Most people today get great joy out of buying a new car if they can afford it. Our buddy Ron has a ten-year-old Tesla Model S, and rather than buying a new car, he decided to have Tesla install a brand new battery.

In our conversation, Ron explains what the original battery was and talks about the original range and how it's degraded over the last decade. One of the big reasons to replace the battery was that the older batteries did not charge very quickly at Superchargers, but the new ones do.

While Ron doesn't put a lot of annual miles on his car, he does go on very long road trips, including an 1,800-mile drive just this year.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2026_04_01

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In this fascinating discussion with Adam Engst, we discuss how he used to think that reading added information to essentially a database in his brain. Recently, though, he has started to think about his brain as a large language model, and that instead, reading is changing the weights of the model to include new information.

Here's a link to the article on tidbits.com/... where Adam explains this concept in full detail.

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The charming Adam Engst joins us to talk about his vision of How Siri Could Become the Mac’s New Help System. His vision is that since Apple knows everything about macOS, it doesn't seem a big leap that we should just be able to ask Siri how to do things on our Mac. It could access all of the developer documentation to do this without breaking a sweat. Of course, we wandered off the reservation into talking about how apps could do this too, and of course, we had great fun together noodling this idea.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2026_02_27

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You may know Jason Howell from his work hosting Daily Tech News Show with Tom Merritt, or his work on the All About Android and Android Faithful Podcasts, or hosting Tech News on the TWiT Network. Over the last two decades, he’s been the voice translating complex technology into clear, human stories that connect with real audiences.

In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Jason joins me to talk about the state of smart glasses. He talks about the different approaches, including simple microphone/speaker/camera glasses, those with monocular or binocular screens for projecting information onto the real world in front of you, and those that provide a full immersive experience in a pair of glasses. We talk Meta, RayNeo, Infinix, Even Realities, XREAL, and Lumus, the waveguide technology company behind Ray-Bans.

You can find Jason at YouTube.com/@JasonHowell

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2026_02_03

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Adam Engst of TidBITS joins me this month to talk about the wonderful world of macOS Tahoe's menu icons. You may not have noticed, or you may not have upgraded to macOS 26 yet, but nearly every menu item in every dropdown menu on nearly every application now has a tiny icon next to it.

In this discussion, Adam and I go through the fabulous blog post by Nikita Prokopov entitled It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons where he shows examples of the problems they cause. From indecipherable to inconsistent, there are a lot of problems.

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In this rather propeller beanie episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart Busschots explains how to configure your DNS records on your server to ensure you can send email from your domain. Like I said, it's nerdy, but we know a fair number of NosillaCastaways host their own servers and will enjoy learning how all of this works. Or maybe it's just that I really wanted to understand more about MX Records and such, so it was fun for me!

This episode also has a full written explanation written by Bart, so you'll have it as a reference when you're done listening.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_12_30

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In this week's episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, Adam Engst joins us to valiantly attempt to explain to us how the new Phone app is supposed to work in iOS 26. He'll demystify the Classic and Unified views and even help you figure out how to call someone from the calls list in the two different views. Of course, he's written up several articles on the topic for your later reference:

Hidden Setting Controls What Happens When You Tap a Call in the Phone App

Comparing the Classic and Unified Views in iOS 26’s Phone App

How to Set Contact Avatars and Posters on the iPhone

I want to make sure that you realize TidBITS is predominantly reader-supported (93%). The fine folks (and especially Adam) have been writing long-form, thoughtful content about the Apple world for 35 years. If you appreciate Adam being on Chit Chat Across the Pond once a month, be like me and support the work at TidBITS by going to the Membership page to sign up for as little as $20/year.

This week, our guest is the ever-delightful Adam Engst of TidBITS. In this episode, he explains what agentic web browsers are and what they are designed to do for you. Adam put five of them through their paces. I don't want to spoil the story, but he uses phrases like "full cuckoo", "daydreams in class", "hapless third graders", requiring "academic integrity referral", and "like a scared, insecure intern". In other words, it doesn't go well.

As always. Adam has a full write-up on TidBITS in his article entitled, Can Agentic Web Browsers Count?

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• PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us
• CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude