Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

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

Question time is here again, and this month our answers address topics like these: why anyone is still using big ol' ATX, our favorite flea market finds of the past, drop shadows under mouse cursors, extremely frivolous 3D printing projects, the mysteries of random Bluetooth interference, and the puny little billionaires who couldn't even manage to escape low Earth orbit.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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

Ever wonder what it's like to try your hand at small-batch manufacturing overseas? Keyboardio's Jesse Vincent joins us this week to address that very subject in a broad discussion of his company's history, with a focus on the trials and tribulations of getting a hardware startup off the ground, setting up production-line tooling in China, being on the outs with your factory reps, solving IC shortages with FPGAs, finding loose iPhone processors in Shenzhen electronics stalls, and more.You can check out the Model 100 Kickstarter here!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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 enjoyed Will's birth-year episode so much a few weeks ago that we're back with a look at the notable events in tech, science, and culture of 1979 now that it's Brad's turn. Slap this tape in your Walkman and listen to us prattle about CompuServe's origins in the life insurance industry, C++, events in nuclear energy (and weapons), the debut of the compact disc, the founding of Pixar and Sierra On-Line, the first Daytona 500 broadcast, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the rings of Jupiter, and more!NOTESHere's the Vice feature on the fall of Sierra On-Line: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3vem8/inside-story-sierra-online-death-cuc-cendant-fraudSupport 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 Will's friend Ben Brown, longtime online software developer, to talk about the Internet old and new. Topics include Ben's grassroots efforts to resurrect the Finger protocol, rooting around in 1977-era Unix source code, why the tech industry keeps reinventing the same features over and over, reading 'zines over Telnet, the never-ending accumulation and corporate consolidation of content, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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 knew we couldn't resist doing a Windows 11 episode, and indeed we're here to talk about the whole shebang: virtualized security and the controversy around CPU support, the good (better window-snapping!), the bad (bottom-only taskbar!), and the ugly (rounded corners!?) of the new UI, the ol' Trusted Platform Module, Microsoft Store revenue changes, Android apps, and the coming war between Microsoft and Google.NOTESHere's TechRepublic's informative piece on Windows 11 CPU compatibility that we referenced a bunch in this episode: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-11-understanding-the-system-requirements-and-the-security-benefits/Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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 month's Q&A episode features Qs (from both email and our Discord) that got us chatting about such topics as: the ARPANET, passive-aggressive email signatures, pre-microprocessor computing history, battery management in devices you never use, corporate-mandated brand pronunciations, why video conferencing is merely "good enough," how we've navigated the sharing of our personal lives online over the years, and more!This week's show art courtesy of UCLASupport 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

id Software's Quake came out 25 years ago this week, and it also changed both of our lives. In this episode we wax nostalgic about the astonishing legacy of technical innovations Quake brought to game design, the ways it inspired our fascination with everything from client/server networking to NeXT workstations, the communities and studios that sprung up in its wake, all those endless .plan updates, the perfection that is DM3, and a lot more. Happy birthday, Quake.SHOW NOTESHere are the articles referenced in this episode:PC Gamer's early Quake preview featuring the dragonGary Whitta's story from the game's launchThe Quake II cover story that touches on Romero's split with idSupport 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 a big week around these parts--Will helped reveal a new game at E3, and Brad helped launch a new online media property--so we did a potpourri episode touching on a bunch of the technical details of working on these projects, including: Will's embrace of git, how to positively influence Internet behavior, Microsoft's open-source moves, when we might see shipping Unreal Engine 5 games, a search engine that plants trees, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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

Reinstalling Windows: no one enjoys it, but everyone has to do it eventually. This week, we spend some time chatting about the ways this timeless ritual has gotten better (or worse) over the years, strategies for making the process as painless as possible, some of the unique things we do to customize a fresh install, and a lot more. Also: tune in for a hands-on report on the new GeForce 3080 Ti (and Will's rapid transformation into a '90s industrial vocalist).SHOW NOTES:Find the dates of your Windows install and updates with Powershell: https://www.nextofwindows.com/when-was-my-windows-10-originally-installedClonezilla, the drive-imaging tool: https://clonezilla.org/Ninite, the multi-app installer: https://ninite.com/Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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

