Transcript: 4: Gremlins, guitars and lawn mowers

Clip: (All the Docs together) Paging all Tech Docs, the clinic is open. Your technology has a fever? Your network is short of breath, or your system just stopped responding? You're in the right place. Here we diagnose digital disorders, troubleshoot stubborn symptoms, and prescribe real-world fixes for modern tech problems. No guesswork, no snake oil, just practical solutions. Welcome to...

Welcome and Personal Updates

Jade: Well, hello. We are back with take two. We'd like to first of all apologise to listeners for the gremlins that got into our machines and made our last episode impossible to publish. But thanks to a Facebook follower, we think we've got the solution, by throwing water on them, and they are now gone. So you're all very welcome to our June episode of The Tech Docs. This is episode four. As usual, I am going to start by asking everyone how your month was, for a second time. So Jackie, how are you?

Jackie: I'm fine. My month has been listening to a lot of audiobooks. I've just finished my hundred and forty-fifth. And I've also been debating: was Mr Bump actually blind or visually impaired? Because I'm reading him in braille at the minute, and he just seems to have a sight issue, and he's very misunderstood.

Jade: Absolutely. To be fair, that's a good way of looking at it. And I wonder if our listeners might have any views on that.

Jackie: But that's just me.

Jade: Excellent. And Ken, how about you? How are you?

Ken: I'm good, Jade, thanks. Like Jackie, listening away to audiobooks. I'm following a series of books called The Grey Man series. I've just finished the third book, and I hope to start the fourth one maybe tomorrow or the next day. Other than that, I've kept going with the DigiCoach project for Fighting Blindness, and just getting out for a walk when the weather allows. Other than that, just keeping myself busy.

Jade: Amazing. Fantastic. You're going to have to start doing us a book recommendation now, Ken.

Ken: I think so. I finished one book in about two days, and I was up till about one o'clock in the morning. I was like, I'll give it five minutes, and before I knew it, five minutes turned into one o'clock in the morning.

Jade: I am the very same. Anyway, Pat, how are you?

Pat: I'm good. As I was just trying to warn you earlier on: do not throw water on gremlins. It makes them multiply. Yeah, I'm taking your role, Jade: this month I'm the Travelling Doc. I'm over in the States, lapping up thirty-one degrees Celsius out there at the minute. I'm trying to stay out of it. And I'm just looking at tech over here a little bit while I'm here. I was speaking to somebody yesterday, and there's one or two different things that I might report on at some stage, in a later episode.

Jade: Oh, do definitely keep us posted. I always find that when you go Stateside, there's so much more that we don't know about.

Pat: Yeah. I'm looking into a piece of tech at the minute that I think a lot of people could find useful. A bit expensive, but...

Jade: What technology isn't?

Pat: Exactly, exactly.

Jade: Well, I will reclaim my seat very soon. But at least you're enjoying the sun while it's miserable and raining here in Ireland.

Pat: That makes it all the better.

Jade: Exactly. And Stuart Haxell, before you tell us how you are: you've had an extremely busy time, so we want to first congratulate you. Do you want to tell our listeners why we're congratulating you?

Stuart H: Oh, I don't know. That's news to me. Is this not about a Monopoly game?

Jade: No, it is not. It is the best game, but you can get to that later.

Stuart H: Okay, fair enough. No, I took part in two blind tennis competitions. The first was over in lovely Loughborough, at Loughborough University, for a regional UK blind tennis tournament, where I got fifth out of twelve, and third place in the doubles. That was out of at least twenty people who took part. And the week after, having barely recovered, I took part in the Irish Nationals here in Shankill, which were open to international players for the first time since they held the world tournament in 2018. And I retained my Irish number one title.

Jade: I'm going to be cheeky and say, if anybody wants to hear about that tennis championship, you can listen to it on Out of Sight with Joe G.

Stuart H: Other than that, I've been listening to a few audiobooks. One that was recommended by the PhD Doc over there in the corner was God Is Disappointed in You.

Jade: I am also listening to that book.

Stuart H: That was hilarious, I have to say, and I highly recommend it.

Jade: I'm not really sure where I sit with it at the minute, but I am also listening.

