Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

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

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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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/explorehttps://organicmaps.app/ 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

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! 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

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: BazziteRetro Game CorpsThe Phawx 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

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

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 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 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. 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

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-westOur photos and videos from the festival: https://photos.app.goo.gl/KW4WX6tYLyjyamYXAYou should really see the home page for the VCF Midwest in Chicago: https://vcfmw.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

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-cutAuto Dark Mode: https://github.com/AutoDarkMode/Windows-Auto-Night-ModeWinDynamicDesktop: https://github.com/t1m0thyj/WinDynamicDesktop 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

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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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

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 ChannelThe Full Nerd PodcastHow MSI Laptops are Designed VideoMSI's GPUs Through History Video 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 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 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