If you're looking for our monthly Q&A ep, you've found it! This time around we consider such listener-provided topics as questionable soap-on-soap interactions, discerning frame rate by eye, dot-com-era layoffs, the legacy and contemporary influence of Neuromancer, software broadcast over the radio, and HDMI over, uh, coat hangers?Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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

Spurred by Will's first month with a Chevy Bolt, we present an episode on electric cars and attempt to answer questions such as: How weird is it to drive without braking? Can you check the car's battery health like it's a phone? What's the public charging situation like these days? How many EVs are out there, anyway? Should your car really have the power to text you?SHOW NOTESThat wild mechanical thumb from the cold open: https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1396003181151272963Science Magazine on the EV battery-recycling problem: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/millions-electric-cars-are-coming-what-happens-all-dead-batteriesThe fiery Houston Tesla crash: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/04/18/2-men-dead-after-fiery-tesla-crash-in-spring-officials-say/Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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

In honor of Will's birthday, this week we traveled back to the heady days of 1975 to see what was big in science and tech in the year of his birth. Our impromptu retrospective features everything from the Altair 8800 to Space Mountain, the Homebrew Computer Club, the Apollo/Soyuz handshake in space, Benoit Mandelbrot, Jaws, Betamax, and a little history-making company from Bill Gates and Paul Allen called... wait, does this say Traf-O-Data?Operating an Altair 8800 is not for the faint of heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh_6DtwmQXsSupport 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

Very special guest Vinny Caravella joins us this week for a wide-ranging chat about his years of video production, juggling cameras in the early days of Whiskey Media, a love letter to analog signals, the infamous List of Terminated HDMI Adopters, a consideration of codecs and protocols past and present, and more. From logging tapes to crimping SDI cables, there's a lot in here!These HDMI adopters have been... terminated: https://www.hdmi.org/adopter/terminatedSupport 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

Six-ish months since launch, the next-gen consoles are now officially current-gen, so we thought it was time for a check-in on the state of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X platforms. How has the user experience matured so far? What system software issues are still lingering? When will games start shipping at 30Hz? Will they ever be easy to actually buy? These questions and more, discussed!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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 time! In this month's Q&A, we talk about Spring cleaning and strategies for organizing electronics with limited storage space, overusing ellipses and other Internet chat habits, long-lost Usenet posts, the great turn-of-the-century capacitor calamity, a mea culpa and backgrounder on the McDonald's coffee lawsuit, and more.Check out Gretchen McCulloch's linguistics podcast Lingthusiasm, referenced on this episode:https://gretchenmcculloch.com/podcast/Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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

Kishore Hari--Tested.com correspondent, noted science communicator, and steak-product connoisseur--rejoins us for a check-in on the state of the COVID-19 pandemic one year after his first appearance. Topics include where we're at with vaccination rates and efficacy, outreach efforts to combat vaccine skepticism, the pause on the Johnson & Johnson shot, how IP ownership is hindering vaccination in the Global South, what a new "normal" might look like, and... what's this feeling? Is that... optimism?CDC COVID Data TrackerNYT Article About Kati KarikoSupport 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

Ultra-wideband support has been making its way into phones for a couple of years now, but... what the heck is it? This week we attempt to demystify this old wireless technology being adapted for modern devices, including its potential for very fine location tracking, why nobody is using it much (yet), whether it could replace Bluetooth, what effect it might have on Minority Report-style advertising, how it may turn your phone into your car keys, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