Stuart H: At the very least, it's very entertaining.

Jade: It is, yeah. It's very good. So everyone has been good and reading a lot of books, which is amazing. My month has been... I would like to say a huge well done and congratulations to my sister, who, by the time this episode comes out, will have finished her Leaving Cert exams. I am extremely proud of her. We all are. She's an amazing young lady, and I can't wait to see what the future holds for her. So by the time this comes out, Taylor, you're free! It's been a long six years in school for her.

Stuart H: Huge congratulations.

Jackie: Yes, exactly.

Listener Emails and Spoken Content Tip

Jade: So aside from all our personal news, have we any follow-up from the last podcast? Stuart, do we have any emails?

Stuart H: We do. We actually got a reply to our question about what the Andrea Mara book was, from Jackie Coyle. Do you remember what she said in her email? Because it's gone out of my head there for a second.

Jade: That bloody gremlin isn't gone.

Stuart H: Yeah, there's at least one gremlin.

Jackie: It Should Have Been You.

Ken: It Should Have Been You. Fair play, Jackie.

Stuart H: Fair play.

Jackie: So all Jackies know books.

Ken: Yeah, exactly. We won't disagree with you, Jackie.

Stuart H: So thank you so much, Jackie, for giving us the name of that book. It was driving us mad on the last podcast.

Jade: And we also had an email that I held back for Pat. By the way, Pat, welcome back, because you were missing from our last podcast that officially went out. So welcome back. I should have said that at the start. We hope you had a fabulous birthday. But I do have a question, so I'm going to put you back to work now.

Pat: Oh God.

Jade: A listener wrote in and asked if you could please explain using spoken content on the screen with magnification.

Pat: Yep. It's something I only discovered recently enough myself. It's to do with the controller for the onscreen magnifier, or Zoom. Basically, you can take any piece of text, be it in a text message, an email or on a website, and just have a line or a paragraph read to you. It's just a setting within the Spoken Content section. So you go into Settings, Accessibility, Spoken Content, and then Speak Screen. In there, down towards the bottom, you're going to see the controller's actions, and one of the controls is for Double Tap. When you go in there, you can choose Speak on Touch. Once that's switched on, and again, just make sure the controller itself is switched on, which is just above that section, then when you go into any text, you just double-tap with one finger on the controller. Your on-screen magnification will help you see it. Then just tap anywhere within the text, and it'll read it to you. It's so easy compared to what I used to do, which was having to highlight a paragraph or a line, then go into a menu and choose Speak. That was a slower process, and it's very hard to highlight just a specific area. So this really cuts out a lot of effort.

Jade: It definitely seems more streamlined. I wish that when I was using magnification on my phone, I could have done this. But we live in hope all the time, don't we?

Pat: Yep.

Jade: But it's funny that you think about things being more streamlined, because Jackie and Stuart were very fortunate to catch up with the founder of ScribeMe.

Interview with ScribeMe Founder Mark Morad

Jade: ScribeMe had a bit of an unfortunate incident where it disappeared off the App Store. The gremlins must have got in there too. But we're delighted to say it's back, aren't we, Stuart?

Stuart H: Absolutely. And me and Jackie were absolutely delighted that we got to interview Mark Morad from ScribeMe. We started off by asking him a personal question, to explain his journey and where he came from.

Mark: I'm Mark Morad. I was actually born fully sighted. I had no problems with my vision until sixth grade. That's when I started to notice that my vision was getting weaker over time. I couldn't see the whiteboard, I couldn't read the A4 papers. At first I thought this was something normal: I would wear glasses and everything would be fine. We visited many doctors' appointments, and no one knew what it was. My vision was getting weaker very fast, week by week. And then I was diagnosed with optic nerve atrophy, which basically means your optic nerve gets weaker over time. I knew that one day I would go blind, but I didn't know when. That day came in tenth grade. I was in school, taking an exam, and I couldn't see the paper, couldn't see the iPad. I couldn't see anything. This was probably the darkest moment in my life, especially as I used to play tennis when I was young.

