Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

333: I Used To Do a Podcast

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Norman Chan) — Sun, 5 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Brad's out this week, so Norman Chan takes the guest chair to talk us through the current state of the art in 3D printing. We cover the latest in FDM printers, whether resin printers are right for you, the best places to find 3D models to print, how you can edit and adjust the models you want to print, and a whole lot more!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

332: Shout Out to the 1979 Lady Kenmore

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Is it time for another Q&A again already? How the months just fly by. This month we address everything from auto-generated podcast chapters and episode links to computer class-action lawsuits, corporate remote administration of your personal devices, how to move a PC across the ocean, the dream of permanent standard time, why you probably still shouldn't clean your computer with a vacuum cleaner, and a bunch more.

331: More Teddy Ruxpin, Less Chucky

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 07:00:00 +0000

It's been a while since we got down to brass tacks with a tips and tricks episode, so that's what we're doing this week with a new list of tech that's making our lives a little more pleasant lately. Will extols the tiling window manager once again -- not just in Linux, but also what's going on with this unique workflow in Windows and MacOS -- and talks over his brute-force strategy for iMessaging in Windows and making his Nest thermostat less evil. And Brad talks about why everyone should buy a $20 USB video capture dongle, how recent additions to PowerToys are making Windows 11 just slightly less crappy, and urges us all to stock up before the grim, optical disc-less future arrives.

330: Our E-Cores Are Better Than Your P-Cores

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:00:00 +0000

There's kind of a mountain of hardware news from the last week, so we're rounding it up this week, starting with Microsoft's Project Helix (a.k.a. the next Xbox), interrogating what exactly that box is going to look like inside and out, how much machine learning is going to factor in, and more. There's also the tiny, cheap MacBook Neo (and a surprising theory about future tiny iPhones), Intel's refreshed Arrow Lake CPUs, upscaling improvements on PS5 Pro (and Sony's anything-goes history of system settings), DLSS 4.5, Valve's continued supply-chain struggles, and more. That's a lot of podcast!

Links for this episode:

From GDC: Building the Next Generation of Xbox - Xbox Wire

GDC 2026: Announcing new tools and platform updates for Windows PC game developers - Windows Developer Blog

Upgraded PSSR upscaler is coming to PS5 Pro – PlayStation.Blog

Say hello to MacBook Neo - Apple

Intel's cheaper, faster new Core Ultra CPUs still have a lot to prove | PCWorld

NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Delivers Major Upgrade With 2nd Gen Transformer Model For Super Resolution & 6X Dynamic Multi Frame Generation | GeForce News | NVIDIA

329: A Plaid Decade

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 8 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

We just passed the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 3, which felt like a good reason to dust off the April 2001 issue of Maximum PC. We reflect on both a quarter-century of programmable pixel shaders -- the tech that's defined 3D rendering ever since -- and Will's cover story on the new GPU, including the secretive trip to Nvidia to benchmark it, a random Tim Sweeney interview, and more. There's also plenty of other fun retro tech to dish about in here, including super-early home wi-fi devices, the reveal of Windows XP, Pentium 4 RD-RAM weirdness, some classic Gordon Mah Ung hijinks, and more.

The Maximum PC issue for this episode: https://archive.org/details/maximum-pc-the-nearly-complete-collection/Maximum%20PC/2001/031%20Maximum%20PC%204-1-2001/page/n1/mode/2up

A clip of the Jack Matthews Metroid Prime interview (full interview also on the channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oiIm5Ymu6s

328: Shared Resources, Shared Problems

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 1 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

It's another glorious bounty of listener questions for the monthly Q&A, touching on a bunch of subjects like modern HDMI switchers, enormous turn-of-the-century TVs, MikroTik network gear, Pluribus, why the PCIe retaining clip exists (and how to defeat it), Unix on the desktop, our wishlist ESP32 projects, and the exact moment when cell phones became widespread -- and whether phone numbers are increasingly useless, at least in the US.

327: Two Hours of War

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:00:00 +0000

There's... a lot going on lately, so we're rounding up some of that news this week, starting with Discord's forthcoming age verification policy rolling out globally, with cursory discussion of some of the alternative platforms starting to assert themselves out there. We also touch on the targeting and compromise of Notepad++ by state-level actors, and the latest effects of the computing supply crisis on hard drives, the Steam Machine, and the PlayStation 6. Lastly, we talk about the bizarre case of the autonomous AI agent that started a flame war against an open source maintainer that... well, you really need to just hear/read about that one yourself.

Discord's age verification announcement: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally

Notepad++ compromised: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-update/

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

(Much more has emerged about the AI agent story since we recorded, including contact with the agent's operator, all described at the link above.)

326: Quantumly Entangled Keyboard Switches

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Magnets have been replacing potentiometers in a variety of places for a while now, especially as Hall effect and TMR joysticks have started popping up in fancy game controllers. Now magnetic switches are becoming more common in mice and mechanical keyboards, and Will has spent some time with new products in both of those categories, so we figured it was a good time to lay out how these kinds of switches work, how resistant to wear and electrical "bouncing" they are, what the heck a transducer is, whether there's quantum mechanics involved or not, and what effect these new switches are going to have on the input devices of the future.

Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-326-mag-switches

325: renderDEEZ128

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 8 Feb 2026 08:00:00 +0000

It's been a while since we did a deep dive on our home networking and server infrastructure (what some might call a "homelab"), so it's time for the 2026 check-in to run down what we're working with these days. By request, we spend a big chunk of the episode on Brad's plain Linux NAS/server, detailing components like Samba, Docker (or Podman), and Sanoid that you'd need to set up yourself to replicate the functionality of something like TrueNAS or Unraid. We also survey Will's more granular approach, once again pine longingly after Wildcat Lake, and more.

Show notes with all the hardware and software we mentioned: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-325-homelab-update

324: The Intel Batman

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 1 Feb 2026 08:00:00 +0000

After two months of accumulated Qs, we felt we still had plenty of As to dispense, so we're wheeling back around to a supplemental questions episode this week, touching on such topics as generating negative mileage in an EV, what the iOS low battery mode actually does, tiny network racks for your desk, a shocking amount of discussion about shells like zsh, fish, PowerShell and Nushell, the whereabouts of Intel's successor to the Alder Lake-N... and, for that matter, why (nearly) everything at Intel is a Lake.

323: Ignore All Previous Instructions

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The questions piled up over the holidays and now it's time to answer them in this, the first Q&A of 2026. This month we touch on topics like the splendor Gateway 2000's cow boxes, the mystery of the ENIAC, whether a shed qualifies as off-site backup, what the heck volt-amps are (and how calculus is involved), the glory days of multi-user computing, what tech today's kids will be nostalgic for in 20 years, using LLMs for troubleshooting and command line assistance, and more.

322: It Was DNS

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 08:00:00 +0000

We get into the nitty gritty this week with a grab bag of home computing projects that's really more like a set of cautionary tales. Will discovers the perils of hanging your entire household's Internet access on a couple of older, neglected Raspberry Pis. Brad learns some harsh lessons about the power draw of a space heater and not maintaining the automation settings on your UPS. And, well, our third topic is about using an Xbox Series X or S as a Moonlight client, which is actually pretty great so far. We suppose one out of three isn't bad?

321: How to Charge Your Knife

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Another new year means another CES means another roundup of CES news. This year we cover all the announcements from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia (or at least one of those), plus some legitimately exciting stuff like smart Legos, the first vehicle shipping with a solid state battery, computers in keyboards, Stream Decks in keyboards, big-name repairable laptops, what appears to be a real-life Star Wars vibroblade, all the things like memory inflation and tariffs that nobody was talking about at the show, and more.

Notes and links for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-321-ces-2025

320: Maybe Somebody Hates Brian Eno

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 4 Jan 2026 08:00:00 +0000

We're back to start the new year with the second and final installment of our ranking of startup sounds. To close out the tier list we consider later consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, more recent Windowses that we didn't even realize had startup sounds, most of the handhelds from Nintendo and Sony, and even some offbeat entries like Analogue's FPGA consoles and older operating systems like BeOS and OS/2. It's an aural extravaganza!

The final tier list: https://tiny.cc/tp320-sounds

319: An Amuse-bouche for Your Device

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 08:00:00 +0000

As is tradition (?) around here, over the holidays we're doing another extended ranking, and this year it's a two-part tier list of... every startup sound we could find across video game consoles, handhelds, and computer operating systems. Where does a startup sound end and menu music begin? Is it possible for a sound to sound the way that khakis look? Just how dank is the Dreamcast sound, anyway? We explore those and other questions in this part one of two!

The tier list as of the end of this episode: https://tinyurl.com/tp319-sound-tiers-684jfsdi

318: System B or systemd?

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 08:00:00 +0000

As the end of the year rolls up on us, we attempt a little personalized year-in-review, looking back at 2025 without dwelling on the various tech crises we've already talked about ad nauseam. Instead we focus on things we thought were cool or uplifting this year, including Will's ongoing Linux desktop adventures, the inevitability of electric cars (and bicycles), when it's worth it to buy the good earbuds, convenience improvements in screen protectors, rediscovering the joy of CRTs and nerdy community, plus some listener nominations and a couple of Andy Rooney-esque rants for good measure.

Linux Unplugged podcast on bcachefs: https://linuxunplugged.com/644

Switch 2 grips Will mentioned: https://amzn.to/48IpFXE

317: Schrödinger's AirPod

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 08:00:00 +0000

It's briskly, unusually cold here in the Bay Area this year, so what better time to crack open another tray of cold opens for your bite-size listening pleasure. This time we discuss such micro-topics as what happens when the building fire alarm gets too old, the joy of a temperature-controlled bed, remotes that nag too much, yet another way Windows 11 is worsening, when good naps go bad, the mystery that is NixOS, and more.

The possible future Windows 11 GUI we mentioned: https://mastodon.online/@grumpy_website/115673036992705122

316: I Don't Like the Sparkle

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 7 Dec 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Things are getting so dire in the PC-building space that we had to revisit the subject again this week, primarily to discuss the sudden and shocking end of longtime RAM and SSD maker Crucial, with a deeper dive into the way the memory supply chain works and a glimpse into a very dark future where building your own PC might be out of reach for many. We also dig into some new reporting about the Steam Machine's HDMI output, and why open gaming platforms are going to be in conflict with proprietary HDMI standards going forward. Plus, the latest AI nonsense (and how to work around it) in Firefox and Google News.

NOTE: We're working on freeing ourselves from the need for Adobe products, so bear with us if the podcast sounds a little different this week. Feedback welcome!

Crucial press release: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-exit-crucial-consumer-business

GamersNexus video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A-eeJP0J7c

Steam Machine and HDMI 2.1: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/why-wont-steam-machine-support-hdmi-2-1-digging-in-on-the-display-standard-drama/

Disable Firefox AI features: https://flamedfury.com/posts/disable-ai-in-firefox/

The Verge on Google News AI headlines: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/838354/googles-ai-news-bot-is-still-confused-but-no-longer-replacing-our-headlines

315: Work-in-Progress Till I Die

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The end of November brings a fresh crop of your questions, this month addressing subjects like getting lost in a corporation's Kafka-esque support infrastructure, video game voice chatting with Internet celebrities, how often to change your CPU paste, consumer tech that we think has plateaued, trenching Ethernet cable for an intra-yard network, the very cool concept of all-sky cameras, the glory of text expansion, and a bunch of other topics!

314: We Hope, We Wish, We Ask, We Request

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0000

It's a news roundup this week, with a ton of recent goings on to discuss, including the sudden explosion in RAM prices (and a similar looming problem with SSDs), Microsoft announcing plans to shove AI agents directly into the Windows taskbar, Google killing off first-gen Nest thermostats (with some open options for resuscitating them), and ongoing changes in compatibility for third-party Switch 2 docks. Plus, with Thanksgiving coming up in the U.S., we dig into another round of tech we're thankful for.

RAM/SSD price news: https://www.pcmag.com/news/ssd-storage-prices-to-climb-as-ai-demand-meets-tight-nand-supply

Agentic Windows impressions: https://www.theverge.com/report/822443/microsoft-windows-copilot-vision-ai-assistant-pc-voice-controls-impressions

No Longer Evil: https://nolongerevil.com/

Sett Thermostat: https://sett.homes/

Switch 2 dock news: https://kotaku.com/nintendo-just-blocked-third-party-switch-2-docks-and-it-sucks-2000644081

313: Chan's on the Move

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0000

It seems like this week's big salvo of Valve hardware announcements is all anyone's talking about right now, particularly the Steam Machine, and who better to fill in a bunch of hands-on details with that li'l box, plus the new Steam Frame VR headset and refreshed Steam Controller, than our old friend Norm Chan of Tested.com, who went up to Valve to see it all. If you want to hear about everything from the Steam Machine's performance and potential price to the Frame's x86 emulation and foveated remote streaming, plus a ton of stuff in between, listen to this podcast!

Tested's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tested

312: The Original Tree Puncher

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 9 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Online game design veteran Raph Koster recently posted a new piece about how he thinks about game design, which got us talking about the history of online multiplayer, so then we figured, why not talk about that subject in a (slightly) more comprehensive way on this podcast? So that's what we did this week, dipping into topics like pre-TCP/IP network gaming, the early video game consoles' various half-baked online solutions, how Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies were both way ahead of their time, how much the infrastructure has evolved for facilitating multiplayer -- and how expected it is as a feature these days -- and plenty more.

Koster's new piece: https://www.raphkoster.com/2025/11/03/game-design-is-simple-actually/

PC Gamer's Everquest history: https://www.pcgamer.com/breaking-the-internet-the-story-of-everquest-the-mmo-that-changed-everything/

Dreamcast online functionality and Sega.net history (with links to similar pages for PS2, GameCube etc. at the bottom): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast_online_functionality

311: The Fab Floor

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 2 Nov 2025 07:00:00 +0000

PC World's Adam Patrick Murray stops by this week to discuss the trip he and Will recently took to visit Intel's new 18A chip fabrication facility in Arizona. Settle in for a wide-ranging chat about the upcoming Panther Lake architecture, why Intel won't have a new desktop part for a while longer, the future of next-gen chiplet interconnects, the difficulty of scheduling between big and little cores, suiting up to enter the fab, 30mph FOUPs whizzing around overhead, EUV machines the size of multiple school buses, getting served beer by tiny horses (??), and more.

310: Target Has a GitHub Account

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 07:00:00 +0000

It's that time again for more of your questions, and this month we discuss medical equipment conducting secret data collection, dangerously fast CD-ROMs, what we'd want in a brand new operating system (assuming we'd even want one), open source software made by big-box retail chains, OLED vs. LCD TVs, impassioned views on McMaster-Carr, whether or not to invest the effort to digitize all your documents, the difficulty of preserving online content for coffee table books, and more.

309: Tivoization

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 07:00:00 +0000

A bunch of products and services seem to be going end-of-life all at once right now, so we did a round-up of some notable ones this week. Believe it or not, the venerable TiVo line of set-top TV recorders was still in service right up until this past week, so we pay tribute to this product that changed everything in the television space (and apparently the open source licensing space). Of course, we also have to do a check-in with Windows 10 now that its EOL date has come and gone, and the options for extended support have become clearer. Lastly, we wrap up with some tidbits about the rapid disappearance of the BD-ROM drive from retail, the end of AOL's dial-up service, and more.

Windows 10 ESU: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/extended-security-updates

Windows LTSC FAQ: https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

TiVo is done: https://cordcuttersnews.com/tivo-stops-selling-dvrs-marking-the-end-of-an-era/

Pioneer sells off its BD-ROM business: https://www.techpowerup.com/336803/pioneer-has-ended-production-of-computer-blu-ray-drives-transfers-pddm-business-to-shanxi-group

308: NEW Lake???

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 07:00:00 +0000

It's been a bit since we did a roundup of tools and tricks that are making our tech lives a little easier, so we're doing that again this week! Will talks about USB-C-to-SATA adapters that can power 3.5" hard drives, Switch 2 grips that actually work, a long term stress test of the under-desk hanging PC, and radical innovations in nanotape technology. Meanwhile, Brad tries out high-endurance SD cards that will hopefully be the last storage you'll need to buy for your Raspberry Pi, plus the unexpected homebrew driver resurrecting Windows Mixed Reality headsets, a much-improved experience with the PlayStation VR2 on PC, and more.

Reverse-engineering the Sandisk high-endurance Micro SD card: https://ripitapart.com/2020/07/16/reverse-engineering-and-analysis-of-sandisk-high-endurance-microsdxc-card/

Oasis driver for Windows Mixed Reality headsets: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3824490/Oasis_Driver_for_Windows_Mixed_Reality/

307: I Hate Smishing

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 5 Oct 2025 07:00:00 +0000

A handful of news stories have caught our eye recently, so we're rounding them up this week. We start with a pair of stories about everyone's least favorite subject, SMS spam, one involving an organized crime ring and the other vulnerable everyday infrastructure. Then we move on to a recent blog post by one of iRobot's founders, in which he expresses extreme wariness about the safety of humans interacting with humanoid robots. Lastly, with only a week and change to go until Windows 10 EOL, we look at Valve's ending support for the 32-bit Steam client (and the end of 32-bit Windows in general) and some predictions for how things might go when the deadline comes... assuming Microsoft doesn't blink at the last minute.

‘SIM Farms’ Are a Spam Plague. A Giant One in New York Threatened US Infrastructure, Feds Say | WIRED

That annoying SMS phish you just got may have come from a box like this - Ars Technica

Why iRobot’s founder won’t go within 10 feet of today’s walking robots - Ars Technica

Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity – Rodney Brooks

Steam will wind down support for 32-bit Windows as that version of Windows fades - Ars Technica

306: The Worst Thing About Bluetooth Is "Sometimes"

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Question time is here again, and this month we attempt to provide answers about subjects such as homebrew on the Steam Deck, outsourcing the university network support, buying phones just to trade them in, grifters getting angry about game engines, why storefronts still bog down and crash in 2025, monitoring your home server energy use, how to distinguish drop-shipped knock-offs from the genuine article, and more.

Decky Loader for Steam Deck homebrew: https://decky.xyz/

MagicPods for ear buds on the Steam Deck: https://magicpods.app/steamdeck/

The deep rabbit hole about PCIe and ASPM: https://z8.re/blog/aspm.html

305: Hardly an Off-the-Shelf Knob

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 07:00:00 +0000

We've been tinkering with a lot of esoteric PC hardware stuff lately, so we're here with a roundup on what we've been up to this week that you'll hopefully find informative. We get into Microsoft's crackdown on the vulnerability in FanControl and other popular monitoring software, attempting to corral fan settings in UEFI as an alternative, and doing battle with the dreaded beat frequencies that can result from adjacent fan placement. Brad also gives a full trip report on his attempt to power a stack of hard drives with an external ATX power supply, with a detour into handy tips for de-pinning a modular power supply cable, stacking multiple hard drives, and more. And Will touches on his recent experience building a new studio PC in a rack-mounted case, plus some tidbits about the last electronics flea market of the year, Linux thread scheduling, Brad's first trip to Micro Center, Will's shiny new CRT (yes, another one), and more!

Links for this episode:

WinRing0: Why Windows is flagging your PC monitoring and fan control apps as a threat: https://www.theverge.com/report/629259/winring0-windows-defender-fan-control-pc-monitoring-alert-quarantine

Noctua on fan placement and beat frequencies: https://noctua.at/en/fan-speed-offset-explained

Stackable hard drive feet Brad bought: https://sednashop.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=95

Seasonic pinout and cable compatibility info: https://seasonic.com/cable-compatibility/

How to de-pin a power supply cable with two staples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6gQ5ie2Dw0

Brad's NAS/hard drive setup and de-pinned cable: https://imgur.com/a/WKPwhCQ

304: Gamify Your Sleep

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Apple really brought the goods to its iPhone 17 event this week, with a freakishly thin phone in the new iPhone Air, major production-level video features and accessories in the 17 Pro, significant health and sleep features in the next Apple Watch, third-gen AirPods Pro, ceramic coating all over basically everything, and perhaps most importantly, Pro-level features and a pretty generous starting storage option trickling down to the base iPhone 17 model. We sit down to run through all this new tech, ponder our upgrade likelihood, marvel at vapor chambers and unibody phone frames, and more.

303: Spaceships Built for Cats

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 7 Sep 2025 07:00:00 +0000

For years, Blendo Games has been releasing its unique brand of systems-driven games on open source id Software tech, most recently with this year's Skin Deep running on a modified version of the Doom 3 engine. Sounds like a Tech Pod topic to us! We're delighted to be joined by Brendon Chung and Sanjay Madhav this week to dig into all the ins and outs of their process making Skin Deep, including working with 20-year-old code, making smart use of features that existed in the original game, restoring algorithms whose patents have since expired, figuring out what to enhance and what to rip out, and plenty of other intriguing subjects.

