Two momentous events have recently rocked the computing world: First, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger abruptly stepped down this week, less than four years after taking the company's helm, and before completing the ongoing transition to its next-generation chip fabrication, and second, Microsoft has removed the venerable WordPad from current and future versions of Windows. We convene to try to make sense of both of these unexpected happenings (and talk a lot about word processors along the way). Cling t...
Dec 08, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 264
The monthly Q&A commenceth again, with emails and Discord Qs positively pouring in about the origin of the flange effect, why all the electrical outlets are upside down, gaming on an M4 Mac Mini and how Apple's move to a 16GB minimum affects their status as a family recommendation, the value of moving to the Bay Area for a computer science degree, the race to the bottom in electronics parts and accessories, Will's holiday board game recommendations, an impromptu ranking of charts, and more. ...
Dec 01, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 263
American Thanksgiving draws near, so it's time again for our annual recitation of techie stuff that we're thankful for. From tangible products on your desk, around the house, and on the road, to more abstract things like moderating your social media intake, finding alternatives to Amazon, and the ease of fixing your foolish eyewear mistakes, we find more than a few things to fill out our lists. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly b...
Nov 24, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 262
We're back again with that floral favorite, the potpourri episode. This time it's a project potpourri, touching on some tech-related projects we've either tackled recently or are planning to get to soon. Learn the full story of how Will more or less Frankensteined his ultrawide monitor back from the dead, listen to Brad's plans for a virtual private cloud server and why Black Friday might be the time to jump in, scorn him for the utterly shameful state of his NAS backups, and more. Support the P...
Nov 17, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 261
It's been a wild few months in CPUs, with next-generation releases from both AMD and Intel in their respective Zen 5 and Arrow Lake categories. Now that most all the big parts are out, we break down what's what, including why everyone is finally going disaggregated (and what that means), what's going on with OS updates to make your processor run faster, which one to get if you just want to play games, what the new CU-DIMM standard means for RAM, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech ...
Nov 10, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 260
We're here at the end of the spookiest month and ready to field your questions once again, this time addressing subjects such as alternative file managers, how often (and why) to replace your surge protectors, why some electrical plugs have that sideways prong, our ability to suss out regional accents, the state of modern instant coffee, and why certain letters just sound cooler than others. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonu...
Nov 03, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 259
Brad's back from Western North Carolina, so it's time for a casual debriefing on being out there for two and a half weeks dealing with the Hurricane Helene aftermath, with a focus on all sorts of technical subjects like portable lighting strategies, acquiring and hooking up a generator in a hurry, making sense of the wiring layouts in older houses, remote work with almost no connectivity, dehumidifying and remediating a flooded basement, and, yes, some of the sillier computing artifacts that eme...
Oct 27, 2024•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 258
Wes Fenlon stops by this week to help Will run down all the new features and changes in the 24H2 update to Windows 11, from better quick settings to Wi-Fi 7 support and the long-awaited (or perhaps dreaded) addition of Microsoft's Copilot AI features. Then Will also delivers a trip report from this year's Maker Faire, detailing all the best projects he saw at the Bay Area's preeminent DIY event. It's like two podcasts in one! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to ...
Oct 20, 2024•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 257
Adam Patrick Murray, PC World's handheld PC gaming expert, drops by to talk about the current state of the handheld union. We discuss what's going on with hardware for the Valve Steam Deck, the ASUS Rog Ally X, and a whole lot more, plus dig deep into the pros and cons of Windows vs. Linux on handhelds, talk about what's going on with Valve's version of Steam Deck OS and homebrew options like Bazzite, and touch on what we'd like to see next from the ecosystem next year and beyond. Stuff discusse...
Oct 13, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 256
Norman Chan has seen the future of eyewear and it is... well, not something you can buy, or even try. But he's donned Meta's Orion AR glasses and has seen (and touched) the augmented reality future. We also talk about the Harvard students who turned their Meta Ray Bans into the ultimate privacy violating machine and Meta's new cheaper Quest 3S. Best of all, very special guest Jeremy Williams joins us to ask the toughest questions in this This Is Only a Test throwback episode! Support the Pod! Co...
