Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NoCillicast podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology podcast that's ever so slight, Apple bias. Today is Sunday, June 4th, 2023, and this is show number 943. If you're listening to this on Sunday night or early Monday morning, don't forget to join the NoCillicast ways in the live chat room during the WWDC keynote at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Monday. You can find us at the live show page, podfeed.com, slash live, if you wanna see an embedded version of the Discord chat, or you can go directly to podfeed.com, slash chat, and that'll create, or take you to a place where you can create a login to go directly to our Discord. Now, I want you to note that there will be no audio or video from me and Steve. If you're on the live page, the video will be there, but it'll be Sunday's show. So we just don't like to interrupt the show with all of us gibber jabbering. You know, that's not what you're there for. You wanna hear the keynote, so we'll just be texting with everybody else. Now, I did wanna let you know that I asked Mastodon to give me a list of books to read during the inevitable hour-long game demos on the new Apple AR VR headset. And I gotta tell you, Mastodon came through for me. Wayne suggested a short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. Ronnie suggested becoming Superman by J. Michael Strasinski, H.C. Light, The Invisible Man by Ralph Allison, and Kevin suggested Bellastriga by Elizabeth Price. If you'd like to join my book club during the boredom, let me know. Well, in all seriousness, I'm fascinated by the hype about the probable AR VR headset from Apple. I still haven't heard a compelling use case for such a thing other than, you know, gaming fun. On MacBright Weekly, Alex Lindsey was explaining how a poor refresh rate gives a lot of people motion sickness. Then he explained that in AR, there's another problem. And that's trying to focus on the lenses that are right in front of you while also focusing on the physical objects in your surroundings. This strain causes headaches and a fair percentage of people.  That sounds great, I'm by three. Now keep in mind, I'm always, almost always, usually wrong about future technology. Usually my prognostications are way off and I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong this time. But I still can't see why everybody is so excited about this. In any case, I hope you'll join us in the live chat room to see me proven wrong. This week, Steve and I joined Bodie Grimm on his awesome Kilowatt podcast. He entitled the episode, The Great Dishwasher Wars of 2023. I love that title because it perfectly captures what we came on the show to talk about. Steve and I have had our whole home batteries from Tesla for about a half a year now and armed with our two master's degrees in engineering, it's still hard to figure out whether we can turn on the dishwasher between four and nine PM. Steve and I get into the details of all of the different configuration options in the Tesla app and why the flexibility of those settings actually kind of makes it harder to figure out how to manage power usage. Now as a general rule, Bodie's show about electric vehicles and renewable energy is delightful. Let me give you a quick sample from a previous show that illustrates why I love listening to Bodie. He's super knowledgeable and yet so self-deprecating and silly, he's a joy to listen to. Tesla has secured an endorsement from the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and I'm gonna say it's information but that's not how it's spelled here. So I might've just spelled it wrong. Informatization, informatization. I'm gonna leave this end, moving on. I gotta tell you, I've played that clip about 35 times and I just can't stop laughing at it. That is quintessential Bodie. He does spend a lot of time editing his work so you don't hear that very often but when it comes out, oh man, I just love it. I just love that guy. Anyway, I hope you'll check out Kilowatt in your podcatcher of choice and of course, make sure to listen to the great dishwasher wars of 2023 with me and Steve. While you're looking up Kilowatt in your podcatcher of choice, I want you to also look for the Unmute Presents podcast. This is a show hosted by two no-silly castaways and friends of mine, Marty Sobo and Michael Babcock. You'll definitely remember Marty as the guy who convinced so many of us to buy the Elgato Wave XLR interface. Their podcast, Unmute Presents focuses on blind accessibility tech and conversations. This week they published an episode called Uncovering the Power of Podcasting and it's an interview with me about how I work accessibility into a mainstream podcast. I really enjoyed hanging out with these two men and I hope you'll give it a listen because I think it's pretty interesting but maybe that's just me because it's all about me, so I enjoyed it. Anyway, these are great guys and I think you'll really like the show. Last week on the show, you heard me sing the many virtues ofophonic, the web-based tool I use to do so many wonderful things for my podcast. But you know what? Things went horribly wrong withophonic just last week. While I'm normally recording the live show, Steve always pulls images and links from my blog post to paste into the live chat room so people can kind of follow along. While I was recording aboutophonic and telling you all of its delights, Steve was pasting images aboutophonic into the live chat. When I took a pause to do some editing, Steve said I had a problem with the link I had posted to alphonic.com. I checked the link and he was right. It didn't work. Jill from the Northwoods usesophonic and she was in the live chat so I asked her to check theophonic website and sure enough,ophonic was down. While I was continuing to record, my only thought at the time was that was unfortunate timing because in just a few minutes, I would publish the show and people would try to use the links in their podcatcher or over on podfeed.com and the one toophonic wouldn't resolve. Well, you probably realized I was forgetting something just a wee bit more important to me. How was it gonna produce my show ifophonic was down? When I waved goodbye to the live audience and I started to work on the show, it hit me. I was gonna have to do all of those things by hand that I had just described to you. With the help of Jill from the Northwoods, who knows the tools I use much better than I do, I got it done, but it wasn't easy. Normally from my recording software, Hindenburg, I export an uncompressed M4A file of the no-silicast recording which maintains the chapter marks. Then I use theophonic web interface to upload it andophonic does pretty much everything else. I was gonna have to do all of this by hand. First, Jill taught me that Hindenburg has a magic levels option. It ran rather quickly on my hour plus recording so I wasn't sure I ran the tool correctly. The first task after that was to export an MP3 file, which was easy work. I realized as I exported from Hindenburg that the MP3 wouldn't have my artwork. Jill came to my aid again and showed me how to import my album artwork for the no-silicast into Hindenburg so it would be embedded into the MP3 file. Yay, Jill again. Then I needed to send the MP3 file up to Libsyn, which is a web service I used to host all of the podcast files. I've been using them for years, but I'm not exactly fond of the service. To start with, you can't really use a normal FTP client like, say, transmit to send the file to them. You sort of can, but it sends us to this black hole folder where it simply vaporizes and then you wait to see if it shows up in the right place. Instead, I tend to use the web interface when I have to do something by hand. Now, version four of their web interface is graphically hideous, but it contains all of the features you need to upload a file and save it to their service. Over a year ago, they introduced version five of their web interface. It's beautiful, it's responsive, it flows, but it has none of the features I actually need, including the ability to send them my darned files or delete the wrong ones. I've asked them why on earth they keep pushing an interface without the actual tools you need to post a podcast and the answer by telling me, well, use version four instead. But it's hard to find version four of the web interface because you can't get to it from Libsyn.com. I finally figured out that it's at four.libsyn.com. Sheesh. On Sunday, I successfully beat the eye-wateringly ugly Libsyn four interface into letting me upload the MP3 file. At every step, I was appreciating Affonic more and more. Around this time, I wondered, how am I gonna do the transcript? As I mentioned last week, Affonic automatically creates the transcript for me using whisper from OpenAI. Luckily, I already had a copy of whisper transcription from the Mac App Store, so I threw my file into it and I let it churn away while I worked on other pieces of the puzzle. When it was nearing completion, I realized that while I knew it would create a transcription because I tested it before, I wasn't sure it would create a nice HTML file for me. I looked into it and that capability is a pro feature of the app, which would cost me around $20. Now, I truly believe in paying for the software I need and even sometimes giving developers extra money just because I appreciate the efforts they make, but Jill said she already has the pro license and she would transcribe it for me. I had so many balls in the air at that point that I took her up on the offer. I put a copy of the MP3 file in Dropbox and sent her the link using Telegram. She pulled the file down and started the time-consuming process of running it through whisper transcription on the most accurate settings. Things were starting to come together. While the transcript process was churning away again, I put the normal pieces in place to get the podcast feed into Feeder, the application I use that sends you the podcast feed. Then I thought maybe I should give the uploaded file a listen and it was super quiet compared to normal. Of course it was because Alphonic wasn't there to apply the standard loudness for podcasting that I told you about. Back to texting Jill asking, what can I do about this? She told me that on export of the MP3 file from Hindenburg, I can choose a loudness. I chose minus 16 LUFS, which is the standard for podcasting and I made sure to include the add chapters option so it would be retaining those chapters. I told you, Jill knows the tools I use better than I do. Okay, I checked the exported file and other than the fact that I had the music a little bit quiet on the intro, my voice came booming out at the beginning like it usually does for the show. Okay, that met back to the eye-wateringly ugly Libsyn4 interface to figure out how do I tell it I wanna replace a file? It's always hard for me to find it, but I eventually did. I got that done and then Steve called me with the dinner bell. All right, I brought my iPad with me to dinner so I could watch for Jill's message when the whisper translation had finished grading the HTML transcript. Halfway through dinner, she sent it to me via Telegram. I opened the file in the Telegram browser and I used the share sheet to save it to files on the iPad. From files, I needed to find my downloads folder in iCloud. Now, I don't ever remember what my Mac's name is so I opened up Tailscale to find out the virtual private network IP address of my Mac on my network. In Safari, I put SMB colon slash slash and then the IP address which Safari offered to open in files. I've realized later I could have done it using the three dot menus of connect to server but I didn't notice that at first. All right, I knew that if I could get the transcript file into my downloads folder up on my Mac, Hazel would find it, secure FTP it to my server and move it to a known location on my