Skin Deep on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/301280/Skin_Deep/

Blendo has a lot of fascinating writeups about their dev process and tools: https://blendogames.com/news/

Sanjay's work as a games programming consultant: https://loophole.games/

302: The System Tray Is No Man's Land

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 07:00:00 +0000

A few links from this episode:

The musical No BS Podcast #100: https://archive.org/details/no_bs_podcast_100

A particularly cool cyberdeck: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/1m9ufwz/rpi_dev_finally_done_youtube_and/

The Chicago dog: https://www.wienerschnitzel.com/food/hot-dogs/chicago-dog/

301: Will Ruined the Internet

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Some handy links if you want to start playing with your own virtual Windows 95 machine:

https://86box.net/

https://winworldpc.com/home

https://www.vogons.org/

300: Never Stop Talking

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Have we really done 300 episodes of this podcast? We have now! To mark the occasion, we're taking a look back at a lot of the things that have changed in the tech world since we posted our first ep in September 2019. Turns out, uh, a lot has happened since then, from scammy Valley bros pivoting through crypto, NFTs, and AI, to streaming services going from beloved to reviled, electric vehicles actually becoming a practical thing, a lot of unsuccessful attempts to knock the dominant social platforms off their pedestals, handheld gaming becoming incredibly robust, and a bunch of other trends to consider. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

299: Donkey Kong Is a Florida Man

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 20:17:35 +0000

It's a topic two-fer! Brad's refrigerator died last week, which gives us a chance to talk about online appliance-buying on a budget in 2025, some refrigeration and food-safety basics, product minimalism and applying the Unix philosophy to home ownership, and more. And Will just got back from Super Mario Land in Hollywood, so we go through a (literal) trip report about the experience and the tech underpinning it, from Amiibo wristbands to augmented-reality Mario Kart, ways to stay off your phone in a theme park, and a startling encounter with Bowser Jr. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

298: Don't Accidentally Become a Bank

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 3 Aug 2025 07:00:00 +0000

The situation we talked about in the episode is evolving pretty rapidly; here are some of the latest updates since we recorded:

Info on how to contact payment processors yourself: https://aftermath.site/steam-itch-porn-censorship-collective-shout-visa-mastercard-paypal

itch.io reindexes NSFW content: https://itch.io/t/5149036/reindexing-adult-nsfw-content

Valve comments on payment processors: https://kotaku.com/mastercard-denies-pressuring-steam-to-censor-nsfw-games-2000614393

Here's the RTINGS article on types of OLEDs mentioned toward the end: https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/qd-oled-vs-woled

297: The AI-Content Centipede

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 07:00:00 +0000

It's the monthly question time again, and this month we talk about what's going to happen when AI is only left with AI-generated content to consume, our thoughts on ad-blocking as people who used to subsist on ads, how to blog about a tech project, why you shouldn't listen to podcasts (or maybe anything) on Spotify, a whole bunch about electricity and power supplies, why geolocating sometimes gets weird, the surprising prevalence of WhirlyBall even 30 years later, plus tidbits about Cheerwine, bears, and a bunch of other stuff. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

296: The Slopposite

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 07:00:00 +0000

What better way to beat the summer heat than with another stack of cold opens for your listening micro-pleasure? This time around we delve into such short topics as etiquette at the EV charging station, why kids hate charging their phones, how to dispose of (or maybe just use) slightly-too-old gasoline, the everlasting value of the office crap table, how procedural generation is weighted in game content, why more products should be like the modern glue stick, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

295: Hacker Tourism

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Wired 04.12, December 1996: https://archive.org/details/wired-magazine-04.12-1996-december

Show notes with page numbers for everything we discuss: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-295-wired-dec-96

294: The God-Tier GPU

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 6 Jul 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Brad's historic YouTube video, "Here's Like 18 Minutes of Destiny 2 at 4k60:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIipgLFxpt4

293: J-ing and K-ing

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 07:00:00 +0000

The monthly Q&A ep is here again, and this time around we field emails and Discord Qs about managing the cognitive load of your hobbies, doing jury duty in a movie theater, site discovery on the indie web, safe ways to repair damaged power cords, websites getting pushy about passkeys, even MORE accurate network time, the high technology of modern sports broadcasting, and more.

Link aggregators for the indie web we mentioned include https://rss.joy and https://ooh.directory

292: Winning the Hummingbird War

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 07:00:00 +0000

On this week's ep, we take inventory of upcoming tech projects we've been looking into, to evaluate our use cases and pick each other's brains about what's worth sinking the time and/or money into in the near future. For Brad, that's getting a proper travel router and GaN charger for easier networking on the road, jailbreaking his Kindle to try out that KOReader magic, and, uh, maybe someday setting up a local network time server. On Will's side, there's getting set up to take advantage of the Twitch 1440p beta, finding ways to utilize a USB-connected multi-foot pedal, and building an outdoor IP camera rig with the optics and shutter speed to properly document the ongoing hummingbird fracas outside his house. An episode as ambitious as it is speculative!

Links for this episode:

The Kindle Modding Wiki: https://kindlemodding.org/

A pretty good basic explainer about Kindle jailbreaking and demoing KOReader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtk7ERwlIAk

The style of travel router Brad's looking at (not sponsored!): https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-axt1800/

291: Evil Finder Icon

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Apple's WWDC and Google I/O have both come and gone, and... well, we took a look at I/O and it was practically all AI this year, so we skipped that. But Apple's annual developer's conference was surprisingly light on AI features -- in fact, the continuing absence of the AI-driven Siri and other features announced last year is itself a notable story -- so this week we recapped what Apple brought to WWDC instead, including its first major UI refresh in a decade, interesting additions to smaller stuff like Wallet and Shortcuts, the ever-more-laptop-like nature of the iPad, the end of x86 support and beginning of annual versioning for MacOS, and a bunch of other stuff.

290: Earn Your Nintendo License

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 8 Jun 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Will got a chance to attend the Switch 2 launch event at Nintendo's brand new San Francisco store and then started feverishly digging into the fundamentals of the new hardware, so this week we had an impromptu discussion about his hands-on impressions so far. Turns out there's a lot going on in this thing, from the delightfully musical new controller haptics to the surprisingly low-tech magnetic Joy-Con attachment, upgraded Switch 1 performance, GameCube emulation, and a bunch of other interesting topics.

289: Computer Shangri-La

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 1 Jun 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Will's here with a two-fer trip report this week, one of which was a literal trip to the grand opening of the brand new Bay Area Micro Center. We dig into what a big-box retailer oriented around building PCs is like in 2025, reflect a bit on the history of other screwdriver and computer shops past, and muse about retiring into PC-builder-helper status. Also, Nvidia has finally released a proper GeForce Now client for the Steam Deck, and we get into what Will's recent testing of the service has been like, whether the various pricing tiers are worth it, how viable it is as a replacement for owning an actual PC, and more.

288: High Quackuracy

techpod@content.town (Nice Segue, LLC) — Sun, 25 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

That Q&A time is here again, and this month we field emails and Discord Qs about such things as the hopeful return of the webring, what to do with the hardware if your PC is compromised by a bad actor, Nvidia cards in Linux, using game consoles as streaming media boxes, human stenography in courtrooms being replaced by recordings (and maybe AI), an extremely ambitious plan to stream some ducks, and perhaps the best pirate radio station idea we've ever heard.

287: Never Click "Show More"

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 18 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

We're reaching deep into the grab bag again this week, with a wide array of topics like the fascinating world of shorthand and stenography machines (plus an open source project to build your own, naturally), replacing your thermostat (there's open source stuff for that too), the perils of running out of data on a small mobile carrier, questionable uses for an AI-driven Darth Vader, some follow-up on Will's recent work tracking microstutter in games, and more.

The Open Steno Project: https://www.openstenoproject.org/

286: SheevQuest 2025

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 11 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

With Brad spending most of his week in a courtroom for the rest of May, we may be doing some looser episodes here and there until we're back on our normal schedule again. This week, a grab bag of tech topics for your consideration, including Will's recent work for PC World quantifying and graphing micro-stutter in game performance, the wretched use of AI that's wormed its way into Google TV's interface, how to troubleshoot a maybe-dying A/V receiver (and when it's time to throw in the towel and buy something new), what an oscilloscope is good for, the sidebar about Linux bootloaders everyone's been waiting for, and more.

285: More Free Space Than Free Time

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 4 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000

By listener request, we're talking about our personal file organization and storage layouts this week, with a focus on our desktop computers--including how we use our OS-level home folders, whether to interact with the root system drive or not, and how much data we even keep on those machines these days--and also how we attempt to organize media, archives, backups and more on our home servers. Plus, a check-in on the state of Windows backup tools. Is it actually possible to avoid the dreaded Nth-level nested "old desktop" folder? Maybe!

Software mentioned in this episode:

Ventoy, the multi-ISO bootable USB image: https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

Everything, the universal search tool: https://www.voidtools.com/

How to use Windows File History: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/backup-and-restore-with-file-history-7bf065bf-f1ea-0a78-c1cf-7dcf51cc8bfc

More info on Windows Libraries: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/client-tools/windows-libraries

EaseUS' free Windows backup utility: https://www.easeus.com/backup-software/tb-free.html

284: Shatner's Sap Shack

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Where does Robocop's data spike rank on our big list of connectors? What do you do with an old cable modem or cable box? What's the fastest discontinued product in tech history (and is it the Microsoft Kin)? Where do ISPs get their Internet? Is it time to stop ripping Blu-ray discs? Is Zachtronics actually gone? Just who listens to this podcast, anyway? All these questions and more, answered on this month's Q&A!

283: Nook NUC: A NUC for Your Nook

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000

It's been 16 frigid months since our last all-intro episode, but now we're pulling the ice tray out of the freezer and offering you another cube of cold opens, covering everything from surge protector safety to thermal paste application methods, stacking storage bins without crushing them, the crazed monitor murderer who's struck again, artifacts of our very early careers, an intensive Weird Al lyrical breakdown, a little paean for Zachtronics, and how not to forget about obligations that might get you arrested.

282: You Can't Contest the Knob Feel

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000

We've both gotten our hands on CRT televisions recently--Will's one from his youth and Brad's a much more modern set--and we've spent a bunch of time tinkering with them, getting our MiSTers to play nicely with them, and generally enjoying some warm analog video. On this week's ep we dig into our time reacquainting ourselves with what TVs used to be like, with a freewheeling conversation that touches on all kinds of minutiae like when it might be time to replace your aging set's capacitors, trying to understand signal standards from RGsB to YPbPr, remembering the time when the only inputs on your TV were a couple of screws, and a bunch more.

Will's TV: General Electric 10AB3406WF02

Brad's TV: https://crtdatabase.com/crts/toshiba/toshiba-14af42

This is a great teardown and servicing video for the Toshiba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ij0i-xnvic

281: Fully Ray-Traced Metal Mario

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 6 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000

With the wraps finally being taken off the Switch 2 this week, PC World's Adam Patrick Murray joins us for a handheld state of the union this week, with a closer look at some of the technical aspects of the new Nintendo handheld including the specs on the screen and TV output, the innards of the dock, the new MicroSD Express storage standard, and more. Then we get into the pervasive rumors about a forthcoming Xbox handheld made by Asus, analyze Microsoft's opportunity for a more gaming-centric Windows experience in the space, speculate about where the Steam Deck might be going next, and more.

280: Pay-to-Reject Cookies Should Be Illegal

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Links mentioned on this episode:

ShaderGlass: https://mausimus.itch.io/shaderglass

Articles on Apple's sealed/immutable system layout in recent MacOS versions:

https://eclecticlight.co/2021/10/29/how-macos-is-more-reliable-and-doesnt-need-reinstalling/

https://eclecticlight.co/2024/10/22/boot-volume-layout-and-structure-in-macos-sequoia/

279: $30,000 to Take Off a Pair of Glasses

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 07:00:00 +0000

The Game Developers Conference has come and gone for another year, and this week we have a potpourri mostly focused on our experiences at the show, with a particular focus on some emerging dev tools like Nvidia's AI-driven text-to-animation system and how they relate to current labor and economic issues in the industry, some of the cool maker-esque projects Will saw at alt.ctrl.GDC, and more.

Videos to all the alt.ctrl.GDC projects we discussed: https://gdconf.com/alt-ctrl-gdc

The blog post referenced later in the episode: https://www.joewintergreen.com/if-you-want-shorter-games-with-worse-graphics-made-by-people-who-are-paid-more-to-work-less-graphics-tech-advancements-should-please-you/

278: rare-platypus-1372

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Email hasn't gotten any less complicated since the last time we covered it, but we have tried a few new options for wrangling our ever-increasing number of inboxes. This week we dig into some of our current strategies, with a focus on Will's time using Fastmail, a paid-only service that purports to let you throw out your Gmails and Outlooks and more fully control your email addresses on domains that you own. We also touch on some of the other popular services like Hey and Proton Mail, grouse about Google's tenacious AI features, dig into our latest trip to the electronics flea market a bit, and more.

277: Very Ultra

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 9 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The PC hardware market has finally settled down with the release of AMD's new Radeon 9000 series and no more major CPU or GPU product launches later this year. So we assess the state of the PC union a bit this week, with a focus on the new AMD cards and their dramatically improved upscaling, ray-tracing, video encoding, and perhaps most of all, price. Plus, some updates on Intel's low-end Battlemage, Nvidia's mounting 50-series woes, the possible delay of Intel's next-gen Panther Lake CPU to 2026, new rumored low-power CPUs for Brad to get excited about running a Linux router on, and more.

276: The Greatest Treasure of the Sith

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 2 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

We've done it: we've brought on Rob Zacny -- host of (among many other things) A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast -- to dissect and attempt to make sense of the rules of technology in the Star Wars universe. Join us as we consider questions such as: What exactly is it that comes out of a lightsaber? Is there a bathroom in the X-wing? How many Imperial officers does it take to fire a giant laser? Does hyperspace make any sense at all? And is there room in this podcast to discuss droid liberation? (At least that last question has a definitive answer: yes, of course.)

275: The Bottomless Q Hole

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 08:00:00 +0000

We had quite a PC-heavy Q&A this month, with multiple questions about Windows 10 and 11 with the former's end-of-support date looming in October, as well as Qs about pronouncing country-code domains, the latest Nvidia 50-series electrical-connector drama, why we haven't seen much Gallium Nitride in PC power supplies yet, ways to get e-books besides Amazon, combatting the dreaded bit rot, and what it would actually mean to print a podcast.

274: A Little Bit Less Good

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Will is trying on a new hat soon, with a newsletter about the ongoing enshittification of our collective computing experience, and some tips and tricks for... unshittifying it a bit. So this week we're digging into both the subject matter itself, and also the ins and outs of launching a newsletter, the features and policies of some of the bigger publishing platforms, hosting costs, email outreach, the decision-making that goes into monetizing your writing, and more. Plus: tangents on why you should never run your own mail server, Linux kernel scene drama, and a brief look back at some of our quaint old Blogspot material.

Will's newsletter: https://next.content.town/

Our previous episode on dark patterns: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/174-weaponized-smurfing

273: The Requisite DeepSeek Episode

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 9 Feb 2025 08:00:00 +0000

It's been a couple of weeks since the Chinese firm DeepSeek released its new R1 large-language model and sheared an enormous amount of value off of American AI companies. Now that the dust has settled, we don our AI-skeptic hats again and try to unpack what makes this model different, including how it was made so much more efficiently, what opening it up for free means for paid competitors, and whether we might not have to burn down quite so many forests going forward. (Hint: Don't get your hopes up.)

https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/why-is-deekspeek-such-a-game-changer-scientists-explain-how-the-ai-models-work-and-why-they-were-so-cheap-to-build

https://hackaday.com/2025/02/03/more-details-on-why-deepseek-is-a-big-deal/

https://www.404media.co/openai-furious-deepseek-might-have-stolen-all-the-data-openai-stole-from-us/

https://www.vellum.ai/blog/the-training-of-deepseek-r1-and-ways-to-use-it

272: Mac OSX Snow Leopard 2

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 2 Feb 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Questions! The time to answer them is here again, and this month we do our best with such topics as the relative scarcity of nuclear energy, nested comment systems, USB thumb drives versus portable SSDs, browser RAM usage, why CPUs get faster from one model to the next, the difficulty of naming operating systems, phones without camera bumps, learning to read an analog clock (and a lot of other things), and when we'll finally get around to reviewing that high-tech toilet.

Submit ideas about secret information encoding in the world around us for an upcoming episode: https://forms.gle/VYgL9gLeSBKkNtfy9

271: Big Honkin' Die

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Will's gotten his hands on Nvidia's fancy new RTX 5090 in advance of its release at the end of the month, and he's spent the last several days feverishly benchmarking it and testing its new features, so this week we dive into the raw performance numbers he's seeing, consider the card's mammoth power requirements, talk about some of the most prominent new out-of-the-box features like multi-frame generation, better DLSS upscaling, and Reflex 2, and then attempt to demystify some of the more forward-looking tech coming to Nvidia cards like neural net shader programs and textures, mega geometry, and more.

Submit ideas about secret information encoding in the world around us for an upcoming episode: https://forms.gle/VYgL9gLeSBKkNtfy9

270: Cat o' Five Tails

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The work of ages continues as we return (for the last time this month) to our tier list of every-ish cable and connector ever made. Such heavy hitters as DisplayPort, SATA, and USBs both mini- and micro- enter the fray this week, with digressions about obscure entries like the DFP (digital flat panel?) cable, powering bare hard drives straight out of the wall, the all-too-often overly stiff jacket on RJ45 ethernet cables, and more.

The Cable Bible: https://amiaopensource.github.io/cable-bible/

Recompute's port roundup: https://recompute.co.zw/buying-guides/a-complete-guide-of-every-type-of-computer-port/

The current cable tier list: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-cable-rankings

Submit ideas about secret information encoding in the world around us for an upcoming episode:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I_oc-N4n3j0QgLStoaXcqaMDgceyYYI1aimcn2udF1s/edit?gid=265742791#gid=265742791

269: Comically Tall Laptops

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0000

It's the Consumer Electronics Show once again, and there's a lot to talk about this year, so we chat this week about all the most interesting topics out of the show, including the Nvidia 50 series and its reliance on DLSS 4, new mobile chips from Intel and AMD, SteamOS-powered third-party handhelds, some eyebrow-raising Switch 2 leaks, new HDMI and DisplayPort standards, plus the usual assortment of off-the-wall and not-ready-for-market tech like IP birdfeeders, perfume-scented laptops, and plenty more.

Submit ideas about secret information encoding in the world around us for an upcoming episode:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I_oc-N4n3j0QgLStoaXcqaMDgceyYYI1aimcn2udF1s/edit?gid=265742791#gid=265742791

268: We're Pro-Thunk Around Here

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 5 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0000

We note the tragic passing this week of our good friend and tech reporting legend Gordon Mah Ung, with a short tribute and a bit of reminiscing about Gordon's illustrious career and the impact he made on everyone he came into contact with. Then we return to the very serious work of ranking every cable and connector in existence, with a pivot this week from numbered rankings to one of those newfangled tier lists, plus considerations of quarter-inch stereo, TOSLINK, DisplayPort, the legendary SCART, and more.

GoFundMe to support Gordon Mah Ung's family: https://www.gofundme.com/f/join-us-in-supporting-dara-glenn-and-marianne

The Cable Bible: https://amiaopensource.github.io/cable-bible/

Recompute's port roundup: https://recompute.co.zw/buying-guides/a-complete-guide-of-every-type-of-computer-port/

The current cable tier list: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-cable-rankings

267: Cold Boot, Fresh Browser

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 08:00:00 +0000

It's our last pod of 2024, and thus, another batch of year-ending questions meets our entirely professional and learned answers. This month we talk about improving your Bluetooth quality in Windows, our personal mouse grip, tech-related anime we've seen, when to throw in the towel on learning new skills, weird freebies with your tech purchases, questionable Black Friday purchases, how many browser tabs is too many, and the oppression of the Elf-on-the-Shelf surveillance state.

266: Connector Mouthfeel

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 08:00:00 +0000

As the end of the year is here again, we're finally doing it: we're ranking every plug and connector in existence, or at least all the ones we can think of. Join us as we evaluate the relative merits in multiple categories -- like ease of use, reliability, versatility, and that satisfying tactile X factor -- of everything from BNC to XLR, Apple's Lightning and old 30-pin dock connector, DB-15 (you know, VGA), the enormous pile of USB types, and more. Will we get through the whole list in one week? Uh, sure!

Follow along with pictures and info about all these connectors with these links:

The Cable Bible: https://amiaopensource.github.io/cable-bible/

Recompute's port roundup: https://recompute.co.zw/buying-guides/a-complete-guide-of-every-type-of-computer-port/

265: Shuck 'Em If You Got 'Em

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Will and family just got back from the final show of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, so this week we dig into some of the technical aspects of a modern arena mega-concert, from turning the audience into a human light show to innovations in ticket-sharing QR code technology and metrics on the mobile data being used in the vicinity. Meanwhile, Brad's been harvesting some extra cheap hard drives in the wake of Black Friday, so we also lay out a primer on what exactly hard drive shucking is, including price-per-terabyte, the best models to look out for, foolproof methods for getting those enclosures open, and more.

Links for this episode:

Wired on the Swift concert tech: https://wired.me/technology/the-tech-behind-taylor-swift-concert-wristbands/

Audience bracelet fun: https://x.com/swifferupdates/status/1644415217445609508

ShuckStop: https://shucks.top/

Easy shucking with guitar picks: https://forums.truenas.com/t/easystore-drive-shucking-like-a-pro-by-a-pro/1498

264: Will's Congressman's Enormous Wang

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 8 Dec 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Two momentous events have recently rocked the computing world: First, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger abruptly stepped down this week, less than four years after taking the company's helm, and before completing the ongoing transition to its next-generation chip fabrication, and second, Microsoft has removed the venerable WordPad from current and future versions of Windows. We convene to try to make sense of both of these unexpected happenings (and talk a lot about word processors along the way).

Cling to WordPad for dear life: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2376881/how-to-get-wordpad-back-windows-11-24h2.html

The Microsoft Fandom wiki: https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_95

263: The Smith Chart Is S-Tier

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 1 Dec 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The monthly Q&A commenceth again, with emails and Discord Qs positively pouring in about the origin of the flange effect, why all the electrical outlets are upside down, gaming on an M4 Mac Mini and how Apple's move to a 16GB minimum affects their status as a family recommendation, the value of moving to the Bay Area for a computer science degree, the race to the bottom in electronics parts and accessories, Will's holiday board game recommendations, an impromptu ranking of charts, and more.

