We're back this week with another round of hot tips for making your computing life less annoying, including super secret UI settings, methods of bending digital voice assistants to your will, a low-level Windows hotkey not even Will knew about, the latest PowerToys (since the last time we talked about PowerToys), an easy way to trim videos without encoding them again, the fastest video player in the West, and other tips you won't want to miss! The apps we mentioned in this ep include LosslessCut...
Sep 03, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 198
Another piping-hot batch of questions is here straight out of the oven (where "the oven" is Discord and our inbox), and we do our best to deliver answers about amassing a collection of Allen wrenches, the seeming fragility of OLED panels, service-nagging from your smart appliances, running dynamic DNS for your home VPN, books about computer history, peated whiskey, and more! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and o...
Aug 27, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 197
Since Brad just went through the new-TV-buying-and-setup process (for someone else), we decided it was time for us to look past our classic plasmas and take stock of the modern TV landscape. In this ep we attempt to casually dissect HDMI 2.1 features and HDR standards, and think about why format wars are never going away, which legacy audio connector is getting short shrift these days, why everything is labeled "8K" all of a sudden, when to buy an OLED, and a bunch more. Support the Pod! Contrib...
Aug 20, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 196
Our friend Wes Fenlon is back, this time to talk about his experiences daily-carrying Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip series of foldable smartphones. By interrogating such topics as whether glass is really meant to bend like that, when a screen protector isn't just a screen protector, how great the Game Boy Advance SP was (very great), and whether Apple might get in on this trend, we analyze whether this a passing fad, or the most exciting thing to happen to phones in some time. Support the Pod! Contrib...
Aug 13, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 195
We're back this week with the mythical three-peat of updates on topics we've discussed either recently or in the distant past. First, following up on last month's patron episode, we dig into our recent experiences with Wireguard and discuss why it's pretty much the only home VPN game in town. Next we dissect the lessons Will learned about operating an electric vehicle in extreme heat on this year's just-concluded sojourn to Palm Desert. Lastly, Brad does a quick update on cold brewing coffee aft...
Aug 06, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 194
It's that Q&A time again, so in between waxing philosophical about meteor showers and shipwrecks, we take a few of your questions this week, about the etiquette of color-matched bidet installs, the current state of AM5, a growing army of robot chore-doers, a check-in on our download folders, and the amount of that sweet, sweet pre-war steel in the Empire State Building. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and ot...
Jul 30, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 193
Will gets to dispense his considerable knowledge of coffee this week as Brad gets into cold brew and consuming way too much caffeine, with a medium-bodied discussion covering the cherry-esque fruit that houses the sacred bean, ratios for brewing a world class cup, some of the flashier and more modern brewing methods out there these days, and a bunch of other details that will hopefully prove informative to even the most refined coffee connoisseur. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patr...
Jul 23, 2023•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 192
We're dusting off the ol' projector this week for a discussion about the 1983 nuclear-warfare classic WarGames (which Brad had never seen!). Did you know the original movie had nothing to do with hacking or nukes? What exactly was inside WOPR, anyway? Is the movie somehow more relevant now than it was then? How much did all that gear in Matthew Broderick's bedroom cost? Listen to this podcast and answer these questions! Sources for this episode: https://www.wired.com/2008/07/ff-wargames/ https:/...
Jul 16, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 191
New competition is springing up in the microblogging space by the week these days, and to one degree or another, all these new services are attempting to reduce the centralization that led to the current sorry state of Twitter. In this ep we chat about the idea of federated social media -- that is, a bunch of communities loosely connected together -- and how it's being implemented on Mastodon and Bluesky, wrestle with the implications for moderation and network effects when everyone is no longer...
Jul 09, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 190
There's a lot going on lately (isn't there always?), so we did a roundup of some recent news stories this week. Canada is now requiring Google and Facebook to compensate news producers whose stories they aggregate, Reddit and Twitter are both self-immolating in spectacular fashion, and an exciting new discovery has been made in the hot astronomical category of gravitational waves. Events! Current ones! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, you...