Mac. Sure enough, I watched as it disappeared from the downloads folder using my iPad and I was able to check the URL on PodV and it worked. It's probably obvious to most of you that instead of all this faffing about in the iPad I could have just walked upstairs and done all of this directly on the Mac but it was kind of fun to see if I could do it from the iPad. Plus, I got to keep eating dinner at the same time. When I had time to look at the transcript Jill had produced for us, I was pleasantly surprised at how pretty it was compared to the one I've been producing from Alphonic. I'd be curious whether it's helpful to anyone to have it prettier or is it actually less functional because of the line by line formatting that it created. I put screenshots of them in the show notes for comparison, so let me know if you have an opinion. I'm also thinking it might be interrupted a lot if you're using a screen reader to try to find a section. But I'm not sure you'd use the transcript. You'd probably just use the audio if you're on a screen reader. So anyway, let me know if you have an opinion on the comparison of these two, the most recent one from last week and any of the previous ones. Now, I'd only do this pretty version by the way if I could automate it, of course. Finally, after well over an hour of work instead of the say 10 minutes of automation I'm normally used to and with so much assistance from Jill I was finally able to publish the show. I was so relieved to be done. Imagine my sadness when I saw Alistair Jenks post on Slack about the episode. He wrote, hmm, I was listening on my way home this evening and I noticed a definite increase in volume during the segment onophonic. The volume went up enough that I had to turn my volume down. Though thought maybe I might have been imagining it but a while later it went down again enough that I had to turn my volume up. I thought I also detected another change early on in the security bit segment. So I'm wondering if my iPhone is doing weird things to me but what are the chances the first time I notice it is during a segment on leveling audio? Well, I did talk to George Holtzman who is the developer ofophonic and he said this was the first time in the 10 years he has had this service up that it has gone down. First time in 10 years.  I hope I never have to do this by hand but it's good to know that I can. I guess I'd better learn how that leveling actually works in Hindenburg for next time because I clearly didn't do it correctly. I know what I'll do. I'll just have Jill teach me how to do it. Hi folks, Bart here with another review. Now I'm not sure exactly when Allison's gonna play this so I'm not gonna say that last week Allison had an excellent segment on Bluetooth chair speakers, but sometime recently, Allison did an excellent segment on choosing a new Bluetooth chair speaker and the process was fascinating to hear and as best as I could tell by listening to the show it sounds like Allison found an amazing speaker at a fantastic price. So I really can't better that in any way, shape size or form for a Bluetooth speaker. Well, what if like me, you don't want a Bluetooth speaker anymore. Sharing Bluetooth devices is painful. I love Bluetooth headphones because they're mine and they pair with just one device and it just works but I really don't like it for speakers. So I have been using AirPlay 2 for quite a few years now and we have AirPlay 2 speakers in pretty much every room in the house and it's so convenient for absolutely anyone whether it be me, the better half or someone visiting to take any Apple device and just make sound come out of the speaker of their choice at the push of a button. And it's also really cool that with AirPlay 2 you can have the same sound in sync coming from multiple speakers at the same time. So I will very often, for example, say when going for a shower, I will play my podcast in the bedroom and in the shower at the same time so that when I'm preparing for my shower I'm in the bedroom, then I go and I shower and I listen to the shower and then I come back and I'm in the bedroom again and my sound is just there. Or when I'm cleaning the house I just have my podcast everywhere and I can go upstairs, I can go downstairs and it's all there and it's always perfectly in sync. I just adore AirPlay 2. So when I needed, or not needed, when I wanted a waterproof speaker for the shower that was AirPlay 2, I did a fair bit of looking around and where I landed in terms of good value for money for a nice speaker with good quality that just, you know, that works well is the little brother of a speaker that Allison mentioned in her list of candidates for her Bluetooth speaker. So Allison mentioned the bigger of the portable speakers from Sonos. And that would be the, I think, oh, it was called the Sonos Move. I think it's a big one. I don't have a Sonos Move. I went with the cheaper, smaller option. I didn't go with it because it was cheaper. I went with it because it was smaller, which is the Sonos Rome and specifically the Sonos Rome SL. And the SL is really important because in Sonos land SL means does not have smart speaker or is not smart speaker or if from my point of view, the important point does not have microphone. And they're also cheaper. So you get the bonus of a cheaper speaker and no mic because I tell you what, I don't want a microphone in my shower. Don't want it there. Also, frankly, the Sonos ones, they only do a lady and I have zero interest whatsoever in giving Amazon any more of my information than they already have. So actually all of my Sonos speakers are the SL model, regardless of what sort of speaker I get from them. Anyway, so the Sonos Rome SL is a fantastic waterproof speaker. It's sort of like a Toblerone chocolate. Big triangle-y thing, but it's very roundy corners and it has two little feet on one side of it. So you can either have it horizontal as a little Toblerone or you can stand it on its end as a little Toblerone. Out of the box, it charges over USB-C and they're doing some sort of black magic. I don't know how it works, but it looks like a normal USB-C port that has no really annoying little rubber gasket wherever you have to remember to plug into it or something. It's just completely open, normal looking USB-C port. That's waterproof. I don't know how it works, but it does work. I have gotten mine very wet very often because it goes into the shower with me and that plug says it's waterproof and it is, I don't know how it works. Now, so it is 179 euro. I'm gonna get my currencies all over the place in this review because I had to buy some things in euros and some things in pounds. So anyway, it's 179 euro for the Sonos Rome SL. I went with the white one, but by utter coincidence or happenstance or wherever these things work out, I ended up on a gift guide, a holiday gift guide show with Chuck Joyner along with another, a fellow podcaster and already an amazing person, Kelly Guimard. And Kelly's pick was actually, or Kelly's picks included two fantastic little accessories for the Sonos Rome. So the first is an unbranded rubber case that gives really good protection for the Sonos Rome and it comes with a little lie hole at the top and a little basic carabiner, which I actually don't use, but you'll see why in a moment. But basically it's designed actually to make the Sonos Rome more rugged. But I just like the fact that it lets me hang it from things because it has that eye loop and ain't no harm, I guess, having a bit of a rubber in it if it falls. It's very carefully molded. It fits like an absolute glove and they went to the effort of making a perfect square cut out in the rubber case to allow the Sonos logo to shine through absolutely perfectly. And they were clearly asleep with the wheel because if you stand the speaker on its end, straight above the logo that is perfectly visible through this case is the status LED. Did they leave a hole for the status LED? No, they did not. Does my rubber case have a hole for the status LED? Why, yes it does, because I just extended the hole to show the logo to be a few millimeters taller and now the LED is covered too and it looks entirely as if it was always assigned that way, it doesn't look like I, you know, hacked it together with a pair of scissors, but anyway, snip, snip, problem solved. Very strange design choice. Now, it is a whopping 21 pounds and 24 pints on Amazon.co.uk and it similarly priced in the US Amazon store.  As I say, it has an eye loop, which is the most important thing and it comes with a basic carabiner, but, but, but, I am not using it with this basic carabiner. I am using it with the second amazingly cool thing that Kelly put me onto, the hero clip. This is like a carabiner, only way more versatile. It's basically a jujitsu kung fu Swiss Army knife of a carabiner. It hinges and twists and turns and has little rubber grippy bits so that it can basically be used to hang anything from anything. It is one of the most versatile little gadgets I have ever come across. They come in all sorts of shapes inside, well, they come in one shape, all sorts of sizes. I went with a medium size blue one. The link in the show notes is just to the hero clip size rather than to a specific hero clip because really depending on what it is you wanna hang whether you want something big or something small, you're gonna want a different hero clip, but they all have this absolutely ingenious design and they really are just the hang anything from anything gadgety thingamabob. So I absolutely adore my hero clip. Basically, I have added a link in the show notes and I've also popped into the show notes a photograph of my Sonos Rome SL with its rubber case with the extra little hole cut into the top for the little status LED light hanging with my hero clip of my shower and you can see it works perfectly. Anyway, hope that's of help to someone and talk to you all soon. Hey, Bart, thanks for that. That was pretty interesting. I'm really surprised that the price is fairly reasonable on the Sonos Rome SL, good to know that SL is the unsmart version of it. A while ago a friend of mine said she was looking for soundbars and she saw that another friend of ours had a Sonos soundbar and I told her, I said, do not buy a Sonos soundbar. Whatever you do, do not buy a Sonos soundbar and she said, well, why aren't they any good? And I said, no, they're fantastic, but they're really, really expensive and everybody I know who buys one ends up buying more of them and then you end up in the poor house because you want everything to be Sonos because they work so well. So another friend of ours, she calls me up and she goes, Alson, I'm thinking about buying this Sonos device and I said, no, don't do it, don't do it, you're gonna spend a fortune.  