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 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 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
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 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, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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
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=zADeLm9g0Zg
MartyPC, the IBM PC/XT emulator: https://github.com/dbalsom/martypc
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
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
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, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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
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 in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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 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 easier.
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
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 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 issue we discussed, along with quite a few other old PC Gamer issues: https://archive.org/details/UneditedPCGamer_marktrade/PC_Gamer_079u/mode/2up
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
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
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 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
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're doing some follow-ups on recent episodes to fill in a few blanks. Spurred on by the PS5's Spider-Man 2, we wanted to talk about the recent advent of gaming at 40Hz, and that led us to finally talk in some more depth about Brad's new television set. Will has also been testing a coffee brewer FROM SPAAAACE!!!! or at least co-designed by an astrophysicist, and has some tips on zero-bypass brewing, wetting your paper filters (eww), and more.
Some links from this episode:
Hisense U8K: https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/hisense/u8-u8k
Nextlevel Pulsar: https://nextlevelbrewer.com/pulsar-brewer/
Coffee ad Astra: https://coffeeadastra.com/
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 at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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 pleasantly floral potpourri this week, mainly focused on Will's trip report from this weekend's Bay Area Maker Faire, the first time the DIY science and tech show has been held since 2019. If you want to hear about model-size mag-lev trains, personal undersea robots, the cottage industry of R2-D2 replica builders, and more, this is your podcast. If you also want to hear about Brad's contemplation of a PC water cooling conversion and Will's recent questionable RGB projects, that's in here too!
A few links for this week's show:
Maker Faire: https://makerfaire.com/
Build your own R2-D2: https://makezine.com/projects/building-your-first-r2/
OpenROV: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openrov/openrov-trident-an-underwater-drone-for-everyone
OpenRGB: https://openrgb.org/
Project Aurora: https://www.project-aurora.com/
Artemis RGB: https://artemis-rgb.com/
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 at: https://patreon.com/techpod
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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