Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

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

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

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

We're firing up the time machine again this week for another visit to the era when computer coverage was "printed" on "paper" in bound volumes called "magazines." This time, we take a look at the voluminous December 2000 issue of PC Gamer, with a look at the early MMO boom brought on by Ultima Online and EverQuest, a preview of EA's weird social game Majestic, reviews of Voyager: Elite Force, Metal Gear Solid for Windows, and the Geforce 2 Ultra, and a bunch more!Here's the browsable version of the issue we discussed, along with quite a few other old PC Gamer issues: https://archive.org/details/UneditedPCGamer_marktrade/PC_Gamer_079u/mode/2upSupport 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

October's terrifying batch of questions hits us like an airborne jack-o-lantern this month, as we discuss topics like: why it's RGB and not RYB, the origin of the computer "wizard," the ethics of tracking your family's movements around the house, the usefulness of a nut milk bag (seriously) for filtering coffee, and perhaps the most Tech Pod email we've ever received from a contributor to not one but two legendary operating systems.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 we're doing some follow-ups on recent episodes to fill in a few blanks. Spurred on by the PS5's Spider-Man 2, we wanted to talk about the recent advent of gaming at 40Hz, and that led us to finally talk in some more depth about Brad's new television set. Will has also been testing a coffee brewer FROM SPAAAACE!!!! or at least co-designed by an astrophysicist, and has some tips on zero-bypass brewing, wetting your paper filters (eww), and more.Some links from this episode:Hisense U8K: https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/hisense/u8-u8kNextlevel Pulsar: https://nextlevelbrewer.com/pulsar-brewer/Coffee ad Astra: https://coffeeadastra.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

We've got a pleasantly floral potpourri this week, mainly focused on Will's trip report from this weekend's Bay Area Maker Faire, the first time the DIY science and tech show has been held since 2019. If you want to hear about model-size mag-lev trains, personal undersea robots, the cottage industry of R2-D2 replica builders, and more, this is your podcast. If you also want to hear about Brad's contemplation of a PC water cooling conversion and Will's recent questionable RGB projects, that's in here too!A few links for this week's show:Maker Faire: https://makerfaire.com/Build your own R2-D2: https://makezine.com/projects/building-your-first-r2/OpenROV: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openrov/openrov-trident-an-underwater-drone-for-everyoneOpenRGB: https://openrgb.org/Project Aurora: https://www.project-aurora.com/Artemis RGB: https://artemis-rgb.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

Following on from our consideration of Google's many terminated products in episode 74, we turn our attention to another graveyard this week, one with a big "Microsoft" on the sign. The company's decades-long policy of trying to supplant market leaders with Microsoft-made equivalents has left us with plenty to talk about, from phones to joysticks, questionable Windows add-ons, an actually superlative streaming service, some very brown portable media players, and plenty more.Big thanks to Killed by Microsoft for the reference material: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/Don't miss the FOSS Pod ep we mentioned about 3D Movie Maker: https://fosspod.content.town/episodes/3d-movie-maker-with-foone-turingSupport 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

A crisp Fall batch of questions has found its way to the show this month, as we attempt to deliver answers about such things as trusting your devices with your biometric data, whether to color-calibrate your screens or not, whether bigger and better screens even matter in the age of ultra-compressed video, the relative utility of network racks and pizza ovens, 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

Intel held its annual Innovation event this week, and our friend Adam Patrick Murray from PC World was there. Now he's here to fill us in on all the details about the company's big shift to Meteor Lake and beyond, including the embrace of chiplet-style modular CPU design, their ever-shrinking process nodes, major changes to how the CPUs are named, their first "neural processing unit," how complicated it's getting to benchmark all this stuff, and more.Check out some of PCWorld's recent coverage of the topics from this ep:Meteor Lake Tech Tour Deep DiveHands-On With Core Ultra Laptops Running AI DemosIntel & The AI PC, NPU Performance, Developer Support & More | The Full Nerd Special EditionSupport 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

Sometimes the events are so current we can't help discussing them, and such is the case with this week's act of self-immolation on the part of Unity and its relationship with the many developers who use its engine to make their games. Plus, iOS 17 and friends are imminent and Will has installed every available *OS beta and is here to talk about some of the new features (VPN on AppleTV?!?), the newly announced iPhones and Watches, and some other stuff!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 dons the game developer hat again this week for a deep dive into how a game gets built. No, not the coding and design and art and all that -- we mean how a game gets literally built into a package that you can run on your PC or console, with some in-depth chat about everything from build servers to source and version control of both code and binary assets, pre-baked lighting, creating automated nightlies of your game, partying in TeamCity, 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

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, mpv, Authy, and the ever-growing Power Toys.The Windows hotkeys we mentioned:Win + . - emoji/Unicode pickerWin + Shift + S - easy screenshotsWin + R - run applicationsWin + L - lock your computerWin + Alt + B - disable / enable HDR at the OS levelWin + Ctrl + Shift + B - video driverWin + P - select output deviceWin + alt + r - record video of game window that’s open (needs Game Bar)Win + alt + g - record last 30 seconds, but needs to be turned on first (also Game Bar)Win + V - clipboard history (need to enable in privacy)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 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 other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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! 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 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! 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 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 after a couple weeks of experimenting with liquid ratios and excess caffeine. It's like three podcasts in one!Some Wireguard links that we mentioned:Wireguard home page: https://www.wireguard.com/Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/PiVPN: https://www.pivpn.io/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 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 other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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 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 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://gizmodo.com/the-computer-simulation-that-almost-started-world-war-i-1686123550https://www.cio.com/article/220297/the-technology-of-wargames.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/movies/wargames-and-cybersecuritys-debt-to-a-hollywood-hack.htmlSupport 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