Oct 06, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 255
Questions! You ask 'em, we answer 'em. This month, we field Qs about such subjects as migrating search engines to Kagi (or at least just away from Google), wi-fi etiquette as the in-home sysadmin, novel uses for power over Ethernet, where the speed holes on the new Ryzens come from, what the forthcoming landscape of over-the-counter hearing aids might look like, matching the PS5 Pro's performance in a PC build, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our b...
Sep 29, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 254
Will's out this week, so Nextlander's Vinny Caravella stops by for a freewheeling gab session about what he's been up to in tech lately, including the professional and personal roles for the eight (!) computers that live in his house, adventures in exposing his (son's) web services to the Internet, the need for a good audio processor in your recording chain, and more! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in ...
Sep 22, 2024•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 253
It was a really big week for hardware announcements, with Sony finally filling in the details on the PlayStation 5 Pro, and Apple announcing new phones, watches, headphones and more. We dive into both subjects, including the PS5 Pro's promising AI upscaling and less promising whopper of a price, the slightly strange AirPod roadmap, the still-ongoing patent dispute over the Apple Watch, and plenty more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a m...
Sep 15, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 252
The world is steadily moving on to Wi-Fi 7 (or 802.11be, if you like), so we figured it's about time we sit down and attempt to understand what separates this latest standard from all the wireless fidelity that came before. Where in the world did they get a number like 46Gbps? What are the forward- and backward-compatible implications with existing devices? How does "multi-link operation" work? Is it time to run out and upgrade yet? What's haunting Brad's access point? We do our best to answer a...
Sep 08, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 251
This week we put our security expert* hats back on to talk about the latest hotness in login technology, passkeys. Find out how passkeys work, how they enable you to login without a password, which major platforms are supporting them, and where and how you should manage them. We also do a quick update on more traditional time-based authenticator apps, including the recent Authy data breach, and then -- whaddaya know, it's our 250th episode! -- we also reflect a little on a momentous five years o...
Sep 01, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 250
The Qs that we attempt to A in this month's question-fest include: What are some less obvious benefits of portable apps? How trustworthy is a package manager? Is a Windows Pro license really worth it? What's your microwave technique for even, efficient heating? How do you stop analyzing products and just buy something already? Is a MagSafe connector like a cloaca? Fair warning, like half of this episode ended up being about food. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access...
Aug 25, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 249
Our good friend Steve Lin joins us to run down the trip he and Brad recently took to the Vintage Computer Festival: West Coast Edition, hosted in Mountain View, CA's wonderful Computer History Museum. Did you ever wonder about the strange arrow-key layout of early Soviet computers? Or how to build your own CRT out of a tube you found on the sidewalk? Or what it takes to rebuild the entirety of the early online service Prodigy from scratch? Or about the time Intel shoved a hundred 286s into a sin...
Aug 18, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 248
We got a listener request to talk about our ride-or-die software, the apps we just can't live without, and we thought a good way to focus that subject was to step through everything we've got on our taskbar, running in the system tray, and pinned to the Start menu. Listen in as we talk through our workflows that feature all sorts of both well known and obscure software for media editing and playback, hardware monitoring, file management, Windows GUI tweaks and tricks, and plenty of other stuff. ...
Aug 11, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 247
Matchmaking: it's hard. Wait, not the online dating kind (well, maybe that too) but the kind where you have to match a bunch of different players with different hardware and different geographic locations together over high-speed Internet and let them have fun in a game together. Prompted by Activision's release of a white paper about Call of Duty's skill-based matchmaking methodology, this week we dig into the technical and sociological ins and outs of creating a rewarding online experience for...
Aug 04, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 246
Q&A time! The last episode of July sees us discussing topics such as turning a childhood computer into a VM, mandatory open source software in government institutions, the strange and continuing ubiquity of 3.5" card readers, building your own private television channel, the death of corporate email, how we fed our early tech obsessions growing up in rural areas, and more. The non-Euclidean Doom video we mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZSFRWJCUY4 Support the Pod! Contribute to th...
