A grab bag, a smorgasbord, a potpourri -- whatever you call it, we've assembled another batch of micro-topics to wend our way through. This time around, precision German podcasting plugins, Will's new green screen-free life (and growing array of tiny pixel art screens), a bit of desk efficiency chat, graphite pads versus thermal paste, and the sheer arrogance of putting an AWE64 in a Windows 3.1 machine.

Links for this episode!

86Box: https://86box.net/

WinWorldPC's old operating system archive: https://winworldpc.com/home

The Ultraschall plugin for Reaper: https://ultraschall-fm.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US

Tidbyt, the tiny pixel screen: https://tidbyt.com/

The Stream Deck line: https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck

CONTROL. MY. MONITOR.: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/control_my_monitor.html

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Look, it's getting harder to think of intro text for a Q&A episode -- but it's ever easier to record one with so many great Qs! This month we tackle our fantasy space missions, a bidet breakdown, dirty dishes on the desktop, the future collectability of current tech, WFH survival strats, filling drives to the brim, the origin of "software," cloud-connected router provisioning, and one intrepid listener's nuclear aspirations.

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Brad's birthday has come and gone, which gives him the privilege of choosing our next tech year in review. This time, the banner year of 1997, which saw everything from Dolly the cloned sheep to IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue, the nuclear-powered Cassini probe to Saturn (and protests to match), the American launch of DVD, Steve Jobs' return to Apple, the anything-goes brutality of Ultima Online, and a bunch more.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 NOTES

Some of the third-party programs we mentioned on the show include:

Steam ROM Manager: https://github.com/SteamGridDB/steam-rom-manager

EmuDeck: https://www.emudeck.com/

Chiaki: https://git.sr.ht/~thestr4ng3r/chiaki

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

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!

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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 NOTES

Here's the lucky gentleman with the 25 gigabit Internet service: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2022-04-23-fiber7-25gbit-upgrade/

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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

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 NOTES

The docs and download links for the Playdate's SDK:

https://play.date/dev/

https://sdk.play.date/1.10.0/Inside%20Playdate.html

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

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 NOTES

The relevant Computer Chronicles episode, season 13 episode 8:

https://archive.org/details/CC1308_greatest_games

Bill Gates invades Doom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2V9TFrmQ_Q

The 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

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 NOTES

The Verge story on 5G and the iPhone SE:

https://www.theverge.com/22968066/apple-iphone-se-5g-mmwave-verizon-uw

Epic's RealityScan app:

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-games-introduces-realityscan-app-now-in-limited-beta

That 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

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

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

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 NOTES

The two Washington Post pieces referenced in the new part of this episode:

Senate plan for permanent daylight saving time faces doubts in the House

Permanent standard time is better than daylight saving, sleep experts say

And 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-worst

Stats on DST and traffic accidents: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002243751000112X

Where 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-22f5a3d5d28c

Info on the famed Manhattanhenge: https://www.farmersalmanac.com/manhattanhenge

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

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

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

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

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-us

QNAP: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/

The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google

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

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!

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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

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

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

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

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-AASzFiw

https://venturebeat.com/2022/01/06/e3-shifts-to-online-only-event-because-of-omicron-concerns/

Panasonic's goggles-sized SteamVR headset

https://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 pain

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/29/22856103/hdmi-2-1a-spec-standard-mess-cables-source-based-tone-mapping-ces-2022

Nvidia announced 3050, 3090ti

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16671/nvidia-launches-geforce-rtx-3050-and-rtx-3050-ti-for-laptops

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17173/nvidia-briefly-teases-geforce-rtx-3090-ti-more-details-later-this-month

AMD talked details on their 2022 CPU roadmap, Zen 4 launching this year

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17152/amd-cpus-in-2022-ces

AM5 is the long term socket for Zen 4

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17192/ces-2022-amds-nextgen-am5-platform-to-have-long-term-support

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

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_5dc9b751e4b00927b237d5be

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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-worst

Stats on DST and traffic accidents: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002243751000112X