I also wanted to major in a subject where, in order to do that, I had to take physics and chemistry in grades 11 and 12. These were really hard, because, as you know, physics and chemistry are all about visuals: charts, graphs. There was no tool that could help me study independently. I had to rely on others. And that's when I had the idea of building ScribeMe.

Stuart H: Could you please tell us about ScribeMe, and where the general idea for it came from?

Mark: I started to work on ScribeMe when I was in 11th grade, and it was doing a simple task: helping me study independently. When I was working on the app, I tried to make it have good OCR, and also describe any images found inside the file. After a couple of months iterating on the app, I published it on the Microsoft Store. At first it was very simple. Then I worked on making it describe images. So if you have a PowerPoint or a PDF, you just upload the file, and it will scan the text, and if it detects any image inside the file, it describes it. For example, if you have a physics PowerPoint with a chart that has an X axis and a Y axis, it tells you what numbers are on the graph, and if the line is going up, that this means it's a positive change. It basically explains everything I needed to know.

That started to gain recognition. Like I said, the first version was published on the Microsoft Store, and then users wanted to have the app on mobile as well. So after some time, we were able to publish ScribeMe on mobile, because it made it easier for users to study through their phone without needing their laptop everywhere. And from there we also introduced Live Assist, which is a real-time AI assistant that can continuously describe your surroundings as it happens. What makes it unique compared to other apps is that you only need to ask once, and it will continuously describe things as they change. You don't have to ask three hundred times, "What do you see now? How about now?", like other apps.

Stuart H: That's amazing. I've used ScribeMe on numerous occasions for different things: trying to scan PDFs, as you said, and using Live Assist. Is it free for people to use, or is there a subscription?

Mark: In the documents section, you get one file every twenty-four hours, with a maximum of ten pages. And for Live Assist, you have ten minutes for free every twenty-four hours as well. Then we have a subscription that's twenty dollars per month, which gives you a hundred points per month and also unlimited access to Live Assist.

Jackie: I have also used the live AI, out and about, and I found it very beneficial. I was looking for a particular shop, and you're walking down the sidewalk, and suddenly it says, "I see a glass building," and it named the shop, and I was like, "Wow, that is cool." But there's such a restriction on live AI in Europe. What made it possible for you to have live AI in Europe?

Mark: I think Meta AI is a bigger company, so they have to deal with more regulations. But with ScribeMe, maybe regulators have not noticed ScribeMe yet. We'll see how it goes in the future.

Jackie: What I noticed when I was using it: I was in a shop, and there were people standing in front of me, children basically. And it never identified the people. It just said there's a group of people standing. So even though it was telling me what was there, it wasn't giving any personal details about the people. And I find that fascinating.

Stuart H: And you've got it working on the Meta glasses these days. How's that going?

Mark: We published ScribeMe's Live Assist on the Meta glasses, I think, a month ago. Time goes very fast. And ever since, it's been very good. We've got users from all over the world using ScribeMe on the Meta glasses. Something that really shocked me is that in the blind community, the Meta glasses are a normal thing. When we published on the Meta glasses, I thought we'd get a small number of users who have the glasses, but it turns out everyone in the blind community has the glasses.

Stuart H: Yeah, it's part of the blind uniform now, I think, at this point. You have your cane, you have your Meta glasses, or you have your guide dog.

Mark: Exactly. And it made it much easier for users outside, because it's hands-free now. You won't need to hold your phone everywhere you go. You just keep your phone in your pocket, and you can see everything through the glasses.

Stuart H: Yes, it absolutely is. I tried it the first time once I got access, and I was blown away: just looking around, I kept getting descriptions as I was turning my head. So if this is a sign of where things are going in the future, I'm really looking forward to it.

Jackie: And where do you see it going? A feature I would love to see is if you could personalise the AI, if you wanted a grumpy one, or if you could program your details into the app so it would know your name and stuff.

Stuart H: Like custom instructions, I think.

Mark: Yes. We actually had thought of this idea, and we're working on making it more personalised, where you could customise the AI based on your needs, and customise the tone. And we actually just made an update today. It's going to be more impressive, because it's much faster in responding. The older version took two to three seconds to respond. This takes less than two seconds, so it's going to feel much more natural, and much faster.