She has bought, I think, five Sonos devices now. So it's an addiction and I know Bart, Bart has a whole bunch of them too, so whatever you do, do not take Bart's advice and buy the Sonos Rome SL Bluetooth shower speaker. It's an addiction, you just don't wanna do it, don't go there, they're too wonderful. It's been a while since we've gotten a new patron of the PodFeed podcast. This show and all of the podcasts we make here are entirely supported by donations through Patreon and PayPal. If you like this, no ads model and you get value from what we teach on the show, I sure hope you'll consider making a donation no matter how small just to help keep the lights on. Head on over to podfeed.com.payton or podfeed.com.payton.payton and make it happen. My friend, Tim Verporten, was addicted to buying speakers. My friend, Victor Coijou, with his vice was buying disk drives. My addiction is to screenshot apps. It's only been a year since I declared CleanShotX the best screenshot and annotation tool I've ever used. But when Pat Dangler sent me a link to the screenshot annotation tool Shorter, I had to take a look. By the way, Shorter is spelled S-H-O-T-T-R. There's no E in there. Now, developer Max has no idea what a gem of an app he has here. For a long time, Shorter was free with an option of just buying him a coffee. I admit that I didn't even test Shorter at first because it was free. I finally broke down and tried it with the intention of writing a review for people with very limited needs in a screenshot and animation tool. I figured it was free, it had to be really limited. I discovered that Shorter is an astonishingly good tool that I find delightful. This week, Max finally bit the bullet and he made Shorter a paid app for the grand sum of $8. Not $8 a month, not $8 a year, $8. I think he feels guilty for charging for it because you can actually still use it for free if you want. Every 5 to 10 editor uses after the free 30-day free trial and he calls it an annoying fellow animates and says, Hi, I'm the world's most annoying salesperson. Do you want to buy Shorter? Well Max also has a $25 tier. He calls the Friends Club, which he says is for those who really like the app. Bragging rights, access to experimental features, and better support. Alright, I have to admit that Shorter is very good and includes many features I've never seen before in any of the screenshot apps I've tried. It's also delightful in design and movement and it's incredibly fast. Now the best part of a good screenshot app is the annotation capabilities, but we have to eat our vegetables first and talk about how to set up Shorter for success. macOS comes with a built-in screenshot utility with some standard keystrokes. To most easily use Shorter, the opening screen suggests you deselect the keystroke options in system settings, keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, screenshots. When you do this, you can assign the same keystrokes your fingers already know to the features in Shorter. After you've disabled the default screenshot shortcuts in macOS, open Shorter's preferences and set the shortcuts the way you like them. Also in Shorter's preferences, you can choose between four options for the background to be included with your screenshots. I personally prefer no background on my screenshots, so I chose the Trim Shadow option, but you can also choose to have your wallpaper as a background, a solid color, or a transparent offset. In Preferences, you can decide how you want Shorter to behave after a screenshot. You can have it show in the editor to start annotating, you can have it just copy, or you can have it simply save to your default screenshots folder, or you can have it do any combination of the three. If that's not enough options, you can have it show in the editor as I mentioned, or just have it show in a thumbnail. If you have it shown in a thumbnail, you could even more options. If you want to be able to hide the thumbnail quickly, select the option to hide the preview thumbnail by simply clicking outside of the thumbnail. Escape works to dismiss it as well. If you find that you're accidentally closing the thumbnail before you're ready, then choose the manual option where you have to select the close button intentionally to close the thumbnail. Alright, that's enough vegetables, let's have some fun editing our screenshots already. When the editor opens, you have a row of buttons across the top. The first two are Copy and Save. Copy will do what it says on the tin, and also immediately dismisses Shorter. The Save button saves your default location, or you can use Command Shift F to save to a new location. Open up is a pin icon that creates a very minimalistic floating window of just your screenshot. This can be really handy if you have something in one app that you need to refer to while you do work in another app. If you hover over the pinned image, along with a close button, you get a little drag and drop icon. Grab that icon and drag the image to the finder or to any document you like. The pencil icon will open the editor. The window also says 100% on the top. I drag the corner of the floating window, and then 100% increase proportionally. Not sure why I need to know that, but it works nicely, stopping in kind of detents at round numbers like 200%. By the way, if you scroll over the pinned window, that will also increase and decrease the size. When you're done with your pinned screenshot, you can simply close it like any standard macOS window. I didn't think the pinned image would be all that useful, but I've used it about a dozen times in the last week. It's so helpful for those apps that don't allow persistent windows. Let's get back to the editor options. Crop and selection are combined into a single tool. If you select a region, the icon changes to the word crop, and all of the icons to the right of the tool change to be specific to this crop function you're about to execute. The most surprising option in there is to capture the text that's inside of the selected region. It's not only super accurate, but it's also really fast. As soon as you hit the OCR button, you get a pop-up on your whole mac window that explains the text is in your clipboard. This pop-up also offers to cut line breaks in the text. Be snappy about hitting that button, though. The pop-up's only on screen for a second, maybe two. If you change your mind, the cut breaks button switches to say add breaks, but again, be quick about it. If you do any kind of graphical layout work, you'll really appreciate the next tool you can use within the selection crop tool. There's a button to imprint the selection size. When you ask for the imprint, on the screenshot you'll see the height and width in red boxes and white text showing you the size of the area you've selected in pixels. You can even select the imprinted numbers and change them individually to points, and you can change the color of these imprints. Select each measurement and hit delete to remove them. The last thing in the contextual menu after you make a selection is an eraser. This brings up the same contextual menu options we'll be seeing in the blur tool, and I'll explain that a little bit. When I first started playing around with the annotation tools inside Shorter, I thought they were pretty limited. For example, there's an arrow tool, but there's only two shapes to choose from and a double-ended arrow. But then I noticed an odd-looking icon to the right of the arrow options. It's a gray dot with a chevron above and below it. If you click first on the left of the three arrow buttons and then on this unnamed button, it changes the shape of the arrow through some much more interesting options. This button changes the default look of the first button until you make another choice with that odd button. Now it's just poking around and I discovered that if you double-click on an arrow you've already placed on the screen, it'll cycle through the different arrow options so you don't even have to bring up the menu. That's pretty handy. You can change the width of the arrows with a typical slider as well. The color options for arrows are pretty limited. There's only eight to choose from so you don't get the standard color picker. Text annotations are cute. They're like rectangular thought bubbles with rounded corners and you can move around the pointy part so it's obvious what the text should be pointing at. To increase the font size, you drag a slider and it automatically increases the size of the thought bubble. If you choose a light color for the text annotation, the text automatically will be black. And if you choose a dark color, like a dark purple, it'll automatically change to white. There's not much flexibility in the text annotation formatting but I think they're very good looking at annotations. Other apps have more options but I think the other options are kind of silly in cartoony. Remember earlier when I told you that with the selection slash crop tool you can imprint a measurement of the selection area? It turns out by holding down the number one or two key, you can instantly measure either vertically or horizontally between any elements in your screenshot. Measuring in this way doesn't automatically imprint it on the image. There's an icon for the ruler but its main job is to remind you to choose one or two on your keyboard to invoke it. It's table stakes that Shutter has a rectangle tool but even here the style is unique. Unlike most rectangle annotations, this one is a nice rounded rectangle which I like quite a bit. You can make the rectangle be opaque or hollow or it can be translucent and of the same color. Kind of like a highlighter with an opaque border. It's very pretty. It's pretty nifty. The latest version of Shutter that just came out this week added two new tools. We now get a freehand drawing tool. After you scribble on the screen, the drawing converts to a smooth vector that can be scaled by drag handles. I'm not much for freehand drawing but if this kind of anarchy blows your dress up you go girl. The second new tool is a highlighter. Holding down the shift key lets you draw a straight horizontal line as nature intended. Another tool that wasn't available for free users before is the spotlight tool. This tool lets you select a region to stay at full brightness and dims the rest of the image. You can choose a nice rounded rectangle or an elongated oval. By default, spotlight has a colored border but if you drag the thickness all the way down, the border disappears. When I first tested the spotlight tool, the one feature I thought was missing was the ability to change the dimness of the background. Because sometimes you want to barely highlight an area to draw attention to an element without making the rest of the image too hard to read, but other times you want to really emphasize that one part of the image that you're spotlighting. I learned a hidden trick from the developer on how to accomplish my goal. Create the spotlight and then just type any number from 1 to 9 to change the opacity of the background from light to very dark. You can do this by selecting it again later. Now I'm a big fan of numbered bubbles next to items in a screenshot. This can be very useful when you're trying to describe a sequence of steps on a screenshot.  There's circles with a little nubbin on them and you can drag the nubbin around on the circle to point in different directions. Now while deleting a counter from a set does not renumber the following counters which I wanted to do, you can change a counter's number simply by selecting the counter and typing a new number. It's not ideal though because adding some subsequent counters keeps the numbering where it left off. Maybe you don't want a number 2 and you want to gap in your numbers but I kind of like them all sequential. Now Shutter's blur tool is actually called blur slash erase and it's amazing. Now the main reason you want to use a blur tool in the first place in a screenshot is to obfuscate some sensitive information or maybe just distracting information. As soon as you select a region to blur you get four options in Shutter. Plain blur pixelates everything in the region you've selected. That's pretty standard. But you can also choose to just blur the text. So let's say there's some text on top of a photo. If you select a region that includes the text and a portion of the photo the photo region does not get pixelated. Seriously it's downright freaky. Now if that's not enough the erase option under the blur tool will erase text and graphics but it leaves the background. Now your mileage may vary on how well this works depending on the background imagery you're working with. But the unique feature of Shutter that I may use the most is its ability to simply erase text leaving the background intact. I can't tell you how much time I've spent trying to draw rectangles over text and using the color picker to try to match the background to cover it up. With Shutter it's instant and it's pretty darn accurate. It's crazy cool and I've never seen anything like this. By the way you can also choose to erase text and graphics so like if there's a button and text and they're both on top of an image the button is considered graphics. It's very weird that it can do both of those. I don't know how it does it. Now I never use tools, ovals as an annotation because nothing ever fits properly inside them. But I might with Shutter's ovals because they're really more like super roundy rectangles. Lines on them can be solid or dotted which is kind of fun. Now Shutter provides single key keystrokes for all of the tools I've described and they make sense like P means pin, T is for text, C is for counter and R is for rectangle. There's a ton more of course. Speaking of keystrokes when the Shutter editor is open you can get to all of the tools from the menu bar too and you can see zoom options with a lot of easy to remember keystrokes. The editor allows you to paste a screenshot on top of an existing screenshot. Now the additional screenshot is much smaller than the original so the features really intended to allow you to add like a small overlay. With CleanShotX you can have two images side by side or overlapping to create a composite image and the entire graphic expands automatically. I use that feature fairly often. The image overlay in Shutter can make an animated GIF of the overlay disappearing and reappearing on the screenshot. I have no idea why you'd ever need to do this but someone must have asked for it. But wait, there's more. Shutter has a few more tricks up its sleeve. It can take scrolling screenshots so you can capture a long webpage as a single image. With other screenshot tools I've used it's sometimes tricky to scroll at the right speed for the image to be captured. Shutter solves this by doing the scrolling for you. When you invoke a scrolling screenshot from the menu bar app or using a keystroke you've defined you get a crosshair cursor. You then select the region of the browser window you want to capture and when you let go the browser window scrolls all by itself and takes the screenshot. You can also have Shutter take a scrolling screenshot by scrolling up instead of down which might be handy if you're trying to screenshot a text message conversation and it's tedious to scroll to the top first. Now often when trying to document a process in an app or even on the web you need to take screenshots of the same area of the screen each time the content changes. Shutter has a repeat capture area option so you get the exact same screenshot size and shape and location each time. From the menu you can capture the active window or any window by tapping on it. You can even do a delayed timed screenshot which is a tool you need frequently to capture things like dropdown menus. In the menu bar dropdown I discovered yet another gem. Shutter can do OCR text on the fly without even taking a screenshot. The default keystroke is control option command O which brings up a crosshair cursor. You simply drag across a region of visual text anywhere on the screen and you will instantly see a pop up saying it's ready to paste anywhere you like. I use this feature in other tools all the time when I'm trying to grab the text in something like say system settings and it's not selectable. Having on the fly OCR as part of Shutter is fantastic. I've described how you can measure objects with Shutter. It turns out you can also select objects. Instead of just dragging with the selection tool across your screenshot, hold down the option key and drag and you can select buttons, text and more. It's really fabulous. Now one of the things I wish CleanShotX could do is resize images. I work on a screenshot, I get it annotated just the way I want but then I have to open it in preview to resize it to post it online. In the upper right of the Shutter window you can see the image size. If you click on the size, you can change the size of the image either by scaling down or up and you can define specific dimensions. The app warns you that this is a destructive change that cannot be undone so beware before using the resize option. All right, we got a bottom line this. I've been going on a long time but bottom line is Shutter is a super capable and really fast screenshot utility with tons of tiny little utilities built in that are very powerful. From OCR to scrolling screen captures to innovative automations to the ability to measure geometry inside screenshots to the hiding of text and images, Shutter is a gem. You can find Shutter at Shutter.cc. If Shutter sounds as delightful and useful to you as it is to me, scrape some loose change out of your couch cushions and pay the $8 for this amazing and delightful app. Well, that is gonna wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allisonatpodfeet.com anytime you like? I like to talk to people so you should write to me. If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over. Hey, we haven't had any dumb questions in a while. Those are questions that you think everybody else knows the answer to and you feel kind of dumb ants asking them but you can ask me and I promise not to make fun of you. We have a lot of fun with those. Anyway, you can follow me on mastodonatpodfeet.com at chaos.social. Hey, maybe give me a book recommendation for during the live show. Not my live show during WWDC. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. If you wanna join in the fun of the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com slash slack where you can talk to me in all of the other lovely no-silly castaways. You can also go to podfeet.com slash chat during WWDC to talk to everybody in text chat while we enjoy the conversation there. All right, you can support the show at podfeet.com slash Patreon or you can do a one-time donation actually you can do both if you wanted to at podfeet.com slash PayPal. And if you wanna join in the fun of the live show head on over to podfeet.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic no-silly castaways. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.


Hello everyone, my name is Yifan Zhang. Today I'm happy to introduce our work, Private Circus with Quasi Linear Randomness. This is a joint work with Weibo Goya and Yuval Yishai. The notion of Private Circus was introduced by Yishai Sihai and Wagner in 2003. It is a simple abstraction of leakage-residual computation. Informally, a private circuit should be secured against leakages of T-ware values chosen by an anniversary. In this work, we consider both the stateless and stateful private circuits, which we give details as follows. Suppose F is a function that we want to compute. It takes as input X and outputs Y. A stateless private circuit for the function F contains three parts. The first part is an input encoder, which encodes the input X to X hat. Then a circuit C takes as input X hat, computes the function F, and outputs the encoded result Y hat. Finally, an output decoder decodes Y hat and outputs Y. The security requires that any T-wares should reveal no information about the input X. To rule out trivial solutions, in which the encoder or the decoder can pure the function F directly, we consider the canonical encoder and decoder by default. Confidently, the canonical encoder splits each input bit into T plus one additive shares, and the canonical decoder computes each bit by adding up a group of T plus one bits. A stronger variant of private circuits referred to as leakage-tolerate private circuits does not have input encoder or output decoder. The security requires that any T-wares reveal at most the same number of input and output bits. With the leakage-tolerate solution, we can obtain a leakage-resilient private circuits by using an encoding scheme that is secure against T-programmed tags, such as the canonical encoder. In particular, we can also jointly encode all input bits with less randomness. In the state-for-model, the circuit maintains an internal state. In each epoch, the circuit takes a public input X and outputs a result Y in clear. A concrete example is an encryption circuit where the internal state is the secret key, the input is the message we want to encrypt, and the output is the separate tags. The security requires that in every epoch, any T-ware values should reveal no information about the internal state. The notion of private circuits is attractive for theoretical study due to the simplicity of its model in the sense that the computation model is just binary circuits, and the class of leakage functions contains all sets of T-ware values in the circuits. A lot of works have shown that we can bootstrap from this minimal notion of private circuits towards resisting more powerful leakage classes such as AC0 leakage or bounded communication leakage. On the other hand, private circuits gain popularity as a practical method for higher-order masking countermeasures that protect embedded devices against realistic set-channel attacks. In this work, we are interested in the randomness complexity of private circuits, which is a natural theoretical question for this notion. The study of randomness complexity can also be motivated by the fact that generating fresh randomness is expensive in practice. In the scenario where the randomness is provided as a part of the input, reducing randomness complexity means reducing the size of the input. In some cases, this can be translated to an improvement in the communication complexity. For example, when we build a leakage-resilient hardware for proof verification, the prover may be responsible to provide fresh randomness used in the hardware. Therefore, in this work, we consider the following question. How many random bits do we need to securely compute a function with circuit-sized S against T-probe attack? The work ISW03 first gives a feasibility result based on MPC protocols. It requires T-square random bits for each modification gate, which adds up to T-square times S random bits for the whole circuit. The work IKL plus 13 introduces the notion of robust random generators. Very informally, it is an implementation of a PRG, such that the implementation is secure against prognotex. Relying on robust PRGs, the authors achieve T-cube times log T-S random bits, which is almost independent of the circuit size. A recent work CGD20 further reduces the randomness complexity to T-square times log T-S. We will provide more details about their techniques later. In this work, we show that any function computed by a Boolean circuit offsets S admits a T-private circuit with a canonical encoder and decoder which uses all of T times log T-S random bits. This represents a fact of T improvement compared with the previously best known results. We also extend our results to the following scenarios. First, when using a random efficient encoder instead of the canonical encoder, we achieve out of T times log T-S over all random bits. This is optimal up to log resomic factors. Second, we show that same bound applies for leakage-tolerate private circuits. And finally, we also show that the same bound applies for the stateful model of private circuits. Here, the random complexity is for every epoch. In the following, I will first discuss the construction in previous works, analyze why their constructions fail to obtain further improvements and give the general idea of our construction. The first construction is given in ASW03. The idea is to compute an additive sharing for each variable value. For example, for variable value X, the goal is to compute X1, X2 to Xn, such that their summation is equal to X. In this way, any T-shears are uniformly random and independent of X. And any T-proven attacks reveal no information about the input. Now, the problem is reduced to evaluating addition gates and the modification gates. For addition gates, we can simply add up the two input additive shareings for modification gates. We first compute the modification between every two shares, one from each input additive sharing. Note that the summation of this n-square multiplication results is equal to X times Y. We then transform the multiplication results to an additive sharing of X times Y. The construction in ASW03 requires to consume all of T-square random bits for each modification gates, resulting in all of T-square times S randomness complexity. To reduce the randomness complexity, the work IKL plus team considers the randomness locality of a circuit. Concretely, a circuit C makes an L local use of its randomness if each value uses at most L random bits. For example, say somewhere W is equal to X times Y plus C plus R1 times R2 times R3 plus R4. Here, X, Y, Z are input bits of C and R1 to R4 are internal random bits. Then the W uses four random bits. Now for a set of T-value values, they together use at most L times T random bits. Then we can replace the fresh random bits by L times T-wise independent random bits without changing the distribution of the value values in W. Ideally, this allows us to reduce the randomness complexity to L times T times some logarithmic factor in the circuit size. However, one problem of this pro-reset, we need to use a circuit to implement the generating process of this random bits. In particular, the circuit of PRG may be vulnerable to probing attacks. To overcome this issue, IKL plus Rdine proposes the notion of robust PRGs. Informally, a robust PRG is a circuit implementation of a PRG that is resilient to probing attacks. As a result, we can use a robust PRG to repair the desired random bits. The work IKL plus Rdine shows that the randomness locality of the basic construction is T-square. Therefore, we need to use T-cube-wise independent random bits. The authors also show the existence of a robust PRG that uses all of T-cube times log T as random bits. As a result, they obtain a T-private circuit that uses the same number of random bits. A recent work, CGZ20 reduces the randomness locality of the basic construction to T, leading to a fact of T improvements in the randomness complexity. We know that this approach appears to be difficult to be the T-square bound. Intuitively, the randomness locality of a private circuit cannot be smaller than T. Otherwise, an adversary can prove a wire value and all random bits used for this wire value, which may leak information about the inputs. Then the random source should be at least T-square-wise independent, which requires at least T-square random bits. Our work does not follow this approach for de-randomization. Here's an overview of our idea. In the first step, instead of using additive shear rings to protect wire values, we choose to use a T-private encoding scheme to protect wire values. We show that such a T-private encoding scheme only needs a tail of all of T random bits. Here, the tail of big O notation all meets logarithmic factors. In the second step, we show that the computation of the T-private encoding scheme can be reduced to constructing a leakage-tolerant axle gadget. Finally, we construct a randomness-efficient leakage-tolerant axle gadget, which only uses tail of all of T random bits, which solves the problem. We first discuss our auto-construction, a T-private circuit, via axle gadgets. Suppose tail C is a circuit that computes a function F. In S of the O3, the construction compiles such a circuit by computing an additive shear ring for each wire value. Our idea is to use a strong T-wise independent PRG to protect these values. Consequently, suppose T is a strong T-wise independent PRG that takes U1 to Um as input and outputs R1 to RS. We mask each wire value WI by RI. Then the goal is to compute WI X or RI for all I. Together with U1 to Um, this can be viewed as an encoding of the wire values. Note that by the property of a strong T-wise independent PRG, any T bits are uniformly random, revealing no information about the input. To compute each mass speed, we further require G to be linear. In this way, each output bit is a linear combination of the input bits. For example, RI may be equal to U1 plus U3 plus U4. We use the support of RI to denote the set of these random bits. Observe that WI X or RI and all bits in the support of RI can be viewed as an additive shear ring of WI. At the first glance, it may appear similar to the idea in SW03. However, there are two key differences. First, the number of shares may vary for different wire values. This is because the number of shares depends on the size of the support of RI, which may be different. Second, the shares among different additive shear rings are naturally reused and there is no need to do de-randomization. In particular, it is known that there exists a linear and strong T-wise independent PRG that uses held of all of T random bits. Now we discuss how to compute each mass speed. For an addition gate, suppose the two input shear rings are W1 and W2 and the goal is to compute the output shear ring W3. We only need to compute W3 X or R3 since the rest of shares are just the input random bits of the PRG. Observe that W3 X or R3 is equal to W1 X or W2 X or R3. Therefore, we only need to compute the summation of bits in the joint size of the shear ring of W1, the shear ring of W2, and the support of R3. This problem can be solved by using a leakage-tolerant XR gadgets. For a modification gate, similarly, we only need to compute W3 X or R3. We follow IS of the O3 and the first compute modifications between every two shares, one from each input additive shear ring. Then W3 is equal to the summation of these modification results. Similarly to the addition gates, to compute W3 X or R3, we can compute the summation of bits in the joint size of the outer product between the shear rings of W1 and W2 and the support of R3. Again, this problem can be solved by a leakage-tolerant XR gadgets. Therefore, our other construction works as follows. We use a linear and strong T-by-independent PRG to protect the variable values. Then the goal is to compute the max bits W and X or R i, where R i is the S of the bits of the PRG. We show that the computation of the max variable values can be done by using a leakage-tolerant XR gadgets. In the next part, I will discuss how we construct leakage-tolerant XR gadgets. What we want to construct is a leakage-tolerant private circuit that computes the XR function of N input bits. We start with the following simple construction. Assume the XR gadget has access to a random additive shear ring of zero, say they are R1 to R4. We mask it input bits X i by R i and let G i denote the results. Then we use an addition circuit to compute the XR of G1 to G4. Intuitively, the security follows from the fact that G1 to G4 forms a random additive shear ring of the output bit Y. Therefore, if any anywhere is probed, the simulator can probe the output bit Y and generate a random additive shear ring as G1 to G4. Then the simulator can simulate all inner wires in the circuit. In other words, probing inner wires of the gadget is not better than probing the output bit. However, this simple construction requires all of N random bits. We need to de-randomize the basic construction. As we have discussed, the generic approach that relies on random locality does not work. This requires us to find a new approach to de-randomize R1 to Rn. Our starting point is the following simple observation. For a set W of T where values, we hope that the random bits R1 to Rn satisfy the following condition. The distribution of values in W when instantiated by using R1 to Rn is identical to that when instantiated by using uniformly random additive shear ring of zero. In this way, any of those three that can only probe T wires cannot distinguish these two instantiations. To better understand this condition, we first write down the inner wires of the circuit. Suppose the addition circuit first computes G1, XRG2, G3, XRG4, and then computes the output bit. Recall that each GI is equal to XI, XRRI, where XI is an input bit and RI is a random bit. We can write down all the variables as follows. These variables are marked by the following random values. For the first layer, G1 is marked by R1, G2 is marked by R2, and so on. For the second layer, G1, XRG2 is marked by R1, XRR2, G3, XRG4 is marked by R3, XRR4. For the last layer, the summation of G1 to G4 is marked by summation of R1 to R4, which is equal to zero. We define a set A that contains this marked random values and refer to this set as an excess set. Now we obtain the following condition. For a set W of T variables in the excess set A, we want that the distribution of values in W when instantiated by using R1 to Rn is identical to that when instantiated by using uniformly random additive sharing of zero. To realize such a sufficient condition, we consider to use a set of random generator to prepare R1 to Rn. With more details, we define the notion of robust parity sharing generators. We say an implementation C of a function G is a robust parity sharing generator with respect to an excess set A if it satisfies the following three conditions. First, the output of the circuit should form an additive sharing of zero. That is the summation of all the Bs is equal to zero. This condition ensures the correctness of the basic construction. Second, we require the circuit C to be secure against probian tags in the leakage tolerance sense. In this way, we only need to focus on the output Bs since any probian tag towards the implementation can be reduced to a probian tag to the output Bs. Finally, for the given excess set which consists of R1 to Rn and linear combinations of R1 to Rn, we require that the distribution of any T variables when instantiated by R1 to Rn should be identical to that when instantiated by using uniformly random additive sharing of zero. The notion of robust parity sharing generators can be viewed as an extension of the robust T-wise-dependent PRG introduced in AKIO plus 13. First, we require the output Bs to satisfy that there's a summation zero. Second, those three can access to the output Bs by learning not only a single output Bs but also a linear combination specified by the excess set. If the excess set only contains the output Bs, a robust parity sharing generator degrades to a robust T-wise-dependent PRG. In our work, we use the probabilistic measure to show the existence of a robust parity sharing generator which uses all of T times log T and random Bs when the size of the excess set is bounded by odd of n. Combining the basic instructions for the extra gadgets and a robust parity sharing generator, we obtain a leak-tolerate extra gadgets which can use extra of n bits and uses the same number of random bits. And I'll make it a problem is that if we use fresh randomness for each extra gadget, the randomity complexity will become linear in the circuit size. To overcome this issue, our solution is to use a single PRG to prepare random bits for all extra gadgets. We refer to the new PRG as multi-phase robust parity sharing generator. Let me give a quick summary of our results and the main techniques. In this work, our main contribution is the construction of private circuits that uses odd of T times log T as random bits. To achieve our results, we first give an outer construction where we use a strong T by C dependent PRG to protect the bare values. We show that the problem of computing the marked bare values can be reduced to constructing leakage-tolerate extra gadgets. Then we focus on constructing randomity efficient leakage-tolerate extra gadgets. We start with a simple construction which requires a linear number of random bits in the input size. To de-randomize the basic construction, we give a new sufficient condition for the random source. We introduce a new notion of PRG, robust parity sharing generators, to prepare the random source required by our new sufficient condition. By using the probabilistic method, we prove the existence of a robust parity sharing generator that uses a set of odd of T random bits. Combining the other construction and the inner construction will obtain our main results. Thank you.


