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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

01:10:17

176: Phone Blasters in DOS Land

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/03/19

Tech news is getting a little too surreal for us lately, so we're taking a brief trip back to a simpler time. This week we go through the very first issue of Boot (later Maximum PC) from 1996, which has everything from Jean-Louis Gassée on the launch of the BeBox to Bill Gates on the x86 PC's murder of SGI, the very first cable modem service, a motorized (?) Panasonic laptop, some shocking secrets about the first Dream Machine and the letters section, the Will Smith byline that almost was, and a

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01:16:38

175: Short Analog, Long Digital

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/03/12

Our desks have evolved since the last time we talked about our personal workspaces (Brad has even achieved the elusive Cord Zero), so we're doing an updated check-in to talk about the current gear we're working with, aspirational cable-routing, portable camera setups, gaming on ultra-wide monitors, custom corkboard cutouts, and a bunch of other related topics.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

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01:17:52

174: Weaponized Smurfing

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/03/05

Remember when pop-up ads looked like they were part of Windows XP? Dark patterns are all around us, even when we don't realize it, and this week we cover a wide range of these insidious methods of manipulating our online behavior, touching on everything from tricks to make you play games longer than you want to subtly enticing you to rope in your friends, succumb to sunk cost fallacy, and more. Editor's note: Brad played Clash Royale for three hours after recording this episode.Support the Pod

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01:06:45

173: Splinter Cell in a Kayak

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/02/26

Brad spent a whole bunch of time in the PlayStation VR 2 this past week, and given Will's previous life as the proprietor of a VR-related business, we're pairing hands-on (or maybe face-on) experience with institutional knowledge this week to dissect the ins and outs of the new headset, comparing it to the current PC fare, speculating about its potential to become a PC headset itself, musing about the use of SLAM tracking in robot vacuums, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon

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01:11:36

172: Orange Ricky & Smashboy

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/02/19

Some scheduling switcharoos mean we're doing February's Q&A episode one (1) whole week early! This month we field Qs about public Unix servers, noisy hard drives, the desirability of your own phone booth, an update on that attempt at roasting weed coffee, our experiences with house plants, a goblin who handcuffs people to chairs, 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

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01:41:33

171: "Gratuitous Stroke"

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/02/12

This week we're thrilled to be joined by Marcin Wichary, author of the upcoming and extensively detailed history of the keyboard, Shift Happens. We get into all kinds of typing-related subjects like QWERTY dominance, the shift wars of the late 1800s, and 150-year-old designs that have trickled down to software keyboards, plus a fascinating discussion about what it's like to spend seven years traveling the world to write a book of this scope and depth.Find out more about (and snag a copy of) Marcin's

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01:12:26

170: The Robots (Hopefully) Aren't Coming

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/02/05

Artificial intelligence, machine learning--whatever we're calling it, it sure is in the news a lot all of a sudden. Everything about the use of AI feels uncanny enough lately that we sat down and had a free-wheeling conversation about the subject, from some basic (fuzzy) terms and definitions to Will's use of machine learning at Foo, the endless ethical dilemmas about the use of the technology, and some loose speculation about where AI will be used going forward and how long it'll take someone to

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01:20:25

169: Don't Trust Alberta's Lies

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/01/29

You sent some serious Qs for this month's Q&A, which got us talking about the intermingling of control schemes in online shooters, the best sci-fi robots, the absurdity of discount medical care, pronounceable file extensions, AI-driven customer service, putting Airtags in other devices, and the northern plight of the humble brown rat.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

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01:06:23

168: It's Cool to Be Cool

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/01/22

It was a pretty heavy week for a variety of reasons, so we decided to discuss a variety of shorter topics this week to try to take it in, starting by touching on the mass layoffs sweeping the tech industry and elsewhere. Then we make a... Musk sandwich, first by covering the New York Times Magazine's extensive article on Tesla's Full Self-Driving issues, then by examining the Orwellian goings-on with Twitter third-party clients. Finally, we go to our happy place with a quick check-in on Will's new

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01:23:14

167: We Can't Give Them the Heads

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/01/15

Will does the unthinkable this week and PODCASTS WITH HIS BOSS, as Stray Bombay head Chet Faliszek joins us on the one-year anniversary of the release of The Anacrusis to talk all things running a small video game studio. From Steam and Xbox backend tools to current engine tech, the difficulty of getting noticed in today's ultra-crowded market, management and decision-making on a small team, whether launching on Game Pass was worth it, and more, there's a lot to cover in this ep.Support the Pod