Stuart H: I believe I actually got that update as you were coming into the podcast. I got a TestFlight update from ScribeMe saying it had updated, so I'm looking forward to trying that out. I think that's all the questions I have. Jackie, do you have any questions?

Jackie: No, I just want to thank you so much for creating the app, because it is a literal game changer. Having AI on the glasses is absolutely amazing, and being out and about, it's absolutely amazing.

Stuart H: So thank you for joining us for this interview. It's been absolutely fantastic.

Jade: Lads, you really got a lot out of him, and it was great to hear all about ScribeMe. I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and buy a pair of Meta glasses.

Jackie: His story's really fascinating.

Jade: He's a very interesting guy.

Ken: And very sincere as well.

Jade: Yeah, I was going to say, Ken, along those lines, he's very softly spoken. He comes across as a lovely guy. So we wish ScribeMe the very best of luck, and I look forward to trying it.

Website Updates and Voice Notes

Jade: We also had a suggestion from Tony Sweeney. Tony suggested that we try using voice notes. So we have taken your suggestion on board, Tony. So if you'd like to contact the show, here's how you can do it.

Clip: Did you know we now have a brand new website? You can visit us at www.thetechdocpod.com. You can contact the show through the website. You can even send us a new ninety-second voice note. Give it a try. We'd love to hear from you.

Jade: Are people genuinely going to get sick of hearing my voice? It seems to be everywhere. So our very own Captain Doc has been very busy in the background creating our website, and all of the contact details and past episodes are available to view there. And you've also added the ninety-second voice note feature, which we have tested, and it works. So we'd love to hear from you. If you have any questions or feedback, or even if you just want to say hello, we would love to hear from our listeners. Stuart, speaking of vibe coding, let's go down the route of tech games and toys, and be modern for a minute, because you designed the website using vibe coding.

Stuart H: I did!

Jade: But that's not the only thing you've done.

Stuart H: Well, that is true. I briefly let it slip earlier, but I did make a Monopoly game using vibe coding. It's framed more around disability: the Community Chest and Chance cards are funny, and when you pass Go, you get the Disability Allowance.

Jade: Can I say, it is addictive and it is funny, and I keep losing to the AI every single time.

Stuart H: And then I just had to go and make it harder for you by adding a difficulty setting.

Jade: Yes, you did. But no, it's fantastic. And if listeners would like to try it...

Stuart H: Absolutely. I'll try and do a small demonstration that we can put out on social media, for people to listen to and see what they think.

Childhood Tech Toys and Memories

Jade: That would be amazing. So you're making me think back to how apps and toys have evolved, from when we were younger to now. My first tech toy, or first piece of tech, if you will, rather than an app: the one that I remember was a Fisher-Price radio. You could put cassette tapes in it and play them, and it had a microphone, and you could actually listen to the radio. I think I used to drive my poor mother mental. Mam, if you're listening to this, do you forgive me?

Stuart H: I actually think I used to have that, because I vaguely remember having something with a microphone that slipped into the side of it, with a solid handle that goes up and around the top.

Jade: Yes!

Stuart H: So I guess I must have had the same thing as you.

Jade: I loved it. And also Tamagotchis. Lads, who didn't have a Tamagotchi?

Stuart H: My sister had them, I think.

Jackie: I never had a Tamagotchi. I did have a Furby.

Stuart H: We had Furbies too. They didn't last long, I don't think.

Jade: But the older I got, the creepier the Furby became. And I had an obsession, and my mother will tell anyone who will listen, that was borderline weird, with porcelain dolls.

Jackie: Oh no, they freak me out as well.

Stuart H: As you can hear, our main topic today is tech toys. So let's go around the table and ask everyone. Jade has already given her tech toy, so I'll give mine. The very first bit of tech that I remember having was the talking watch that would never shut up. It would wake you up in the middle of the night going off with that cock-a-doodle-doo. Sometimes it was in the middle of class, in senior or junior infants, and people were looking around wondering, "What is this noise?"

Jade: I got banned from wearing mine in school.