262: Mrs. Collier Was a Real One

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0000

American Thanksgiving draws near, so it's time again for our annual recitation of techie stuff that we're thankful for. From tangible products on your desk, around the house, and on the road, to more abstract things like moderating your social media intake, finding alternatives to Amazon, and the ease of fixing your foolish eyewear mistakes, we find more than a few things to fill out our lists.

261: A Big Black Slab of Shame

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0000

We're back again with that floral favorite, the potpourri episode. This time it's a project potpourri, touching on some tech-related projects we've either tackled recently or are planning to get to soon. Learn the full story of how Will more or less Frankensteined his ultrawide monitor back from the dead, listen to Brad's plans for a virtual private cloud server and why Black Friday might be the time to jump in, scorn him for the utterly shameful state of his NAS backups, and more.

260: CPUs Have Been Juicing for Too Long

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 08:00:00 +0000

It's been a wild few months in CPUs, with next-generation releases from both AMD and Intel in their respective Zen 5 and Arrow Lake categories. Now that most all the big parts are out, we break down what's what, including why everyone is finally going disaggregated (and what that means), what's going on with OS updates to make your processor run faster, which one to get if you just want to play games, what the new CU-DIMM standard means for RAM, and more.

259: Hey Google, It's Time for Bed!

Sun, 3 Nov 2024 07:00:00 +0000

We're here at the end of the spookiest month and ready to field your questions once again, this time addressing subjects such as alternative file managers, how often (and why) to replace your surge protectors, why some electrical plugs have that sideways prong, our ability to suss out regional accents, the state of modern instant coffee, and why certain letters just sound cooler than others.

258: Some Real MacGyver #$@!%

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Brad's back from Western North Carolina, so it's time for a casual debriefing on being out there for two and a half weeks dealing with the Hurricane Helene aftermath, with a focus on all sorts of technical subjects like portable lighting strategies, acquiring and hooking up a generator in a hurry, making sense of the wiring layouts in older houses, remote work with almost no connectivity, dehumidifying and remediating a flooded basement, and, yes, some of the sillier computing artifacts that emerged in the course of the cleanup.

The links for emergency and offline maps we mentioned that were sent in by a listener:

http://cellmapper.net/

https://atlas.eia.gov/apps/all-energy-infrastructure-and-resources/explore

https://organicmaps.app/

257: Fire Copilot Down the Cortana Hole

techpod@content.town (Will Smith) — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Wes Fenlon stops by this week to help Will run down all the new features and changes in the 24H2 update to Windows 11, from better quick settings to Wi-Fi 7 support and the long-awaited (or perhaps dreaded) addition of Microsoft's Copilot AI features. Then Will also delivers a trip report from this year's Maker Faire, detailing all the best projects he saw at the Bay Area's preeminent DIY event. It's like two podcasts in one!

256: Gotta Get That Smooth 40

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Adam Patrick Murray) — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Adam Patrick Murray, PC World's handheld PC gaming expert, drops by to talk about the current state of the handheld union. We discuss what's going on with hardware for the Valve Steam Deck, the ASUS Rog Ally X, and a whole lot more, plus dig deep into the pros and cons of Windows vs. Linux on handhelds, talk about what's going on with Valve's version of Steam Deck OS and homebrew options like Bazzite, and touch on what we'd like to see next from the ecosystem next year and beyond.

Stuff discussed in this episode:

255: Don't Ask the AI For a Recipe

techpod@content.town (Norman Chan, Jeremy Williams, Will Smith) — Sun, 6 Oct 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Norman Chan has seen the future of eyewear and it is... well, not something you can buy, or even try. But he's donned Meta's Orion AR glasses and has seen (and touched) the augmented reality future. We also talk about the Harvard students who turned their Meta Ray Bans into the ultimate privacy violating machine and Meta's new cheaper Quest 3S. Best of all, very special guest Jeremy Williams joins us to ask the toughest questions in this This Is Only a Test throwback episode!

254: How to Hide Your Sardine Bricks

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Questions! You ask 'em, we answer 'em. This month, we field Qs about such subjects as migrating search engines to Kagi (or at least just away from Google), wi-fi etiquette as the in-home sysadmin, novel uses for power over Ethernet, where the speed holes on the new Ryzens come from, what the forthcoming landscape of over-the-counter hearing aids might look like, matching the PS5 Pro's performance in a PC build, and more.

253: My Three DACs

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Will's out this week, so Nextlander's Vinny Caravella stops by for a freewheeling gab session about what he's been up to in tech lately, including the professional and personal roles for the eight (!) computers that live in his house, adventures in exposing his (son's) web services to the Internet, the need for a good audio processor in your recording chain, and more!

252: Frames Win Games

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 07:00:00 +0000

It was a really big week for hardware announcements, with Sony finally filling in the details on the PlayStation 5 Pro, and Apple announcing new phones, watches, headphones and more. We dive into both subjects, including the PS5 Pro's promising AI upscaling and less promising whopper of a price, the slightly strange AirPod roadmap, the still-ongoing patent dispute over the Apple Watch, and plenty more.

251: That 6GHz Really Tied the Spectrum Together

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 8 Sep 2024 07:00:00 +0000

The world is steadily moving on to Wi-Fi 7 (or 802.11be, if you like), so we figured it's about time we sit down and attempt to understand what separates this latest standard from all the wireless fidelity that came before. Where in the world did they get a number like 46Gbps? What are the forward- and backward-compatible implications with existing devices? How does "multi-link operation" work? Is it time to run out and upgrade yet? What's haunting Brad's access point? We do our best to answer all this and more.

The article referenced in this episode: https://dongknows.com/wi-fi-7-explained/

Our original Wi-Fi 6 episode (which was episode 9!): https://techpod.content.town/episodes/9-orthogonal-frequency-division-multiple-access-Sb_AgiQe

Our more recent networking primer from early this year: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/227-a-donut-of-good-internet-UAno2S2L

250: The Arbiters of Authentication

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 1 Sep 2024 07:00:00 +0000

This week we put our security expert* hats back on to talk about the latest hotness in login technology, passkeys. Find out how passkeys work, how they enable you to login without a password, which major platforms are supporting them, and where and how you should manage them. We also do a quick update on more traditional time-based authenticator apps, including the recent Authy data breach, and then -- whaddaya know, it's our 250th episode! -- we also reflect a little on a momentous five years of doing this podcast.

*not actual security experts

249: Good Enough Is Good Enough

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 07:00:00 +0000

The Qs that we attempt to A in this month's question-fest include: What are some less obvious benefits of portable apps? How trustworthy is a package manager? Is a Windows Pro license really worth it? What's your microwave technique for even, efficient heating? How do you stop analyzing products and just buy something already? Is a MagSafe connector like a cloaca? Fair warning, like half of this episode ended up being about food.

248: Peace, Love, and Old Computers

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 17:37:27 +0000

Our good friend Steve Lin joins us to run down the trip he and Brad recently took to the Vintage Computer Festival: West Coast Edition, hosted in Mountain View, CA's wonderful Computer History Museum. Did you ever wonder about the strange arrow-key layout of early Soviet computers? Or how to build your own CRT out of a tube you found on the sidewalk? Or what it takes to rebuild the entirety of the early online service Prodigy from scratch? Or about the time Intel shoved a hundred 286s into a single computer? Then this is the episode for you!

Show notes and links for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-248-vcf-west

Our photos and videos from the festival: https://photos.app.goo.gl/KW4WX6tYLyjyamYXA

You should really see the home page for the VCF Midwest in Chicago: https://vcfmw.org/

247: What's in Your Tray?

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 07:00:00 +0000

We got a listener request to talk about our ride-or-die software, the apps we just can't live without, and we thought a good way to focus that subject was to step through everything we've got on our taskbar, running in the system tray, and pinned to the Start menu. Listen in as we talk through our workflows that feature all sorts of both well known and obscure software for media editing and playback, hardware monitoring, file management, Windows GUI tweaks and tricks, and plenty of other stuff. Hopefully, you'll come away with some new favorite apps, too!

Links to some of the more obscure applications we discussed:

Everything: https://www.voidtools.com/

mpv: https://mpv.io/

MusicBee: https://www.getmusicbee.com/

EarTrumpet: https://eartrumpet.app/

SumatraPDF: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/

WinMerge: https://winmerge.org/

WizTree: https://diskanalyzer.com/

LosslessCut: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

Auto Dark Mode: https://github.com/AutoDarkMode/Windows-Auto-Night-Mode

WinDynamicDesktop: https://github.com/t1m0thyj/WinDynamicDesktop

246: The Guy-in-Chicago Problem

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 4 Aug 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Matchmaking: it's hard. Wait, not the online dating kind (well, maybe that too) but the kind where you have to match a bunch of different players with different hardware and different geographic locations together over high-speed Internet and let them have fun in a game together. Prompted by Activision's release of a white paper about Call of Duty's skill-based matchmaking methodology, this week we dig into the technical and sociological ins and outs of creating a rewarding online experience for players, from server types to hosting heuristics, player behaviors, ranking types, and a bunch more.

Activision's COD white paper about matchmaking: https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/CallofDuty_Matchmaking_Series_2.pdf

245: RGB Has Gone Too Far

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Q&A time! The last episode of July sees us discussing topics such as turning a childhood computer into a VM, mandatory open source software in government institutions, the strange and continuing ubiquity of 3.5" card readers, building your own private television channel, the death of corporate email, how we fed our early tech obsessions growing up in rural areas, and more.

The non-Euclidean Doom video we mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZSFRWJCUY4

244: Otaku Christmas

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 07:00:00 +0000

We're putting the time machine back into service again this week with another magazine review, this time of Next Generation issue 36 from December 1997. Notably, this was the issue when the venerable thinking-person's game magazine first declared the PC the best place to play games, along with an in-depth assessment of the N64, PlayStation, and Saturn's places in the market. Plus, we also run through a whole bunch of other interesting material, including an early call for an independent game development scene, a look at some entry-level mid-'90s game dev tools and early Dreamcast development kits, the surprisingly silly origins of Gran Turismo, a review of Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and a bunch of other stuff. Check the show notes for a link to the issue!

Follow along with the magazine here: https://archive.org/details/NextGeneration36Dec1997/mode/2up

243: "Fing Boeing, Holy S"

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 07:00:00 +0000

This week we discuss a three-fer of mini-topics from current events. First we take a look at Boeing's troubled Starliner test flight that's left a pair of astronauts stranded on the International Space Station. Next up, Goldman Sachs has issued a scathingly negative report about the validity and sustainability of the current AI bubble. And last, with Windows 10's end-of-support date looming, we dig into the upgrade requirements that are going to leave millions of PCs stranded, and maybe proclaim the year of the Linux desktop along the way (well, not really (OK, maybe kind of)).

Links referenced this episode include:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/starliner-still-doesnt-have-a-return-date-as-nasa-tests-overheating-thrusters/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/10/openai-board-microsoft-apple-withdraw/

https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit/report.pdf

242: Skittles Exterior, M&Ms Interior

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 7 Jul 2024 07:00:00 +0000

We're back with another hot month's worth of your questions to answer, this time addressing such wide-ranging subjects as easy ways to defeat Blu-ray region locks, tech tips for your fantasy new-home build, the sweet spot for solar panels paying for themselves, whether anyone actually needs a 10-gigabit home Internet connection, the ephemeral nature of knowledge locked up in Discord servers, ways to track subscriptions and to-do items with your partner, and more.

241: The Computruth About Computex

techpod@content.town (Adam Patrick Murray, Will Smith) — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000

This week, Friend of the Show Adam Patrick Murray from PC World joins Will to share the ground truth about Computex. Freshly returned from Taipei, Adam is a Computex veteran, and told us what it's like to attend and cover the most important PC hardware trade show in the world.

What Hardware Should You Use for UE5 Development?
PC World's YouTube Channel
The Full Nerd Podcast
How MSI Laptops are Designed Video
MSI's GPUs Through History Video

240: The Mouse That Changed Everything

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000

We're taking another close look at a product that broke out and redefined its entire category, this time the venerable IntelliMouse Explorer. These days it's hard to remember that it was Microsoft who banished the infernal ball and introduced the optical mouse to the mainstream, so we head back to 1999 and discuss what mice were like beforehand, how mechanical and optical sensors work, debate PS/2 versus USB, make an argument that the whole PC gaming accessory ecosystem owes its existence to this product, and more.

Our last game-changer product deep-dive, about the Xbox 360: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/183-hiroprotagonist-loves-an-inhale-a0zOAKKo

239: Calculator on an iPad?!

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference has come and gone again, and frankly there were enough interesting additions to the company's various OSs that we figured an episode was warranted even before we got to "Apple Intelligence." We do our best in this jumbo episode to round up everything from silly corporate stunts to a (finally, maybe) context-aware Siri, an intelligent way to deal with too many notifications, build-your-own emojis, better vitals on the watch, MacOS's long-overdue window-snapping, and too many other features to list.

Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-239-wwdc-24

Watch the WWDC keynote here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXeOiIDNNek

238: The Dread of Sitting in the Cone Zone

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 9 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Will just traded in the ol' Chevy Bolt for a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5, so it's time to run down all the pros and cons of this newer and more robust electric vehicle, and also check in on everything that's changed in the world of EVs in the three (!!) years since we did our Bolt episode. Listen on for our thoughts on everything from plug standards to the rapidly expanding charger network, how many driver assists are too many, the seemingly endless absurdities in automotive UX, and a bunch of other stuff.

Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-238-ioniq-5

Here's our episode on the Chevy Bolt and the basics of EVs: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/88-it-just-makes-the-lithium-angrier

237: Should We Really Be Teaching Machines to Lie?

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 2 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Microsoft has announced some... controversial new AI-driven features coming to Windows 11, so we thought it was time to dissect the Copilot+ PC spec and particularly its Recall functionality, especially in light of the new Qualcomm ARM chips that are bringing more efficiency and more machine-learning compute power to the portable PC space. Is this stuff something you need? Is it something you should worry about? We do our best to answer these and other questions.

Show notes and links for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-237-copilot-plus-ai

236: Not an Egg, Not Yet a Chicken

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 26 May 2024 07:00:00 +0000

It's another Q&A episode, and this month we get into a wide range of topics including our haul from the electronics flea market, our growing appreciation for SCART, Micro Center's rapidly expanding operations, the open-source automotive self-driving solution, a farewell to mini-USB, a quick Steam patching explainer, and more!

235: The Diabolical Nature of Ear Bones

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 19 May 2024 07:00:00 +0000

We've got another two-fer of mini-topics this week around projects we've been tinkering with lately. First, Will has been investigating ways to get the SteamOS experience on hardware that's not a SteamDeck, with both the full-on SteamOS rebuild HoloISO and the more general gaming-focused Linux distro Bazzite. Second, we've both had Fallout New Vegas (and its many necessary mods) on the brain a lot lately, and have been looking into the open-source mod manager Wabbajack and some of the other stuff going on around automating mods these days. Lastly, uh, enjoy the podcast!

Stuff discussed in this episode includes:

HoloISO: https://github.com/HoloISO/releases

Bazzite: https://bazzite.gg/

Wabbajack: https://www.wabbajack.org/

Viva New Vegas: https://vivanewvegas.moddinglinked.com/

Tale of Two Wastelands: https://taleoftwowastelands.com/

Rounds: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1557740/ROUNDS/

234: One Step Closer to Bringing Back Webrings

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 12 May 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Hey, remember RSS? Friend of the show Wes Fenlon joins us for a record fourth (!!) time to reminisce about the glory days of really simple syndication, when you could just aggregate all your favorite news and blogs into one tidy feed. This episode is about more than just waxing nostalgic, though; Wes is here to tell us all about bringing it all back with his self-hosted RSS stack, including his setup for FreshRSS (and some of its alternatives), ways to get RSS out of sites that don't even serve it anymore, the growing "indie web" movement that aims to recapture the spirit of a simpler Internet, and more.

Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-234-self-hosted-rss

Check out Wes' newsletter on emulation and retro games: https://www.readonlymemo.com/

Episode art courtesy of Sandwich Tribunal: https://www.sandwichtribunal.com/2024/02/south-australias-fritz-and-sauce/

233: My Wife Is a LaserDisc Guy

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 5 May 2024 07:00:00 +0000

We're embarking on a two-part rundown of home video formats this week, with part one focusing on analog video up through the mid-1990s and covering biggies like VHS and LaserDisc, plus also-rans like Betamax, Video8, and the truly strange CED. Tune in for plenty of fun trivia, like myths and misconceptions about the first major format war, Sony's ahead-of-its-time analog HD video system, why a video format patterned after a record player isn't a great idea, and a bunch more!

(There are some drops in Brad's recording this week due to an infestation of audio gremlins which we're working to exterminate. Apologies for any inconvenience.)

The MiSTer clone video from the cold open: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RSrzM7dM-Y

Show notes for this ep, with links to a lot of the videos and images discussed: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-233-analog-home-video

232: Secret Search Engine!

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 07:00:00 +0000

April concludes with another round of questions, during which we entertain the idea of inviting Q to assist us with Qs, Will teases a historic search engine switch, and we field a wide array of topics including breakaway USB-C cables, how to wade through the sea of search-engine slop, why you don't need "www." much anymore, our approach to episode research and accuracy, the best sandwich salads, fermented coffee and bonded whiskey, and a bunch more.

231: What on Earth Would Ordinary People Want With Computers?

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 07:00:00 +0000

The time has come for our deep dive into Pirates of Silicon Valley, the 1999 made-for-TNT movie that chronicles the parallel rises of Apple and Microsoft. Join us for a bunch of chatter about the historic business deals and betrayals, the portrayals of Gates, Jobs, Ballmer, Wozniak and others, what the actual people depicted thought about the movie, how Shakespeare informed the production, the delightful '90s blue screen effects, and plenty more. (And check the show notes if you haven't seen the movie yet!)

Watch Pirates of Silicon Valley before listening to the ep: https://archive.org/details/piratesofsiliconvalley_201908

Read Fire in the Valley, the book the movie is based on: https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Valley-Birth-Personal-Computer-dp-1937785769/dp/1937785769/

Check out Folklore.org's sprawling history of the Macintosh's development that Brad mentioned (linked here to a story about who actually created the Mac project): https://folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html

230: Maybe Gentoo Was Right All Along

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 19:39:56 +0000

This week we attempt to unpack the recent, historic security breach in the open source world, after the discovery of a secret backdoor that was inserted by a malicious actor into the the xz-utils package, with a focus on which specific Linux distros were targeted and why, how the attacker socially engineered their way into the position of authority that made this possible, and what ought to be done to support developers of critical infrastructure to (hopefully) prevent this from happening again.

Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-230-xz-backdoor

Go watch Pirates of Silicon Valley for an upcoming episode where we'll discuss it: https://archive.org/details/piratesofsiliconvalley_201908

229: IMAX, the TikTok of Film Projection

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 7 Apr 2024 07:00:00 +0000

We're doing a follow-up Q&A this week while we sort out some scheduling hurdles on the backend, and taking a bunch more of your questions from the last six months about ideal pixel density on monitors, what the heck Salesforce does, a portable gaming-focused Windows, when in the product cycle to buy, how the Clapper might integrate into your home automation setup, and lastly, you know, the slow and steady decline of everything around us.

Go watch Pirates of Silicon Valley for an upcoming episode where we'll discuss it: https://archive.org/details/piratesofsiliconvalley_201908

228: Never Forward a Port to Your Brain

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

March's Q&A features a wide array of questions that inspired discussions about such wide-ranging topics as our love of screensavers, a world without Gmail, Will's strong opinions on Ethernet termination standards, wearing shoes inside the house (or not), the lack of 9s in product naming, Proton-like cross-platform game support on MacOS, and a bunch more.

Make sure to watch Pirates of Silicon Valley for an upcoming episode we'll be recording in two or three weeks: https://archive.org/details/piratesofsiliconvalley_201908

The SGI Onyx $250,000 supercomputer video Brad mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA

And in case you're curious, the two Ethernet termination standards we talked about.

227: A Donut of Good Internet

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Inspired by what's probably the most common subject we see questions about on our Discord, this week we're doing an updated primer on home networking, with a refresher on some basic terms and concepts and our thoughts on a wide array of topics from modern mesh networks to fiber in the home, ISP-provided equipment, whether you should separate your wi-fi from your gateway, rolling your own router, the rapidly decreasing cost of high-end network speeds, and more.

226: shooter.exe

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

We've got a two-fer this week, with a pair of topics that might not have filled a whole ep on their own but turn out to be two great podcast tastes that, uh, taste great together... anyway, first we talk about the benchmark Will is currently creating in Unreal Engine to push CPUs and GPUs in a game development context, and then we check in on how the grand unification of smart home devices is coming along with the new Matter and Thread standards, now that products have been on the market for a year or so. There's definitely just one standard now, right? ...Right?

Articles referenced in this ep:

The Verge on a year with Matter & Thread: https://www.theverge.com/23997548/matter-smart-home-2023-platforms

Ars Technica on the continued value of Zigbee and Z-Wave: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/i-was-wrong-to-ignore-zigbee-and-z-wave-theyre-the-best-part-of-my-smart-home/

225: The Goldblum Conjecture

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

What makes a great tech demo? Besides killer tech, do you need theatricality? Stage presence? The risk of everything exploding at the seams at any moment? This week we look back on a ton of notable tech demos big and small, from the largest Apple and Microsoft stages to people in their living rooms, to reminisce about some of the most exciting reveals and try to locate the exact intersection where earnestness and carnival barking meet to create a truly memorable presentation.