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01:08:47

166: Someone Else's Cables

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/01/08

It's (belatedly) time to answer more of your questions, and this time you posed Qs that resulted in As about an iPhone without charging ports, cured meats, hyphy dark roast, favorite classic screensavers, favorite console boot-up animations, the rise of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, and social acceptance of CRT filters. Last month's questions, today!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

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01:08:52

165: I Don’t Believe in Adverbs

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2023/01/01

On our first show in 2023, we rejoin our epic task of ranking all of humanity's software. Will we actually start putting things in order this week? Or will we get sidetracked by our love of dot matrix-printed banners? Or by reminiscing about the excitement of IRC channel takeover wars? Will Brad be flabbergasted that Will has never played Gorilla.bas? Will we ever finish this project? Listen on and find out!This week's show art courtesy of Blake Patterson.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod

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01:05:35

164: Truly Lawless

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2022/12/25

Here at the tail end of 2022, are we nuts enough to attempt to rank every piece of software ever written? OK, not quite, but we're going to do our best to assemble a list and put it in an order... eventually. If you've ever wanted to hear someone debate the relative merits of the LAMP stack versus the Video Toaster versus Super Mario 64, you've come to the right podcast.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other

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01:12:32

163: JWST (Just Wonderful Science and Technology)

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2022/12/18

Our friend Kishore Hari becomes our first three-time guest by joining us this week to run down some of our favorite science and tech stories of 2022, including the latest developments in nuclear fusion, some ML-driven mid-podcast protein prediction, the latest addition to the dark energy debate, extremely American asteroid deflection strategies, one of the more exciting Antarctic discoveries in recent memory, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming

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01:03:00

162: Storage Wars

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2022/12/11

Will's recent clean-slate PC build and newfound abundance of extremely fast storage got us thinking about all things storage. So this week we had a top-to-bottom chat about our current storage strategies, including the ways we are and aren't still using local drives, our fondness for portable apps, how many cloud storage services is too many, the promise of something like rclone to manage all of your offsite storage, dumping long-term data into S3 Glacier, and more.Here's Will's recent PC build with

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01:00:59

161: Get Stretchy

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2022/12/04

Brrr, is it cold in here? It's time to deliver our semi-annual Cube of Cold Opens: Holiday Edition, with short and pithy conversations about cramming your Fortnite homework, that loud phone life, running your laptop off of your PC, reckless Thanksgiving leftovers, game console quality modes, the etiquette of (not) asking for your controller back, the unrivaled glory of a working dishwasher, and more. Enjoy, and stay warm!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our

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01:03:03

160: Gelatinous Soup Tube

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2022/11/27

We're thankful for the copious bounty of questions sent in by you this month, which got us talking about all kinds of stuff. Stuff like our love of treehouses (and mushroom soup), mouse pad technology, advanced s'more techniques, people who hold their phone in the toast position, more on setting up your own blog, the iPad apps Apple doesn't want you to have, Will's love of model railroads, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name

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01:03:21

159: It's Good Brain

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2022/11/20

Techsgiving is here again, as we wax thankful about some of the stuff we love in our own specific nerdy spheres. Join us for some chill discussion of everything from defying gravity (under the desk) to the simple joy of playing guitar into your computer, wearable tech, wireless charging, intergalactic space inside your drinking bottle, good old simple human communication, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and

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01:20:59

158: Twitastrophe

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2022/11/13

Elon Musk's Twitter disaster has been impossible to look away from, and since we probably owe some amount of our careers to everyone's favorite social media platform, we had to spend this ep running down and trying to make sense of a series of events that's almost impossible to believe. We also dig into some of the feasible alternatives to Twitter, like Mastodon, Cohost, and the Bluesky project with its AT protocol. #twitastropheSHOW NOTESStories and reporters referenced in this episode include:A

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01:07:07

157: Cereal's Dark Legacy

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2022/11/06

This week we decided to do something radically different and "record" a "podcast" to answer some of your "questions." In the course of doing so we revealed shocking details about breakfast cereal, ran down our three-day weekend preferences, discussed the latest in sleep and robe technology, talked about spooky names, considered future Steam Decks, checked our interest in Linux laptops, and more. It's a Q&A!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord,

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344 results

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