What is this week's episode about, you might ask? Why, it has a delightfully floral scent, almost like... a potpourri. You could say it's sort of a buffet, offering a little something for everyone. It's a little from column A, a little from columns B through Z. In fact, this episode may be about everything under the sun and also nothing at all.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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

Like Spring, emails are upon us once again, and this month we talk about such listener-provided topics as the stagnation of flash memory, a Starlink trip report, some of the downsides of PC-building, multithreading video games, TVs that are monitors that are TVs, browser containerization, and the things you find down at the water treatment plant.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

What the heck is going on with modern video game controllers? That's the question we're trying to address this week, with Joy Con and DualSense analog stick drift, unresponsive Xbox face buttons, do-it-yourself repair, advanced soldering techniques, class action lawsuits and other subjects all weighing on our minds. Is there any end in sight?Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpodIGN's summary of Joy Con lawsuits and joystick damage:https://www.ign.com/articles/all-the-lawsuits-nintendo-is-facing-over-joy-con-driftiFixit's breakdown of the DualSense joysticks (also thanks to them for the show image):https://www.ifixit.com/News/48944/heres-why-ps5-joysticks-drift-and-why-theyll-only-get-worseTronicsFix on the DualSense triggers:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rNITneXnCo&t=555s 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 our quest to find consensus on the best advancements in PC-building reaches its end. From the USB superposition to the class warfare of fancy motherboards, the baffling duality of the M.2 socket, the many flavors of PCI Express, and the questionable inclusion of the headlamp, rest assured that we considered every possible angle in assembling this authoritative list that should be taken extremely seriously.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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 urge to rank is upon us again, and this time we're looking to put together a list of the best advancements in hardware over our 25-year history of building PCs. Can modular power supplies step to the mighty universal serial bus? Is there anything better than a case that doesn't lacerate your hands every time you open it? How serial IS serial ATA, anyway? Listen and find out!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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

Listener emails return after a brief hiatus, and this time they bring chatter about the correct Windows taskbar positioning, the latest PlayStation VR news, where we think AR might be going, "biannual" workarounds, a lament for the closure of Fry's, Freeman Dyson's fast-and-loose orbital mechanics, and the eternal glory of RSS.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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 Adam Rogers, Wired senior correspondent and author of Proof: The Science of Booze, to talk all things alcohol. Topics include millennia-old fermentation practices, the stimulant/depressant dichotomy of drinking, that classically refined sommelier's palate, attempts to speed up the aging process, and modern assembly-line whiskey production. Bottoms up!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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

Google's "pivot" away from first-party Stadia development seemed like a good cue to spend an episode not only pondering the future of the company's game-streaming service--including third-party applications for Stadia's technology stack, and what all those server racks might be good for--and also going through the company's many, many dearly departed products. Anyone remember Google Pie?Links!The Google GraveyardGoogle's statement on the Stadia pivotThe guy who founded his own ISPSupport 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 used to work for a tech magazine. Brad always wanted to. We both read more than our fair share back in the day. So let's talk about magazines! In this ep we look back on those mammoth issues of Computer Shopper, our love of the PC Gamer demo CD, embargoes and print deadlines, Will's years in the magazine mines, what the (bumpy) transition from print to online was like, and lots more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpodHere's the short article that kicked off this ep, about Future, Chris Anderson, and .net Magazine:https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/magazines-about-the-web-sitepoint-smashing-magazine-net-magazine-css-tricks/ 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 a check-in on the health of VR, including the latest in headsets and controllers, standout games and productivity software, the open-sourcing of Tilt Brush, our amazement that Windows Mixed Reality still exists, and the potential for AR to eventually supplant the whole thing anyway. You knew we'd find an excuse to use that photo eventually.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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

Friend of the podcast Doug Ellison from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab stops by to give us the lowdown on the newest Mars rover Perseverance, set to land on the red planet in just a few weeks, plus all kinds of fun info about Lagrange transceivers, making oxygen out of thin air, flying helicopters on other planets, and recording home movies at mach 25.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod 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