Where 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-22f5a3d5d28c

Info on the famed Manhattanhenge: https://www.farmersalmanac.com/manhattanhenge

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

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

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

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

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: 00:10:19

Twitch: 00:36:57

Windows 11: 00:56:16

Some handy links from this week's ep:

Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet (cloudflare.com)

More details about the October 4 outage - Facebook Engineering

Updates on the Twitch Security Incident | Twitch Blog

Twitch’s security problems started long before this week’s hack - The Verge

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

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.pdf

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

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

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/copy

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

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

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

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

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

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's
  • Buffer overruns, license violations, and bad code: FreeBSD 13’s close call | Ars Technica
  • The hijacked OPNSense domain: https://opnsense.org/opnsense-com/
• Ubiquiti's terrible week:
  • Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic” – Krebs on Security
  • Ubiquiti 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) – FFmpeg
• Linksys GPL Violation:
  • https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/03/06/08/1749217/is-linksys-violating-the-gpl

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

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. #hacktheplanet

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

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

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!

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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!

NOTES

Here'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-fraud

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

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

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.

NOTES

Here'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

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 UCLA

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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 NOTES

Here are the articles referenced in this episode:

PC Gamer's early Quake preview featuring the dragon

Gary Whitta's story from the game's launch

The Quake II cover story that touches on Romero's split with id

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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

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-installed

Clonezilla, 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

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

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 NOTES

That wild mechanical thumb from the cold open: https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1396003181151272963

Science Magazine on the EV battery-recycling problem: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/millions-electric-cars-are-coming-what-happens-all-dead-batteries

The 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

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_6DtwmQXs

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

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/terminated

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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

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/

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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 Tracker
• NYT Article About Kati Kariko

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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.

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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.

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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

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/techpod

IGN's summary of Joy Con lawsuits and joystick damage:

https://www.ign.com/articles/all-the-lawsuits-nintendo-is-facing-over-joy-con-drift

iFixit'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-worse

TronicsFix on the DualSense triggers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rNITneXnCo&t=555s

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

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

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

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

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 Graveyard

Google's statement on the Stadia pivot

The guy who founded his own ISP

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

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/techpod

Here'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/

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

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

Time for some 2021 emails! This month we talked about dearly departed Google products, how to fix a broken USB port (or whether you should even try), how we got started doing this, why your TOSLINK cable is keyed, a lab meat topic we should never have read out loud, and the current whereabouts of Maura Labingi.

Intel's ARK CPU Fact Sheet Site

AMD's Product Fact Sheet Site

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We were unable to turn our attention to anything but the week's horrifying events in Washington, D.C., so for this episode we had a freewheeling chat about... well, everything, including some perspective from Will's time working on the Hill, the infosec implications of the Capitol breach, how we attempted to keep up with the onslaught of news on Wednesday, and more. Stay safe, everyone.

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

We're kicking off 2021 with a trip back to... 1985? Yes, we sat down with a vintage episode of the Computer Chronicles to reflect on the hard disk's momentous arrival on the personal computing scene. Join us as we take a look back at drives measured in the whopping tens of megabytes, Winchester drives, XTs and ATs, the Mac HyperDrive, the ancient precursor to the Zip drive, beige boxes, and business suits galore.

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

Here's the Computer Chronicles episode we're discussing this week, S03E16 from 1985:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBsKakmW0fs

With 2020 (finally) drawing to a close, we look back on a few of our favorite tech things, big or small, from this challenging year. From advances in medical science to ways to stay social from afar, from new workflows we worked out to new gadgets we, uh, gadgeted, here's an informal list of some of the stuff that kept our spirits up, and a couple of things we're looking forward to, during this strange time in history.

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

Our last email ep of 2020 addresses such topics as: how to trust Google search results (or not), bad tech habits we just can't shake, how to get and stay digitally organized, the worth of external GPU enclosures, a life-changing tip about our Gmail workflow, some more home networking tips, and a treatise on the regional naming differences of winter hats.