Show notes and YouTube links for this ep: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-225-famous-tech-demos

Our Xbox 360 deep dive episode: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/183-hiroprotagonist-loves-an-inhale

224: Heavy Metal Twenty-Something Swagger

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 3 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Book club returns this week, now that we've both read id Software founder John Romero's memoir, Doom Guy: Life in First Person. Join us for an extremely nerdy chat about Romero's early days as a teenage Apple II developer learning 6502 assembly, the pre-id team's blistering one-game-a-month output at Softdisk, technical innovations that led to id's most groundbreaking games, the internal strife that ultimately split the company, retrospective thoughts on a very different mid-'90s Doom 3 than the one we got later, and a bunch more.

Pick up Doom Guy: https://www.amazon.com/Doom-Guy-Life-First-Person/dp/141975811X

Romero's fan mail to Jordan Mechner: https://twitter.com/jmechner/status/1253777950299873283

223: Our Favorite Corporate Besties

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 08:00:00 +0000

This month's Q&A features another bumper crop of great topics, including installing in-wall speakers and hidden audio systems, the final word on the origins of WASD, doing A/V production on Linux (really), the relative value of the Raspberry Pi in 2024, how we use bookmarks these days, our feelings on mechanical versus smart watches, and a long-awaited update on the wi-fi sheep shed.

222: War of the Chatbots

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 08:00:00 +0000

News has been happening (when hasn't it?) and this week we're rounding up some of the stories that caught our attention in recent days. First, the launch of OpenAI's generative-video product Sora, as we consider what this thing is actually going to be used for, and what sorts of havoc it may wreak. Next, the effects of the EU's Digital Markets Act and the stringent ways that some large platform holders are starting to respond to it (looking at you, Apple). Lastly, the talk out of DICE about the state of the video game business and the likelihood of getting new projects off the ground.

Notes and links for this episode: http://tinyurl.com/techpod-222-news-roundup

221: Cluck to Home Screen

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 08:00:00 +0000

We're pleased to welcome Tested's Norman Chan back to the show, fresh off of his first week with the Apple Vision Pro and ready to fill us in on everything from the fitting process at the store to UI shortcuts with your mouth, connecting to an external Mac, the ins and outs of the video passthrough (and your loved ones appearing as ghosts atop Mount Hood), and everything in between.

Check out Norm's upcoming Vision Pro video, plus all his other work: https://www.youtube.com/@tested

220: Hit That Optimize Button

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 4 Feb 2024 08:00:00 +0000

PC graphics settings have only gotten more complex in recent years, with new options around AI-driven supersampling, ray tracing, latency reduction, and a bunch of other stuff joining classics like SSAO. We attempt this week to step through the most common settings, with basic explanations and recommendations, as well as our experiences getting things like variable refresh to work, choosing between borderless and fullscreen, debating whether you should just let GeForce Experience do all this for you, and more.

Show notes for this ep: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-220-gfx-settings

219: The Mark of Expertise

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 08:00:00 +0000

We begin this month's Q&A with a slightly mind-bending discussion of questions that exist in a quantum state, before falling back to more grounded topics like charging your EV out your apartment window, real-life keyboard shortcuts, why we all ended up on WASD, crowdfunding a Moon landing, speeding up your bulk photo-scanning, and the shameful faux pas of changing your profile picture.

218: Products People Love

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Will unearthed a venerable SpaceOrb 360 in his garage recently, which sent us down a rabbit hole chasing all the weird, experimental input devices of the late '90s, back when everyone was just figuring out 3D control in the first-person shooter. Before we all standardized on mice and dual analog sticks, there were apparently a lot of different ways to Frankenstein together trackballs, dials, joints, hinges and more, and this week we try to catalog as much of it as we can.

Notes for this ep, including pics and a bunch of links to all these devices (and some ongoing efforts to keep them working): https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT-lwdhF-FAZmBOaWimIr1ExIcNW0ZYy4plcw_BKtZA7xQB5c0ZLjxRbaTCSBv2wzJk4otzOhjXRTGt/pub

217: Still a Festering Hellhole

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Another Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone, and we've sifted through the highs and lows to bring you a casual discussion about the stuff that actually mattered (Nvidia's Pulsar G-SYNC tech and Super GPUs, better wireless charging, new screen technologies), the strange and ridiculous (AI-powered cat doors, a robot that parks cars, a whole-mouth toothbrush), plus a bonus lightning round where we attempt to stump each other with real versus fake products.

Digital Trends' report on the self-emissive quantum dot (or "nanoLED") display tech Brad mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eONWY3kbZc0

216: Tactical Baking Method

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 7 Jan 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The seasonal metaphors continue as we weather a blizzard of great questions from you for the monthly Q&A, this time covering everything from Swiss army knife roles in game development to replacing USB ports, the mythical petabyte retail drive, extending wi-fi across hundreds of feet, whether we'll ever see a 128-bit CPU, L-shaped desks, our auditory sleep strategies, and more.

The GDC talk about Bungie's Production Engineering role: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025970/Bungie-s-Force-Multipliers-Production

The one sheep-herding video you simply must watch: https://www.tiktok.com/@seanthesheepman/video/7312752825379884321

215: Taking the Temperature of the Market

techpod@content.town (Adam Patrick Murray, Will Smith) — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

On the final day of 2023, Will is joined by Adam Patrick Murray from PC World to discuss the year that was. We run down the last twelve months of PC and mobile hardware, pick this year's winners (and a few losers) and call out the trends and hardware that we were most excited about in 2023! Plus, scene drama!

214: David Smith (Hobbyist)

techpod@content.town (Kishore Hari, Will Smith) — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

This week, Will is joined by Kishore Hari, who takes us on scientific journey through some of the biggest science stories of the year. Topics include advancements in cancer research, a cure for sickle cell anemia, the Nine Boundaries graph, advances in brain science, the cheapest way to land on the Moon, long-standing math problems solve by amateurs, and the year in science woo.

213: Therapy Over Teams

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

We had such a surplus of good questions in October and November that this week we're shattering our own precedent and doing a supplemental mid-month Q&A to catch up on topics like how (or whether) to block YouTube ads, the increasing costs of midrange GPUs, the eternal struggle of inputting text with controllers, mixing chocolate milk and lemonade in the same glass (not a euphemism, we swear), pivoting careers mid-life, and more.

212: Programmable for the Masses

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

The temperature outside is plummeting, but the number of cold opens in this episode is skyrocketing! We convene once again this week for our sort-of-semi-annual block of short segments about everything from video game Yule logs to neighbors waging holiday decoration warfare, keeping your CPU from (almost) melting, neglecting your cast iron, maximizing your Panda Express order, and more.

211: The Drier, the Burnier

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 3 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

A cornucopia of great questions graced our podcasting table this month, and from it we drew such topics as (not) mixing and matching your RAM, fishing for game saves in AppData, an appreciation of the demoscene past and present, the redundant measurements that are totally the power company's fault, and the unmitigated decadence of the Tim Tam slam.

Here's Area 5150, the IBM PC demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zADeLm9g0Zg

MartyPC, the IBM PC/XT emulator: https://github.com/dbalsom/martypc

210: TWELVE HUNDRED MEGARAYS

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Will's been fortunate to spend a chunk of time with the new Steam Deck OLED, and now it's time to talk through both his firsthand impressions and the list of small-yet-significant upgrades Valve has made to just about everything on the device, from screen size to weight to battery life, heat and cooling, memory bandwidth, and even the color of the power button.

209: Please Show the Hamster Guy Some Respect

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 08:00:00 +0000

It's nearly Turkey Day here in the US once again, so it's time to discuss another round of tech we're thankful for, which includes such topics as the year USB-C finally happened (for real), freeing yourself from the single critical computer, the joys of both wireless and wired headphones, powering one computer off of another computer, learning to love YouTube again, and more.

208: Don't Be Mean to Racoons

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 08:00:00 +0000

We've been thinking about troubleshooting lately (because it feels like we've all been doing a lot of it), so in this ep we did a formal rundown of how we approach solving technical problems, both in PCs and otherwise. From the analytical joy of log files to A/B testing and eliminating variables, the dos and don'ts of both searching for and contributing to advice online, and other methods of stepping through the problem, hopefully this ep helps make your problem solving just a little bit easier.

207: When Magazines Were Phone Books

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 5 Nov 2023 07:00:00 +0000

We're firing up the time machine again this week for another visit to the era when computer coverage was "printed" on "paper" in bound volumes called "magazines." This time, we take a look at the voluminous December 2000 issue of PC Gamer, with a look at the early MMO boom brought on by Ultima Online and EverQuest, a preview of EA's weird social game Majestic, reviews of Voyager: Elite Force, Metal Gear Solid for Windows, and the Geforce 2 Ultra, and a bunch more!

Here's the browsable version of the issue we discussed, along with quite a few other old PC Gamer issues: https://archive.org/details/UneditedPCGamer_marktrade/PC_Gamer_079u/mode/2up

206: A Bunch of Ferrets Is Called a Business

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 07:00:00 +0000

October's terrifying batch of questions hits us like an airborne jack-o-lantern this month, as we discuss topics like: why it's RGB and not RYB, the origin of the computer "wizard," the ethics of tracking your family's movements around the house, the usefulness of a nut milk bag (seriously) for filtering coffee, and perhaps the most Tech Pod email we've ever received from a contributor to not one but two legendary operating systems.

205: More Than a Drip, Less Than a Gush

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 07:00:00 +0000

This week we're doing some follow-ups on recent episodes to fill in a few blanks. Spurred on by the PS5's Spider-Man 2, we wanted to talk about the recent advent of gaming at 40Hz, and that led us to finally talk in some more depth about Brad's new television set. Will has also been testing a coffee brewer FROM SPAAAACE!!!! or at least co-designed by an astrophysicist, and has some tips on zero-bypass brewing, wetting your paper filters (eww), and more.

Some links from this episode:

Hisense U8K: https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/hisense/u8-u8k

Nextlevel Pulsar: https://nextlevelbrewer.com/pulsar-brewer/

Coffee ad Astra: https://coffeeadastra.com/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

204: Science Cookies??

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 19:24:10 +0000

We've got a pleasantly floral potpourri this week, mainly focused on Will's trip report from this weekend's Bay Area Maker Faire, the first time the DIY science and tech show has been held since 2019. If you want to hear about model-size mag-lev trains, personal undersea robots, the cottage industry of R2-D2 replica builders, and more, this is your podcast. If you also want to hear about Brad's contemplation of a PC water cooling conversion and Will's recent questionable RGB projects, that's in here too!

A few links for this week's show:

Maker Faire: https://makerfaire.com/

Build your own R2-D2: https://makezine.com/projects/building-your-first-r2/

OpenROV: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openrov/openrov-trident-an-underwater-drone-for-everyone

OpenRGB: https://openrgb.org/

Project Aurora: https://www.project-aurora.com/

Artemis RGB: https://artemis-rgb.com/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

203: Don't Mess With Big Encyclopedia

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 8 Oct 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Following on from our consideration of Google's many terminated products in episode 74, we turn our attention to another graveyard this week, one with a big "Microsoft" on the sign. The company's decades-long policy of trying to supplant market leaders with Microsoft-made equivalents has left us with plenty to talk about, from phones to joysticks, questionable Windows add-ons, an actually superlative streaming service, some very brown portable media players, and plenty more.

Big thanks to Killed by Microsoft for the reference material: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

Don't miss the FOSS Pod ep we mentioned about 3D Movie Maker: https://fosspod.content.town/episodes/3d-movie-maker-with-foone-turing

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

202: The Puritanical Wrath of the Universe

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 1 Oct 2023 07:00:00 +0000

A crisp Fall batch of questions has found its way to the show this month, as we attempt to deliver answers about such things as trusting your devices with your biometric data, whether to color-calibrate your screens or not, whether bigger and better screens even matter in the age of ultra-compressed video, the relative utility of network racks and pizza ovens, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

201: Core 1 Ultra Extreme Plus+

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 22:41:43 +0000

Intel held its annual Innovation event this week, and our friend Adam Patrick Murray from PC World was there. Now he's here to fill us in on all the details about the company's big shift to Meteor Lake and beyond, including the embrace of chiplet-style modular CPU design, their ever-shrinking process nodes, major changes to how the CPUs are named, their first "neural processing unit," how complicated it's getting to benchmark all this stuff, and more.

Check out some of PCWorld's recent coverage of the topics from this ep:

Meteor Lake Tech Tour Deep Dive

Hands-On With Core Ultra Laptops Running AI Demos

Intel & The AI PC, NPU Performance, Developer Support & More | The Full Nerd Special Edition

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

200: Bump to Squirt

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Sometimes the events are so current we can't help discussing them, and such is the case with this week's act of self-immolation on the part of Unity and its relationship with the many developers who use its engine to make their games. Plus, iOS 17 and friends are imminent and Will has installed every available *OS beta and is here to talk about some of the new features (VPN on AppleTV?!?), the newly announced iPhones and Watches, and some other stuff!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

199: MAKE ROME

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Will dons the game developer hat again this week for a deep dive into how a game gets built. No, not the coding and design and art and all that -- we mean how a game gets literally built into a package that you can run on your PC or console, with some in-depth chat about everything from build servers to source and version control of both code and binary assets, pre-baked lighting, creating automated nightlies of your game, partying in TeamCity, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

198: Insert ASCII Shrug™ Here

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 3 Sep 2023 07:00:00 +0000

We're back this week with another round of hot tips for making your computing life less annoying, including super secret UI settings, methods of bending digital voice assistants to your will, a low-level Windows hotkey not even Will knew about, the latest PowerToys (since the last time we talked about PowerToys), an easy way to trim videos without encoding them again, the fastest video player in the West, and other tips you won't want to miss!

The apps we mentioned in this ep include LosslessCut, mpv, Authy, and the ever-growing Power Toys.

The Windows hotkeys we mentioned:

Win + . - emoji/Unicode picker
Win + Shift + S - easy screenshots
Win + R - run applications
Win + L - lock your computer
Win + Alt + B - disable / enable HDR at the OS level
Win + Ctrl + Shift + B - video driver
Win + P - select output device
Win + alt + r - record video of game window that’s open (needs Game Bar)
Win + alt + g - record last 30 seconds, but needs to be turned on first (also Game Bar)
Win + V - clipboard history (need to enable in privacy)

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

197: The Pigs Go Ham

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Another piping-hot batch of questions is here straight out of the oven (where "the oven" is Discord and our inbox), and we do our best to deliver answers about amassing a collection of Allen wrenches, the seeming fragility of OLED panels, service-nagging from your smart appliances, running dynamic DNS for your home VPN, books about computer history, peated whiskey, and more!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

196: HDMI Kablammo

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Since Brad just went through the new-TV-buying-and-setup process (for someone else), we decided it was time for us to look past our classic plasmas and take stock of the modern TV landscape. In this ep we attempt to casually dissect HDMI 2.1 features and HDR standards, and think about why format wars are never going away, which legacy audio connector is getting short shrift these days, why everything is labeled "8K" all of a sudden, when to buy an OLED, and a bunch more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

195: In Our Bendy Phone Era

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Our friend Wes Fenlon is back, this time to talk about his experiences daily-carrying Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip series of foldable smartphones. By interrogating such topics as whether glass is really meant to bend like that, when a screen protector isn't just a screen protector, how great the Game Boy Advance SP was (very great), and whether Apple might get in on this trend, we analyze whether this a passing fad, or the most exciting thing to happen to phones in some time.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

194: All I Want Is Simple Determinism!

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 6 Aug 2023 07:00:00 +0000

We're back this week with the mythical three-peat of updates on topics we've discussed either recently or in the distant past. First, following up on last month's patron episode, we dig into our recent experiences with Wireguard and discuss why it's pretty much the only home VPN game in town. Next we dissect the lessons Will learned about operating an electric vehicle in extreme heat on this year's just-concluded sojourn to Palm Desert. Lastly, Brad does a quick update on cold brewing coffee after a couple weeks of experimenting with liquid ratios and excess caffeine. It's like three podcasts in one!

Some Wireguard links that we mentioned:

Wireguard home page: https://www.wireguard.com/

Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/

PiVPN: https://www.pivpn.io/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

193: The Bob Ballard Fan Club

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 07:00:00 +0000

It's that Q&A time again, so in between waxing philosophical about meteor showers and shipwrecks, we take a few of your questions this week, about the etiquette of color-matched bidet installs, the current state of AM5, a growing army of robot chore-doers, a check-in on our download folders, and the amount of that sweet, sweet pre-war steel in the Empire State Building.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

192: Straight Out the Bunn

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Will gets to dispense his considerable knowledge of coffee this week as Brad gets into cold brew and consuming way too much caffeine, with a medium-bodied discussion covering the cherry-esque fruit that houses the sacred bean, ratios for brewing a world class cup, some of the flashier and more modern brewing methods out there these days, and a bunch of other details that will hopefully prove informative to even the most refined coffee connoisseur.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

191: WINNER: NONE

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 07:00:00 +0000

We're dusting off the ol' projector this week for a discussion about the 1983 nuclear-warfare classic WarGames (which Brad had never seen!). Did you know the original movie had nothing to do with hacking or nukes? What exactly was inside WOPR, anyway? Is the movie somehow more relevant now than it was then? How much did all that gear in Matthew Broderick's bedroom cost? Listen to this podcast and answer these questions!

Sources for this episode:

https://www.wired.com/2008/07/ff-wargames/

https://gizmodo.com/the-computer-simulation-that-almost-started-world-war-i-1686123550

https://www.cio.com/article/220297/the-technology-of-wargames.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/movies/wargames-and-cybersecuritys-debt-to-a-hollywood-hack.html

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

190: A Mishmash Mismatch

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 9 Jul 2023 07:00:00 +0000

New competition is springing up in the microblogging space by the week these days, and to one degree or another, all these new services are attempting to reduce the centralization that led to the current sorry state of Twitter. In this ep we chat about the idea of federated social media -- that is, a bunch of communities loosely connected together -- and how it's being implemented on Mastodon and Bluesky, wrestle with the implications for moderation and network effects when everyone is no longer on the same service, and remember that the Internet has been here and done all this before.

Here's Bob Ballard's Titanic talk and the original press conference mentioned in the cold open:

2012 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Q3eA6wYil4

1986 discovery press conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe54buLGWS8

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

189: A Long Time in a Short Time

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 2 Jul 2023 07:00:00 +0000

There's a lot going on lately (isn't there always?), so we did a roundup of some recent news stories this week. Canada is now requiring Google and Facebook to compensate news producers whose stories they aggregate, Reddit and Twitter are both self-immolating in spectacular fashion, and an exciting new discovery has been made in the hot astronomical category of gravitational waves. Events! Current ones!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

188: Full-Time Lego Broker

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 07:00:00 +0000

As one social media platform after another lights itself on fire, we spend a good chunk of this month's Q&A thinking about other ways to use (or just get off of) the Internet, plus field some other Qs about ways to keep Windows XP alive, laptops for parents, some thoughts about the coming passkey era, acceptable data hoarding, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Special FOSS Ep: Pine64 With Lukasz Erecinski

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 18 Jun 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Due to travel and other scheduling, we're debuting a brand new episode of the FOSS Pod in the feed this week. Hope you enjoy!

Pine64 is one of the most ambitious open hardware projects around, delivering a wide range of low-cost and modifiable products including smart phones and watches, laptops, earbuds, soldering irons, and plenty more, all based on ARM and RISC-V. Senior advisor Lukasz Erecinski joins us on this episode to talk about the company's origins, letting your userbase weigh in on the hardware design process, running Linux on a phone, the promise of RISC-V, and a lot more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

187: Certified Volumetric Environment™

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Our friend Norman Chan of Tested.com seized the chamfered aluminum ring this week by not only getting invited to the Apple Vision Pro reveal event but also getting to actually try the thing. Norm joins us this week for a very deep dive into this extraordinarily expensive piece of high technology, from getting his face and ears scanned to the gesture-based controls, his (shocking!) favorite experience, comparisons with other headsets, and all kinds of other stuff.

Check out Norm's video from the Vision Pro event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0HBzePUmZ0

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

186: Cutting Matt

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 4 Jun 2023 07:00:00 +0000

This week we're rounding up another handful of lifehacks-that-aren't-lifehacks, ranging from unexpected uses for barcode readers to apps that reduce food waste, a shocking truth about surge protectors, cutting mats and foot rockers, one weird trick to make your 30-year-old hard drive spin up, ways to fight back against the tyranny of MAX, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

185: That's Nana's Prerogative

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 28 May 2023 07:00:00 +0000

The last Sunday of the month heralds questions such as these: What's Amazon going to do with data on the layout of your house? Are the Netflixes of the world going to fight back against VPNs eventually? Is Windows really getting .rar support after all these years? How sustainable is the direct-funding model for indie media? Are bedsheet habits a shockingly contentious subject? Has the time come for the 220v personal computer?

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

184: Not the Out-of-Box Experience

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 21 May 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Now that we're both on new PCs in the last six months, it's time for us to run through some of our experiences and offer a few (hopefully new) tips for anyone else building a machine. Join us as we talk shop this week about recent BIOS trends, our love of portable apps, unconventional cloud storage strategies, much handwringing about motherboard vendor drivers, Windows package managers, some hefty praise for WSL2 (plus a dangerous digression into the varied feelings about systemd), and more.

Some of the less common software mentioned in this episode, which is all easy to Google:

Rufus (the full-featured disk imager for making OS install media)

PowerToys (make Windows way better)

Chocolatey, WinGet, and scoop (the Windows package managers)

Input Director (Will's software KVM solution)

rclone (command line cloud storage manager)

HWiNFO (the gold standard hardware monitor)

OCCT (hardware stability and stress testing)

LatencyMon (diagnose audio/video latency issues in Windows)

Lastly, the Wired article about the capsized cars: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/the-race-to-save-the-cougar-ace/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

183: HiroProtagonist Loves an Inhale

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 14 May 2023 07:00:00 +0000

We're going to start taking the occasional look at a product that changed everything in its respective field, starting this week with the game console that redefined how consoles work in the online era, the Xbox 360. From achievements and cross-game chat to first-class downloadable games and controller standardization, evolution in game development and mainstream marketing, our memories of working with the system in the media, and not-so-flattering things like the red ring, HD-DVD, and Kinect, there's a lot to cover in this lengthy episode.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

182: The Healthy Kind of Nihilism

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 7 May 2023 07:00:00 +0000

We're delighted to be joined this week by Katie Mack, noted astrophysicist and author of The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), to talk about, well, how to think about the end of all existence, along with a bunch of other cosmological topics like the new research being enabled by the JWST, ingenious ways of using astronomical objects to study other astronomical objects, the programming languages astrophysicists use, the shocking truth about chalkboards versus dry erase, and more.