Jul 02, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 189
As one social media platform after another lights itself on fire, we spend a good chunk of this month's Q&A thinking about other ways to use (or just get off of) the Internet, plus field some other Qs about ways to keep Windows XP alive, laptops for parents, some thoughts about the coming passkey era, acceptable data hoarding, 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 suppor...
Jun 25, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 188
Due to travel and other scheduling, we're debuting a brand new episode of the FOSS Pod in the feed this week. Hope you enjoy! Pine64 is one of the most ambitious open hardware projects around, delivering a wide range of low-cost and modifiable products including smart phones and watches, laptops, earbuds, soldering irons, and plenty more, all based on ARM and RISC-V. Senior advisor Lukasz Erecinski joins us on this episode to talk about the company's origins, letting your userbase weigh in on th...
Jun 18, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Our friend Norman Chan of Tested.com seized the chamfered aluminum ring this week by not only getting invited to the Apple Vision Pro reveal event but also getting to actually try the thing. Norm joins us this week for a very deep dive into this extraordinarily expensive piece of high technology, from getting his face and ears scanned to the gesture-based controls, his (shocking!) favorite experience, comparisons with other headsets, and all kinds of other stuff. Check out Norm's video from the ...
Jun 11, 2023•2 hr•Ep. 187
This week we're rounding up another handful of lifehacks-that-aren't-lifehacks, ranging from unexpected uses for barcode readers to apps that reduce food waste, a shocking truth about surge protectors, cutting mats and foot rockers, one weird trick to make your 30-year-old hard drive spin up, ways to fight back against the tyranny of MAX, 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 ca...
Jun 04, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 186
The last Sunday of the month heralds questions such as these: What's Amazon going to do with data on the layout of your house? Are the Netflixes of the world going to fight back against VPNs eventually? Is Windows really getting .rar support after all these years? How sustainable is the direct-funding model for indie media? Are bedsheet habits a shockingly contentious subject? Has the time come for the 220v personal computer? Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to ...
May 28, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 185
Now that we're both on new PCs in the last six months, it's time for us to run through some of our experiences and offer a few (hopefully new) tips for anyone else building a machine. Join us as we talk shop this week about recent BIOS trends, our love of portable apps, unconventional cloud storage strategies, much handwringing about motherboard vendor drivers, Windows package managers, some hefty praise for WSL2 (plus a dangerous digression into the varied feelings about systemd), and more. Som...
May 21, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 184
We're going to start taking the occasional look at a product that changed everything in its respective field, starting this week with the game console that redefined how consoles work in the online era, the Xbox 360. From achievements and cross-game chat to first-class downloadable games and controller standardization, evolution in game development and mainstream marketing, our memories of working with the system in the media, and not-so-flattering things like the red ring, HD-DVD, and Kinect, t...
May 14, 2023•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 183
We're delighted to be joined this week by Katie Mack, noted astrophysicist and author of The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), to talk about, well, how to think about the end of all existence, along with a bunch of other cosmological topics like the new research being enabled by the JWST, ingenious ways of using astronomical objects to study other astronomical objects, the programming languages astrophysicists use, the shocking truth about chalkboards versus dry erase, and more. Find...
May 07, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 182
Our month-ending Q&A is here again, with a bevy of emails and Discord questions pertaining to subjects such as these: scanning and 3D-printing precision parts, parental controls on your kid's first PC, the great Imgur purge of anonymous uploads, our two-factor and recipe-organizing strategies, leaking state secrets on Discord, evolution (and aerodynamics!) in PC cases over the year, and... wearing outside clothes to bed. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to o...
Apr 30, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 181
Spring is in the air, flowers are blooming, and the potpourri is back. In our latest floral pouch of podcast topics, we get into the IP camera setup Will is using for his bird cam, Stream Deck alternatives like Bitfocus Companion and Loupedeck, reliable old laser printers, the return of GPU space heaters, replacing filthy Windows installs, and the end of girl scout cookie season. Bitfocus Companion: https://bitfocus.io/companion Loupedeck: https://loupedeck.com/us/ Amcrest IP cameras: https://am...
