x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

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

01:14:41

299: Donkey Kong Is a Florida Man

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/08/10

It's a topic two-fer! Brad's refrigerator died last week, which gives us a chance to talk about online appliance-buying on a budget in 2025, some refrigeration and food-safety basics, product minimalism and applying the Unix philosophy to home ownership, and more. And Will just got back from Super Mario Land in Hollywood, so we go through a (literal) trip report about the experience and the tech underpinning it, from Amiibo wristbands to augmented-reality Mario Kart, ways to stay off your phone in a

en

01:08:27

298: Don't Accidentally Become a Bank

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/08/03

The situation we talked about in the episode is evolving pretty rapidly; here are some of the latest updates since we recorded:Info on how to contact payment processors yourself: https://aftermath.site/steam-itch-porn-censorship-collective-shout-visa-mastercard-paypalitch.io reindexes NSFW content: https://itch.io/t/5149036/reindexing-adult-nsfw-contentValve comments on payment processors: https://kotaku.com/mastercard-denies-pressuring-steam-to-censor-nsfw-games-2000614393Here's the RTINGS article

en

01:12:50

297: The AI-Content Centipede

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/07/27

It's the monthly question time again, and this month we talk about what's going to happen when AI is only left with AI-generated content to consume, our thoughts on ad-blocking as people who used to subsist on ads, how to blog about a tech project, why you shouldn't listen to podcasts (or maybe anything) on Spotify, a whole bunch about electricity and power supplies, why geolocating sometimes gets weird, the surprising prevalence of WhirlyBall even 30 years later, plus tidbits about Cheerwine,

en

00:54:02

296: The Slopposite

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/07/20

What better way to beat the summer heat than with another stack of cold opens for your listening micro-pleasure? This time around we delve into such short topics as etiquette at the EV charging station, why kids hate charging their phones, how to dispose of (or maybe just use) slightly-too-old gasoline, the everlasting value of the office crap table, how procedural generation is weighted in game content, why more products should be like the modern glue stick, and more.Support the Pod! Contribute to

en

01:20:36

295: Hacker Tourism

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/07/13

Wired 04.12, December 1996: https://archive.org/details/wired-magazine-04.12-1996-decemberShow notes with page numbers for everything we discuss: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-295-wired-dec-96Support 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

en

00:59:17

294: The God-Tier GPU

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/07/06

Brad's historic YouTube video, "Here's Like 18 Minutes of Destiny 2 at 4k60:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIipgLFxpt4Support 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

en

01:15:30

293: J-ing and K-ing

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/06/29

The monthly Q&A ep is here again, and this time around we field emails and Discord Qs about managing the cognitive load of your hobbies, doing jury duty in a movie theater, site discovery on the indie web, safe ways to repair damaged power cords, websites getting pushy about passkeys, even MORE accurate network time, the high technology of modern sports broadcasting, and more.Link aggregators for the indie web we mentioned include https://rss.joy and https://ooh.directorySupport the Pod! Contribute

en

01:07:38

292: Winning the Hummingbird War

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/06/22

On this week's ep, we take inventory of upcoming tech projects we've been looking into, to evaluate our use cases and pick each other's brains about what's worth sinking the time and/or money into in the near future. For Brad, that's getting a proper travel router and GaN charger for easier networking on the road, jailbreaking his Kindle to try out that KOReader magic, and, uh, maybe someday setting up a local network time server. On Will's side, there's getting set up to take advantage of the

en

01:20:20

291: Evil Finder Icon

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/06/15

Apple's WWDC and Google I/O have both come and gone, and... well, we took a look at I/O and it was practically all AI this year, so we skipped that. But Apple's annual developer's conference was surprisingly light on AI features -- in fact, the continuing absence of the AI-driven Siri and other features announced last year is itself a notable story -- so this week we recapped what Apple brought to WWDC instead, including its first major UI refresh in a decade, interesting additions to smaller stuff

en

01:09:03

290: Earn Your Nintendo License

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/06/08

Will got a chance to attend the Switch 2 launch event at Nintendo's brand new San Francisco store and then started feverishly digging into the fundamentals of the new hardware, so this week we had an impromptu discussion about his hands-on impressions so far. Turns out there's a lot going on in this thing, from the delightfully musical new controller haptics to the surprisingly low-tech magnetic Joy-Con attachment, upgraded Switch 1 performance, GameCube emulation, and a bunch of other interesting

