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Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.
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Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

Author: Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith

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Each Sunday, Brad Shoemaker and Will Smith discuss a new technology topic. Come for the long-form conversations about virtual reality, space travel, electric cars, refresh rates, and a whole lot more.

Support the pod on Patreon: http://patreon.com/techpod
237 Episodes
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Inspired by what's probably the most common subject we see questions about on our Discord, this week we're doing an updated primer on home networking, with a refresher on some basic terms and concepts and our thoughts on a wide array of topics from modern mesh networks to fiber in the home, ISP-provided equipment, whether you should separate your wi-fi from your gateway, rolling your own router, the rapidly decreasing cost of high-end network speeds, 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
226: shooter.exe

226: shooter.exe

2024-03-1701:06:30

We've got a two-fer this week, with a pair of topics that might not have filled a whole ep on their own but turn out to be two great podcast tastes that, uh, taste great together... anyway, first we talk about the benchmark Will is currently creating in Unreal Engine to push CPUs and GPUs in a game development context, and then we check in on how the grand unification of smart home devices is coming along with the new Matter and Thread standards, now that products have been on the market for a year or so. There's definitely just one standard now, right? ...Right?Articles referenced in this ep:The Verge on a year with Matter & Thread: https://www.theverge.com/23997548/matter-smart-home-2023-platformsArs Technica on the continued value of Zigbee and Z-Wave: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/i-was-wrong-to-ignore-zigbee-and-z-wave-theyre-the-best-part-of-my-smart-home/ 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
What makes a great tech demo? Besides killer tech, do you need theatricality? Stage presence? The risk of everything exploding at the seams at any moment? This week we look back on a ton of notable tech demos big and small, from the largest Apple and Microsoft stages to people in their living rooms, to reminisce about some of the most exciting reveals and try to locate the exact intersection where earnestness and carnival barking meet to create a truly memorable presentation.Show notes and YouTube links for this ep: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-225-famous-tech-demosOur Xbox 360 deep dive episode: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/183-hiroprotagonist-loves-an-inhale  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
Book club returns this week, now that we've both read id Software founder John Romero's memoir, Doom Guy: Life in First Person. Join us for an extremely nerdy chat about Romero's early days as a teenage Apple II developer learning 6502 assembly, the pre-id team's blistering one-game-a-month output at Softdisk, technical innovations that led to id's most groundbreaking games, the internal strife that ultimately split the company, retrospective thoughts on a very different mid-'90s Doom 3 than the one we got later, and a bunch more.Pick up Doom Guy: https://www.amazon.com/Doom-Guy-Life-First-Person/dp/141975811XRomero's fan mail to Jordan Mechner: https://twitter.com/jmechner/status/1253777950299873283 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
This month's Q&A features another bumper crop of great topics, including installing in-wall speakers and hidden audio systems, the final word on the origins of WASD, doing A/V production on Linux (really), the relative value of the Raspberry Pi in 2024, how we use bookmarks these days, our feelings on mechanical versus smart watches, and a long-awaited update on the wi-fi sheep shed.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
222: War of the Chatbots

222: War of the Chatbots

2024-02-1801:15:311

News has been happening (when hasn't it?) and this week we're rounding up some of the stories that caught our attention in recent days. First, the launch of OpenAI's generative-video product Sora, as we consider what this thing is actually going to be used for, and what sorts of havoc it may wreak. Next, the effects of the EU's Digital Markets Act and the stringent ways that some large platform holders are starting to respond to it (looking at you, Apple). Lastly, the talk out of DICE about the state of the video game business and the likelihood of getting new projects off the ground.Notes and links for this episode: http://tinyurl.com/techpod-222-news-roundup 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
221: Cluck to Home Screen

221: Cluck to Home Screen

2024-02-1101:37:401

We're pleased to welcome Tested's Norman Chan back to the show, fresh off of his first week with the Apple Vision Pro and ready to fill us in on everything from the fitting process at the store to UI shortcuts with your mouth, connecting to an external Mac, the ins and outs of the video passthrough (and your loved ones appearing as ghosts atop Mount Hood), and everything in between.Check out Norm's upcoming Vision Pro video, plus all his other work: https://www.youtube.com/@tested 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
PC graphics settings have only gotten more complex in recent years, with new options around AI-driven supersampling, ray tracing, latency reduction, and a bunch of other stuff joining classics like SSAO. We attempt this week to step through the most common settings, with basic explanations and recommendations, as well as our experiences getting things like variable refresh to work, choosing between borderless and fullscreen, debating whether you should just let GeForce Experience do all this for you, and more.Show notes for this ep: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-220-gfx-settings 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
219: The Mark of Expertise

219: The Mark of Expertise

2024-01-2801:13:42

We begin this month's Q&A with a slightly mind-bending discussion of questions that exist in a quantum state, before falling back to more grounded topics like charging your EV out your apartment window, real-life keyboard shortcuts, why we all ended up on WASD, crowdfunding a Moon landing, speeding up your bulk photo-scanning, and the shameful faux pas of changing your profile picture. 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
218: Products People Love