Apr 23, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 180
Yes, Brad built a new PC. Seriously! For this momentous occasion, we got together to talk all things PC-building, starting with some early impressions of the new build and then heading off into tangents on ludicrous ray tracing performance, the ongoing mystery of PCIe lanes, working with the executive motherboard, the terror of the land grid array, and more. Download Fan Control here: https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access ...
Apr 17, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 179
Each of us are on overlapping mini-vacations this week, so we're debuting a brand new episode of the FOSS Pod in the feed. Enjoy! With tens of millions of units sold, it's no surprise the Raspberry Pi has become synonymous with the phenomenon of single-board computers, and it's also a great gateway into the world of open source. For this ep, we spoke to none other than co-founder and CEO Eben Upton about every Pi-related topic we could think of, including the Pi's origins in academia, early chal...
Apr 09, 2023•1 hr 11 min
It's been several months since Will needed a laptop and bought an M2 iPad Pro, keyboard, and pencil instead, so we figured enough time has passed to decide if that was the right move or not. In this ep we dig into the ups and downs of replacing a laptop with a tablet, what the workflow looks like, screen protectors that feel like paper, iPad OS multitasking, what you might use this sort of setup for in a serious film or media production setting, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech ...
Apr 02, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 178
Another month's worth of questions has accrued, and so this week we dispense answers about being the family tech support, silliness with Imperial measurements, gigantic patches for games, recurring spell check issues, questionable PC-building tricks, the MacOS command line, and some truly, truly accursed file systems. Here are links to the sheer insanity of pingfs: https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs And YouTubeFS: https://github.com/robertkeizer/youtubefs Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech P...
Mar 26, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 177
Tech news is getting a little too surreal for us lately, so we're taking a brief trip back to a simpler time. This week we go through the very first issue of Boot (later Maximum PC) from 1996, which has everything from Jean-Louis Gassée on the launch of the BeBox to Bill Gates on the x86 PC's murder of SGI, the very first cable modem service, a motorized (?) Panasonic laptop, some shocking secrets about the first Dream Machine and the letters section, the Will Smith byline that almost was, and a...
Mar 19, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 176
Our desks have evolved since the last time we talked about our personal workspaces (Brad has even achieved the elusive Cord Zero), so we're doing an updated check-in to talk about the current gear we're working with, aspirational cable-routing, portable camera setups, gaming on ultra-wide monitors, custom corkboard cutouts, and a bunch of 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 bene...
Mar 12, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 175
Remember when pop-up ads looked like they were part of Windows XP? Dark patterns are all around us, even when we don't realize it, and this week we cover a wide range of these insidious methods of manipulating our online behavior, touching on everything from tricks to make you play games longer than you want to subtly enticing you to rope in your friends, succumb to sunk cost fallacy, and more. Editor's note: Brad played Clash Royale for three hours after recording this episode. Support the Pod!...
Mar 05, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 174
Brad spent a whole bunch of time in the PlayStation VR 2 this past week, and given Will's previous life as the proprietor of a VR-related business, we're pairing hands-on (or maybe face-on) experience with institutional knowledge this week to dissect the ins and outs of the new headset, comparing it to the current PC fare, speculating about its potential to become a PC headset itself, musing about the use of SLAM tracking in robot vacuums, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Pa...
Feb 26, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 173
Some scheduling switcharoos mean we're doing February's Q&A episode one (1) whole week early! This month we field Qs about public Unix servers, noisy hard drives, the desirability of your own phone booth, an update on that attempt at roasting weed coffee, our experiences with house plants, a goblin who handcuffs people to chairs, 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 sup...
Feb 19, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 172
This week we're thrilled to be joined by Marcin Wichary, author of the upcoming and extensively detailed history of the keyboard, Shift Happens. We get into all kinds of typing-related subjects like QWERTY dominance, the shift wars of the late 1800s, and 150-year-old designs that have trickled down to software keyboards, plus a fascinating discussion about what it's like to spend seven years traveling the world to write a book of this scope and depth. Find out more about (and snag a copy of) Mar...
Feb 12, 2023•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 171
