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.
Following on from our consideration of Google's many terminated products in episode 74, we turn our attention to another graveyard this week, one with a big "Microsoft" on the sign. The company's decades-long policy of trying to supplant market leaders with Microsoft-made equivalents has left us with plenty to talk about, from phones to joysticks, questionable Windows add-ons, an actually superlative streaming service, some very brown portable media players, and plenty more.
Big thanks to Killed by Microsoft for the reference material: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
Don't miss the FOSS Pod ep we mentioned about 3D Movie Maker: https://fosspod.content.town/episodes/3d-movie-maker-with-foone-turing
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
A crisp Fall batch of questions has found its way to the show this month, as we attempt to deliver answers about such things as trusting your devices with your biometric data, whether to color-calibrate your screens or not, whether bigger and better screens even matter in the age of ultra-compressed video, the relative utility of network racks and pizza ovens, 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 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
Intel held its annual Innovation event this week, and our friend Adam Patrick Murray from PC World was there. Now he's here to fill us in on all the details about the company's big shift to Meteor Lake and beyond, including the embrace of chiplet-style modular CPU design, their ever-shrinking process nodes, major changes to how the CPUs are named, their first "neural processing unit," how complicated it's getting to benchmark all this stuff, and more.
Check out some of PCWorld's recent coverage of the topics from this ep:
Meteor Lake Tech Tour Deep Dive
Hands-On With Core Ultra Laptops Running AI Demos
Intel & The AI PC, NPU Performance, Developer Support & More | The Full Nerd Special Edition
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
Sometimes the events are so current we can't help discussing them, and such is the case with this week's act of self-immolation on the part of Unity and its relationship with the many developers who use its engine to make their games. Plus, iOS 17 and friends are imminent and Will has installed every available *OS beta and is here to talk about some of the new features (VPN on AppleTV?!?), the newly announced iPhones and Watches, and some other stuff!
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
Will dons the game developer hat again this week for a deep dive into how a game gets built. No, not the coding and design and art and all that -- we mean how a game gets literally built into a package that you can run on your PC or console, with some in-depth chat about everything from build servers to source and version control of both code and binary assets, pre-baked lighting, creating automated nightlies of your game, partying in TeamCity, 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 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 back this week with another round of hot tips for making your computing life less annoying, including super secret UI settings, methods of bending digital voice assistants to your will, a low-level Windows hotkey not even Will knew about, the latest PowerToys (since the last time we talked about PowerToys), an easy way to trim videos without encoding them again, the fastest video player in the West, and other tips you won't want to miss!
The apps we mentioned in this ep include LosslessCut, mpv, Authy, and the ever-growing Power Toys.
The Windows hotkeys we mentioned:
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
Another piping-hot batch of questions is here straight out of the oven (where "the oven" is Discord and our inbox), and we do our best to deliver answers about amassing a collection of Allen wrenches, the seeming fragility of OLED panels, service-nagging from your smart appliances, running dynamic DNS for your home VPN, books about computer history, peated whiskey, 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 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
Since Brad just went through the new-TV-buying-and-setup process (for someone else), we decided it was time for us to look past our classic plasmas and take stock of the modern TV landscape. In this ep we attempt to casually dissect HDMI 2.1 features and HDR standards, and think about why format wars are never going away, which legacy audio connector is getting short shrift these days, why everything is labeled "8K" all of a sudden, when to buy an OLED, and a bunch 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 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
Our friend Wes Fenlon is back, this time to talk about his experiences daily-carrying Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip series of foldable smartphones. By interrogating such topics as whether glass is really meant to bend like that, when a screen protector isn't just a screen protector, how great the Game Boy Advance SP was (very great), and whether Apple might get in on this trend, we analyze whether this a passing fad, or the most exciting thing to happen to phones in some time.
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're back this week with the mythical three-peat of updates on topics we've discussed either recently or in the distant past. First, following up on last month's patron episode, we dig into our recent experiences with Wireguard and discuss why it's pretty much the only home VPN game in town. Next we dissect the lessons Will learned about operating an electric vehicle in extreme heat on this year's just-concluded sojourn to Palm Desert. Lastly, Brad does a quick update on cold brewing coffee after a couple weeks of experimenting with liquid ratios and excess caffeine. It's like three podcasts in one!
Some Wireguard links that we mentioned:
Wireguard home page: https://www.wireguard.com/
Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/
PiVPN: https://www.pivpn.io/
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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