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

Product design is on our minds this week, starting with the industry-redefining research that led to the production of modern, psychologically optimized junk food. Have the same sensibilities now overtaken the design of consumer electronics? Do soundbars and Cheetos have more in common than we realize? Is there a bliss point, but for tech? We explore this slightly abstract topic and attempt to arrive at a few answers.

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

Here's the article we reference extensively throughout the episode:

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html

The time has come to discuss 5G and the latest cellular data specs (largely because Will got an iPhone 12). We get into his hands-on experience with 5G speeds, the differences between low, medium, and high-band spectra, how 5G compares to LTE, what millimeter wave is exactly, how 5G may or may not interfere with weather forecasts, and 5G's potential to turn you into a lizard person. (One of these topics may be fake.)

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

Our Fall cornucopia of emails contains such succulent questions as: How future-proof should your new smart home be? To prebuilt PC or not to prebuilt PC? Where are all the HDMI 2.1 accessories? How do you wrangle a monitor and a TV in Windows? Plus, a whole bunch of tech that we--and you--have been thankful for in this trying 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

On this busy week we threw together a delightful potpourri of different topics, from gadget repair to drilling through PCBs, lust for 4k TVs (or not), making the lightest mouse in history, the huge potential of handheld lidar, and a quick glimpse at what's coming next in big-budget video game development.

Support the show and join the Techpod Discord for as little as $2/month at https://patreon.com/techpod.

Bearded Bob's YouTube G Pro switch replacement video (the whole channel is good too!): 

• Solder Sucker That Actually Works: https://amzn.to/2UsEGFZ
• Will's Hakko Soldering Station: https://amzn.to/3f2AdDj
• Paste Flux: https://amzn.to/3f4IXsH
• Kailh GM Red Replacement Mouse Switches: https://lethalgaminggear.com/products/kailh-gm-micro-switch-2-pc
• Hyperslide Replacement Mouse Feet: https://amzn.to/2Uumufa
• Embark Blog Post (new): https://medium.com/embarkstudios/our-continued-journey-89dad7a76bff
• Embark Blog Post (old): https://medium.com/embarkstudios/an-update-from-embark-5f7a58ff1551

Follow us on Twitter! 

• Podcast: https://twitter.com/sweatpantstech
• Brad: https://twitter.com/bradshoemaker
• Will: https://twitter.com/willsmith

Big AMD energy this week. PC World's Gordon Mah Ung has gotten his hands on the new Ryzen 5000 series chips, and now he's here to tell us all about AMD's latest attempt to take the CPU crown (well, that and getting the fire department called). Then we dig into the announcement of the new RDNA 2-based Radeon 6000 cards, perhaps more affectionately known as BIG NAVI.

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

On this month's email show we talk about our love of astrophysics, a PC that could last you forever, bad interface design in consumer electronics, why e-ink screens aren't everywhere, Android longevity, the social niceties of Discord, and a bonus segment with Will's thoughts on gaming at THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY HERTZ.

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

All these new PC hardware announcements have us feeling nostalgic again, so we took another trip down memory lane to talk in-depth about the '90s 3D accelerator boom. The rise and fall of 3dfx! The OpenGL vs. Direct3D wars! All those .plan updates! Join us for some reminiscing about how we got from the earliest cards to the GeForces and Radeons of today.

Computer Time vs. Human Time

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

This week, we couldn't resist talking about the newly announced Zen 3 CPUs from AMD, along with the tease of their upcoming Big Navi-based graphics cards, plus a bonus segment on that PlayStation 5 teardown. We're just a couple of big old hardware nerds at heart, what can we 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

Links!

AMD's Zen 3 Presentation

PlayStation 5 Teardown

Brad just read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the first time (and Will reread it for the eleventy-thousandth), and now we're here to discuss the book's cheeky sci-fi Anglicisms and cavalier relationship with reality and metaphysics, its endless influence on pop culture, the career of Douglas Adams, and more. Thanks to all of our supporters who made this episode possible!

