Background Mode Podcast

Victor Fiss has had a distinguished career leading teams to implement, integrate, and manage enterprise wide systems. As Director of Sales Engineers, he oversees coordination of pre-sales and post-sales delivery for Parallels solutions. He is responsible for the team’s goals and initiatives with sales, product management, development, and worldwide customer support.

Victor and I explored everything about Parallels Desktop on the Mac. What it is, how it works, supported OSes, support for Metal, external GPUs, games, working at home issues and support, macOS VM clients, adjustments at Parallels amidst COVID-19, embracing OS agnosticism, the Parallels Toolbox, the Remote Application Server, and a brief discussion of Parallels Desktop on ARM-based Macs. It’s all right here.

Chris Matyszczyk is the President of creative consultancy Howard Raucous LLC. He advises corporations and individuals on content creation, advertising and marketing. For the last 13 years, he has also written the Technically Incorrect column first for CNET and now for ZDNet. He also writes the Absurdly Driven column at Inc.

Chris has a witty, irreverent, playful writing style at times. Over the years, several of his articles have caught my attention for my Friday column, Particle Debris, and we chatted about them. Plus, I’ve always wanted to hear his career story and how he got started as a technical columnist. In this interview, you’ll get a sense of Chris’s wry humor, and he’ll keep you laughing the whole show.

Dr. Jud Brewer is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a research affiliate at MIT.

As an addiction psychiatrist, Dr. Jud has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety. He is the author of The Craving Mind: from cigarettes to smartphones to love, why we get hooked and how we can break bad habits.

In this sparkling and entertaining interview, I pepper Jud with questions about his chosen career, consciousness, mindfulness, reward-behavior, breaking bad habits and how to cope with the isolation and stress of our current pandemic. You should get into the habit of listening to Dr. Jud!

Dr. Craig Hunter is an aerospace engineer at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia with research experience in experimental, theoretical, and computational fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, and aeroacoustics.  He has developed technology-enabling software tools and analysis methods for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, aerodynamic design, and jet noise prediction.

In 2008, Craig founded Hunter Research and Technology to create innovative and compelling apps for the fledgling Apple iPhone, namely Theodolite, Pro Compass and Nav Camera.

Craig is an expert pressing high-end Macs into service for scientific computations. We chatted about his Ph.D work, work at NASA in CFD and jet engine noise simulations, his recent computational review of a US$31,000 2019 Mac Pro, and his iOS app side-business and how that market has changed over the years. Heady stuff.

Christopher Moore is the author of 17 novels, including Lamb, Coyote Blue, The Serpent of Venice, The Stupidest Angel, and NOIR. Chris published his first novel, Practical Demonkeeping in 1992, and his latest novel, Shakespeare For Squirrels, will be released on May 12th.

We chatted at length about how Chris came to be a very successful novelist. I asked about the influence of author Harlan Ellison as well as his favorite and best selling novels. We explored his writing technique as we delved into two of my own favorite novels, The Stupidest Angel and NOIR. ( He writes on his Mac and uses Scrivener to outline and MS Word to compose. ) If you love Chris’s work, you’ll be entranced by his charming anecdotes in this stellar interview.

Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus is a writer, book author and raconteur. He writes for the Houston Chronicle and The Mac Observer, and he specializes in the “Dummies” books about Apple products like the Mac, the iPad and iPhone.

In this episode, Bob and I focus on the practice of working from home. We covered work strategies and techniques, workspace and hours, software vs. paper tools, clothing and eating, task management, multitasking vs. single focus and more. We delved into microphones and cameras for a Mac as well as some video conferencing apps and touched on the notion of spending time learning unfamiliar but essential internet technologies. We closed with a discussion of music to work by and a great library app called Libby.

Kelly Guimont is a long-time podcaster, Contributing Editor for The Mac Observer, the host of the Mac Observer’s Daily Observations podcast, and a tech support guru.

In her 10th appearance, Kelly and I chat about our favorite streaming TV shows of late. I open segment #1 with a critique of Amazing Stories: “The Cellar” (Apple TV+), then rave reviews for a shared favorite, Star Trek: Picard and a Kelly favorite: Westworld S3 (HBO). In segment #2: Kelly: The Expanse (Amazon), Wynonna Earp (SyFy). John: Outlander (S3) (Netflix) and Night on Earth (Netflix). Join us as we explore together what’s great (and not great) about these shows.

Dr. Genevieve Guenther is a scholar and author. She is affiliate faculty at the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School in New York and the founder and director of End Climate Silence, an activist organization helping the news media cover the climate crisis.

How should climate scientists use effective language skills and storytelling to convey scientific research? How can they speak effectively to both fellow scientists and the lay public? How can they avoid what’s called semantic ambiguity so that their choice of words isn’t twisted by deniers? How can the media learn to couch severe climate change events in proper science context while not appearing unduly biased? Dr. Genevieve Guenther chats with me on all this and more in a most engaging and informative discusion.

John Kheit is a New York attorney and a regular contributor to The Mac Observer. We share many common interests, including the 4K/UHD/HDR TV revolution, 8K TV and displays, Wi-Fi/5G technologies and the state of Apple.

In this special edition, I interview John about his new 2019 Mac Pro. I asked John about the configuration he ordered, what substitutions he made (graphics card), his add-on SSD, and whether he bought the Pro Display XDR. John shared lots of technical tidbits: a changed initial order, his total outlay, details of the T2 security chip, the various kinds (layer configurations) of SSDs, his display setup and observations about the cooling system. If you’re planning to purchase a new Mac Pro, this conversation is essential listening.

Dr. Howard Oakley is currently a developer of Mac software and is the founder of The Eclectic Light Company. Howard started life keenly interested in medicine, attended Oxford, and spent most of his career with the British Royal Navy as a doctor, ascending to the rank of Surgeon Commander. Along the way, he became heavily involved with computers and programming. His first encounter with a Mac SE and MPW hooked him for life.

We chatted about his life and times as a navy physician, his parallel evolution as a Mac developer, his amazing blog, The Eclectic Light Company, his writing for Mac Format, and some of his amazing free software: Aquiline Check, Consolation and SilentKnight, tools he wanted for himself. Howard delves into security issues, like XProtect, in a way that few other developers do.

Jeff Gamet the former managing editor of The Mac Observer, a position he held for 13 years. He’s also a book author and noted podcaster. About a year ago, Jeff left TMO to become the Smile TextExpander Evangelist.

With a year at his new job under his belt, I asked Jeff about his accomplishments, challenges, and ongoing change in perspective being an evangelist for a major software company. We chatted about being deep on macOS, the TextExpander transition to macOS Catalina, the change being heavily involved in Apple developer relations and the change in work habits, especially being no longer immersed in every Apple product and service. We also chatted about his new 16-inch MacBook Pro at some length. Jeff was as he always is: charming and warm.