Find out more about Katie's work, her book, and more at her site: https://www.astrokatie.com/

Cornell's arXiv, the open-access archive for scholarly articles: https://arxiv.org/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

181: Hatch Watch Is On

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Our month-ending Q&A is here again, with a bevy of emails and Discord questions pertaining to subjects such as these: scanning and 3D-printing precision parts, parental controls on your kid's first PC, the great Imgur purge of anonymous uploads, our two-factor and recipe-organizing strategies, leaking state secrets on Discord, evolution (and aerodynamics!) in PC cases over the year, and... wearing outside clothes to bed.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

180: Chowder 'n Cookies

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Spring is in the air, flowers are blooming, and the potpourri is back. In our latest floral pouch of podcast topics, we get into the IP camera setup Will is using for his bird cam, Stream Deck alternatives like Bitfocus Companion and Loupedeck, reliable old laser printers, the return of GPU space heaters, replacing filthy Windows installs, and the end of girl scout cookie season.

Bitfocus Companion: https://bitfocus.io/companion

Loupedeck: https://loupedeck.com/us/

Amcrest IP cameras: https://amcrest.com/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

179: The World’s Largest Graphics Card

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:04:14 +0000

Yes, Brad built a new PC. Seriously! For this momentous occasion, we got together to talk all things PC-building, starting with some early impressions of the new build and then heading off into tangents on ludicrous ray tracing performance, the ongoing mystery of PCIe lanes, working with the executive motherboard, the terror of the land grid array, and more.

Download Fan Control here: https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Special FOSS Ep: Raspberry Pi With Eben Upton

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 9 Apr 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Each of us are on overlapping mini-vacations this week, so we're debuting a brand new episode of the FOSS Pod in the feed. Enjoy!

With tens of millions of units sold, it's no surprise the Raspberry Pi has become synonymous with the phenomenon of single-board computers, and it's also a great gateway into the world of open source. For this ep, we spoke to none other than co-founder and CEO Eben Upton about every Pi-related topic we could think of, including the Pi's origins in academia, early challenges designing the first board, adapting to pandemic supply constraints, selling such a successful device at low margins, and a lot more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

178: Windows on Top of Windows

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 2 Apr 2023 07:00:00 +0000

It's been several months since Will needed a laptop and bought an M2 iPad Pro, keyboard, and pencil instead, so we figured enough time has passed to decide if that was the right move or not. In this ep we dig into the ups and downs of replacing a laptop with a tablet, what the workflow looks like, screen protectors that feel like paper, iPad OS multitasking, what you might use this sort of setup for in a serious film or media production setting, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

177: Five Thou Tolerances

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Another month's worth of questions has accrued, and so this week we dispense answers about being the family tech support, silliness with Imperial measurements, gigantic patches for games, recurring spell check issues, questionable PC-building tricks, the MacOS command line, and some truly, truly accursed file systems.

Here are links to the sheer insanity of pingfs: https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs

And YouTubeFS: https://github.com/robertkeizer/youtubefs

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

176: Phone Blasters in DOS Land

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Tech news is getting a little too surreal for us lately, so we're taking a brief trip back to a simpler time. This week we go through the very first issue of Boot (later Maximum PC) from 1996, which has everything from Jean-Louis Gassée on the launch of the BeBox to Bill Gates on the x86 PC's murder of SGI, the very first cable modem service, a motorized (?) Panasonic laptop, some shocking secrets about the first Dream Machine and the letters section, the Will Smith byline that almost was, and a bunch more.

Read along at home with Boot issue #1: https://archive.org/details/boot-magazine-vol01-issue01-sept-1996

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

175: Short Analog, Long Digital

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Our desks have evolved since the last time we talked about our personal workspaces (Brad has even achieved the elusive Cord Zero), so we're doing an updated check-in to talk about the current gear we're working with, aspirational cable-routing, portable camera setups, gaming on ultra-wide monitors, custom corkboard cutouts, and a bunch of other related topics.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

174: Weaponized Smurfing

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 5 Mar 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Remember when pop-up ads looked like they were part of Windows XP? Dark patterns are all around us, even when we don't realize it, and this week we cover a wide range of these insidious methods of manipulating our online behavior, touching on everything from tricks to make you play games longer than you want to subtly enticing you to rope in your friends, succumb to sunk cost fallacy, and more. Editor's note: Brad played Clash Royale for three hours after recording this episode.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

173: Splinter Cell in a Kayak

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Brad spent a whole bunch of time in the PlayStation VR 2 this past week, and given Will's previous life as the proprietor of a VR-related business, we're pairing hands-on (or maybe face-on) experience with institutional knowledge this week to dissect the ins and outs of the new headset, comparing it to the current PC fare, speculating about its potential to become a PC headset itself, musing about the use of SLAM tracking in robot vacuums, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

172: Orange Ricky & Smashboy

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Some scheduling switcharoos mean we're doing February's Q&A episode one (1) whole week early! This month we field Qs about public Unix servers, noisy hard drives, the desirability of your own phone booth, an update on that attempt at roasting weed coffee, our experiences with house plants, a goblin who handcuffs people to chairs, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

171: "Gratuitous Stroke"

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 12 Feb 2023 08:00:00 +0000

This week we're thrilled to be joined by Marcin Wichary, author of the upcoming and extensively detailed history of the keyboard, Shift Happens. We get into all kinds of typing-related subjects like QWERTY dominance, the shift wars of the late 1800s, and 150-year-old designs that have trickled down to software keyboards, plus a fascinating discussion about what it's like to spend seven years traveling the world to write a book of this scope and depth.

Find out more about (and snag a copy of) Marcin's book: https://shifthappens.site/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

170: The Robots (Hopefully) Aren't Coming

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 5 Feb 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Artificial intelligence, machine learning--whatever we're calling it, it sure is in the news a lot all of a sudden. Everything about the use of AI feels uncanny enough lately that we sat down and had a free-wheeling conversation about the subject, from some basic (fuzzy) terms and definitions to Will's use of machine learning at Foo, the endless ethical dilemmas about the use of the technology, and some loose speculation about where AI will be used going forward and how long it'll take someone to unironically name their startup Skynet.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

169: Don't Trust Alberta's Lies

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 29 Jan 2023 08:00:00 +0000

You sent some serious Qs for this month's Q&A, which got us talking about the intermingling of control schemes in online shooters, the best sci-fi robots, the absurdity of discount medical care, pronounceable file extensions, AI-driven customer service, putting Airtags in other devices, and the northern plight of the humble brown rat.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

168: It's Cool to Be Cool

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 08:00:00 +0000

It was a pretty heavy week for a variety of reasons, so we decided to discuss a variety of shorter topics this week to try to take it in, starting by touching on the mass layoffs sweeping the tech industry and elsewhere. Then we make a... Musk sandwich, first by covering the New York Times Magazine's extensive article on Tesla's Full Self-Driving issues, then by examining the Orwellian goings-on with Twitter third-party clients. Finally, we go to our happy place with a quick check-in on Will's new Beelink NUC-like and the server stuff he's done with it so far.

The New York Times Magazine piece we discussed: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/magazine/tesla-autopilot-self-driving-elon-musk.html

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

167: We Can't Give Them the Heads

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Will does the unthinkable this week and PODCASTS WITH HIS BOSS, as Stray Bombay head Chet Faliszek joins us on the one-year anniversary of the release of The Anacrusis to talk all things running a small video game studio. From Steam and Xbox backend tools to current engine tech, the difficulty of getting noticed in today's ultra-crowded market, management and decision-making on a small team, whether launching on Game Pass was worth it, and more, there's a lot to cover in this ep.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

166: Someone Else's Cables

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 8 Jan 2023 08:00:00 +0000

It's (belatedly) time to answer more of your questions, and this time you posed Qs that resulted in As about an iPhone without charging ports, cured meats, hyphy dark roast, favorite classic screensavers, favorite console boot-up animations, the rise of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, and social acceptance of CRT filters. Last month's questions, today!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

165: I Don’t Believe in Adverbs

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 1 Jan 2023 08:00:00 +0000

On our first show in 2023, we rejoin our epic task of ranking all of humanity's software. Will we actually start putting things in order this week? Or will we get sidetracked by our love of dot matrix-printed banners? Or by reminiscing about the excitement of IRC channel takeover wars? Will Brad be flabbergasted that Will has never played Gorilla.bas? Will we ever finish this project? Listen on and find out!

This week's show art courtesy of Blake Patterson.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

164: Truly Lawless

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Here at the tail end of 2022, are we nuts enough to attempt to rank every piece of software ever written? OK, not quite, but we're going to do our best to assemble a list and put it in an order... eventually. If you've ever wanted to hear someone debate the relative merits of the LAMP stack versus the Video Toaster versus Super Mario 64, you've come to the right podcast.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

163: JWST (Just Wonderful Science and Technology)

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Our friend Kishore Hari becomes our first three-time guest by joining us this week to run down some of our favorite science and tech stories of 2022, including the latest developments in nuclear fusion, some ML-driven mid-podcast protein prediction, the latest addition to the dark energy debate, extremely American asteroid deflection strategies, one of the more exciting Antarctic discoveries in recent memory, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

162: Storage Wars

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Will's recent clean-slate PC build and newfound abundance of extremely fast storage got us thinking about all things storage. So this week we had a top-to-bottom chat about our current storage strategies, including the ways we are and aren't still using local drives, our fondness for portable apps, how many cloud storage services is too many, the promise of something like rclone to manage all of your offsite storage, dumping long-term data into S3 Glacier, and more.

Here's Will's recent PC build with Gordon and Adam from PC World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIJBxR_BkRI

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

161: Get Stretchy

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 4 Dec 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Brrr, is it cold in here? It's time to deliver our semi-annual Cube of Cold Opens: Holiday Edition, with short and pithy conversations about cramming your Fortnite homework, that loud phone life, running your laptop off of your PC, reckless Thanksgiving leftovers, game console quality modes, the etiquette of (not) asking for your controller back, the unrivaled glory of a working dishwasher, and more. Enjoy, and stay warm!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

160: Gelatinous Soup Tube

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 08:00:00 +0000

We're thankful for the copious bounty of questions sent in by you this month, which got us talking about all kinds of stuff. Stuff like our love of treehouses (and mushroom soup), mouse pad technology, advanced s'more techniques, people who hold their phone in the toast position, more on setting up your own blog, the iPad apps Apple doesn't want you to have, Will's love of model railroads, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

159: It's Good Brain

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Techsgiving is here again, as we wax thankful about some of the stuff we love in our own specific nerdy spheres. Join us for some chill discussion of everything from defying gravity (under the desk) to the simple joy of playing guitar into your computer, wearable tech, wireless charging, intergalactic space inside your drinking bottle, good old simple human communication, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

158: Twitastrophe

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 20:19:10 +0000

Elon Musk's Twitter disaster has been impossible to look away from, and since we probably owe some amount of our careers to everyone's favorite social media platform, we had to spend this ep running down and trying to make sense of a series of events that's almost impossible to believe. We also dig into some of the feasible alternatives to Twitter, like Mastodon, Cohost, and the Bluesky project with its AT protocol. #twitastrophe

SHOW NOTES

Stories and reporters referenced in this episode include:

A timeline of the whole mess: https://www.ign.com/articles/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-and-the-chaos-that-followed-the-complete-timeline

Implications for Musk's business empire: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-money-sucking-quagmire-tesla-spacex-debt-2022-4

Text messages between Musk and others: https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-texts-joe-rogan-larry-elllison-dorsey-twitter-1849600155

Casey Newton: https://www.platformer.news/

Mike Masnick: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/

Mike Isaac: https://www.nytimes.com/by/mike-isaac

Also, Will's definitely-not-shitty blog: https://shitty.blog/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

157: Cereal's Dark Legacy

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 6 Nov 2022 07:00:00 +0000

This week we decided to do something radically different and "record" a "podcast" to answer some of your "questions." In the course of doing so we revealed shocking details about breakfast cereal, ran down our three-day weekend preferences, discussed the latest in sleep and robe technology, talked about spooky names, considered future Steam Decks, checked our interest in Linux laptops, and more. It's a Q&A!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Special Ep: Don't Pull the Frenulum

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 07:05:00 +0000

Brad is feeling under the weather this week, so we weren't able to turn Qs into As, but we did manage to find a classic Halloween episode of the Patron cast deep in the Tech Pod Vault. Brad and Will turn Qs into As and talk about the true horrors of the technological world, self-closing doors. Enjoy!

156: The People's Benchmark

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 23 Oct 2022 07:00:00 +0000

It's been too long since PC World's hardware expert Gordon Mah Ung dropped by, and what better occasion than the big launch of new CPUs from both AMD and Intel? Gordon runs down all his recent experience with the Ryzen 7000 and 13th gen Core parts, sits through a lightning round of hardware vendor Qs, considers whether undervolting is just overclocking for old people, and a bunch more in this loose, wide ranging chat about our first and most enduring love, PC hardware.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

155: Cyberplunk

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 07:00:00 +0000

The sizable slab of silicon known as the Geforce 4090 has landed in Will's computer, so this week we did a deep dive on his experiences with it so far, ranging from basic performance to impressions of how DLSS 3 impacts micro-stutter and game feel, installing the massive three-slot card and dealing with its new power connector, some speculation about what drove the unusual branding decisions around the 40-series, a hodgepodge of info we picked up at Nvidia's recent editor's day, and more.

Nvidia's extremely brief update about "unlaunching" the 12GB 4080: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/12gb-4080-unlaunch/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

154: Gas Station Tri-Tip

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 9 Oct 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Will and family just did the Southern California theme-park circuit, so this week we had a casual chat about some of the more technical aspects of visiting Disneyland and Universal Studios in 2022. How well do the old animatronics hold up? What's up with all that new Star Wars stuff? Just how much do you need your phone, really? What goes on in the Disneyland nerve center? (We can only speculate about that one... for now.)

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Special FOSS Ep: OctoPrint With Gina Häußge

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 2 Oct 2022 07:00:00 +0000

This week, we're checking back in with the FOSS Pod--now that we're several months (and more than a dozen episodes) into its run--by presenting our recent chat with Gina Häußge, founder and maintainer of OctoPrint, along with a new intro and outro by us. Gina covers topics like the work that goes into supporting endless printer models, transitioning from being the sole contributor on a project to managing contributors, doing open source work in Europe, why you shouldn't run your Raspberry Pi on an iPhone charger, and lots more.

Listen and subscribe to the FOSS Pod here: https://fosspod.content.town/

Learn more about OctoPrint: https://octoprint.org/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

153: A Time for Questions

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 25 Sep 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Summer may be over, but we're still here and ready to answer the hot questions from you, the listener. This month we field everything from automating household chores to HDMI-CEC woes, that time one of the Mythbusters (guess who!) built a buzzsaw-equipped drone of death, our dream interviews from throughout history, 140-year-old fire safe technology, a preemptive year-end performance review, plus other stuff!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

152: Three Pfizers to the Wind

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 07:00:00 +0000

This past Friday EVGA made the shocking and abrupt announcement that it's exiting the GPU market after two decades of making Nvidia cards. We drew on Will's many years of reviewing PC hardware to look back on that span of time, ponder the circumstances around the decision, and consider what's next for all involved. Plus, we dig into the slightly less shocking reveal that the PlayStation VR2 will lack backwards compatibility with games from the previous headset. What a topical show!

Here's the Gamers Nexus video we referenced during the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV9QES-FUAM

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

151: A Dynamic Island Getaway

techpod@content.town (Nice Segue, LLC) — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 07:00:00 +0000

The annual Apple event has come and gone, and we're here to run down the goings on with the latest iPhones, Watches, and AirPods. Learn more about satellite SOS and crash detection, privacy concerns around body temperature sensors, camping out overnight at the Apple Store, the Apple Watch as status symbol, Will's secret history as a diver (!), Brad's shocking thoughts on the latest notch, and more!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

150: Things You Plug Into Your TV

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 4 Sep 2022 07:00:00 +0000

We're thinking a lot about the ways you receive and watch TV this week, with a look back at the last 20-ish years of set-top boxes beginning with the venerable TiVo. Remember paying a monthly fee for TV listings, or hacking your old Xbox to run an open-source media player? How frustrating is it that content has become so balkanized, just when all the apps are finally available everywhere? Are built-in TV apps ever going to be good enough to replace the boxes entirely? We consider these and a bunch of other subjects.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

149: The Rhythm Nation Test Suite

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 07:00:00 +0000

We're doing some navel-gazing on this month's Q&A with a bevy of questions that came in about this very podcast: the business of hosting and advertising, research and production work, how we choose topics, and more. Plus: creating your own Wikipedia page (or not), Will's other life as an ageless and all-powerful being, too much discussion about software version numbering, and destroying hard drives with the power of pop music.

SHOW NOTES

Perfect Bid, the Price is Right documentary we mentioned: https://www.netflix.com/title/81092327

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

148: Neither Fish Nor Fowl: The Foo VR Story

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Hey, did you know Will ran a VR animation company before we did this podcast? By popular request, this week we talk through the history of Foo VR start to finish, touching on all kinds of topics like leaving behind a steady paycheck to bet on an emerging technology, the overwhelming shininess of venture capitalist offices, the meaning of "bad signal," how rapidly three months can turn into a year, and more.

SHOW NOTES

The Foo Show: https://store.steampowered.com/app/411820/The_FOO_Show_featuring_Will_Smith/

Andre's original demo reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Uru5Wp9oJA

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

147: Why Thread Matters

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Together, Matter and Thread are the new software and networking standards that promise to make all of your home automation and IoT gear work together, regardless of manufacturer. After Home Assistant's Paulus Schoutsen piqued our interest on the FOSS Pod, we decided to do a deep dive this week to demystify exactly what the two standards are and how they relate to one another, how they'll (hopefully) make things better, what they mean for your existing smart home equipment, and more.

NOTES

Our FOSS Pod ep about Home Assistant with maintainer Paulus Schoutsen: https://fosspod.content.town/episodes/home-assistant-with-paulus-schoutsen

The Connectivity Standards Alliance's Matter page: https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/

The Verge's very helpful interview on Thread and Matter: https://www.theverge.com/23165855/thread-smart-home-protocol-matter-apple-google-interview

The requisite XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

146: Nothing Beats Parachute Day

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 7 Aug 2022 07:00:00 +0000

A grab bag, a smorgasbord, a potpourri -- whatever you call it, we've assembled another batch of micro-topics to wend our way through. This time around, precision German podcasting plugins, Will's new green screen-free life (and growing array of tiny pixel art screens), a bit of desk efficiency chat, graphite pads versus thermal paste, and the sheer arrogance of putting an AWE64 in a Windows 3.1 machine.

Links for this episode!

86Box: https://86box.net/

WinWorldPC's old operating system archive: https://winworldpc.com/home

The Ultraschall plugin for Reaper: https://ultraschall-fm.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US

Tidbyt, the tiny pixel screen: https://tidbyt.com/

The Stream Deck line: https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck

CONTROL. MY. MONITOR.: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/control_my_monitor.html

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

145: Fat Stacks of DIMMs

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Look, it's getting harder to think of intro text for a Q&A episode -- but it's ever easier to record one with so many great Qs! This month we tackle our fantasy space missions, a bidet breakdown, dirty dishes on the desktop, the future collectability of current tech, WFH survival strats, filling drives to the brim, the origin of "software," cloud-connected router provisioning, and one intrepid listener's nuclear aspirations.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

144: The Anamorphic Squinch

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Brad's birthday has come and gone, which gives him the privilege of choosing our next tech year in review. This time, the banner year of 1997, which saw everything from Dolly the cloned sheep to IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue, the nuclear-powered Cassini probe to Saturn (and protests to match), the American launch of DVD, Steve Jobs' return to Apple, the anything-goes brutality of Ultima Online, and a bunch more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Special Ep: A Flickr Group for Martian Photographers

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 07:00:00 +0000

With the James Webb telescope in the news and Will convalescing from COVID-19, we're bringing back one of our favorite patron-exclusive eps this week: the first appearance of our friend Doug Ellison from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, in which he regales us with stories about taking photos not of Mars but on it, data throughput from another planet, what it's like to work at JPL, and a whole lot more. Enjoy!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

143: The Ol' Dirty Bastard Adapter

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Will and family have made their annual month-long pilgrimage to the desert once again, so this week we ended up having a free-wheeling conversation about portable tech and working on the road. Topics include tech-savvy AirBnb hosts, optimizing your electric car, dealing with Xbox development away from home, the moment that USB-C finally happened, the value of just getting TSA pre-check already, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

142: Flanders Is Dead. Long Live Neddy

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 3 Jul 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Will's longtime home server Flanders has finally given up the ghost, and now he's streamlined his life by moving to an integrated Synology box. After significant hands-on time, we get into the ins and outs of what it's like running network storage in this sort of turnkey, integrated box, including ease of setup, hardware specs and limitations, Will's possibly controversial feelings about Docker, Brad's slow descent into madness on the extreme other end of the NAS hardware spectrum, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

141: Poor Pour Pore Technique

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 07:00:00 +0000

It means being bad at researching how to use a spout. Oh, right, this is a Q&A episode! This month we discuss the potential of open smartphones, Fermi's paradox, French toast supremacy, electronics in the bathroom (yea or nay), Brad's dwindling sardine hoard, a bunch of barbecue-related subjects, mispronouncing tech, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

140: Wes and Norm Were Right

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 19 Jun 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Will got his hands on his very own Steam Deck and he's bursting at the seams to talk about it, so we're back with a follow-up to our first Deck ep with an updated trip report. How has compatibility, performance, and system software shaped up in the months since the device first started shipping? What are some of the fun third-party apps you can install for emulation, game management and so forth these days? Did Will dabble with the forbidden emulation fruit? The answers lie within.