You've done the BlowerDark test, you've done the Duck Blaster test, you've got all those numbers and you've plugged them in your computer system and you've gotten a hers rating it says here. And I see the report that you've put together for Gary and this homeowner, a hers rating of 52. Can you kind of talk about exactly what that means? What that scale, that hers rating, that hers scale means for a little bit? Right. That scale can go up to whatever, on this report it'll go up to a 500, 500 being a house that uses a lot of energy down to a 0, 0 being a net zero energy house meaning it's not going to use any purchase energy. Houses right now that are built to Fargo codes or 2006 codes actually will be at score about a 100. And so when we compare to that 100 on this house, this house actually scored a 52. So what we're saying is that this house is about 48% more efficient than the house that met that 2006 code. And so 52 is actually a really good score. If you hit 80, you're actually, you know, with other things in mind for energy stars as long as you meet the other criteria then you can qualify for the energy star. So Gary's met all that criteria that energy star requires at that point plus he's exceeded that 80 score and got it all the way down to 52 which is excellent. So 50, it's really hard to break 50 unless you're doing something a little bit different that's going to cost actually a little bit more. But with a home like this that we're not actually putting a whole lot more money into just a little bit more detail and attention into the way it's insulated, the equipment that it uses, the type of windows we're using, the infiltration rates, all that goes into account into this score. And so 52 is an excellent score. And you mentioned cost a little bit. You know, it's hard to tell what exactly going to cost to live in a house. It depends on, you know, if you have five teenagers taking 15 showers a day. But you know, what are some of the general ideas for how much it's going to cost to heat in this cool, heat and cool this house versus a house that's just built to the code. Right. And they give an actual report of how much that cost actually comes out to. So for heating, a loan for this one is actually $84. So that's annual. Just to give an idea too of, Joe had mentioned that the code is, the benchmark is to the 2006 energy code standard is a hundred. And so if you take that as their benchmark and bring that down, cut it say in half to roughly a thousand dollars less in annual energy costs for her score that is at that 50 or half of a hundred. So it makes a big difference and it's something that you're going to have to be paying less every month for in the operating costs. So potentially a thousand dollars more in that homeowner's pocket or more. Energy Star like I said, it's a good program. You know that you got to meet that 80 score to get down to that. And so Energy Star builders can be found on energystar.gov or they can be found on Cass County Electric's website as well for local area builders. But in any case, if you do decide you want to go with the Energy Star builder, you're making a good choice right from the start. And you know, so like that, you know, the hers rating that Energy Star rating is that that's giving you your miles per gallon on that house. And you know, instantly if you walk in, you see that scurril of a 50, it's, you know, 50% more efficient than the average house that's being built out there in essence. And you have a number to stick with your house. So if a builder claims that he's got a tight house and it's tight construction, it's one thing to claim it, but it's another thing to prove it. And so with the Energy Star, or just the home energy rating and the hers score, you've actually gone out of your way to make sure that you have third party verification to get that score. And this is the score that we used to prove that, yeah, this is a tight home rather than, you know, just saying that it's a tight home. Okay. A lot of them aren't really concerned about how much energy efficiency or how energy efficient the house is. They're looking at more of it, you know, the flooring and the granite countertops. Anything that's decorative inside the home. What they really don't see is anything that's behind the sheet rocker, you know, above the sheet rocker, you know, the type of foundation walls or what they're going to be paying on an average basis or, you know, average monthly, you know, and there's a lot of variables that go into that. But on a house like this with the ICF foundations and the low infiltration rate on this one, it's basically about $115 a month compared to other houses that might cost you $200 a month. If a couple is looking at buying a house and they're looking at spending a certain amount on their, you know, whatever their range is or whatever they can afford, you know, you can always take an effect how much this house is going to cost me on a utility basis. And there's other programs out there, too, that I don't think are too popular right now in this area. But eventually I think they will be, you know, with energy efficient mortgages and stuff like that. So, on a house like this, $115 a month for your average utility bill is excellent, especially in this area of the country.


If you're a kid in the 90s and ever watched The Courage the Cowardly Dog cartoon, boy you're in for a treat. The title character of this kid's show is an anthropomorphic dog, who lives with an elderly couple in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. And in each episode the trio is thrown into bizarre, frequently disturbing and often paranormal and supernatural type misadventures, where Courage encounters various villains with his fear and context playing a key role in how he perceives the world. But is this ultimately true and what does it have to do with Plato? Between 438 and 348 BC there was this individual called Plato who used to tell this story about people being trapped and confined in a cave since birth, always facing the cave's wall. And the evil trickster who made all of this possible has built a fire and uses it to project shadows onto the cave's wall in front of the prisoners. Now what these people know is only the shadows casted on the wall in front of them. They try to see shadows of animals, people, objects and other beings of Earth. But they do not truly know what they are, they think what they see is the real world and they assign their own meaning to these figures. Until one day one of the people in the cave manages to get outside and get to experience this new layer that we now call the real world. And when he comes back to announce this epic trio to others he is now unable to see in the dark mists of the cave. And the people that are still living inside of the cave still believe that even if there is an outside, it is dangerous to go out there. This is called Plato's allegory of the cave. Now Plato uses this to sketch an understandable portrait of what it means to be a philosopher in his attempt to educate the public.  Well if you think about it, everything. The same way courage sees his environment with mean people trying to hurt his owners with him trying to protect his reality with all costs, the same way Plato's people want to remain in the cave. In a way courage only sees what's in front of him and has a small world view because his owners are old and do not take him outside. And this is why the dog believes that his world is truly in the middle of nowhere and essentially stays unaware of what's out there. He also has his own shadow being casted on the wall in the intro which feeds into the theory that everything is only happening inside a courage's mind. Now this story creates a beautiful transition to understanding that the cave can represent these people who think that knowledge comes only from what we see and hear, the external stimuli. And this is still relevant because it can be read in far more ways. One must remember that Plato was no ordinary guy. He of course had crazy ideas such as the womb being a wild animal or that us humans are only mere featherless bipeds but he also came up with thoughts that fed into the creation of all western philosophy. Because the 20th century philosopher Alfred North whitehead put it, the safe general characterization of European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. One can even stretch it so much that we could say that Plato predicted quantum mechanics where the cave story still represents our inability to understand the true essence of reality. And Plato sensed this and attempted to convince others that it was a natural part of life and one should not be pushed back by our lack of understanding of the world but instead accept it and try to push the barriers of our abilities of the mind. The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. The cave story also feeds into another golden nugget which is Plato's theory of the form in which things in the physical world are only flawed reflections of ideal forms. And this is why we now have the word in the term Platonism which is the view that there exists such things as abstract objects where an abstract object is an object that does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely non-physical and non-mental. And this is why Platonism in this sense is a contemporary view as well. Now some people think that Plato is indeed overrated but not irrelevant. As far as I understood we do not really know how much of Plato's writings was based on his own ideas and how much did he use to stand on the shoulders of giants like Socrates. One of his fundamental works like The Republic comes and outlines some ideas that might seem impractical such as having mating festivals, no families and children being raised by the state. He also throws in that instead of having politicians and stuff you can have a philosopher king that will somehow remain enlightened and sane and not become a megalomaniac. And Plato is a gatekeeper, an expression of rationalism in the philosophical sense and he may have had a greater impact on the formation of Western philosophy than anybody else in history. And I think that it was a sincere attempt to make sense of reality using the best arguments and evidence available at that time because the most valuable aspect of studying philosophy in my opinion is that it teaches rational inquiry as a way of life. And it shows that all of these strange theories may coexist with a shared belief in reason as the way to truth.