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

The emails cometh, and bringeth with them questions and tips about why nobody can order a 3080 or PS5, the eyeball-saving properties of red nightlights, rounded vs. angular phone design, consumerism in tech and ethics in coding, and, yes, how to make your own Lack rack.

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

Nvidia bought ARM. Nvidia bought ARM! It's one of the biggest semiconductor deals in history, so we dive deep into what it all means, from some basics on CPU architecture to the implications for the mobile, enterprise, and machine-learning markets. One of our nerdiest episodes yet!

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

Playing video games remotely has gotten surprisingly good lately, so this week we decided to sit down and figure out the what's what of home game streaming. From older options like Steam Link to the Parsecs and Moonlights of today, not to mention some of the recent high-quality, low-latency backend tech that's making it possible, there's a lot to unpack. Join us!

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

Some useful links for this week's show:

Moonlight - https://moonlight-stream.org/

Steam Link - https://store.steampowered.com/steamlink/about/

Parsec - https://parsecgaming.com/

Raspberry Pi 3 - https://amzn.to/35xiL7y

Raspberry Pi 4 - https://amzn.to/2FfcDWN

URI vs. URL - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier#URLs_and_URNs

Last week Brad and Will got to attend a virtual deep dive on Nvidia's new 30-series GPUs, and in this ep we attempt to break down all the new ray-tracing optimizations, DirectStorage capability, whole-system latency reduction, push-pull cooler designs, V-shaped PCBs, and more. Be warned, it's a lot!

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

Our 50th episode doesn't quite have 50 emails, but it's close: tune in for listener mails about bugout bags, evacuation tips, data over HAM radio, the resilience of municipal fiber, and very, very high-end broadcast video.

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

Show art credit: Chechu Risk

Gemini (a Gopher-like protocol)

Camera Clamp 

Tripod Extender

(Use 2x Camera clamps + one tripod extender to make a monitor arm mountable camera mount)

With the latest round of California wildfires heavy on our minds, this week we ended up with a wide-ranging conversation about what to take with you when you evacuate, climate change, PCs as space heaters, crawl space water cooling, and the genius of Douglas Adams.

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

Following up on our software unitasker ep from a few weeks ago, we're now moving into the physical realm. This week we run down a few of our favorite devices, trinkets, and doodads that make it just a little bit easier to get things done.

Here's a quick list of the stuff we mentioned on this ep which should be easy to search for:

Brad

Genki Covert Dock by Human Things
Retractable cables (Digital Ant's look pretty good)
Charging station (bamboo or other)
Articulated HDMI extenders (Monoprice is a good bet for these)

Will

Anker Multiport USB Chargers  
MagSafe-like USB cables - Digital Ant Gen-X Micro
A good headlamp - Black Diamond Spot 325
USB-powered lights stuck under the bottom edge of your monitor
USB pantry/closet light Amico Motion Sensor Closet Light
Soldering extra hands - KOTTO Third Hands  
Unipod thingy for webcam/whatever - Dinkum Systems Action Pod Pro
Cable grabbers - Bluelounge CableDrop    
Nano bubble  grip surface

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

This week we very carefully lower ourselves into the unthinkably deep rabbit hole of mechanical keyboards. If you've ever wanted to know your MX reds from your blues, tenkeyless from 65%, keycaps, backlights, and more, this episode is for you.

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

Some mech keyboard resources:

Drop: https://drop.com/

Keyboard Catalog: http://keyboardcatalog.com/

Deskthority: https://deskthority.net/

NovelKeys: https://novelkeys.xyz/

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeemails this month address questions like: Where the heck are the color e-ink readers? Can we imagine a world without DNS? What in the world is a sputtering target? Want a quick 'n easy cable-organizing tip that will BLOW YOUR MIND?

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

Here's the magical hanging cable organizer in all its full-size glory: https://imgur.com/a/r4URJ0G

PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon stops by to talk about turning an old PC into a new router. Why would you want to roll your own router in the first place? What are your hardware and software options to do so? What kind of fancy new network stuff can you do with it? The answers lie within!