Stuart H: Did anyone else, apart from me and Jade, have one?

Ken: No.

Jackie: I was in secondary school, and I bashed mine off the bottom of something, so it wouldn't stop talking, and I was like, "Oh, for God's sake."

Jade: "It is five forty-five a.m."

Stuart H: So Jackie, what are your tech toys?

Jackie: Well, I just have to share a funny story. Being a girl and all that, you were lumbered with a baby doll, and I would get clothes for the dolls. And I was being quite violent. One day I had the doll sitting in the pram with the hood up, and I started to shake the doll by the throat. I was only about eight, so forgive me. Some man jumped out of his car. He thought it was a real baby.

Stuart H: Oh no!

Ken: Hopefully there's no kids listening.

Jade: We do not encourage the shaking of babies, no.

Jackie: No, definitely not. But it was just hilarious. I got the shock of my life.

Stuart H: Well, I've got our disclaimer for our show notes now.

Jade: They do have reborn dolls, and they look scarily lifelike.

Jackie: Yeah, they're creepy.

Jade: Well, I have heard some stories, and whether they're believable or not is beyond me, but apparently there have been some reborn dolls known to grow hair.

Jackie: Oh God.

Pat: I could do with one of those. Okay, well, let's just say that no dolls have been harmed in the making of this podcast. My first memory of tech was also a watch: a digital watch with numbers that lit up red. I can't remember if it made any sounds. Showing my age now, there was a programme on at the time called Gemini Man, and when he pressed the button on his watch, he went invisible. I think he had superpowers; I honestly can't remember. But I remember running around with this watch, fascinated by the red numbers showing up on the screen, pressing a button and pretending I was invisible. My mother probably wished that I was. But it's funny: I still like that on the Apple Watch you can double-tap the screen and get the time read out to you. I still feel like a superhero when I do that.

Ken: You sound a bit like Michael Knight from Knight Rider.

Pat: Yeah, completely the same, Ken. The other one, more assistive tech, I suppose, was the reader, I can't remember the name of it, where you ran a little mouse across the page of a book.

Jackie: Oh yes, I had one of them as well.

Jade: That was my very first CCTV experience.

Pat: Mine too. The first time I read a book from start to finish. I was just fascinated by it.

Jade: It took a little while to read, if I remember correctly, because if the page went askew, you'd have to line it up again.

Jackie, actually, it's funny: it's because of you that we came to this topic originally. You had something years ago that was really simple, and I don't think it was even an assistive tech toy, was it?

Jackie: It did talk, but you could turn the speech off. It was a Franklin Language Master. It was like a wee mini computer, and it had games on it as well. I built up my speed in typing by using it, because there was a game where it would call out letters, and you'd have to press the letter before the thing fell. And there were anagrams and hangman. And it only died recently.

Stuart H: We'll have a moment's silence.

Jade: RIP, Franklin.

Stuart H: RIP, Franklin.

Jade: And Ken, you're very quiet there. It's always the quiet ones.

Stuart H: It's always the quiet ones you have to be afraid of.

Ken: We've the Munster final now on Saturday, Jade. We could be drowning our sorrows.

Jade: We won't talk about that.

Stuart H: So what's your tech toy, then?

Ken: The Atari. It probably did have a number, but for the life of me, I can't remember it. Basically, it was a square kind of machine that you connected up to the TV, and you'd put these cartridges into the machine. There were car games and soccer games and jumping games and shooting games.

Jade: I remember these.

Jackie: Oh yeah.

Stuart H: I think we used to have one here, and we used to have Sonic on it.

Ken: It was so easy to use, and you'd have two joysticks. The only thing was, the joysticks were very finicky, because you'd be absolutely whacking them, and the wires would break inside, so you'd have to get someone to open them up and solder them back on again.

Jade: God, do you remember that? When it wasn't as simple as, "I'll just go get a new one," or "I'll order one from Amazon."

Ken: Get the soldering gun, yeah. And they were very sensitive. You had two buttons to press and this little joystick that you'd be whacking the hell out of. And then poor Atari went to heaven. I sat on the game, and that was the end of Atari.

Jade: No!