Hello. Welcome to ongoing town meeting coverage from town meeting television. My name is Bobby Lucier and I'll be hosting the program today, which will focus on the ranked choice voting ballot item in Burlington. So this program is one of a series of forms that we're hosting in advance of town meeting day, which this year is on March 7th, coming up. And before we get started, just a reminder that if you are tuning in live, we welcome your questions anytime at<PHONE_NUMBER> and you can give us a call and we'll hear your question live on the air. And another reminder that you can watch town meeting TV on Comcast channel 1087, Burlington telecom channels 17 and 217 as well as on YouTube, youtube.com slash town meeting TV. So with that, we can now dive right into the ranked choice voting ballot item in Burlington. And I think we'll pull up the language here. So the ballot item states charter change, read the ability to use ranked choice voting for the election of mayor, school commissioners and ward election officers, shall the charter of the city of Burlington, acts of 1949, number 298 as amended, be further amended by Mending Title II, Section 5, election to be by ballot method of election runoff elections to adopt a ranked choice voting for the elections of mayor, school board commissioners and ward election officers. And so this ranked choice voting system has already been implemented for city council races in Burlington per vote in 2021 when 64 percent of Burlington voters voted in favor of installing the system, specifically just for city council elections. And now on team town meeting day this year, voters will have the choice to implement this system as well for future races for mayor as well as school board and election officials. So we're here to unpack this system a bit today and joining us, we have Ed Adrian from the Vermont Legislative Portionment Board as well as Sam McGinty, Sam McGinty who is the democracy advocate for V-Purge. Thank you both so much for joining us. Thank you. Awesome. So we'll jump into opening statements and Sam will just ask you to start off just to tell us a bit about yourself, why you're interested in this issue and how you're qualified to speak about the issue of ranked choice voting. Thank you so much. So happy to be here. Thanks to CCTV and Ed. Great to meet you. My name is Sam McGinty. I'm the democracy advocate with V-Purge which is the Vermont Public Interest Research Group where one of the state's largest environmental and consumer advocacy organizations and we're also one of the state's leading pro-democracy, pro-voter organizations in the state and we've worked on a host of pro-voter, pro-democracy issues ranging from same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, vote-by-mail, ballot curing, lots of different things that have really helped make Vermont one of the easiest and voter-friendly places to cast a ballot and that's great and that's awesome but there are still lots of problems with the way that we vote and some of that has to do with the limitations of a single-choice ballot and that's why V-Purge has been looking at systems like ranked-choice voting to help ameliorate some of the most common problems that we see in our elections with a single-choice ballot whether that's the lack of majority winners, spoiler candidates, you know negative campaigning and really we're so we've been working on ranked-choice voting for 20 some years or so and there's been a growing movement nationally in states and municipalities across the country and we're really excited that Burlington voters voted to bring back ranked-choice back in 2021. We've done lots of voter education, get out to vote, that kind of stuff and we're excited that beyond this past special election in December that the whole city is going to be able to use ranked-choice voting in city council elections and we're supportive of the expansion to bring the benefits of ranked-choice to virtually all local elections here in the city. Thanks so much, Sam. Ed? Thanks Bobby. Yes, I'm Ed Adrian. I am an attorney in private practice although the practice that I'm in we represent mostly municipalities around the state of Vermont so I'm constantly answering questions about fire departments and police and voting and open records laws. I'm also on the legislative apportionment board and I'm a former city councilor IRV in I think it was 2010 when Kurt Wright ran against Bob Kiss and Andy Montrow and Dan Smith and Dan Smith who was the independent thought that he would have a chance because of IRV but he still came in fourth so and I have the greatest respect for Dan. I have some real reservations and concerns about how IRV works and I'm going to call it IRV because that's what it is. One of my concerns actually is from the get-go is this rebranding. You know obviously somebody didn't like instant runoff voting or IRV so they said hey let's call it something else let's call it ranked-choice voting and Sam correct me if I'm wrong but I think they're the exact same system so whenever somebody tries to change their their appearance that's a red flag. So we're going to jump into the sort of mechanics of ranked-choice instant runoff and I'll ask you Ed to just describe what your understanding of how ranked-choice voting works and what the percentage is needed for someone to be considered a winner and then Sam you can jump in after that to if there's anything that you disagree with in terms of how it is described. Sure so you need 50 plus one the way that it works is let's say there's five people in the race you get to rank all five of them first choice second choice etc and they tally up all the votes after the first round and if nobody has 50 plus one they knock out the fifth place person they take the votes that went to the fifth place person reassign them based on how the people who voted for the fifth place person for the first choice rank the other people and they keep doing that until you get to 50 percent plus one. Sam does that sound right to you? Yeah that's that's accurate the one thing that'll add is you don't have to rank all of the candidates if you don't want to you can rank as many or as few as you want right now you can really only vote for one candidate in our current system but rank choice voting gives voters the opportunity to have a backup choice and for whatever reason if your top voter your first choice candidate is no longer viable it gives the voters to have their vote count for their next choice instead just as a Yeah you know I I like that Sam is mentioning that unfortunately what we've found and there's been studies on this is people don't like not filling in the blanks if they have the opportunity to do so you see that a lot with the senate races if people can vote strategically you know when we used to have a six person district senate district now there's two three senate districts but you know this last time there was actually one person that I only one out of three that I actually wanted to be the senator so I just voted for them but if you look at the percentages of people that will actually take that option and you look at the studies that have been done people think they're wasting a vote by not filling in the other two choices which is it's an opinion but it's not a true opinion because the vote is actually strengthened by not voting for those other two now if they want all three they want all three but I think the vast majority of people feel the need to rank everybody because it's there and they have the opportunity to do so so what impact does that then have on the on the election results well the problem with rank choice voting at its core is that there's no way for people to understand how it works once you get past the first round now I want to say the mechanics of it are understandable but you can't game out how you know if you if you vote for this person strategically who you think might come in fifth place out of the example that I gave there's no way to determine one you know in what order the other four people are going to come up whereas in the traditional voting system you always know that if you vote for one person that person is either going to win or lose and if there's an issue with that then we should just do it like we've always done it and have a runoff election or sorry Sam in the alternative what I would support is an open primary or open caucus in the case of city council elections and the top two or three vote getters they could be progressives all progressives all democrats all republicans or mix thereof or independents the top two or three then progress to the finals so you actually don't ever have to have a runoff election or the top two let's say because that way you don't have to deal with this 50 percent question so that is a system that's easy to understand that doesn't require any separate instructions that there's no barriers to for people that are older disabled english language learners that meshes well with the system that we currently have in place I'm going to jump to Sam for just your take on why you support this measure or don't and yeah you can take it away awesome well just to just respond briefly to what ed had to say rank choice voting is is really simple right you know the the idea of ranking things in order of preference is something that we do in our daily lives you know we're running a lot of voter education right now with Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavors for example and if I go to the grocery store and I'm thinking in my head like I really want to have fish food for dessert tonight but if there's no fish food at the grocery store I can have a backup choice and settle for chunky monkey or you know have you know chocolate therapy or something you know and that system is really intuitive and it's something that we do in our daily lives from small things like ice cream to really big decisions like where we're going to go to college or where we want to buy a house and voters have found rank choice voting to be really simple all all the polling from the major cities that have implemented it found that people were you know in the the 80th or 90th percentile in terms of voter confidence and voter understanding and it is a really easy to understand system and and on your point about strategic voting that is a really big problem with our single-choice elections and our first past the post elections or even a top two runoff election where voters have to go to the poll and really pick between the lesser of two evils if I go to the poll I have to vote for the candidate that I think has the best shot of winning because I don't want my vote to inadvertently help my least favorite candidate instead but with rank choice voting and this is one of the main reasons why we support it is I can go and vote for the candidate that I like the best and they may not have a great shot of winning right like they may be you know the Bernie Sanders in a presidential contest they may not actually win or have a real shot but I can still cast my vote and rank someone as a second choice and once Bernie Sanders or another candidate to that effect is eliminated my vote can still count for that second choice instead and that kind of moves and eliminates a little bit of that strategic voting because at the end of the day voters should vote their conscience and that's really important if I can yeah I mean I love the fact that you brought up Bernie Sanders because as many people are probably aware if we had instant runoff voting back in 1981 Bernie Sanders probably wouldn't we won't probably want to know who he is right because we know what happened in that race what happened was was that a spoiler Democrat or ex-democrat got in Dick Bove he's doing Bove's restaurant who sucked out about a thousand or so votes the incumbent mayor and Bernie were separated by 17 votes but it's it's pretty clear to the people that were watching at the time that the vast majority of the the Bove votes would have gone to the incumbent mayor and not to Bernie and so we wouldn't have had Bernie Sanders and you know in regard to the ice cream analogy it's cute but the problem is is that you're dealing with an electorate of one and this is not an electorate of one so yes we make choices all the times we rank things in our heads all the times whether they're colleges or ice cream but we only have to negotiate that with ourselves and maybe one or two other people who we live with thanks Ed we have a caller coming in um I'm going to take the call in a second here um okay I'm going to take the call here hello you're live on air can you share your name and your question with us yes hi my name is Lillian and I just want to know if you guys could talk a little about the benefits of ranked choice voting regarding candidates I heard it helps like more BIPOC and presenting people at the office is that true uh Sam we'll start with you for that one certainly um so a lot of the data that's been coming out of ranked choice voting elections across the country have indicated that it's helped elect and help encouraged run more females and BIPOC candidates it's no small secret that they are largely underrepresented in our elections and ranked choice voting really helps to open up that candidate field it's well documented that women and