SHOW NOTES

Some of the third-party programs we mentioned on the show include:

Steam ROM Manager: https://github.com/SteamGridDB/steam-rom-manager

EmuDeck: https://www.emudeck.com/

Chiaki: https://git.sr.ht/~thestr4ng3r/chiaki

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

139: Grill Drama Is Real Drama

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 07:00:00 +0000

As summer heats up, we're cooling things down with another (now-semi-annual?) cube of cold opens. Thrill! to the long and sordid tale of Will's Stripe fraud saga. Chill! at the campsite mishap that demolished someone's data plan. Spill! your drink everywhere when you realize that the innocent Roblox scammers of today may become the business leaders of tomorrow. Uh, fill? your ears with all the other bite-size topics that weren't long enough to consume a whole episode!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

138: Crank: The Unofficial Game of the Movie

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 5 Jun 2022 07:00:00 +0000

We've been mulling the idea of donning our game dev hats and attempting to make our own little Playdate game as an educational exercise, and this week we commit ourselves to this task publicly with a consideration of the hardware and controls at our disposal, followed by a bunch of brainstorming different game ideas. Plus, a few interludes about the coming dominance of 40Hz games, Will's shocking ignorance of gorilla.bas, and some other fun stuff!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

137: Emails Qs Are Qs Too

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 29 May 2022 07:00:00 +0000

It seems like it was only last month that we answered our last batch of questions, and yet here we are with another one. This time we address subjects like getting squashed by an asteroid (or meteorite), who in the world ever used eSATA, the ancient noodle superset, Will's scandalous views on cats, diving into the ol' money bin, coding showcases for kids, Apple's stringent stance on VMs, social Siri engineering, and incendiary devices connected to your smart home.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

136: The Hubble-ub

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 22 May 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Part two of our 1993 retrospective is here, with our consideration of the following: Power Computing's Macintosh clones, Apple's first Newton, the proving of Fermat's last theorem, happenings in SPAAAAACE including the Hubble mirror kerfuffle, the loss of Mars Observer, and the discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, computing miscellany from Lua to UTF-8 to the SGI Onyx to the creation of the .rar, the sheer spectacle that was Biosphere 2, and more!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

135: This Machine Is a Server!!

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 15 May 2022 07:00:00 +0000

On the occasion of Will's birth we're back for another year in review, this time taking a look at the year he went off to college, 1993 (or at least as much of it as we can fit into one episode). Join us as we gab about everything from NCSA Mosaic and the creation of the World Wide Web at CERN to the founding of Nvidia, the Pentium FDIV bug, the CG-free Jurassic Park that almost was, the inexplicable longevity of the .mp3, and more!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

134: Another Lane Disaster Waiting to Happen

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 8 May 2022 07:00:00 +0000

This week we're putting ourselves to the test by bringing a list of PC and tech peeves, and then passing judgement on our own complaints. Do we have a legitimate grievance, or are we just being crotchety about things like monitors that don't behave themselves, the disappearance of PCIe slots, Internet of Things things going off the grid, useless motherboard shrouds, rattling hard drive cages, and the algorithmic destruction of useful search results? We decide! Then you also decide!

SHOW NOTES

Here's the lucky gentleman with the 25 gigabit Internet service: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2022-04-23-fiber7-25gbit-upgrade/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

133: The Lady and the Samba Problem

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 1 May 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Queeeeeestions and aaaaaaanswers. This month we field Qs from you, the listener, about better electric vehicles versus better mass transit, the mysteries of the L-shaped desk, extreme climate-change preparedness, throwing bread like a frisbee (??), monitors that double as modems, (mostly) useless domain names, how many Discord servers is too many, the last San Francisco eatery you'll ever need, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

132: The Coldest Open

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 07:00:00 +0000

With Will briefly trapped in the great frozen north(ern California), we got together for a chilly, scrappy two-fer this week with a couple of short topics. First we chat about Panic's Playdate, with an emphasis on our time spent compiling sample games and otherwise fiddling around with the new handheld's SDK and web-based Pulp game creation tool. Then we get into some home network spring cleaning, from unidentified and forgotten devices to lazy Raspberry Pi update strategies. It's like two short podcasts in one! Actually, it's exactly that!

SHOW NOTES

The docs and download links for the Playdate's SDK:

https://play.date/dev/

https://sdk.play.date/1.10.0/Inside%20Playdate.html

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

131: Booth by GWAR

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 07:00:00 +0000

It's time for another visit with Stewart Cheifet and the Computer Chronicles. This time we're heading back to 1995 for a computer games special that includes Microsoft's ill-fated DirectX event Judgment Day, a very silly Bill Gates promo video, demos of MechWarrior 2 and Phantasmagoria (with Roberta Williams!), a random PlayStation-versus-Saturn head to head from Stewart, and more.

SHOW NOTES

The relevant Computer Chronicles episode, season 13 episode 8:

https://archive.org/details/CC1308_greatest_games

Bill Gates invades Doom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2V9TFrmQ_Q

The letter from Alex St. John's daughter:

https://www.wired.com/2016/04/alex-st-johns-daughter-wrong-women-tech/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

130: The Last Home Button Standing

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Well, we're only about *check's Apple Watch* a month late to the most recent Apple event, which we're using as an excuse to talk about a whole range of topics like: the (potential) death of millimeter-wave 5G, whether the Mac Pro line has truly left us or not, Brad's time so far with an M1 MacBook Pro, the weirdness of spatial audio in your ears, the many ways Will's wrist is now controlling his life, and more!

SHOW NOTES

The Verge story on 5G and the iPhone SE:

https://www.theverge.com/22968066/apple-iphone-se-5g-mmwave-verizon-uw

Epic's RealityScan app:

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-games-introduces-realityscan-app-now-in-limited-beta

That next MacBook Air notch may come in white:

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/28/next-macbook-air-white-notch-bezels/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

129: Main Character Territory

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker and Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 3 Apr 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Will sure had a wild, weird week on Twitter following last week's, uh, historic showdown at the Oscars, and now he's here to decompress. What were the first 24 hours like? How close did he get to being on cable news? Have Twitter's tools improved for managing torrents of incoming tweets? What kinds of questionable business offers came in? C'mon, you knew we weren't going to talk about anything else.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

128: An Elevator Named Otis

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 07:00:00 +0000

The monthly questions came in, and now the answers go forth, pertaining to such topics as these: weirdly named folders on our desktops, regrettable usernames, paltry American downstream speeds, Brad's delusions of cross-coastal VPN grandeur, an unprecedented round of answers seeking questions (??), a spirited debate about showering protocols, some shocking stats on streaming service penetration, and a shocking reveal about elevator open and close buttons that you won't see coming!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Special Episode: Return of Manhattanhenge

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 02:37:12 +0000

The United States Senate proved to be full of Tech Pod listeners this week as it passed a measure to make Daylight Savings Time permanent. But wait, did they pick the right time? This week we're reissuing our in-depth DST explainer from last Fall, complete with a new intro looking at what's going on in Congress, musings on overnight-flight and time-zone nonsense from our past and present, some feedback from a chronobiologist we received about our original episode, and more.

SHOW NOTES

The two Washington Post pieces referenced in the new part of this episode:

Senate plan for permanent daylight saving time faces doubts in the House

Permanent standard time is better than daylight saving, sleep experts say

And the links from the original DST ep:

A cartographer makes maps to argue for ending DST altogether: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-25/these-maps-prove-that-daylight-saving-time-is-the-actual-worst

Stats on DST and traffic accidents: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002243751000112X

Where all 50 states are at with DST legislation: https://www.9news.com/article/news/nation-world/daylight-saving-time-bill-status-all-50-states/507-25ff8777-63bc-423f-895d-22f5a3d5d28c

Info on the famed Manhattanhenge: https://www.farmersalmanac.com/manhattanhenge

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

127: "fear, sex"

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Will just happened to watch a whole bunch of Star Trek: TNG when he was laid up recently, so we got together this week to decidedly NOT talk about Best of Both Worlds, Measure of a Man, Darmok, or The Inner Light, but instead to run down some of our favorite sleeper eps, genre work, and picks for some of the most under-appreciated gems from one of our favorite TV series ever.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

126: Welcome to the Question Store

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 6 Mar 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Another round of your questions meets another round of our answers this week, with queries about delayed eating habits, the "break-even" point on fixing or replacing old appliances, the mystery of cryptic crosswords, a theoretical number of monitors that's too many, the criminal bottom-charging Apple mouse, and a SHOCKING revelation about Windows Notepad's deepest, darkest secret.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

125: A NUC With a Screen

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 08:00:00 +0000

It's a little reunion this week as our Steam Deck-equipped friends Norman Chan (of Tested) and Wes Fenlon (of PC Gamer) join us for a deep dive into Valve's new handheld after a couple of rigorous weeks of trying it out. Topics covered include the performance you can expect from games of various eras, a thorough breakdown of the controls, battery life and suspend mode, flinging your current game right to your PC, what it's like digging into the machine's Linux underpinnings, and much more.

Check out Wes' review of the Steam Deck over at PC Gamer, and Norm's review on Tested.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Special Episode: FOSS NAS Solutions

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Building a NAS served as the gateway into free and open source software for both of us, so in this ep we're looping back around and checking in on the current state of FOSS-y network attached storage options like OpenMediaVault, TrueNAS, and Proxmox, plus dishing out some practical tips about why you'd want a NAS in the first place, some advice on hardware requirements, best practices for backups, and more.

FOSS projects for running your own NAS that we mentioned in this episode include:

OpenMediaVault: https://www.openmediavault.org/

TrueNAS: https://www.truenas.com/

Proxmox: https://www.proxmox.com/en/

And some of the turnkey hardware solutions you might pair with these projects are:

Synology: https://www.synology.com/en-us

QNAP: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

Subscribe to the FOSS Pod at https://fosspod.content.town/!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

124: The Year of the Grid

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 08:00:00 +0000

That pleasantly floral scent you're detecting means it's time for another potpourri ep! This time we dive into the nitty gritty of our podcast workflow and Brad's forthcoming adventures with XLR recording chains, a laparoscopic trip report, the collapse of the Nvidia/ARM deal, Will's mad-scientist experiments in RGB synchronization, the perils of running double-digit hard drives at once, and more!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Special Episode: Enter the FOSS Pod

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 6 Feb 2022 16:00:00 +0000

Hey, we're launching a new spinoff podcast alongside the Tech Pod! It's a biweekly show about free and open source software called The FOSS Pod (which we think is extremely on brand), and this here is the first episode, in which we consider the Open Broadcaster Software--commonly known as OBS--and talk at length to founder and maintainer Jim Bailey about the past, present, and future of the project. Big thanks to Jim for taking the time to chat with us, and we hope you enjoy!

Subscribe to the FOSS Pod at https://fosspod.content.town/!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

123: Not a Positive Outcome

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 08:00:00 +0000

You have questions, we have answers about what we thought was cool in 2021, a couple of our war stories working in media, repairing a classic flip clock (and other old gear), the ins and outs of a hologram group-buy, a short love letter to neofetch, the ideal monitor size, what might come after "FAANG," and more!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

122: Hashtag Octothorpe

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Microsoft's mind-boggling purchase of Activision this week prompted us to look back on other tech acquisitions large and small over the last two decades. Herein, a chat about the big winners, the stinkers, and everything in between. Which company has swallowed up the most smaller fish? Was Compaq seriously worth $25 billion dollars? Who exactly owns those robots that are going to end us all? What should you definitively NOT say in a meeting with Steve Jobs?

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

121: Notepad Dark Mode?!?

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Will just successfully shipped his first game, and Brad has spent years asking questions about shipping games, so this week we met in the middle with a freewheeling chat about some of the technical nitty gritty of making and promoting a game. Listen in for topics from build servers to CNAMEs, working with varying storefront CMSs, running playtests on PCs in another state, some thoughts on collaboration from our time working with other startups and small teams, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

120: What Comes After

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 9 Jan 2022 08:00:00 +0000

This week we avoided traveling to Las Vegas for CES and instead tried to absorb all the news coming out of the show from the comfort of our desks. Listen on for some loose chatter about goggles-shaped VR headsets, Samsung's entry into the OLED market, the travails of dealing with the latest HDMI standard, the latest from AMD and Nvidia, Will's Vegas survival dos and don'ts, and more.

Stories discussed in this episode:

CES attendance plummets 70%, E3 in-person canceled:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ces-gadget-show-turnout-falls-more-than-70-25-thanks-to-covid/ar-AASzFiw

https://venturebeat.com/2022/01/06/e3-shifts-to-online-only-event-because-of-omicron-concerns/

Panasonic's goggles-sized SteamVR headset

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/panasonic-tiny-glasses-sized-steamvr-goggles-are-coming-this-spring/

Samsung making its own quantum dot OLED panels:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/explaining-qd-oled-samsungs-display-tech-thats-wowing-ces/

HDMI 2.1a sounds like a pain

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/29/22856103/hdmi-2-1a-spec-standard-mess-cables-source-based-tone-mapping-ces-2022

Nvidia announced 3050, 3090ti

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16671/nvidia-launches-geforce-rtx-3050-and-rtx-3050-ti-for-laptops

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17173/nvidia-briefly-teases-geforce-rtx-3090-ti-more-details-later-this-month

AMD talked details on their 2022 CPU roadmap, Zen 4 launching this year

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17152/amd-cpus-in-2022-ces

AM5 is the long term socket for Zen 4

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17192/ces-2022-amds-nextgen-am5-platform-to-have-long-term-support

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

119: The Sardine Warlord of the Wasteland

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 2 Jan 2022 08:00:00 +0000

New year, new set of listener questions! This month's Q&A has us addressing CES survival strategies, how to lose 77 terabytes of data overnight, the wisdom of dumping irradiated water into the ocean, the baffling continued existence of WinZip, lifelong breakfast meats, and a long overdue consideration of Marty the Stop & Shop robot.

Check out Wordle, the word game everyone refuses to stop talking about! https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

Gaze upon Marty and despair: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stop-shop-marty-robot-funny-tweets_l_5dc9b751e4b00927b237d5be

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Holiday Special: Abit, Are You Listening?

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 08:00:00 +0000

This week we're reaching deep into the vault for the holidays and unlocking one of our favorite Patron-exclusive episodes, featuring dramatic readings of some of our most excruciating old posts from places like Usenet and the Ars Technica forums. Thanks to everyone for supporting us, have a safe and happy holiday, and we'll see you in 2022! Wait, is that actually a real year?

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

118: #TidyDeskLife

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:22:56 +0000

The weather is getting frigid (at least some places), and that means one thing: it's time for us to deliver another cube of cold opens. This time around we tackle everything from long-term Christmas tree planning to VPN strategies, the perils of teaching your child to use a can opener, freeing A Charlie Brown Christmas in the public interest, to haircut or not to haircut, the TSA's extreme aversion to coffee, and making enough egg nog to bathe in.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

117: A Turnip Cures Elvis

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 08:00:00 +0000

We had such a good time talking about Hackers a few weeks ago that we're back with that other seminal '90s computer crime movie, Sneakers! Join us for a deep dive into the movie's stellar and surprisingly august cast, the prescient view of information warfare and government power, the joys of the Rube Goldberg heists, that saxophone, some chatter about San Francisco movies in general, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

116: Nano on Both Sides

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 5 Dec 2021 08:00:00 +0000

The holidays are here again, and with them, the need to gift. This week we offer an informal not-a-gift-guide chat about gift giving and receiving, including topics like how to pick thoughtful gifts, trinkets and doodads our community loves, the ever-expanding (and surprisingly erotic) offerings on Etsy, a quick primer on Harbor Freight, the simple joy of a weighted blanket, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

115: Deals on Wheels

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 08:00:00 +0000

This week we're thankful for our listeners and the many questions they provided to this Q&A ep, which got us talking about topics including how we research a new tech project before diving in, using VR to desensitize yourself to real motion sickness, the ravages of space on the human body, the .png pronunciation, a deep dive on stuffing recipes, and whether we'll ever daily-drive a Linux desktop or not. All that, plus, a real live chronobiologist (!) weighs in on our recent Daylight Savings episode!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

114: That's One Spicy Pillow

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 21 Nov 2021 08:00:00 +0000

This week Apple announced an effort to begin offering service manuals, replacement parts, and other self-repair services to its customers. Who better to discuss this landmark move than iFixit CEO and right-to-repair advocate Kyle Wiens? Kyle joins us to talk about his DIY repair efforts over the years, what opening up your own iPhone will be like, Microsoft's exploratory moves toward repairability, the legal state of affairs that's driving this sea change, where e-waste actually goes when you dispose of it, and a lot more.

Thanks again to Kyle for joining us this week. Here's Kyle's Twitter, as well as iFixit's Twitter and website.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

113: Three Prongs Bad, Two Prongs Good

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 14 Nov 2021 08:00:00 +0000

We've been holding video game controllers for most of our natural lives, and now we're attempting to put them in a qualitative, ordered list; a sort of "ranking," if you will. In this ep, we go decade by decade, from the NES to today, considering the technical innovations, ergonomics, fit and finish, historical influence, and general usability of our favorite (and not-so-favorite) controllers to arrive at the best of the best.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

112: Here Comes Manhattanhenge!

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 7 Nov 2021 07:00:00 +0000

By the time you hear this ep, Daylight Savings Time will have departed for another year, so DST is naturally what we're chatting about this week. We clear up some myths and history about DST's origins, talk about the axial tilt of the planet a bunch, swap tips about time changes and home automation, look at DST's relative safety and economic effects, debate whether society should keep doing this whole thing or not, and uncover the ancient myth of... Manhattanhenge.

Episode Links!

A cartographer makes maps to argue for ending DST altogether: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-25/these-maps-prove-that-daylight-saving-time-is-the-actual-worst

Stats on DST and traffic accidents: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002243751000112X

Where all 50 states are at with DST legislation: https://www.9news.com/article/news/nation-world/daylight-saving-time-bill-status-all-50-states/507-25ff8777-63bc-423f-895d-22f5a3d5d28c

Info on the famed Manhattanhenge: https://www.farmersalmanac.com/manhattanhenge

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

111: Flanders Is Running in a Degraded State

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 07:00:00 +0000

It's the most horrifying Q&A episode we've ever recorded! This month we field Qs about such topics as: how to teach your kids to view Internet content and influencers with a critical eye, our home electronics protocols for going out of town, essential gadgets we just can't bring ourselves to splurge on, listening to podcasts at super speed, and our favorite historical OS transitions. Plus, Will recounts his longtime experience running BartStorage, and Brad reveals his deepest personal secrets... at least as pertains to network hostnames and the contents of his .zshrc file.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

110: The UPC of the Beast

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 24 Oct 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Will's daughter recently had her first encounter with a corded telephone, which got us thinking about other technologies that are on the way out or have already vanished from society. In this ep we touch on a wide range of aspects of the old phone system, what things were like before every product had a barcode on it, whether we're trending toward a cashless society or not, how in the heck they processed credit card transactions before the magnetic strip, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

109: A House of Lies

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 07:00:00 +0000

It's been nine years since Will's last big house cleanup, and the time has come once again to discuss... THE PURGE (of all his stuff). In the interest of general decluttering, this ep is a rambling consideration of such topics as: What should you do with all your fancy Lego builds? Is it better to hoard stuff, or data? Can you dig a basement under a house that already exists? How many USB cables does a person need, anyway?

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

108: Deez Network Servers

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Well, this was one heck of a week. On Monday, Facebook experienced a historic outage of its infrastructure that impacted services used by billions of people. On Tuesday, a new Windows came out. On Wednesday, Twitch disclosed one of the largest data breaches in years, maybe ever. We were duty-bound to talk through our view on all these momentous events, and some of the things we've learned along the way, and that's exactly what we did.

If you'd like to jump to any of the individual topics this week, the timecodes are:

Facebook: 00:10:19

Twitch: 00:36:57

Windows 11: 00:56:16

Some handy links from this week's ep:

Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet (cloudflare.com)

More details about the October 4 outage - Facebook Engineering

Updates on the Twitch Security Incident | Twitch Blog

Twitch’s security problems started long before this week’s hack - The Verge

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

107: The Kick-Ass Stamp of Approval

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 3 Oct 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Will Smith, this is your life! Or at least one month of it, specifically November 2009, when you published an issue of Maximum PC that included a review of Windows 7, speculation about ray tracing in video games, a breathless report about absolutely enormous 160GB SSDs, and other historical curiosities. With Windows 11 looming, we thought it would be fun to reach back into the vault and check out some coverage of a previous Windows launch and all the other fun and/or embarrassing stuff that came along with that particular issue.

Here's a PDF version of Maximum PC November 2009, the issue we covered in this episode: https://web.archive.org/web/20160618072632/http://dl.maximumpc.com/Archives/MPC1109-web.pdf

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

106: That's So USB!