218: Products People Love

2024-01-2101:03:54

Will unearthed a venerable SpaceOrb 360 in his garage recently, which sent us down a rabbit hole chasing all the weird, experimental input devices of the late '90s, back when everyone was just figuring out 3D control in the first-person shooter. Before we all standardized on mice and dual analog sticks, there were apparently a lot of different ways to Frankenstein together trackballs, dials, joints, hinges and more, and this week we try to catalog as much of it as we can.Notes for this ep, including pics and a bunch of links to all these devices (and some ongoing efforts to keep them working): https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT-lwdhF-FAZmBOaWimIr1ExIcNW0ZYy4plcw_BKtZA7xQB5c0ZLjxRbaTCSBv2wzJk4otzOhjXRTGt/pub 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
Another Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone, and we've sifted through the highs and lows to bring you a casual discussion about the stuff that actually mattered (Nvidia's Pulsar G-SYNC tech and Super GPUs, better wireless charging, new screen technologies), the strange and ridiculous (AI-powered cat doors, a robot that parks cars, a whole-mouth toothbrush), plus a bonus lightning round where we attempt to stump each other with real versus fake products.Digital Trends' report on the self-emissive quantum dot (or "nanoLED") display tech Brad mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eONWY3kbZc0 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
216: Tactical Baking Method

216: Tactical Baking Method

2024-01-0701:20:00

The seasonal metaphors continue as we weather a blizzard of great questions from you for the monthly Q&A, this time covering everything from Swiss army knife roles in game development to replacing USB ports, the mythical petabyte retail drive, extending wi-fi across hundreds of feet, whether we'll ever see a 128-bit CPU, L-shaped desks, our auditory sleep strategies, and more.The GDC talk about Bungie's Production Engineering role: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025970/Bungie-s-Force-Multipliers-ProductionThe one sheep-herding video you simply must watch: https://www.tiktok.com/@seanthesheepman/video/7312752825379884321 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
On the final day of 2023, Will is joined by Adam Patrick Murray from PC World to discuss the year that was. We run down the last twelve months of PC and mobile hardware, pick this year's winners (and a few losers) and call out the trends and hardware that we were most excited about in 2023! Plus, scene drama! 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
This week, Will is joined by Kishore Hari, who takes us on scientific journey through some of the biggest science stories of the year. Topics include advancements in cancer research, a cure for sickle cell anemia, the Nine Boundaries graph, advances in brain science, the cheapest way to land on the Moon, long-standing math problems solve by amateurs, and the year in science woo.  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
213: Therapy Over Teams

213: Therapy Over Teams

2023-12-1701:09:071

We had such a surplus of good questions in October and November that this week we're shattering our own precedent and doing a supplemental mid-month Q&A to catch up on topics like how (or whether) to block YouTube ads, the increasing costs of midrange GPUs, the eternal struggle of inputting text with controllers, mixing chocolate milk and lemonade in the same glass (not a euphemism, we swear), pivoting careers mid-life, 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 Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
The temperature outside is plummeting, but the number of cold opens in this episode is skyrocketing! We convene once again this week for our sort-of-semi-annual block of short segments about everything from video game Yule logs to neighbors waging holiday decoration warfare, keeping your CPU from (almost) melting, neglecting your cast iron, maximizing your Panda Express order, 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 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
A cornucopia of great questions graced our podcasting table this month, and from it we drew such topics as (not) mixing and matching your RAM, fishing for game saves in AppData, an appreciation of the demoscene past and present, the redundant measurements that are totally the power company's fault, and the unmitigated decadence of the Tim Tam slam.Here's Area 5150, the IBM PC demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zADeLm9g0ZgMartyPC, the IBM PC/XT emulator: https://github.com/dbalsom/martypc 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
Will's been fortunate to spend a chunk of time with the new Steam Deck OLED, and now it's time to talk through both his firsthand impressions and the list of small-yet-significant upgrades Valve has made to just about everything on the device, from screen size to weight to battery life, heat and cooling, memory bandwidth, and even the color of the power button.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
It's nearly Turkey Day here in the US once again, so it's time to discuss another round of tech we're thankful for, which includes such topics as the year USB-C finally happened (for real), freeing yourself from the single critical computer, the joys of both wireless and wired headphones, powering one computer off of another computer, learning to love YouTube again, 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 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
We've been thinking about troubleshooting lately (because it feels like we've all been doing a lot of it), so in this ep we did a formal rundown of how we approach solving technical problems, both in PCs and otherwise. From the analytical joy of log files to A/B testing and eliminating variables, the dos and don'ts of both searching for and contributing to advice online, and other methods of stepping through the problem, hopefully this ep helps make your problem solving just a little bit easier.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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Comments (4)

Wladislav Hassun

Stop making me excited for an Asura's Wrath sequel that doesn't exist. 😞

Jan 14th
Reply

Jan J.

So weird but at 9:03 when they say to enjoy the patron episode it just quits the stream

Dec 27th
Reply (1)

Wladislav Hassun

This has to be the worst top 10 controllers list I've ever witnessed. I love it.

Nov 16th
Reply
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