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

Here's Wes' article on PC Gamer about pfSense: https://www.pcgamer.com/i-built-my-own-super-router-out-of-old-pc-parts-and-ive-never-felt-so-powerful/

In these trying times, we thought a nostalgic little walk down memory lane might be nice. Join us as we look back at the '90s Internet, from PPP connections and .plan files to Gopher, IRC, and Will's part in the Eternal September.

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

Here's the microsuction stuff Will mentions in the intro: https://www.amazon.com/Sewell-Direct-AirStick-Microsuction-250mmx300mm/dp/B00ITX9OU2/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=sl1&tag=notthatwill0d-20&linkId=4f0530f913b3084c875bb01bf3140f20&language=en_US

Dust off your telnet client and let's all play Legend of the Red Dragon: https://lord.stabs.org/

This week we run down a few of the common and not-so-common software tools that make our lives a bit easier. From text-syncing to task-scheduling, audio management and phone automation, we hope there's something in here that can make your life a little easier, too.

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

This month's email episode contains some of your own tech horror stories, from melted carpet fibers and shutting down a whole town's Internet to causing seven-figure production stoppages. Also: draconian ISP upstream policies and a chat about the mechanical, pre-silicon days of computing. 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

Another Apple episode already? Yeah, we didn't expect it either until WWDC brought such a bounty of new stuff to talk about. In addition to ARM-based Macs, somehow iOS managed to be the most interesting thing at this year's conference. Home screen widgets! Multitasking! App defaults? After all these years?!

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

Here's MKBHD's great iOS 14 hands-on walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLyDvABxGF0

Oh, the horror! This week we recount some of the tech disasters from our past. From near-miss electrocutions to ruined prototype hardware, PC-building boondoggles, all-night server restores, and extremely lucky data recovery, relive some of our best and worst moments getting hands-on with hardware and software.

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

Things are rough out there, so this week we recorded a free-wheeling episode about tech-ish self-care strategies for things like exercise, meditation, lighting, and so forth. Plus: Will's making his own MiSTer case!

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

It's time for infosec episode, the sequel! Will recounts the hackery he's dealt with since our initial podcast about online security a few weeks ago, then we grade the big tech companies on their privacy efforts (or lack thereof) and dig into the what, how, and why of modern data collection -- and how to stop it.

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, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Here's the American Cinematographer deep dive on The Mandalorian's production that we mentioned a couple weeks ago.

With everyone trapped indoors, streaming video on the Internet is an especially good way to connect with people right now. This week we did a broad survey of practical streaming tech, from hardware and software setups to codecs and protocols, Brad's latest questionable tech project, and the ever-present danger of streaming Will's inbox live to the world.

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

With the advent of another generational Unreal Engine tech demo, it's time to have a live watch party and then mull over what the UE5 tech means for asset creation, real-time lighting, and other trends in game development, and then gush over the Unreal-driven virtual sets in TV productions like The Mandalorian. Graphics!

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

Unreal Engine 5 tech demo

The Mandalorian virtual set deep dive

UE4 Next-Gen Virtual Production Demo

Friend of the pod Brian Fitzpatrick of Tock Inc. and ORD Camp stops by to talk about the early days of big data at Google, shipping 1500-pound rack servers, working on widely used open-source software, and how to score a half-ton irradiated electromagnet.

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

• Google Takeout
• Tock
• Google Corkboard Server
• The Google Server Rack We Discussed
• Tefi Tape
• Fermilab Tevatron
• Tevatron Magnet
• Iomega Pocketzip
•  

By all accounts, Apple is moving its laptops to ARM sooner than later. What's this transition going to mean for existing MacOS software? How many days straight will your new MacBook run on battery? Can we envision a big old Mac Pro running on an itsy bitsy ARM chip? These questions and more, pondered herein!

