'll hit enter when you stop. Yeah. Yeah, it's basically do the search, whereas the one in the keyboard just types what you say. So yeah, I'm glad you said that, because I thought the audio messages thing was always problematic, like in the sense of like, well, but you don't know what the person said, you don't know if it's like an appropriate time to listen to it, it's just like, no, don't do that. It's a story so long, it's better in voice. I do like to do that. I have a friend who, I don't know what it is she's doing, but we use telegram for communication mostly, and you'll see so-and-so recording dot, dot, dot. And she's like, bump that button, and it happens all the time. And nothing ever comes out, so she eventually notices, but it might be like an hour later. Yeah, who knows what's gonna happen if she actually ever sends.     Yeah. So it is true that you have to think a little bit about what you're saying.  And I'm like, don't say it that way. It triggers all the editor-editor instincts in me. And of course she's going to just send because that's the whole point of it. Just to do it quickly. It's even harder when you're driving and whatnot. The car's moving so she can't type as easily as she would otherwise. But yeah, so it is- To be clear, you're driving when this is happening. I'm driving and she's texting. So that's the thing is I can't even say anything, right? Cause I'll interrupt what she's saying or my words might even get into it. So I'm just sitting there going.  Some people never grow up. It's still funny. It's still funny. Now I've started to do it to other people because it is pretty funny when you do it.  You want them to be able to communicate with you. You need something from them. And so if you figure out how they want to communicate that's gonna be better than trying to tell them they should communicate the way you want to communicate. So you talked about a grandparent to a grandchild learning that they don't use the telephone anymore. Step one. Number two is email, maybe, maybe not. Texting, one of my favorite things is as an elderly person we have a tendency to say goodbye like to sign off on a text message but anybody under 30, 40 years old would never do that. That would never happen. You just stop talking. Yeah, I think it's very important to meet people where they are because it takes two to tango. It's as simple as that. And what's funny is that I think we usually think about all these other things as like, oh, how would the older person who might have these issues what we do to meet them? But realistically it goes both ways. Again, if they want to talk to a teenager, phone isn't gonna work, email really isn't gonna work either. But simultaneously they're probably not gonna do Snapchat. The grandchild or the grandparent probably won't do Snapchat. So that halfway might be right here in my message. Yeah, so I think that's, again, that's a little bit of that conversation. And in the case of the grandchild, talking to the parents and saying, so how am I actually gonna be able to get to this kid? I also think about time of day too. Steve's mom is in her early 80s and very tech savvy and she has started to use messages more because she knows she gets more immediate response. But I also know that if I email her first thing in the morning sometime before nine o'clock, I'll get a response. If I email her in the afternoon, it might not be till later that day. And then she feels all apologetic because she may be waiting an hour for a response to something that didn't matter. But if I can do it in the morning, that's when she checks her email. So I get a sense of that. One of the most interesting things I read about this cross-generational communication was an article talking about words we use. Notice what a younger person says if you say thank you, they will never say you're welcome. They'll say no problem. And even if you complain, they say no problem. It's like, no, it really was a problem. What is this phrase? But what young kids hear this article claim is that what young people hear when they hear you're welcome is they hear you're welcome. They hear sarcasm. Oh, really? And so we could be miscommunicating when we're both being completely polite on either end of the age spectrum there. I did see something, I think it was Maven Seth Godin talking about this, where he actually recommended it's my pleasure or something like that. That was sort of a way to get around like the no problem or you're welcome being weirdly. That's very nice. Yeah, right, right. Another one I've heard lately is I appreciate you. And it seems out of context, but it always makes me feel really good. I think that, I don't know if it started there or it was just popularized there. I believe that's a Ted Lasso. Is it? Yeah, yeah, because the Ted Lasso character says I appreciate you a lot. Yeah, interesting. So that's my guess on that one. It's my pleasure, I really like that. That's gonna make people feel good. Yeah, and the other one that actually I know about, but I refuse to cave to, apparently young people are perturbed by punctuation at the end of texts. Oh dear. Like if you put a period at the end of your sentence in a text, that's like, you know, you're mad or you're clipped, you know, clipped speech. You know, that kind of thing. It'd be as bad as a period at the end of a bullet in a list of bullet points when you read it. How do they feel about exclamation points? I hope that's okay, cause I'm a big fan. I think exclamation points are pretty heavily used now. So that's, you know, but again, in the right place. But yeah, apparently periods are like complied disapproval, et cetera, et cetera. Again, I'm like, no, it's punctuation. Get over yourself. We could do a whole episode on language and punctuation, but we better cut this off. This has been fantastic. I highly recommend people sign up for the tidbits newsletter if nothing else because it's a great resource. I always find something interesting to read in it. And this article is linked in the show notes with lots of screenshots where the background is not pink, turned by Adam to explain the different things that he does and get that shortcut from you. And so if people want to find it, it's at tidbits.com and it looks like you're pretty not on meta products, but can be found on mastodon. I see tidbits at mastodon.social and adamanks at mastodon.social. Are those good spots? Yeah, yeah, that's totally fine. I'll see everything that's posted there. Yeah, I've pretty much decided that I don't do big company social media. I mean, meta is problematic in so many ways and Twitter, well, I don't even want to start. I'm looking at meta now going, hey, it's not as bad as Twitter. You know, I actually had that issue too. For a long time I was like, well, Twitter's kind of a cesspool and I don't approve, et cetera, et cetera. But at least it's not meta, at least it's not Facebook. And at least not Instagram. And now I'm like, oh man, when, yeah. I still haven't brought, I haven't still have not come to the point where I can use the letter X without, well, I haven't used it yet. I've actually mostly just done the service formerly known as. Refer to as X Twitter. Cause then it's insulting. I like it. All right, we should probably cut this off. As always, this is super good time, Adam. Thanks for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chitchat Across the Pon Light. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because this show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. If you learned something or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the PodFeed podcast. You can do that by going over to podfeed.com and look for the big red button that says support the show. When you click that button, you're gonna find different ways to contribute. If you'd like to do a one time donation, you can click the PayPal button. If you wanna make a recurring contribution, click the weekly Patreon button. You're only charged when I publish an episode of the NoCillicast, which let's face it, it's every single week. So I don't charge Patreon for Chitchat Across the Pon Light or programming by stealth episodes. Another way to contribute is to record a listener contribution. It's a great way to help the NoCillicast ways learn from you and takes a little bit of the load off of me doing all the work. If you wanna contact me for any reason, you can email me at alison at podfeed.com and I really encourage you to follow me on mastodon at podfeed.caos.social. Maybe you wanna talk to the other NoCillicast ways. You can do that in our Slack group at podfeed.com slash slack. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.