Stay ConnectedEach 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.
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Copyright: © 2019 Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.
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 Brad's recording this week due to an infestation of audio gremlins which we're working to exterminate. Apologies for any inconvenience.)
The MiSTer clone video from the cold open: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RSrzM7dM-Y
Show notes for this ep, with links to a lot of the videos and images discussed: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-233-analog-home-video
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 at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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 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
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 movie yet!)
Watch Pirates of Silicon Valley before listening to the ep: https://archive.org/details/piratesofsiliconvalley_201908
Read Fire in the Valley, the book the movie is based on: https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Valley-Birth-Personal-Computer-dp-1937785769/dp/1937785769/
Check out Folklore.org's sprawling history of the Macintosh's development that Brad mentioned (linked here to a story about who actually created the Mac project): https://folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html
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 at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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 notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-230-xz-backdoor
Go watch Pirates of Silicon Valley for an upcoming episode where we'll discuss it: https://archive.org/details/piratesofsiliconvalley_201908
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 at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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 where we'll discuss it: https://archive.org/details/piratesofsiliconvalley_201908
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 at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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: https://archive.org/details/piratesofsiliconvalley_201908
The SGI Onyx $250,000 supercomputer video Brad mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA
And in case you're curious, the two Ethernet termination standards we talked about.
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 at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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 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
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 or so. There's definitely just one standard now, right? ...Right?
Articles referenced in this ep:
The Verge on a year with Matter & Thread: https://www.theverge.com/23997548/matter-smart-home-2023-platforms
Ars Technica on the continued value of Zigbee and Z-Wave: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/i-was-wrong-to-ignore-zigbee-and-z-wave-theyre-the-best-part-of-my-smart-home/
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 at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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 links for this ep: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-225-famous-tech-demos
Our Xbox 360 deep dive episode: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/183-hiroprotagonist-loves-an-inhale
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 at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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 we got later, and a bunch more.
Pick up Doom Guy: https://www.amazon.com/Doom-Guy-Life-First-Person/dp/141975811X
Romero's fan mail to Jordan Mechner: https://twitter.com/jmechner/status/1253777950299873283
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 at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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