en

01:03:05

289: Computer Shangri-La

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/06/01

Will's here with a two-fer trip report this week, one of which was a literal trip to the grand opening of the brand new Bay Area Micro Center. We dig into what a big-box retailer oriented around building PCs is like in 2025, reflect a bit on the history of other screwdriver and computer shops past, and muse about retiring into PC-builder-helper status. Also, Nvidia has finally released a proper GeForce Now client for the Steam Deck, and we get into what Will's recent testing of the service has been

en

01:23:55

288: High Quackuracy

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/05/25

That Q&A time is here again, and this month we field emails and Discord Qs about such things as the hopeful return of the webring, what to do with the hardware if your PC is compromised by a bad actor, Nvidia cards in Linux, using game consoles as streaming media boxes, human stenography in courtrooms being replaced by recordings (and maybe AI), an extremely ambitious plan to stream some ducks, and perhaps the best pirate radio station idea we've ever heard.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech

en

01:13:01

287: Never Click "Show More"

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/05/18

We're reaching deep into the grab bag again this week, with a wide array of topics like the fascinating world of shorthand and stenography machines (plus an open source project to build your own, naturally), replacing your thermostat (there's open source stuff for that too), the perils of running out of data on a small mobile carrier, questionable uses for an AI-driven Darth Vader, some follow-up on Will's recent work tracking microstutter in games, and more.The Open Steno Project:

en

00:55:46

286: SheevQuest 2025

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/05/11

With Brad spending most of his week in a courtroom for the rest of May, we may be doing some looser episodes here and there until we're back on our normal schedule again. This week, a grab bag of tech topics for your consideration, including Will's recent work for PC World quantifying and graphing micro-stutter in game performance, the wretched use of AI that's wormed its way into Google TV's interface, how to troubleshoot a maybe-dying A/V receiver (and when it's time to throw in the towel and buy

en

01:23:03

285: More Free Space Than Free Time

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/05/04

By listener request, we're talking about our personal file organization and storage layouts this week, with a focus on our desktop computers--including how we use our OS-level home folders, whether to interact with the root system drive or not, and how much data we even keep on those machines these days--and also how we attempt to organize media, archives, backups and more on our home servers. Plus, a check-in on the state of Windows backup tools. Is it actually possible to avoid the dreaded

en

01:14:36

284: Shatner's Sap Shack

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/04/27

Where does Robocop's data spike rank on our big list of connectors? What do you do with an old cable modem or cable box? What's the fastest discontinued product in tech history (and is it the Microsoft Kin)? Where do ISPs get their Internet? Is it time to stop ripping Blu-ray discs? Is Zachtronics actually gone? Just who listens to this podcast, anyway? All these questions and more, answered on this month's Q&A!Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming

en

01:10:45

283: Nook NUC: A NUC for Your Nook

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/04/20

It's been 16 frigid months since our last all-intro episode, but now we're pulling the ice tray out of the freezer and offering you another cube of cold opens, covering everything from surge protector safety to thermal paste application methods, stacking storage bins without crushing them, the crazed monitor murderer who's struck again, artifacts of our very early careers, an intensive Weird Al lyrical breakdown, a little paean for Zachtronics, and how not to forget about obligations that might get

en

01:12:20

282: You Can't Contest the Knob Feel

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/04/13

We've both gotten our hands on CRT televisions recently--Will's one from his youth and Brad's a much more modern set--and we've spent a bunch of time tinkering with them, getting our MiSTers to play nicely with them, and generally enjoying some warm analog video. On this week's ep we dig into our time reacquainting ourselves with what TVs used to be like, with a freewheeling conversation that touches on all kinds of minutiae like when it might be time to replace your aging set's capacitors, trying

en

01:18:35

281: Fully Ray-Traced Metal Mario

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/04/06

With the wraps finally being taken off the Switch 2 this week, PC World's Adam Patrick Murray joins us for a handheld state of the union this week, with a closer look at some of the technical aspects of the new Nintendo handheld including the specs on the screen and TV output, the innards of the dock, the new MicroSD Express storage standard, and more. Then we get into the pervasive rumors about a forthcoming Xbox handheld made by Asus, analyze Microsoft's opportunity for a more gaming-centric

en

01:13:07

280: Pay-to-Reject Cookies Should Be Illegal

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/03/30

Links mentioned on this episode:ShaderGlass: https://mausimus.itch.io/shaderglassArticles on Apple's sealed/immutable system layout in recent MacOS versions:https://eclecticlight.co/2021/10/29/how-macos-is-more-reliable-and-doesnt-need-reinstalling/https://eclecticlight.co/2024/10/22/boot-volume-layout-and-structure-in-macos-sequoia/ 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

en

329 results

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Linux in the Ham Shack

Black Sparrow Media

Data Engineering Podcast

Tobias Macey

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith

Reflections

Livewire Labs