Stuart H: RIP, Atari.

Jackie: I had a Sega Master System, and I finished Sonic the Hedgehog. All the levels. I finished them. And no wonder I'm blind, because I would have been literally nose to the screen trying to see what it was doing.

Jade: That's an achievement in itself, Jackie.

Jackie: Oh, the brilliant bit is when he jumped onto the thing at the end and all the rings went around him. I was like, I finished Sonic, and I still had lives left.

Ken: And does anyone remember Snake on the Nokia? That was brilliant.

Jade: I was obsessed.

Jackie: I could never play it.

Jade: Like you, Jackie, I was nose to the screen. It got really annoying, because the longer the snake got, the harder it was to get the food, and you'd have to make it do loop-de-loops and then try and get it back out.

Ken: There were different levels as well, I think.

Stuart H: There were indeed.

Jade: I think at one point I got to level ten, and I was delighted with myself.

Pat: I think Tetris nearly ended my first Nokia phone, because I used to line the blocks up perfectly as they came down, and I was so proud of myself, and at the last minute they seemed to move for some reason.

Ken: How did we ever do it? The screen was so small.

Pat: I know. I was sure I had it lined up properly, until it got that close and I realised, oh no, and I'd try to move it over just one space, and of course it would turn upside down. Oh my God.

Stuart H: I can just imagine it in slow motion.

Ken: I remember I had to get a little magnifying glass to try and play it. You weren't even looking at the keys; you were just moving your finger, holding the magnifying glass on the screen.

Pat: I was just threatening it with a hammer, basically.

Ken: It was very addictive, though.

Pat: Seeing as everybody knows these episodes don't go out live, should we record "Well done, Cork" or "Ah, too bad, Cork"?

Ken: No.

Jade: No, let's just leave it.

Pat: Okay, let's leave it with "Too bad, Cork." Maybe next time.

Stuart H: Let's ask the audience to email in their tech toys, and what they have to contribute to this conversation.

Jade: Absolutely. And I'm going to yet again put our producer on the spot. Stuart, can you come out of the control room for a second, please?

Stuart L: Right, I'm back from the control room. You keep making me run in and out of the control room.

Jade: I'm sorry, but I do believe there was a story that your sisters told me about a toy you had when you were younger, and I remember my daughter having a very similar toy. So do you want to tell us what your first toy was? It's not exactly tech, but it's interesting.

Stuart L: It's not tech at all, but it's funny: I was only talking to my dad about this recently, and we talked about how it was sort of a mobility aid. My toy was a toy lawnmower, and I loved it, and it would click, click, click along. We went on a family holiday to Sligo, and I was on Rosses Point beach, which I'm sure Stuart and Jackie are very familiar with. I used to walk on Rosses Point beach pushing my lawnmower ahead of me, click, click, click, and it would make a different clicking sound when it hit the sea, so I'd know I was at the water.

Jade: But surely you'd hear the splash anyway.

Stuart L: Well, you know me. But we talked about it recently, and they were saying it was like an early cane: I was pushing it out in front of me, detecting things. The odd time it hit a rock or a stone, and I'd stop and move the lawnmower around. And it even had a little cord on the front, like the pull cord you'd use to start a real lawnmower. I loved my lawnmower. I don't know where it is now.

Ken: Did it have a name, Stuart?

Stuart L: That's a good question. But it's gone somewhere now, in the great loft in the sky.

Stuart H: It's gone up to heaven with Franklin and the Atari.

Stuart L: It's chatting to Franklin there.

Jade: So Mrs Lawler, if you're listening: did Stuart have a name for the lawnmower, and where is it now?

Stuart H: And everyone else: if it didn't have a name, what do you think it should have been called?

Jade: My daughter had a very similar lawnmower, a really simple thing, except it was revolutionised in that it blew bubbles.

Pat: I remember those.

Ken: And just a funny story on names, actually: my retired guide dog is Marley. My friend has him now, and she got a robot hoover. She was asking me, "What do you think I should call it?", and I was like, "I have no idea." She was thinking about it for ages, and when I was talking to her the next day, she said, "I called him Bob." That's actually fitting: Bob Marley. We both had the same thought, to call him Bob.

