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PODCAST

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith

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

technology

All Episodes

01:18:32

234: One Step Closer to Bringing Back Webrings

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/05/12

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

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01:34:23

233: My Wife Is a LaserDisc Guy

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/05/05

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

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01:10:27

232: Secret Search Engine!

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/04/28

April concludes with another round of questions, during which we entertain the idea of inviting Q to assist us with Qs, Will teases a historic search engine switch, and we field a wide array of topics including breakaway USB-C cables, how to wade through the sea of search-engine slop, why you don't need "www." much anymore, our approach to episode research and accuracy, the best sandwich salads, fermented coffee and bonded whiskey, and a bunch more. Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod

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01:25:47

231: What on Earth Would Ordinary People Want With...

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/04/21

The time has come for our deep dive into Pirates of Silicon Valley, the 1999 made-for-TNT movie that chronicles the parallel rises of Apple and Microsoft. Join us for a bunch of chatter about the historic business deals and betrayals, the portrayals of Gates, Jobs, Ballmer, Wozniak and others, what the actual people depicted thought about the movie, how Shakespeare informed the production, the delightful '90s blue screen effects, and plenty more. (And check the show notes if you haven't seen the

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01:01:57

230: Maybe Gentoo Was Right All Along

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/04/14

This week we attempt to unpack the recent, historic security breach in the open source world, after the discovery of a secret backdoor that was inserted by a malicious actor into the the xz-utils package, with a focus on which specific Linux distros were targeted and why, how the attacker socially engineered their way into the position of authority that made this possible, and what ought to be done to support developers of critical infrastructure to (hopefully) prevent this from happening again.Show

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01:14:20

229: IMAX, the TikTok of Film Projection

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/04/07

We're doing a follow-up Q&A this week while we sort out some scheduling hurdles on the backend, and taking a bunch more of your questions from the last six months about ideal pixel density on monitors, what the heck Salesforce does, a portable gaming-focused Windows, when in the product cycle to buy, how the Clapper might integrate into your home automation setup, and lastly, you know, the slow and steady decline of everything around us.Go watch Pirates of Silicon Valley for an upcoming episode

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01:16:52

228: Never Forward a Port to Your Brain

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/03/31

March's Q&A features a wide array of questions that inspired discussions about such wide-ranging topics as our love of screensavers, a world without Gmail, Will's strong opinions on Ethernet termination standards, wearing shoes inside the house (or not), the lack of 9s in product naming, Proton-like cross-platform game support on MacOS, and a bunch more.Make sure to watch Pirates of Silicon Valley for an upcoming episode we'll be recording in two or three weeks:

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01:08:58

227: A Donut of Good Internet

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/03/24

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

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01:06:30

226: shooter.exe

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/03/17

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

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01:12:05

225: The Goldblum Conjecture

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/03/10

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

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01:22:51

224: Heavy Metal Twenty-Something Swagger

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/03/03

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

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01:03:13

223: Our Favorite Corporate Besties

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/02/25

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,

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01:15:31

222: War of the Chatbots

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/02/18

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

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01:37:40

221: Cluck to Home Screen

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/02/11

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/@testedSupport the Pod

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01:09:31

220: Hit That Optimize Button

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/02/04

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

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01:13:42

219: The Mark of Expertise

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/01/28

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,

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01:03:54

218: Products People Love

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/01/21

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

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01:04:47

217: Still a Festering Hellhole

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/01/14

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

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01:20:00

216: Tactical Baking Method

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2024/01/07

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:

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01:48:32

215: Taking the Temperature of the Market

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/12/31

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

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