Episoder
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It was a really big week for hardware announcements, with Sony finally filling in the details on the PlayStation 5 Pro, and Apple announcing new phones, watches, headphones and more. We dive into both subjects, including the PS5 Pro's promising AI upscaling and less promising whopper of a price, the slightly strange AirPod roadmap, the still-ongoing patent dispute over the Apple Watch, and plenty more.
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 all this and more.
The article referenced in this episode: https://dongknows.com/wi-fi-7-explained/
Our original Wi-Fi 6 episode (which was episode 9!): https://techpod.content.town/episodes/9-orthogonal-frequency-division-multiple-access-Sb_AgiQe
Our more recent networking primer from early this year: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/227-a-donut-of-good-internet-UAno2S2L
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 of doing this podcast.
*not actual security experts
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 single computer? Then this is the episode for you!
Show notes and links for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-248-vcf-west
Our photos and videos from the festival: https://photos.app.goo.gl/KW4WX6tYLyjyamYXA
You should really see the home page for the VCF Midwest in Chicago: https://vcfmw.org/
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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. Hopefully, you'll come away with some new favorite apps, too!
Links to some of the more obscure applications we discussed:
Everything: https://www.voidtools.com/
mpv: https://mpv.io/
MusicBee: https://www.getmusicbee.com/
EarTrumpet: https://eartrumpet.app/
SumatraPDF: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/
WinMerge: https://winmerge.org/
WizTree: https://diskanalyzer.com/
LosslessCut: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
Auto Dark Mode: https://github.com/AutoDarkMode/Windows-Auto-Night-Mode
WinDynamicDesktop: https://github.com/t1m0thyj/WinDynamicDesktop
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 players, from server types to hosting heuristics, player behaviors, ranking types, and a bunch more.
Activision's COD white paper about matchmaking: https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/CallofDuty_Matchmaking_Series_2.pdf
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 development scene, a look at some entry-level mid-'90s game dev tools and early Dreamcast development kits, the surprisingly silly origins of Gran Turismo, a review of Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and a bunch of other stuff. Check the show notes for a link to the issue!
Follow along with the magazine here: https://archive.org/details/NextGeneration36Dec1997/mode/2up
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 the year of the Linux desktop along the way (well, not really (OK, maybe kind of)).
Links referenced this episode include:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/starliner-still-doesnt-have-a-return-date-as-nasa-tests-overheating-thrusters/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/10/openai-board-microsoft-apple-withdraw/
https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit/report.pdf
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 VideoSupport the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 this product, and more.
Our last game-changer product deep-dive, about the Xbox 360: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/183-hiroprotagonist-loves-an-inhale-a0zOAKKo
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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-snapping, and too many other features to list.
Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-239-wwdc-24
Watch the WWDC keynote here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXeOiIDNNek
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 stuff.
Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-238-ioniq-5
Here's our episode on the Chevy Bolt and the basics of EVs: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/88-it-just-makes-the-lithium-angrier
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-237-copilot-plus-ai
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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 stuff going on around automating mods these days. Lastly, uh, enjoy the podcast!
Stuff discussed in this episode includes:
HoloISO: https://github.com/HoloISO/releases
Bazzite: https://bazzite.gg/
Wabbajack: https://www.wabbajack.org/
Viva New Vegas: https://vivanewvegas.moddinglinked.com/
Tale of Two Wastelands: https://taleoftwowastelands.com/
Rounds: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1557740/ROUNDS/
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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Hey, remember RSS? Friend of the show Wes Fenlon joins us for a record fourth (!!) time to reminisce about the glory days of really simple syndication, when you could just aggregate all your favorite news and blogs into one tidy feed. This episode is about more than just waxing nostalgic, though; Wes is here to tell us all about bringing it all back with his self-hosted RSS stack, including his setup for FreshRSS (and some of its alternatives), ways to get RSS out of sites that don't even serve it anymore, the growing "indie web" movement that aims to recapture the spirit of a simpler Internet, and more.
Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-234-self-hosted-rss
Check out Wes' newsletter on emulation and retro games: https://www.readonlymemo.com/
Episode art courtesy of Sandwich Tribunal: https://www.sandwichtribunal.com/2024/02/south-australias-fritz-and-sauce/
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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We're embarking on a two-part rundown of home video formats this week, with part one focusing on analog video up through the mid-1990s and covering biggies like VHS and LaserDisc, plus also-rans like Betamax, Video8, and the truly strange CED. Tune in for plenty of fun trivia, like myths and misconceptions about the first major format war, Sony's ahead-of-its-time analog HD video system, why a video format patterned after a record player isn't a great idea, and a bunch more!
(There are some drops in Brad's recording this week due to an infestation of audio gremlins which we're working to exterminate. Apologies for any inconvenience.)
The MiSTer clone video from the cold open: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RSrzM7dM-Y
Show notes for this ep, with links to a lot of the videos and images discussed: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-233-analog-home-video
Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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