Jul 28, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 245
We're putting the time machine back into service again this week with another magazine review, this time of Next Generation issue 36 from December 1997. Notably, this was the issue when the venerable thinking-person's game magazine first declared the PC the best place to play games, along with an in-depth assessment of the N64, PlayStation, and Saturn's places in the market. Plus, we also run through a whole bunch of other interesting material, including an early call for an independent game dev...
Jul 21, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 244
This week we discuss a three-fer of mini-topics from current events. First we take a look at Boeing's troubled Starliner test flight that's left a pair of astronauts stranded on the International Space Station. Next up, Goldman Sachs has issued a scathingly negative report about the validity and sustainability of the current AI bubble. And last, with Windows 10's end-of-support date looming, we dig into the upgrade requirements that are going to leave millions of PCs stranded, and maybe proclaim...
Jul 14, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 243
We're back with another hot month's worth of your questions to answer, this time addressing such wide-ranging subjects as easy ways to defeat Blu-ray region locks, tech tips for your fantasy new-home build, the sweet spot for solar panels paying for themselves, whether anyone actually needs a 10-gigabit home Internet connection, the ephemeral nature of knowledge locked up in Discord servers, ways to track subscriptions and to-do items with your partner, and more. Support the Pod! Contribute to t...
Jul 07, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 242
This week, Friend of the Show Adam Patrick Murray from PC World joins Will to share the ground truth about Computex. Freshly returned from Taipei, Adam is a Computex veteran, and told us what it's like to attend and cover the most important PC hardware trade show in the world. What Hardware Should You Use for UE5 Development? PC World's YouTube Channel The Full Nerd Podcast How MSI Laptops are Designed Video MSI's GPUs Through History Video Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and...
Jun 30, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 241
We're taking another close look at a product that broke out and redefined its entire category, this time the venerable IntelliMouse Explorer. These days it's hard to remember that it was Microsoft who banished the infernal ball and introduced the optical mouse to the mainstream, so we head back to 1999 and discuss what mice were like beforehand, how mechanical and optical sensors work, debate PS/2 versus USB, make an argument that the whole PC gaming accessory ecosystem owes its existence to thi...
Jun 23, 2024•54 min•Ep. 240
Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference has come and gone again, and frankly there were enough interesting additions to the company's various OSs that we figured an episode was warranted even before we got to "Apple Intelligence." We do our best in this jumbo episode to round up everything from silly corporate stunts to a (finally, maybe) context-aware Siri, an intelligent way to deal with too many notifications, build-your-own emojis, better vitals on the watch, MacOS's long-overdue window-sna...
Jun 16, 2024•1 hr 47 min•Ep. 239
Will just traded in the ol' Chevy Bolt for a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5, so it's time to run down all the pros and cons of this newer and more robust electric vehicle, and also check in on everything that's changed in the world of EVs in the three (!!) years since we did our Bolt episode. Listen on for our thoughts on everything from plug standards to the rapidly expanding charger network, how many driver assists are too many, the seemingly endless absurdities in automotive UX, and a bunch of other st...
Jun 09, 2024•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 238
Microsoft has announced some... controversial new AI-driven features coming to Windows 11, so we thought it was time to dissect the Copilot+ PC spec and particularly its Recall functionality, especially in light of the new Qualcomm ARM chips that are bringing more efficiency and more machine-learning compute power to the portable PC space. Is this stuff something you need? Is it something you should worry about? We do our best to answer these and other questions. Show notes and links for this ep...
Jun 02, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 237
It's another Q&A episode, and this month we get into a wide range of topics including our haul from the electronics flea market, our growing appreciation for SCART, Micro Center's rapidly expanding operations, the open-source automotive self-driving solution, a farewell to mini-USB, a quick Steam patching explainer, and more! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! ...
May 26, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 236
We've got another two-fer of mini-topics this week around projects we've been tinkering with lately. First, Will has been investigating ways to get the SteamOS experience on hardware that's not a SteamDeck, with both the full-on SteamOS rebuild HoloISO and the more general gaming-focused Linux distro Bazzite. Second, we've both had Fallout New Vegas (and its many necessary mods) on the brain a lot lately, and have been looking into the open-source mod manager Wabbajack and some of the other stuf...
May 19, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 235
