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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

01:12:05

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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00:55:56

214: David Smith (Hobbyist)

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/12/24

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

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01:09:07

213: Therapy Over Teams

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/12/17

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

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00:50:39

212: Programmable for the Masses

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/12/10

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,

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00:55:06

211: The Drier, the Burnier

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/12/03

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

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00:59:30

210: TWELVE HUNDRED MEGARAYS

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/11/26

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,

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01:08:06

209: Please Show the Hamster Guy Some Respect

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/11/19

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

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01:05:37

208: Don't Be Mean to Racoons

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/11/12

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

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01:19:21

207: When Magazines Were Phone Books

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/11/05

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

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01:24:59

206: A Bunch of Ferrets Is Called a Business

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/10/29

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

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335 results

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