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

• How Windows works on ARM
• How Microsoft does x86 emulation
• Bloomberg Report on ARM on OSX
• Gruber on ARM OSX

Time for another Q&A! This week we discuss listener-submitted emails about the ultra-sandboxed future of Windows 10X, a short mouse retrospective, waiting for the right time to build a new PC, electron beams 'n electromagnets, questionable phone upgrades, and our personal histories of taking stuff apart and putting it back together.

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

This week we reach into our grab bag of homebound projects to chat about the tech stuff we're up to lately, from Will's ray-traced camera obscura and adventures in Behringer mixing to Brad's efforts to bring a FrankenMiSTer to life and get to the bottom of the great shingled hard drive scandal of 2020.

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

Special guest time! Digital Eclipse's Mike Mika joins us to talk about the early days of programming video games, how not to get murdered by your arcade machine, reverse engineering classic games without source code, the coming CRT apocalypse, and what the new console hardware means for old games.

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

In this grab bag of an episode, we cover topics ranging from ground loop isolators to the MiSTer, fixing holes in air mattresses, modern uses for 3D printing, an in-depth primer on coronavirus testing, reclaiming that precious blue screen of death, and more stories from our quarantined home life.

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

Some links from this week's episode:

That 3D-printable NAS case: https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-mk735-mini-server-nas-chassis-96113

The ground loop isolator Brad bought: https://www.amazon.com/Isolator-Audiophile-Frequency-Without-Distortion/dp/B01N10AQ76/

Get the blue screen of death back: https://winaero.com/blog/show-bsod-details-instead-of-the-sad-smiley-in-windows-10/

Laser-cuttable PPE: http://bit.ly/solinflatpack

• Serious Eats Food Safety
• The YouTube Food Video
• Social Distancing Strategies for Curbing COVID-19
• COVID Tracking Project

As always, we couldn't make this show without our Patrons. Special thanks to our Producer-level Patrons! 

Executive Producer - David Allen
Associate Producer - Iain Baillie
Associate Producer - Graham Banks
Associate Producer - Sam Buck
Associate Producer - Ezekiel Holiman
Associate Producer - Paul Reust
Associate Producer - Thomas Shea

Here's Will's ridiculous portrait ultra-wide monitor: https://imgur.com/a/yy3EJNp

Anker 5-port 60W USB Charger

Anker Quick Charge 3.0 Battery

Anker Wireless Charging Pad

Anker Wireless Charging Stand

• d.Light Solar Lantern + Phone Charger
• MPOWERD inflatable Solar Lantern
• BigBlue 5V 28W Solar Charger
• Anker Backup Battery
• Lifestraw Personal Size
• Lifestraw 1Gallon Bag
• UV Light Water Sterilizer
• Ensure Milk Chocolate
• Emergency Crank-Powered Radio
• A Big Car Camping Tent
• Sleeping Bags
• Bleach
• Tea Lights
• Emergency Blanket
• First Aid Supplies
• Gas Shutoff Wrench
• Can Opener
• Wet Wipes
• Demolition Tool
• Gerber Shard
• Pliers Multitool
• Medicine dropper
• Fire starters
• Electric Match
• Jetboil Camp Stove
• A Kindle!
• N95 Masks (for dust, but not Coronavirus)
• Pet Food
• People Food
• Baby/Kid Supplies
• A good starter option: 2 Adult/3 Day Kit (Food + first aid + supplies)

Don't miss Will's old magazine reviews of Windows 2000 and Millennium Edition. It's like traveling through time!

Programmable lights: www.twinkly.com

Homebridge: https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge

That self-driving car GIF

Apologies for the crackling in the audio! A recording snafu forced us to use a backup recording that wasn't as high quality as we would have liked.

The best reference material I found on quantum computing (It's a comic).

Scott Aaronson's blog with a ton of good quantum computing info.

Larry Osterman on Microsoft's backwards slashes. 

The time Pixar deleted Toy Story 2. 

Here's the mid-'90s memo outlining the use of private address ranges like 192.168.0.0 for internal network use. If you happen to be Robert G. Moskowitz, we'd love to chat!

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1918