Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

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. 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

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. 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

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-updatesWindows LTSC FAQ: https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_linksTiVo 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 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

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/ 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

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 | WIREDThat annoying SMS phish you just got may have come from a box like this - Ars TechnicaWhy iRobot’s founder won’t go within 10 feet of today’s walking robots - Ars TechnicaWhy Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity – Rodney BrooksSteam will wind down support for 32-bit Windows as that version of Windows fades - Ars Technica 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

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 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

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-quarantineNoctua on fan placement and beat frequencies: https://noctua.at/en/fan-speed-offset-explainedStackable hard drive feet Brad bought: https://sednashop.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=95Seasonic 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=n6gQ5ie2Dw0Brad's NAS/hard drive setup and de-pinned cable: https://imgur.com/a/WKPwhCQ 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

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. 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

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/ 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

A few links from this episode:The musical No BS Podcast #100: https://archive.org/details/no_bs_podcast_100A 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/ 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

Some handy links if you want to start playing with your own virtual Windows 95 machine:https://86box.net/https://winworldpc.com/homehttps://www.vogons.org/ 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

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

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

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-paypalitch.io reindexes NSFW content: https://itch.io/t/5149036/reindexing-adult-nsfw-contentValve comments on payment processors: https://kotaku.com/mastercard-denies-pressuring-steam-to-censor-nsfw-games-2000614393Here's the RTINGS article on types of OLEDs mentioned toward the end: https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/qd-oled-vs-woled 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

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

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

Wired 04.12, December 1996: https://archive.org/details/wired-magazine-04.12-1996-decemberShow notes with page numbers for everything we discuss: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-295-wired-dec-96 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

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

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 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

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/ 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

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. 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

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. 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

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. 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

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. 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

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/ 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

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. 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

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.htmlEverything, 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-7dcf51cc8bfcMore info on Windows Libraries: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/client-tools/windows-librariesEaseUS' free Windows backup utility: https://www.easeus.com/backup-software/tb-free.html 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

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! 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

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. 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

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 10AB3406WF02Brad's TV: https://crtdatabase.com/crts/toshiba/toshiba-14af42This is a great teardown and servicing video for the Toshiba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ij0i-xnvic 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

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. 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

Links mentioned on this episode:ShaderGlass: https://mausimus.itch.io/shaderglassArticles 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/ 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

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-gdcThe 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/ 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

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. 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

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. 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

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.) 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

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. 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

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 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

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-buildhttps://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 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

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 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

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 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

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-rankingsSubmit 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 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

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 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

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-marianneThe 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 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

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. 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

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/ 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

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/1644415217445609508ShuckStop: https://shucks.top/Easy shucking with guitar picks: https://forums.truenas.com/t/easystore-drive-shucking-like-a-pro-by-a-pro/1498 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

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

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. 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

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. 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