Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 NOTESSome of the third-party programs we mentioned on the show include:Steam ROM Manager: https://github.com/SteamGridDB/steam-rom-managerEmuDeck: https://www.emudeck.com/Chiaki: https://git.sr.ht/~thestr4ng3r/chiakiSupport 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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'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 NOTESHere'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 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

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 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 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 NOTESThe docs and download links for the Playdate's SDK:https://play.date/dev/https://sdk.play.date/1.10.0/Inside%20Playdate.htmlSupport 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 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 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 NOTESThe relevant Computer Chronicles episode, season 13 episode 8:https://archive.org/details/CC1308_greatest_gamesBill Gates invades Doom:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2V9TFrmQ_QThe 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 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

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 NOTESThe Verge story on 5G and the iPhone SE:https://www.theverge.com/22968066/apple-iphone-se-5g-mmwave-verizon-uwEpic's RealityScan app:https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-games-introduces-realityscan-app-now-in-limited-betaThat 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 NOTESThe two Washington Post pieces referenced in the new part of this episode:Senate plan for permanent daylight saving time faces doubts in the HousePermanent standard time is better than daylight saving, sleep experts sayAnd 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-worstStats on DST and traffic accidents: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002243751000112XWhere 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-22f5a3d5d28cInfo on the famed Manhattanhenge: https://www.farmersalmanac.com/manhattanhengeSupport 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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-usQNAP: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.googleSubscribe 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 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 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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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 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 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 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-AASzFiwhttps://venturebeat.com/2022/01/06/e3-shifts-to-online-only-event-because-of-omicron-concerns/Panasonic's goggles-sized SteamVR headsethttps://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 painhttps://www.theverge.com/2021/12/29/22856103/hdmi-2-1a-spec-standard-mess-cables-source-based-tone-mapping-ces-2022Nvidia announced 3050, 3090tihttps://www.anandtech.com/show/16671/nvidia-launches-geforce-rtx-3050-and-rtx-3050-ti-for-laptopshttps://www.anandtech.com/show/17173/nvidia-briefly-teases-geforce-rtx-3090-ti-more-details-later-this-monthAMD talked details on their 2022 CPU roadmap, Zen 4 launching this yearhttps://www.anandtech.com/show/17152/amd-cpus-in-2022-cesAM5 is the long term socket for Zen 4https://www.anandtech.com/show/17192/ces-2022-amds-nextgen-am5-platform-to-have-long-term-supportSupport 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 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

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_5dc9b751e4b00927b237d5beSupport 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 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'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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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'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 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 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 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 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 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 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-worstStats on DST and traffic accidents: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002243751000112XWhere 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-22f5a3d5d28cInfo on the famed Manhattanhenge: https://www.farmersalmanac.com/manhattanhengeSupport 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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: 00:10:19Twitch: 00:36:57Windows 11: 00:56:16Some handy links from this week's ep:Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet (cloudflare.com)More details about the October 4 outage - Facebook EngineeringUpdates on the Twitch Security Incident | Twitch BlogTwitch’s security problems started long before this week’s hack - The VergeSupport 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 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 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.pdfSupport 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 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 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 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

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/copySupport 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 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

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 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'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 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 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 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 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 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

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'sBuffer overruns, license violations, and bad code: FreeBSD 13’s close call | Ars TechnicaThe hijacked OPNSense domain: https://opnsense.org/opnsense-com/Ubiquiti's terrible week:Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic” – Krebs on SecurityUbiquiti 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) – FFmpegLinksys GPL Violation:https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/03/06/08/1749217/is-linksys-violating-the-gplSupport 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 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 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. #hacktheplanetSupport 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 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