people of color are often targeted as spoilers in an election and either forced to drop out of a race based on you know party leaders or you know other constituent bases and not run in the first place but with ranked choice voting because of the elimination of the spoiler candidate effect there's really no reason for them not to get in another reason is a lot of research has shown that the vitriol and the negative campaigning in our elections is a is a major reason that a lot of female candidates don't get into the race in the first place and there's some great data out there from exit interviews and studies and surveys that have shown that ranked choice voting helps lower the the temperature of our politics because the candidates themselves they need to not only attract core support but help identify backup choices too and go across the aisle and when you're running an overtly negative campaign you ostracize you know huge portions of the voter base so take the may mares races across the city i think actually have a number here somewhere for rcv elected mares 47 percent are women and 53 percent are men and you take that in comparison to the 100 largest cities that don't use ranked choice voting and 31 percent of them are women and 69 percent of them are men so going into some of those factors that help open up the election we've seen some really great data that's shown that it that it does help more Sam what's the sample size on that that's a good question i mean the top 100 mares for the largest cities would be 100 sure and then rcv elected mares it's 63 jurisdictions that use it that i mean that's across the country out of the out of the hundred or just in general well so 63 cities are using at the municipal level for ranked choice but it's not the top 100 largest cities right but ranked choice voting is used in some really large cities like new york and san francisco and also a lot of really big counties in utah which is also a heavily red state sure i mean a couple of things one is i'm not sure that i totally agree with sam's position that it lowers the temperature in races because just look what went on in the new york city mayors race i mean that was a traditional knock down drag out you know mud slinging race that did attract women and by pock folks a by pock person did win but he was seen as you know one of the most conservative in the field relatively speaking former police lieutenant or or you know police officer and but also you know the politics is you know not a game for the fan of heart for better for worse especially now we live in an age where there's accessibility to all kinds of information and one of the ways that we vet people is their ability to withstand the pressure cooker of a campaign to see how they'll be able to withstand their time in office and i'm not saying it's the best system but until the time in office part becomes easier i do think they need to be vetted a little bit more in undergo some of those pressures as far as who we are electing um let me put this another way while you know i think that the the system where we have open primaries or open caucuses also encourages folks to run because again they're not spoilers if we look at california i think 50 something people ran in one of the last mayor election gubernatorial elections which is a little ridiculous but there you have it um they still got to gavin newson who is obviously one of the top-ranked candidates the whole time i would actually propose and i'm going to be blunt here i think that given an equal playing field um the system that i'm proposing versus rank choice voting actually uh elects more moderate candidates in general and i think that's better for democracy okay so we're going to turn now to what kinds of questions you each are uh fielding as you're um thinking about this issue and what so what kinds of questions and confusions are you hearing from members of the public on on rank choice voting and how do you typically respond to them and we'll start with that yeah i mean so i i think that over the years you know when this when this issue has come up and people have discussed it one of the largest misconceptions and i don't know how to dispel it and this goes back to something sam was saying is that when people think they have these choices like they think oh i'm going to vote for the second you know bob for second place then they somehow think that bob's gonna win they vote for him for second place so i think that there's this misconception that they have these other choices and they're gonna they're therefore going to you know if their first choice doesn't get it then their second or third choices is gonna get it um i don't know how that started exactly but you know here's the thing that i found ultimately at the end of the day is people don't really want a lot of people don't really want to pay attention to politics they want boring they want somebody that's going to be an adult and take care of the city of the state of the country and they don't want the drama and so they sort of tune out a lot of the background noise and part and parcel with that is when it comes to voting a lot of folks aren't as educated as they they could be because they just want you know the parties to represent them and they're less likely to look in depth into the people you know that's not everybody obviously but i think that represents a lot of people sam um we'll certainly get to that the voter misconception piece but i i agree with you adam that last part and i don't think that that is something that we should strive for in our democracy right like you look at some of the polling nationwide and it's something like well over 60 of voters identify as independence because they are truly upset with the two major parties right now and the two major parties themselves are not working together you know across party lines on really any issue and that is a disservice to voters and i look at some of the you know other things that v perk has worked on like universally mailed ballots and one of the things we heard from our members is voters really enjoyed the ability to sit down and have their ballot at their kitchen table and research those candidates and to you know really arm themselves when they cast their vote and it's great that that burlington is doing the exact same for this city council election and it's it's empowering voters to take their time with the ballot and you know to understand it and and do some of that research and i think that's a really good thing because we we don't want people to be disengaged at the ballot box and you know their participation democracy should go well beyond election day um one of the common things that i've heard as a question about casting a ballot with rank choice is whether you need to rank all of the candidates and you don't need to you know if you only feel strongly about one candidate or two candidates you only need to vote for one or two candidates uh you don't have to rank all of the candidates on the ballot thanks ham so we've mentioned it a couple times but there is some history here in burlington with rank choice voting it was installed in the 2000s and then was repealed in 2010 and now it's coming back so sam can you maybe describe a little bit about why you in why in your view it was initially repealed and then why it's come back again and whether it's changed substantially or why why we've had this kind of on and off relationship with rank choice voting uh yeah so ed gave a little bit of the background already there were three strong candidates in that race bob kiss who was running for reelection uh kurt right who is a republican city counselor at the time an anti-montral democrat uh in that first round kurt right uh was leading in first choice votes with like 33 percent um bob kiss was in second place with i think 28 percent and then anti-montral was the third place finisher like 21 percent um if that was how we were running our elections kurt right would have won that race without rank choice voting if there was no top two runoff or anything um but in one of the problems with that is at the at the time and i think it's true right now is burlington is a largely left-leaning city and the two strong left-leaning candidates split that vote um and once anti-montral is eliminated the vast majority of his support went to bob kiss and bob kiss ended up winning that election um after he was in office uh mayor kiss became really unpopular there was a scandal with the misuse of public funds and i think it was burlington telecom is that that right um and he became really unpopular and as a as a really a referendum on the mayor himself um a lot of kurt right supporters led a repeal effort to get it off the ballot um and in by all accounts rank choice voting worked as it should have that repeal effort was really thin it only passed with 52 percent support and it was the repeal was only favored in two of burlington's seven wards uh both of which were kurt right strongholds um so for the rest of the city they they didn't really want to get rid of rank choice voting and there was a really strong vote in 2021 to bring it back with over 64 percent support um we had a really strong test run on the 12-6 special election and vprik had the opportunity to do some very non-scientific exit polling of voters coming out of the polls and you know by and large the vast majority of folks said it was really positive they love the ability to rank candidates uh much sam i think just in the interest of time we're going to turn it over to ed why did you think what are you in your view is it repealed and then coming back i would agree with what sam said about you know it's some of it is was a reflection of of the weakness of mayor kiss unfortunately i do want to think i think correct sam on something after the first round i believe kurt right had 37 percent i think in which case under burlington's charter at the time he wouldn't have won because he needed a 40 threshold so there would have run off between kurt right and bob kiss um i agree that burlington's generally left leaning but there was a huge gap between bob kiss and andy mantra now both bob and andy were not dynamic candidates but i think when push came to shove democrats who voted for andy could not bring themselves to vote for kurt right just because he had the r next to his name if kurt wasn't at most other states you know he's probably a phil scott republican or pretty close to it and i've had my disagreements with kurt believe me um but i think that that my belief is that when the progressives put up bob kiss to begin with they never thought he had a chance of winning and nobody else wanted to run and they were shocked when he won the first time um so you know it's it's a little bit of that that being uh tested in the cauldron uh that didn't occur in that instance where if uh bob was tested a little bit further and pushed a little bit further then perhaps he wouldn't have won so i think we've just got a couple minutes here so we're going to wrap up with closing state statements i think you have about a minute we'll start with you ed uh thanks so much for the opportunity to speak today it's always fun to come to channel 17 and uh everybody here does a great service and is always welcoming um i you know i'm going to be voting against this i i would support a different system i do think we need a different system to make things a little bit less acrimonious but i still like the head to head nature of our elections rather than watering it down through an irv system i think that um open ballots i'm sorry open primaries or open caucuses can achieve that just the same way there has been success in those in other states um i think they lead to more moderate candidates and i think more moderate candidates are generally better for society because they create less tension thanks head sam closing statement awesome yeah thank you to cctv thank you ed for this conversation it's been awesome um myself as a war two voter um is going to vote in favor of this and v perg is strongly in support of this as a way uh to really improve our democracy by giving voters more choices and more voices um and to help ameliorate some of the biggest problems that we're seeing in our election with spoiler candidates and electing people who don't have majority support um and one of the benefits of rank choice voting if it were a if we were to do a top two runoff is uh it saves taxpayers money from a costly and separate runoff election which is proven to have low voter turnout um and and that's a problem too and and this really doesn't solve everything but it does give some real solutions to some of the biggest problems that we're seeing in our election so thank you guys so much for for having this and putting it on yeah thanks so much sam thank you sam and thank you all for tuning in um and uh stay tuned for more of town meeting tv's coverage of town meeting day local candidates local budgets and valid items make sure you vote on march seventh ballots are not mailed automatically uh this year or actually is that true they are in burlington they are mailed automatically um and um you can make sure that you get out to the ballot or uh put your vote in the mail before march seventh um thanks so much for watching and sharing town meeting tv