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

01:23:55

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

01:07:43

279: $30,000 to Take Off a Pair of Glasses

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/03/23

The Game Developers Conference has come and gone for another year, and this week we have a potpourri mostly focused on our experiences at the show, with a particular focus on some emerging dev tools like Nvidia's AI-driven text-to-animation system and how they relate to current labor and economic issues in the industry, some of the cool maker-esque projects Will saw at alt.ctrl.GDC, and more.Videos to all the alt.ctrl.GDC projects we discussed: https://gdconf.com/alt-ctrl-gdcThe blog post referenced

en

01:04:42

278: rare-platypus-1372

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/03/16

Email hasn't gotten any less complicated since the last time we covered it, but we have tried a few new options for wrangling our ever-increasing number of inboxes. This week we dig into some of our current strategies, with a focus on Will's time using Fastmail, a paid-only service that purports to let you throw out your Gmails and Outlooks and more fully control your email addresses on domains that you own. We also touch on some of the other popular services like Hey and Proton Mail, grouse about

en

01:19:15

277: Very Ultra

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/03/09

The PC hardware market has finally settled down with the release of AMD's new Radeon 9000 series and no more major CPU or GPU product launches later this year. So we assess the state of the PC union a bit this week, with a focus on the new AMD cards and their dramatically improved upscaling, ray-tracing, video encoding, and perhaps most of all, price. Plus, some updates on Intel's low-end Battlemage, Nvidia's mounting 50-series woes, the possible delay of Intel's next-gen Panther Lake CPU to 2026,

en

01:51:44

276: The Greatest Treasure of the Sith

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/03/02

We've done it: we've brought on Rob Zacny -- host of (among many other things) A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast -- to dissect and attempt to make sense of the rules of technology in the Star Wars universe. Join us as we consider questions such as: What exactly is it that comes out of a lightsaber? Is there a bathroom in the X-wing? How many Imperial officers does it take to fire a giant laser? Does hyperspace make any sense at all? And is there room in this podcast to discuss droid

en

01:08:13

275: The Bottomless Q Hole

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/02/23

We had quite a PC-heavy Q&A this month, with multiple questions about Windows 10 and 11 with the former's end-of-support date looming in October, as well as Qs about pronouncing country-code domains, the latest Nvidia 50-series electrical-connector drama, why we haven't seen much Gallium Nitride in PC power supplies yet, ways to get e-books besides Amazon, combatting the dreaded bit rot, and what it would actually mean to print a podcast.Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get

en

01:03:49

274: A Little Bit Less Good

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/02/16

Will is trying on a new hat soon, with a newsletter about the ongoing enshittification of our collective computing experience, and some tips and tricks for... unshittifying it a bit. So this week we're digging into both the subject matter itself, and also the ins and outs of launching a newsletter, the features and policies of some of the bigger publishing platforms, hosting costs, email outreach, the decision-making that goes into monetizing your writing, and more. Plus: tangents on why you should

en

01:01:05

273: The Requisite DeepSeek Episode

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/02/09

It's been a couple of weeks since the Chinese firm DeepSeek released its new R1 large-language model and sheared an enormous amount of value off of American AI companies. Now that the dust has settled, we don our AI-skeptic hats again and try to unpack what makes this model different, including how it was made so much more efficiently, what opening it up for free means for paid competitors, and whether we might not have to burn down quite so many forests going forward. (Hint: Don't get your hopes

en

01:28:20

272: Mac OSX Snow Leopard 2

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/02/02

Questions! The time to answer them is here again, and this month we do our best with such topics as the relative scarcity of nuclear energy, nested comment systems, USB thumb drives versus portable SSDs, browser RAM usage, why CPUs get faster from one model to the next, the difficulty of naming operating systems, phones without camera bumps, learning to read an analog clock (and a lot of other things), and when we'll finally get around to reviewing that high-tech toilet.Submit ideas about secret

en

01:18:14

271: Big Honkin' Die

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/01/26

Will's gotten his hands on Nvidia's fancy new RTX 5090 in advance of its release at the end of the month, and he's spent the last several days feverishly benchmarking it and testing its new features, so this week we dive into the raw performance numbers he's seeing, consider the card's mammoth power requirements, talk about some of the most prominent new out-of-the-box features like multi-frame generation, better DLSS upscaling, and Reflex 2, and then attempt to demystify some of the more

en

01:06:32

270: Cat o' Five Tails

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/01/19

The work of ages continues as we return (for the last time this month) to our tier list of every-ish cable and connector ever made. Such heavy hitters as DisplayPort, SATA, and USBs both mini- and micro- enter the fray this week, with digressions about obscure entries like the DFP (digital flat panel?) cable, powering bare hard drives straight out of the wall, the all-too-often overly stiff jacket on RJ45 ethernet cables, and more.The Cable Bible:

en

01:20:23

269: Comically Tall Laptops

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. ·

2025/01/12

It's the Consumer Electronics Show once again, and there's a lot to talk about this year, so we chat this week about all the most interesting topics out of the show, including the Nvidia 50 series and its reliance on DLSS 4, new mobile chips from Intel and AMD, SteamOS-powered third-party handhelds, some eyebrow-raising Switch 2 leaks, new HDMI and DisplayPort standards, plus the usual assortment of off-the-wall and not-ready-for-market tech like IP birdfeeders, perfume-scented laptops, and plenty

en

318 results

Similar Podcasts

Pantomath

PANTOMATH

What"s New

WIRED

Security, Spoken

WIRED

Ben Wehrman Podcast

Ben Wehrman

MacMagazine no Ar

MacMagazine.com.br