Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Software mentioned in this episode:

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

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

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

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

Links mentioned on this episode:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The current...

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

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

https://docs.google.com...

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

GoFundMe to support Gordon Mah Ung's family: https://www.gofundme.com...

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

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in...

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

Follow along with pictures...

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

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

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

The Microsoft Fandom...

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

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

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits...

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

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

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

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can...

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

The links for emergency and offline maps we mentioned...

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

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name...

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

Stuff discussed in this episode: 

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

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

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the...

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

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

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

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the...