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Our monthly Q&A episode is all over the place in September, addressing such wide-ranging subjects as the fastest Internet we've ever used, surviving bear attacks, why they're so stingy with the USB-C ports, when exactly the week begins and ends, and a housewares block including electric kettles, cleaning bathrooms, letting go of boxes, and a debate about that age old matchup, oatmeal versus grits. Thanks to everyone who wrote in!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

105: The Hardest Lift

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Health science writer and noted swole woman Casey Johnston joins us this week to talk about the convergence of exercise and strength training, food science, mobile tech, and the Internet. What's a healthy way to track your fitness progress without staring at numbers all day? How much commitment does it take to lift weights, really? Is food good? (Hint: probably.) We ponder these questions and more, plus a conversation about the past and present of digital journalism and some thoughts on the independent-newsletter life.

You can find Casey's newsletter at She's A Beast: A Swole Woman's Newsletter, and here are some starter fitness links provided by Casey herself:

GZCLP: https://saynotobroscience.com/gzclp-infographic/

r/fitness basic beginner routine: https://thefitness.wiki/routines/r-fitness-basic-beginner-routine/

StrongLifts: https://stronglifts.com/

A beta of Casey's program LIFTOFF: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14GO0yclhOU4_Jfj7DPBHVr_CIvkZvBoFt37TriHo8DY/copy

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

104: Get the Good out of It

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Bang for the buck! There's no greater feeling than finding that one product that's way, way better than it should be for the price--or modifying it yourself to eke out that extra little bit of worth. In this episode we reminisce about some of the best tech scores we can remember, from venerable overclockers like the Celeron 300A and Duron 600 to huge audio upgrades by Sennheiser, Cambridge Soundworks, and even Radio Shack. From firmware upgrades to Ikea hacks to the Catleap monitor phenomenon, this episode packs a lot of value.

Thanks to RoboHobo for this week's episode art.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

103: A Watershed Moment in Copyright Litigation

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 5 Sep 2021 07:00:00 +0000

This week we're joined by Google's director of open source, Chris DiBona, to talk all things software licensing. Topics include corporate sponsorship of open source developers, how Google maintains license compliance across all its projects, what the ramifications of Oracle's long-running Java lawsuit could have been, why there isn't more open source game development, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

102: My Little iPad Pillow

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 07:00:00 +0000

On this month's Q&A ep, we debut some wild new cold-open technology, and then get on with the business of addressing subjects like the future of movie theaters, putting OnlyFans on the block chain, WinAmp memories, our current thoughts on smart watches, the explosion of new web and mobile tech around 2010 (and our fondness for WebOS), the ease of starting a company on the Internet, the best Star Trek tech that isn't the replicator, and more!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

101: Big-Dot-Little

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 22 Aug 2021 07:00:00 +0000

This week we recorded a grab bag about some disruptive current events going on in various tech spaces. Intel is finally making a real push into the GPU space, and also getting excited about the angstrom. OnlyFans has abruptly shut out the sex workers it built its business on, while placing the blame on moralizing payment processors. And Facebook is attempting to inch toward whatever the hell it thinks the metaverse is with its new VR workplace app. Join us as we attempt to dissect these and other related topics!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

100: The Spiteful Fork

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Drama alert! Our long-promised scene drama episode (vol. 1) is here to explore community kerfuffles new and old, with conversations about Ubiquiti's no-good-very-bad week, pfSense's self-immolation via buggy Wireguard commit, Linksys' ancient violations of the GPL, illicit binaries, warring office-furniture companies, petty domain hijacking, and why so many of these situations seem to spring up around open-source projects.

pfSense's
- Buffer overruns, license violations, and bad code: FreeBSD 13’s close call | Ars Technica
- The hijacked OPNSense domain: https://opnsense.org/opnsense-com/
Ubiquiti's terrible week:
- Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic” – Krebs on Security
- Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface (x-post from HackerNews) : Ubiquiti (reddit.com)
ffmpeg vs Newtek (NDI)
- #7589 (NewTek distributing non-free FFmpeg build) – FFmpeg
Linksys GPL Violation:
- https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/03/06/08/1749217/is-linksys-violating-the-gpl

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

99: You Wanna Be Elite?

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 8 Aug 2021 07:00:00 +0000

We recently found a Hackers-sized hole in Brad's filmgoing history, so we're killing two birds with one stone this week by making him watch the movie, and then recording an ep about it! Join us for a chat about this campy cult classic as we consider chunky laptops, cornball effects shots, teen-movie clichés, a star-studded cast, the presentation of the '90s hacker ethos, all the things the movie got right and wrong, and the idea that there might just be a little Zero Cool in all of us. #hacktheplanet

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

98: The Fox Knows What's Up

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 1 Aug 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Question time is here again, and this month our answers address topics like these: why anyone is still using big ol' ATX, our favorite flea market finds of the past, drop shadows under mouse cursors, extremely frivolous 3D printing projects, the mysteries of random Bluetooth interference, and the puny little billionaires who couldn't even manage to escape low Earth orbit.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

97: How to Survive the Chipocalypse

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 25 Jul 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Ever wonder what it's like to try your hand at small-batch manufacturing overseas? Keyboardio's Jesse Vincent joins us this week to address that very subject in a broad discussion of his company's history, with a focus on the trials and tribulations of getting a hardware startup off the ground, setting up production-line tooling in China, being on the outs with your factory reps, solving IC shortages with FPGAs, finding loose iPhone processors in Shenzhen electronics stalls, and more.

You can check out the Model 100 Kickstarter here!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

96: National Ground Beef Day

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 18 Jul 2021 07:00:00 +0000

We enjoyed Will's birth-year episode so much a few weeks ago that we're back with a look at the notable events in tech, science, and culture of 1979 now that it's Brad's turn. Slap this tape in your Walkman and listen to us prattle about CompuServe's origins in the life insurance industry, C++, events in nuclear energy (and weapons), the debut of the compact disc, the founding of Pixar and Sierra On-Line, the first Daytona 500 broadcast, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the rings of Jupiter, and more!

NOTES

Here's the Vice feature on the fall of Sierra On-Line: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3vem8/inside-story-sierra-online-death-cuc-cendant-fraud

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

95: The Pirate Radio of Podcasts

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 07:00:00 +0000

This week we're joined by Will's friend Ben Brown, longtime online software developer, to talk about the Internet old and new. Topics include Ben's grassroots efforts to resurrect the Finger protocol, rooting around in 1977-era Unix source code, why the tech industry keeps reinventing the same features over and over, reading 'zines over Telnet, the never-ending accumulation and corporate consolidation of content, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

94: "Naked Corporate Opportunism"

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 4 Jul 2021 07:00:00 +0000

You knew we couldn't resist doing a Windows 11 episode, and indeed we're here to talk about the whole shebang: virtualized security and the controversy around CPU support, the good (better window-snapping!), the bad (bottom-only taskbar!), and the ugly (rounded corners!?) of the new UI, the ol' Trusted Platform Module, Microsoft Store revenue changes, Android apps, and the coming war between Microsoft and Google.

NOTES

Here's TechRepublic's informative piece on Windows 11 CPU compatibility that we referenced a bunch in this episode: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-11-understanding-the-system-requirements-and-the-security-benefits/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

93: Missives From the Void

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 07:00:00 +0000

This month's Q&A episode features Qs (from both email and our Discord) that got us chatting about such topics as: the ARPANET, passive-aggressive email signatures, pre-microprocessor computing history, battery management in devices you never use, corporate-mandated brand pronunciations, why video conferencing is merely "good enough," how we've navigated the sharing of our personal lives online over the years, and more!

This week's show art courtesy of UCLA

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

92: Carmackology

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 07:00:00 +0000

id Software's Quake came out 25 years ago this week, and it also changed both of our lives. In this episode we wax nostalgic about the astonishing legacy of technical innovations Quake brought to game design, the ways it inspired our fascination with everything from client/server networking to NeXT workstations, the communities and studios that sprung up in its wake, all those endless .plan updates, the perfection that is DM3, and a lot more. Happy birthday, Quake.

SHOW NOTES

Here are the articles referenced in this episode:

PC Gamer's early Quake preview featuring the dragon

Gary Whitta's story from the game's launch

The Quake II cover story that touches on Romero's split with id

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

91: Professor Will’s Magical Sensorium

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 07:00:00 +0000

It's been a big week around these parts--Will helped reveal a new game at E3, and Brad helped launch a new online media property--so we did a potpourri episode touching on a bunch of the technical details of working on these projects, including: Will's embrace of git, how to positively influence Internet behavior, Microsoft's open-source moves, when we might see shipping Unreal Engine 5 games, a search engine that plants trees, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

90: CONTROL MY MONITOR

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 6 Jun 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Reinstalling Windows: no one enjoys it, but everyone has to do it eventually. This week, we spend some time chatting about the ways this timeless ritual has gotten better (or worse) over the years, strategies for making the process as painless as possible, some of the unique things we do to customize a fresh install, and a lot more. Also: tune in for a hands-on report on the new GeForce 3080 Ti (and Will's rapid transformation into a '90s industrial vocalist).

SHOW NOTES:

Find the dates of your Windows install and updates with Powershell: https://www.nextofwindows.com/when-was-my-windows-10-originally-installed

Clonezilla, the drive-imaging tool: https://clonezilla.org/

Ninite, the multi-app installer: https://ninite.com/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

89: Don't Mix the Soaps!

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 30 May 2021 07:00:00 +0000

If you're looking for our monthly Q&A ep, you've found it! This time around we consider such listener-provided topics as questionable soap-on-soap interactions, discerning frame rate by eye, dot-com-era layoffs, the legacy and contemporary influence of Neuromancer, software broadcast over the radio, and HDMI over, uh, coat hangers?

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

88: It Just Makes the Lithium Angrier

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 23 May 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Spurred by Will's first month with a Chevy Bolt, we present an episode on electric cars and attempt to answer questions such as: How weird is it to drive without braking? Can you check the car's battery health like it's a phone? What's the public charging situation like these days? How many EVs are out there, anyway? Should your car really have the power to text you?

SHOW NOTES

That wild mechanical thumb from the cold open: https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1396003181151272963

Science Magazine on the EV battery-recycling problem: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/millions-electric-cars-are-coming-what-happens-all-dead-batteries

The fiery Houston Tesla crash: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/04/18/2-men-dead-after-fiery-tesla-crash-in-spring-officials-say/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

87: With a Name Like Deke...

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 16 May 2021 07:00:00 +0000

In honor of Will's birthday, this week we traveled back to the heady days of 1975 to see what was big in science and tech in the year of his birth. Our impromptu retrospective features everything from the Altair 8800 to Space Mountain, the Homebrew Computer Club, the Apollo/Soyuz handshake in space, Benoit Mandelbrot, Jaws, Betamax, and a little history-making company from Bill Gates and Paul Allen called... wait, does this say Traf-O-Data?

Operating an Altair 8800 is not for the faint of heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh_6DtwmQXs

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

86: 42U or Bust

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 9 May 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Very special guest Vinny Caravella joins us this week for a wide-ranging chat about his years of video production, juggling cameras in the early days of Whiskey Media, a love letter to analog signals, the infamous List of Terminated HDMI Adopters, a consideration of codecs and protocols past and present, and more. From logging tapes to crimping SDI cables, there's a lot in here!

These HDMI adopters have been... terminated: https://www.hdmi.org/adopter/terminated

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

85: Hey, They've Got That Baseball

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 2 May 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Six-ish months since launch, the next-gen consoles are now officially current-gen, so we thought it was time for a check-in on the state of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X platforms. How has the user experience matured so far? What system software issues are still lingering? When will games start shipping at 30Hz? Will they ever be easy to actually buy? These questions and more, discussed!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

84: On a Cleaning Jag

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 25 Apr 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Email time! In this month's Q&A, we talk about Spring cleaning and strategies for organizing electronics with limited storage space, overusing ellipses and other Internet chat habits, long-lost Usenet posts, the great turn-of-the-century capacitor calamity, a mea culpa and backgrounder on the McDonald's coffee lawsuit, and more.

Check out Gretchen McCulloch's linguistics podcast Lingthusiasm, referenced on this episode:

https://gretchenmcculloch.com/podcast/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

83: The Best One Is the One You Can Get

techpod@content.town (Nice Segue, LLC) — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Kishore Hari--Tested.com correspondent, noted science communicator, and steak-product connoisseur--rejoins us for a check-in on the state of the COVID-19 pandemic one year after his first appearance. Topics include where we're at with vaccination rates and efficacy, outreach efforts to combat vaccine skepticism, the pause on the Johnson & Johnson shot, how IP ownership is hindering vaccination in the Global South, what a new "normal" might look like, and... what's this feeling? Is that... optimism?

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

82: A Hundred Pounds and Razor Sharp

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 11 Apr 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Ultra-wideband support has been making its way into phones for a couple of years now, but... what the heck is it? This week we attempt to demystify this old wireless technology being adapted for modern devices, including its potential for very fine location tracking, why nobody is using it much (yet), whether it could replace Bluetooth, what effect it might have on Minority Report-style advertising, how it may turn your phone into your car keys, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

81: A Cube of Cold Opens

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 4 Apr 2021 07:00:00 +0000

What is this week's episode about, you might ask? Why, it has a delightfully floral scent, almost like... a potpourri. You could say it's sort of a buffet, offering a little something for everyone. It's a little from column A, a little from columns B through Z. In fact, this episode may be about everything under the sun and also nothing at all.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

80: That's a Sewer Diamond!

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Like Spring, emails are upon us once again, and this month we talk about such listener-provided topics as the stagnation of flash memory, a Starlink trip report, some of the downsides of PC-building, multithreading video games, TVs that are monitors that are TVs, browser containerization, and the things you find down at the water treatment plant.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

79: A Subsidiary of Starko Industries

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 07:00:00 +0000

What the heck is going on with modern video game controllers? That's the question we're trying to address this week, with Joy Con and DualSense analog stick drift, unresponsive Xbox face buttons, do-it-yourself repair, advanced soldering techniques, class action lawsuits and other subjects all weighing on our minds. Is there any end in sight?

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

IGN's summary of Joy Con lawsuits and joystick damage:

https://www.ign.com/articles/all-the-lawsuits-nintendo-is-facing-over-joy-con-drift

iFixit's breakdown of the DualSense joysticks (also thanks to them for the show image):

https://www.ifixit.com/News/48944/heres-why-ps5-joysticks-drift-and-why-theyll-only-get-worse

TronicsFix on the DualSense triggers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rNITneXnCo&t=555s

78: The One With the Racing Stripes

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 08:00:00 +0000

This week our quest to find consensus on the best advancements in PC-building reaches its end. From the USB superposition to the class warfare of fancy motherboards, the baffling duality of the M.2 socket, the many flavors of PCI Express, and the questionable inclusion of the headlamp, rest assured that we considered every possible angle in assembling this authoritative list that should be taken extremely seriously.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

77: Big Shoutout to Thumbscrews

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 7 Mar 2021 08:00:00 +0000

The urge to rank is upon us again, and this time we're looking to put together a list of the best advancements in hardware over our 25-year history of building PCs. Can modular power supplies step to the mighty universal serial bus? Is there anything better than a case that doesn't lacerate your hands every time you open it? How serial IS serial ATA, anyway? Listen and find out!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

76: Hell or Palo Alto

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Listener emails return after a brief hiatus, and this time they bring chatter about the correct Windows taskbar positioning, the latest PlayStation VR news, where we think AR might be going, "biannual" workarounds, a lament for the closure of Fry's, Freeman Dyson's fast-and-loose orbital mechanics, and the eternal glory of RSS.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

75: The Right Right-Stuff Stuff

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 08:00:00 +0000

This week we're joined by Adam Rogers, Wired senior correspondent and author of Proof: The Science of Booze, to talk all things alcohol. Topics include millennia-old fermentation practices, the stimulant/depressant dichotomy of drinking, that classically refined sommelier's palate, attempts to speed up the aging process, and modern assembly-line whiskey production. Bottoms up!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

74: Mining for Computronium

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 18:36:40 +0000

Google's "pivot" away from first-party Stadia development seemed like a good cue to spend an episode not only pondering the future of the company's game-streaming service--including third-party applications for Stadia's technology stack, and what all those server racks might be good for--and also going through the company's many, many dearly departed products. Anyone remember Google Pie?

Links!

The Google Graveyard

Google's statement on the Stadia pivot

The guy who founded his own ISP

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

73: Thirteen Issues a Year

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 7 Feb 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Will used to work for a tech magazine. Brad always wanted to. We both read more than our fair share back in the day. So let's talk about magazines! In this ep we look back on those mammoth issues of Computer Shopper, our love of the PC Gamer demo CD, embargoes and print deadlines, Will's years in the magazine mines, what the (bumpy) transition from print to online was like, and lots more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Here's the short article that kicked off this ep, about Future, Chris Anderson, and .net Magazine:

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/magazines-about-the-web-sitepoint-smashing-magazine-net-magazine-css-tricks/

72: The State of the (Virtual) Union

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 17:52:15 +0000

It's time for a check-in on the health of VR, including the latest in headsets and controllers, standout games and productivity software, the open-sourcing of Tilt Brush, our amazement that Windows Mixed Reality still exists, and the potential for AR to eventually supplant the whole thing anyway. You knew we'd find an excuse to use that photo eventually.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

71: Curiosity and Perseverance

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 18:46:37 +0000

Friend of the podcast Doug Ellison from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab stops by to give us the lowdown on the newest Mars rover Perseverance, set to land on the red planet in just a few weeks, plus all kinds of fun info about Lagrange transceivers, making oxygen out of thin air, flying helicopters on other planets, and recording home movies at mach 25.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

70: Executed By Google

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Time for some 2021 emails! This month we talked about dearly departed Google products, how to fix a broken USB port (or whether you should even try), how we got started doing this, why your TOSLINK cable is keyed, a lab meat topic we should never have read out loud, and the current whereabouts of Maura Labingi.

Intel's ARK CPU Fact Sheet Site

AMD's Product Fact Sheet Site

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

69: The Gravest Day

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 14:00:00 +0000

We were unable to turn our attention to anything but the week's horrifying events in Washington, D.C., so for this episode we had a freewheeling chat about... well, everything, including some perspective from Will's time working on the Hill, the infosec implications of the Capitol breach, how we attempted to keep up with the onslaught of news on Wednesday, and more. Stay safe, everyone.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

68: The Treacherous World of Magnetic Flux

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 3 Jan 2021 14:00:00 +0000

We're kicking off 2021 with a trip back to... 1985? Yes, we sat down with a vintage episode of the Computer Chronicles to reflect on the hard disk's momentous arrival on the personal computing scene. Join us as we take a look back at drives measured in the whopping tens of megabytes, Winchester drives, XTs and ATs, the Mac HyperDrive, the ancient precursor to the Zip drive, beige boxes, and business suits galore.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Here's the Computer Chronicles episode we're discussing this week, S03E16 from 1985:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBsKakmW0fs

67: Nog Ambitions

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 14:00:00 +0000

With 2020 (finally) drawing to a close, we look back on a few of our favorite tech things, big or small, from this challenging year. From advances in medical science to ways to stay social from afar, from new workflows we worked out to new gadgets we, uh, gadgeted, here's an informal list of some of the stuff that kept our spirits up, and a couple of things we're looking forward to, during this strange time in history.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

66: That Classic Chonk

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Our last email ep of 2020 addresses such topics as: how to trust Google search results (or not), bad tech habits we just can't shake, how to get and stay digitally organized, the worth of external GPU enclosures, a life-changing tip about our Gmail workflow, some more home networking tips, and a treatise on the regional naming differences of winter hats.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

65: Visionary or Villain

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Product design is on our minds this week, starting with the industry-redefining research that led to the production of modern, psychologically optimized junk food. Have the same sensibilities now overtaken the design of consumer electronics? Do soundbars and Cheetos have more in common than we realize? Is there a bliss point, but for tech? We explore this slightly abstract topic and attempt to arrive at a few answers.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Here's the article we reference extensively throughout the episode:

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html

64: That Cheapskate Cumulonimbus

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 6 Dec 2020 14:00:00 +0000

The time has come to discuss 5G and the latest cellular data specs (largely because Will got an iPhone 12). We get into his hands-on experience with 5G speeds, the differences between low, medium, and high-band spectra, how 5G compares to LTE, what millimeter wave is exactly, how 5G may or may not interfere with weather forecasts, and 5G's potential to turn you into a lizard person. (One of these topics may be fake.)

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

63: Brad and Will Build a Dream House

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 14:00:00 +0000

While we're nursing our meat hangovers, we took a cue from last week's email about future-proofing your home to chat about 21st-century home ownership, including the thermodynamically efficient passive house, strategies for replacing cables in walls, current solar and battery capacity, novel construction materials, hanging furniture, and more! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

62: PEMDAS for Monitors

techpod@content.town (Nice Segue, LLC) — Sun, 22 Nov 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Our Fall cornucopia of emails contains such succulent questions as: How future-proof should your new smart home be? To prebuilt PC or not to prebuilt PC? Where are all the HDMI 2.1 accessories? How do you wrangle a monitor and a TV in Windows? Plus, a whole bunch of tech that we--and you--have been thankful for in this trying year.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

61: The Bad Kind of Complexity

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 15 Nov 2020 14:00:00 +0000

On this busy week we threw together a delightful potpourri of different topics, from gadget repair to drilling through PCBs, lust for 4k TVs (or not), making the lightest mouse in history, the huge potential of handheld lidar, and a quick glimpse at what's coming next in big-budget video game development.

Support the show and join the Techpod Discord for as little as $2/month at https://patreon.com/techpod.