Stuart H: That's good.

Jade: We all need those robot vacuums.

Jackie: Sorry, just on Stuart's thing: when I lost my sight, for some reason, when I was in the hospital, I had an inflatable guitar with me. I don't know why. So I used the inflatable guitar: I held it with the neck sticking out, so I would know if I was going to hit off the wall or the doors.

Stuart H: Did it hit the D, the E or the G chord?

Jackie: I'm so baffled. Why did I have an inflatable guitar in the hospital?

Ken: Jackie, I think that's a sign. They're taking auditions for Britain's Got Talent at the moment, so maybe that could be a sign.

Jade: We'll have to be the Tech Docs band. Does anyone have a name we could be? Pat, I think you said you had a name for us.

Pat: I did. Because I've been eating so much since I came out here, I've needed to expand the elastic on my pants. So I think: The Elastic Band.

Stuart H: Okay, I think before this deteriorates any more, we should move along.

Jade: Yeah, I think we should move on. You're right, it's getting chaotic. Another suggestion for us was to have a news segment, which we will work on. But for now, we are going to introduce something new to you, lovely listeners. And we're going to call this one... the remaining gremlin.

Tech Doc Tip on VoiceOver Gestures

Clip: (The remaining gremlin) Okay, okay, I'll say it. It's time for a Tech Doc Tip. You'll be told something you didn't know you needed to know. This month's tip is...

Jackie: Okay. You know the Escape command, the scrub? I have changed that to a two-finger gesture on the top edge of the screen. To do this, you go into Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, Commands, Touch Gestures. And you can do it for any command you don't really use. I find this great, because I struggle to do the backward Z because of my fingers. So my tip today is: look at the commands on your phone and see if you can change them to make them easier than they are at the moment.

Jade: That's actually a very good tip. And thanks to one of my fellow DigiCoaches, or Tech Docs, I learned to do a four-finger single tap to paste.

Ken: And Jackie, I've been showing my clients that tip this week. They struggle with the scrub too, so I'm setting it to a one-finger triple tap, because a lot of them find that easier.

Jackie: It's amazing what you can do in Commands and gestures.

Ken: There's so much in there. Absolutely.

Stuart H: I'd agree, definitely. For the longest time, I was never able to do the scrub, so I just ignored it. I'd say it was last year when I finally...

Jade: It took Meta breaking Facebook for us.

Ken: Yes, exactly.

Jade: If listeners take away any Tech Doc advice from this month's episode, it is to change your gestures, have a play with them, and see what you can make easier for yourself.

Ken: And don't blame us if it goes wrong.

Stuart H: Absolutely. And you can always reset them back to default. There's a reset in there in Commands, if things start going too crazily wrong.

Jade: Oh, would you look at that: we just gave our advice.

Wrap Up and Mysterious Outro Music

Jade: So it is time for us to say goodbye. Thank you, as always, to all of our listeners for listening and for your support. And remember, you can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts, and also on our brand new shiny website, thetechdocpod.com. We'd really appreciate it if you could give us a like and a review, and tell your friends about us. Or the gremlins might come after you to make you listen.

Jackie: Yes, exactly.

Stuart H: And as we've been told, water only makes them multiply.

Jade: Well, clearly we haven't got rid of all the gremlins. One still remains.

Stuart H: So the gremlin is the mascot. We keep the gremlin.

Ken: We'll keep him, yeah.

Jade: Yeah, so we would like listeners to name our gremlin.

Jackie: This feels very much like Bear in the Big Blue House. Bye, everyone!

(Music starts playing.)

Stuart H: What's that?

Ken: It sounds very much like him.

Jade: Maybe he's singing in the control room and doesn't realise his microphone is on.

Stuart H: I think we've given him too much power.

Jade: We're going to have to ask him back next time to explain this, if it is him. So, listeners, we would like you to answer: is it Stuart Lawler, or is it AI?

Stuart H: And what on earth is he singing?

Ken: He could join Britain's Got Talent, maybe.

Stuart H: We've found a lead singer, at least.

(The episode closes with the mystery song from the control room.)