Bearded Bob's YouTube G Pro switch replacement video (the whole channel is good too!):

Solder Sucker That Actually Works: https://amzn.to/2UsEGFZ
Will's Hakko Soldering Station: https://amzn.to/3f2AdDj
Paste Flux: https://amzn.to/3f4IXsH
Kailh GM Red Replacement Mouse Switches: https://lethalgaminggear.com/products/kailh-gm-micro-switch-2-pc
Hyperslide Replacement Mouse Feet: https://amzn.to/2Uumufa
Embark Blog Post (new): https://medium.com/embarkstudios/our-continued-journey-89dad7a76bff
Embark Blog Post (old): https://medium.com/embarkstudios/an-update-from-embark-5f7a58ff1551

Podcast: https://twitter.com/sweatpantstech
Brad: https://twitter.com/bradshoemaker
Will: https://twitter.com/willsmith

60: Forgiveness, Not Permission

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 8 Nov 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Big AMD energy this week. PC World's Gordon Mah Ung has gotten his hands on the new Ryzen 5000 series chips, and now he's here to tell us all about AMD's latest attempt to take the CPU crown (well, that and getting the fire department called). Then we dig into the announcement of the new RDNA 2-based Radeon 6000 cards, perhaps more affectionately known as BIG NAVI.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

59: How You Know You're Living in the Future

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 1 Nov 2020 14:00:00 +0000

We've both tumbled down the Home Assistant rabbit hole, so this week we recorded an informal trip report on this sprawling open-source home automation system. Why would you want to replace your commercial hub? What sort of crazy scripting and automations can you come up with? Is it really worth editing .yaml files for all this? The answers lie within! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

58: Lil' Doppler Redshift

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 25 Oct 2020 13:00:00 +0000

On this month's email show we talk about our love of astrophysics, a PC that could last you forever, bad interface design in consumer electronics, why e-ink screens aren't everywhere, Android longevity, the social niceties of Discord, and a bonus segment with Will's thoughts on gaming at THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY HERTZ.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

57: Everything's Bigger in Texas

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 13:00:00 +0000

All these new PC hardware announcements have us feeling nostalgic again, so we took another trip down memory lane to talk in-depth about the '90s 3D accelerator boom. The rise and fall of 3dfx! The OpenGL vs. Direct3D wars! All those .plan updates! Join us for some reminiscing about how we got from the earliest cards to the GeForces and Radeons of today.

Computer Time vs. Human Time

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

56: TressFX Vs. HairWorks

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 13:00:00 +0000

This week, we couldn't resist talking about the newly announced Zen 3 CPUs from AMD, along with the tease of their upcoming Big Navi-based graphics cards, plus a bonus segment on that PlayStation 5 teardown. We're just a couple of big old hardware nerds at heart, what can we say?

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Links!

AMD's Zen 3 Presentation

PlayStation 5 Teardown

55: Five Altairian Dollars a Day

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 4 Oct 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Brad just read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the first time (and Will reread it for the eleventy-thousandth), and now we're here to discuss the book's cheeky sci-fi Anglicisms and cavalier relationship with reality and metaphysics, its endless influence on pop culture, the career of Douglas Adams, and more. Thanks to all of our supporters who made this episode possible!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

54: Lack Rack!

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 13:00:14 +0000

The emails cometh, and bringeth with them questions and tips about why nobody can order a 3080 or PS5, the eyeball-saving properties of red nightlights, rounded vs. angular phone design, consumerism in tech and ethics in coding, and, yes, how to make your own Lack rack.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

53: The Mass-to-Volume Ratio

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 13:00:22 +0000

Nvidia bought ARM. Nvidia bought ARM! It's one of the biggest semiconductor deals in history, so we dive deep into what it all means, from some basics on CPU architecture to the implications for the mobile, enterprise, and machine-learning markets. One of our nerdiest episodes yet!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

52: It's an App Basket!

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 13 Sep 2020 13:00:23 +0000

Playing video games remotely has gotten surprisingly good lately, so this week we decided to sit down and figure out the what's what of home game streaming. From older options like Steam Link to the Parsecs and Moonlights of today, not to mention some of the recent high-quality, low-latency backend tech that's making it possible, there's a lot to unpack. Join us!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Some useful links for this week's show:

Moonlight - https://moonlight-stream.org/

Steam Link - https://store.steampowered.com/steamlink/about/

Parsec - https://parsecgaming.com/

Raspberry Pi 3 - https://amzn.to/35xiL7y

Raspberry Pi 4 - https://amzn.to/2FfcDWN

URI vs. URL - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier#URLs_and_URNs

51: The Man With the Spatula

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 6 Sep 2020 13:00:22 +0000

Last week Brad and Will got to attend a virtual deep dive on Nvidia's new 30-series GPUs, and in this ep we attempt to break down all the new ray-tracing optimizations, DirectStorage capability, whole-system latency reduction, push-pull cooler designs, V-shaped PCBs, and more. Be warned, it's a lot!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

50: Two Is One, One Is None

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 13:00:16 +0000

Our 50th episode doesn't quite have 50 emails, but it's close: tune in for listener mails about bugout bags, evacuation tips, data over HAM radio, the resilience of municipal fiber, and very, very high-end broadcast video.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Show art credit: Chechu Risk

Gemini (a Gopher-like protocol)

Camera Clamp

Tripod Extender

(Use 2x Camera clamps + one tripod extender to make a monitor arm mountable camera mount)

49: Proto-Prepping

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 13:00:10 +0000

With the latest round of California wildfires heavy on our minds, this week we ended up with a wide-ranging conversation about what to take with you when you evacuate, climate change, PCs as space heaters, crawl space water cooling, and the genius of Douglas Adams.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

48: Grip Is Good

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 13:00:08 +0000

Following up on our software unitasker ep from a few weeks ago, we're now moving into the physical realm. This week we run down a few of our favorite devices, trinkets, and doodads that make it just a little bit easier to get things done.

Here's a quick list of the stuff we mentioned on this ep which should be easy to search for:

Brad

Genki Covert Dock by Human Things
Retractable cables (Digital Ant's look pretty good)
Charging station (bamboo or other)
Articulated HDMI extenders (Monoprice is a good bet for these)

Will

Anker Multiport USB Chargers
MagSafe-like USB cables - Digital Ant Gen-X Micro
A good headlamp - Black Diamond Spot 325
USB-powered lights stuck under the bottom edge of your monitor
USB pantry/closet light Amico Motion Sensor Closet Light
Soldering extra hands - KOTTO Third Hands
Unipod thingy for webcam/whatever - Dinkum Systems Action Pod Pro
Cable grabbers - Bluelounge CableDrop
Nano bubble grip surface

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

47: Key-Hoarding

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 9 Aug 2020 13:00:41 +0000

This week we very carefully lower ourselves into the unthinkably deep rabbit hole of mechanical keyboards. If you've ever wanted to know your MX reds from your blues, tenkeyless from 65%, keycaps, backlights, and more, this episode is for you.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Some mech keyboard resources:

Drop: https://drop.com/

Keyboard Catalog: http://keyboardcatalog.com/

Deskthority: https://deskthority.net/

NovelKeys: https://novelkeys.xyz/

46: The Suborbitable Caterpillar

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 2 Aug 2020 13:00:03 +0000

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeemails this month address questions like: Where the heck are the color e-ink readers? Can we imagine a world without DNS? What in the world is a sputtering target? Want a quick 'n easy cable-organizing tip that will BLOW YOUR MIND?

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Here's the magical hanging cable organizer in all its full-size glory: https://imgur.com/a/r4URJ0G

45: No-Tonsil-Stone Zone

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 13:00:05 +0000

PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon stops by to talk about turning an old PC into a new router. Why would you want to roll your own router in the first place? What are your hardware and software options to do so? What kind of fancy new network stuff can you do with it? The answers lie within!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Here's Wes' article on PC Gamer about pfSense: https://www.pcgamer.com/i-built-my-own-super-router-out-of-old-pc-parts-and-ive-never-felt-so-powerful/

44: alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 13:00:11 +0000

In these trying times, we thought a nostalgic little walk down memory lane might be nice. Join us as we look back at the '90s Internet, from PPP connections and .plan files to Gopher, IRC, and Will's part in the Eternal September.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Here's the microsuction stuff Will mentions in the intro: https://www.amazon.com/Sewell-Direct-AirStick-Microsuction-250mmx300mm/dp/B00ITX9OU2/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=sl1&tag=notthatwill0d-20&linkId=4f0530f913b3084c875bb01bf3140f20&language=en_US

Dust off your telnet client and let's all play Legend of the Red Dragon: https://lord.stabs.org/

43: Sigh Ops

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 13:00:02 +0000

This week we run down a few of the common and not-so-common software tools that make our lives a bit easier. From text-syncing to task-scheduling, audio management and phone automation, we hope there's something in here that can make your life a little easier, too.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

42: It’s Only a Mistake if You Don’t Learn

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 5 Jul 2020 13:00:18 +0000

This month's email episode contains some of your own tech horror stories, from melted carpet fibers and shutting down a whole town's Internet to causing seven-figure production stoppages. Also: draconian ISP upstream policies and a chat about the mechanical, pre-silicon days of computing. Enjoy!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

41: The Great Simian Mathematician

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 13:00:21 +0000

Another Apple episode already? Yeah, we didn't expect it either until WWDC brought such a bounty of new stuff to talk about. In addition to ARM-based Macs, somehow iOS managed to be the most interesting thing at this year's conference. Home screen widgets! Multitasking! App defaults? After all these years?!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Here's MKBHD's great iOS 14 hands-on walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLyDvABxGF0

40: Gigantic Flaming Luminous Orb

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 13:00:06 +0000

Oh, the horror! This week we recount some of the tech disasters from our past. From near-miss electrocutions to ruined prototype hardware, PC-building boondoggles, all-night server restores, and extremely lucky data recovery, relive some of our best and worst moments getting hands-on with hardware and software.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

39: The Eternal Optimist

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 13:00:12 +0000

Things are rough out there, so this week we recorded a free-wheeling episode about tech-ish self-care strategies for things like exercise, meditation, lighting, and so forth. Plus: Will's making his own MiSTer case!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

38: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 7 Jun 2020 13:00:04 +0000

It's time for infosec episode, the sequel! Will recounts the hackery he's dealt with since our initial podcast about online security a few weeks ago, then we grade the big tech companies on their privacy efforts (or lack thereof) and dig into the what, how, and why of modern data collection -- and how to stop it.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

37: Mr. Reginald Edit

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 31 May 2020 13:00:31 +0000

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Here's the American Cinematographer deep dive on The Mandalorian's production that we mentioned a couple weeks ago.

36: The Frankencoder Liiiiiiives

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 24 May 2020 13:00:08 +0000

With everyone trapped indoors, streaming video on the Internet is an especially good way to connect with people right now. This week we did a broad survey of practical streaming tech, from hardware and software setups to codecs and protocols, Brad's latest questionable tech project, and the ever-present danger of streaming Will's inbox live to the world.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

35: Every Polygon Is a Pixel

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 17 May 2020 13:00:04 +0000

With the advent of another generational Unreal Engine tech demo, it's time to have a live watch party and then mull over what the UE5 tech means for asset creation, real-time lighting, and other trends in game development, and then gush over the Unreal-driven virtual sets in TV productions like The Mandalorian. Graphics!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Unreal Engine 5 tech demo

The Mandalorian virtual set deep dive

UE4 Next-Gen Virtual Production Demo

34: My Other Computer Is a Datacenter

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 10 May 2020 13:00:07 +0000

Friend of the pod Brian Fitzpatrick of Tock Inc. and ORD Camp stops by to talk about the early days of big data at Google, shipping 1500-pound rack servers, working on widely used open-source software, and how to score a half-ton irradiated electromagnet.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

33: Prudiest Common Denominator

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 3 May 2020 13:00:15 +0000

By all accounts, Apple is moving its laptops to ARM sooner than later. What's this transition going to mean for existing MacOS software? How many days straight will your new MacBook run on battery? Can we envision a big old Mac Pro running on an itsy bitsy ARM chip? These questions and more, pondered herein!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

32: Bless the Drive

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 13:00:03 +0000

Time for another Q&A! This week we discuss listener-submitted emails about the ultra-sandboxed future of Windows 10X, a short mouse retrospective, waiting for the right time to build a new PC, electron beams 'n electromagnets, questionable phone upgrades, and our personal histories of taking stuff apart and putting it back together.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

31: Virtuals on Virtuals on Virtuals

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 19 Apr 2020 13:00:04 +0000

This week we reach into our grab bag of homebound projects to chat about the tech stuff we're up to lately, from Will's ray-traced camera obscura and adventures in Behringer mixing to Brad's efforts to bring a FrankenMiSTer to life and get to the bottom of the great shingled hard drive scandal of 2020.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

30: The Neighborhood Software Pirate

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 13:00:11 +0000

Special guest time! Digital Eclipse's Mike Mika joins us to talk about the early days of programming video games, how not to get murdered by your arcade machine, reverse engineering classic games without source code, the coming CRT apocalypse, and what the new console hardware means for old games.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

29: Have Laser, Will Cut

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 5 Apr 2020 13:00:07 +0000

In this grab bag of an episode, we cover topics ranging from ground loop isolators to the MiSTer, fixing holes in air mattresses, modern uses for 3D printing, an in-depth primer on coronavirus testing, reclaiming that precious blue screen of death, and more stories from our quarantined home life.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Some links from this week's episode:

That 3D-printable NAS case: https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-mk735-mini-server-nas-chassis-96113

The ground loop isolator Brad bought: https://www.amazon.com/Isolator-Audiophile-Frequency-Without-Distortion/dp/B01N10AQ76/

Get the blue screen of death back: https://winaero.com/blog/show-bsod-details-instead-of-the-sad-smiley-in-windows-10/

Laser-cuttable PPE: http://bit.ly/solinflatpack

28: Low Bidet-lability

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 13:00:01 +0000

As always, we couldn't make this show without our Patrons. Special thanks to our Producer-level Patrons!

Executive Producer - David Allen
Associate Producer - Iain Baillie
Associate Producer - Graham Banks
Associate Producer - Sam Buck
Associate Producer - Ezekiel Holiman
Associate Producer - Paul Reust
Associate Producer - Thomas Shea

27: The Week That It Happened

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 13:00:05 +0000

Microsoft and Sony dumped a treasure trove of Xbox and PlayStation hardware specs this week, and we do our best to break down the APIs and SOCs, ponder ultra-fast flash storage and ray tracing, speculate about how the new boxes will affect development going forward, and more! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

26: Come On Downe to Dongle Towne!

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 16:00:02 +0000

Here's Will's ridiculous portrait ultra-wide monitor: https://imgur.com/a/yy3EJNp

25: Put a Doober in the Wall

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 8 Mar 2020 16:45:28 +0000

Anker 5-port 60W USB Charger

Anker Quick Charge 3.0 Battery

Anker Wireless Charging Pad

Anker Wireless Charging Stand

24: The Mad Max Threshold

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 1 Mar 2020 17:22:37 +0000

d.Light Solar Lantern + Phone Charger
MPOWERD inflatable Solar Lantern
BigBlue 5V 28W Solar Charger
Anker Backup Battery
Lifestraw Personal Size
Lifestraw 1Gallon Bag
UV Light Water Sterilizer
Ensure Milk Chocolate
Emergency Crank-Powered Radio
A Big Car Camping Tent
Sleeping Bags
Bleach
Tea Lights
Emergency Blanket
First Aid Supplies
Gas Shutoff Wrench
Can Opener
Wet Wipes
Demolition Tool
Gerber Shard
Pliers Multitool
Medicine dropper
Fire starters
Electric Match
Jetboil Camp Stove
A Kindle!
N95 Masks (for dust, but not Coronavirus)
Pet Food
People Food
Baby/Kid Supplies
A good starter option: 2 Adult/3 Day Kit (Food + first aid + supplies)

23: Some Real Karen Energy

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 15:01:14 +0000

Q&A time! On our latest emails episode we cover topics like Raspberry Pi media servers, backing up old Nintendo games, dystopian uses for biometric data, COM ports in 2020, Will's travails with Netflix customer chat, and the ancient, forgotten magic of LightScribe. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

22: Like a '70s Oldsmobile

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 16 Feb 2020 19:26:19 +0000

Our super-definitive ordering of every Windows concludes with the all the modern ones: XP and SP2, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10. Remember the Start Screen? Remember WinFS? Remember hooking your unpatched PC straight into your Internet connection? After this episode, you will! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

21: WINDOWS ON TRIAL

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 9 Feb 2020 14:00:26 +0000

Don't miss Will's old magazine reviews of Windows 2000 and Millennium Edition. It's like traveling through time!

20: It's Like a USB Condom

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 2 Feb 2020 20:46:37 +0000

Information security is more important than ever these days, so it's time to talk best practices, from two-factor authentication to Yubi keys, password strength, drive encryption, financial security, and more. Don't miss out on free food like we did! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

19: The Codec-sperts

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 18:30:08 +0000

It's that time again: emails! We're computer-heavy this week with questions about our favorite PC cases and understanding video formats, but we also make time for silicon wafers and diamond-resin grinding wheels, the Kessler Syndrome, and the great meatloaf battle of beef versus pork. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

18: A Cave for Your Hard Drives

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 19 Jan 2020 21:54:45 +0000

This week we're getting NASty... network-attached storage, that is. From wi-fi-enabled USB drives to Synology to FreeNAS and beyond, this episode is a wide-ranging deep dive on network storage options, RAID, ZFS, dealing with open-source media streaming and home automation, NUT servers, and more! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

17: Jimmy Dean Organic

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 20:49:12 +0000

Another Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone, and while we dodged the Vegas bullet this year, we still read all the news: Bluetooth LE audio, fake pork, Sony's fake car, Intel's possibly real GPU, AMD's bazillion chiplets, 360Hz monitors, and more! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

16: Heavy HDMI

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 5 Jan 2020 21:44:33 +0000

Will and Brad turn Qs into As in another mailbag edition of the Tech Pod. Topics include getting hands-on with Half-Life: Alyx, next-gen console minspecs, why there's never a queue to watch Watchmen, Brad's long HDMI cable, and the state of AMD's latest CPU designs. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

15: Bob Iger Will Eat You

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 01:10:33 +0000

A new decade is nigh, so what better time to look back on the tech trends that defined the twenty-tens... teens... whatever. From smartphones to 3D movies, home laser cutters to endless payments of $10 a month, settle in for a look back at the decade that was! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

14: It's Just Math

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 21:37:12 +0000

This week we dip our toes into the wild world of ray tracing, from the physical basics to emerging APIs, a brief history of GPU design, what the ray tracing solutions might look like in the new consoles, and a DIY tech demo you can do at your kitchen table! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

13: Tech the Halls!

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 20:14:15 +0000

Programmable lights: www.twinkly.com

Homebridge: https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge

12: I Have a Website!

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 1 Dec 2019 18:50:06 +0000

You ask and we answer! This week, we tackle relevant tech topics like chicken farming, vaporware, drive-by-wire, upgrading a 486 to a 586, and what will definitely be the final email about cooking rice in a pressure cooker. Enjoy! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

11: Spatchcock Central

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 18:24:50 +0000

The annual giving of thanks is almost upon us, so Brad and Will sat down to chew the well-rendered bird fat about a few of the technologies they're thankful for, from noise-canceling headphones to... speedy Windows installs? Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

10: The Corgi of Cars

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 18:48:29 +0000

That self-driving car GIF

9: Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 17:00:02 +0000

Apologies for the crackling in the audio! A recording snafu forced us to use a backup recording that wasn't as high quality as we would have liked.

8: The One Where We Go Dark

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 3 Nov 2019 20:03:01 +0000

The best reference material I found on quantum computing (It's a comic).

Scott Aaronson's blog with a ton of good quantum computing info.

Larry Osterman on Microsoft's backwards slashes.

The time Pixar deleted Toy Story 2.

7: Singularities All Around Us!

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 27 Oct 2019 17:00:01 +0000

The technological singularity may or may not be looming in our future, so we attempt to get to the bottom of singularities past and present, quantum intelligence, civilizational collapse, and other cheerful subjects. Plus: a hands-on report and one (1) email! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

6: Spray the Frame Hose

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 20 Oct 2019 17:00:09 +0000

This week we crack open the time capsule with the first episode we ever recorded, about screens! From their humble origins with the first analog TVs to modern ultra-fast gaming monitors and adaptive sync in next-gen consoles, we go deep on this most refreshing topic. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

5: Punch a Couple of Nuns

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 01:35:46 +0000

This week, we talk about supply chain. Why did the iPod Nano beget the iPhone? What's the big deal with batteries? What does the Gmail launch have to do with supply chain? Find out the answers to these questions (and more!) on this week's Tech Pod. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

4: A Bomb That Sits on Your Stove

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 6 Oct 2019 20:11:18 +0000

This week we had the brilliant idea of talking about food tech while we were starving. Pressure cookers! Air fryers! The Maillard reaction! N-nitrogen dewars? Roto-stators? Do people really put sugar in grits? All that and more on our most delicious episode yet! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

3: 340 Trillion Trillion Trillion

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 18:04:06 +0000

Here's the mid-'90s memo outlining the use of private address ranges like 192.168.0.0 for internal network use. If you happen to be Robert G. Moskowitz, we'd love to chat!

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1918

2: Captain Crunch's Electric Car

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:24:37 +0000

Batteries power everything from phones and laptops to cars now, but it feels like the technology is lagging behind. Brad and Will talk about different types of batteries and how they work, share some good guidelines for care and maintenance of the lithium batteries that are in most of your mobile devices, and contemplate Will's high-tech high school romantic life. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

1: We're Gonna Need JNCOs For That

techpod@content.town (Will Smith, Brad Shoemaker) — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 22:00:31 +0000

Brad and Will contemplate their own mortality while discussing this week's Apple event. Topics include Apple's newest iPhones, Watches, iPads, and services. There's also at least one banger of a segue. Enjoy! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

0: Sweatpants Tech Podcast

techpod@content.town (Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith) — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 17:23:24 +0000

On this inaugural episode, Brad and Will share their technological origin stories and why they've always loved tech. Hear the reason they're making a podcast, the stories of their first PC builds, and their love of Socket 7. Enjoy! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod