We're back with another hodgepodge of user-submitted topics this week to clear out some of our backlog from the summer, leading us to talk about everything from uses for a PC's real-time-clock wake feature to domain hijacking and protecting your custom email address, the origins of the octothorpe, a very cool virtual operating system museum, and lots of stuff in between.

The Virtual OS Museum: https://virtualosmuseum.org/

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The Q&A returns for August with a variety of topics including pet-related tech mishaps, the contentious multimeter pronunciation debate, arcade boards and Super NES expansion chips, the return of physical keyboard phones, and an accidental grip of AI-related questions about web-scraping statistics, podcasters putting on new vocal identities, cyberattacks on infrastructure, and the growing societal backlash that might (maybe) blunt all this at some point.

Arcade board cases discussed in this ep:

https://www.scanlinecity.com/mortal-kombat-ii-3-layer

https://github.com/emilianoarlettaz/arcade-pcb-case

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It's been a while since we checked in on note-taking apps and ways to wrangle their data, and a lot has changed with our personal use cases on that front. Will has gone deep on Notion's relational capabilities and seen how well they can support a shared knowledge base for a team of a couple dozen people. Meanwhile, Brad has done a survey of apps targeted at the individual end user, with the goal of fully owning the data and controlling how and where it's synced. We round up everything we've discovered in this week's episode, with some detours into things like rclone cloud mounts, the amazing utility of the (nearly) universal format conversion tool pandoc, 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 reach into the grab bag again this week for a selection of topics we hope will delight and/or inform. On the AI front, Twitch stepped in it this week with a belated ability to opt your streams out of use in Amazon's AI training, raising questions about just how long this practice has been going on, and we also look at some emerging novel techniques for defeating web scrapers taking fresh training data. We also touch on the California Extreme arcade and pinball show, including obscure prototype cocktail cabinets and some updates on the open source CRT chassis we talked about a couple of years ago. Finally, we briefly look at the state of refurbished MacBook Pros now that un-refurbished (that is, new) machines have gotten so pricey.

Brad's video of the td-crt demo cabinet: https://imgur.com/a/california-extreme-26-td-crt-demo-cabinet-5s2gB1k

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Brad and Will reconvene this week to talk about their recent adventures in the real world. Brad returns from the Vintage Computer Festival West once again with a recap of this year's highlights, including projects to resurrect everything from classic America Online to obscure software distribution kiosks from 1980s Japan, panels with some fun details about things like the creation of Ethernet and programming heroics on the Atari 2600, plus some Quake deathmatch against today's youth. And Will returns from Los Angeles to talk about object show meetups and the latest from Disneyland, such as high-tech face projection mapping, why the Lightning Lane isn't so Lightning anymore, the joy of trackless dark rides, and more.

Notes and links for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-351-vcfw-disney

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Our friend Steve Lin joins Will this week for a broad discussion about hobbies, learning new skills, and preserving the past. Topics include everything from the multidisciplinary practice of maintaining arcade cabinets and pinball tables, the Video Game History Foundation's new archive of E3 materials, watch repair, model trains, preserving the institutional knowledge of diehard hobbyist communities, how to get started picking up new skills and knowing when to call it quits on a project, and plenty more.

The VGHF's E3 materials archive: https://gamehistory.org/e3-history/

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It's our first-ever solo Q&A episode, and Will takes on a backlog of awesome questions from the audience. Topics include Will's favorite way to make popcorn, under-volting for fun and profit, good books about the history of modern computing, the problem with Peltier/thermo-electric coolers, and what's going on with the Internet of Shit? 

Content Warning: I discuss self-harm in the context of taking health advice from LLMs from 55-58 minutes. 

Links:

Links contain affiliate codes. Buying stuff using them helps support the pod! 

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

In a wide-ranging conversation, Nextlander's Vinny Caravella sits down with Will to ask a cavalcade of questions. Topics include whether paid search engines are worth the cash, what happens when your NAS needs new hard drives in 2026, why Fastmail rules, when you do (and do not) need to hire an electrician, and what can only be described as group therapy session about the horrors plumbers face every day.

If you want to try Fastmail, consider using Will's Fastmail affiliate link to get a 10% discount on your first year and Fastmail throws a few bucks Will's way. 

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

PC Gamer and Read Only Memo's Wes Fenlon joins us on the pod this week to talk about the latest retro game recompilations for N64, PSX, and Xbox 360 games, with a big bonus helping on the latest MiSTer UI and maintenance updates. Sign up for Wes's Read Only Memo newsletter, it's awesome and free!  

We talked about: 

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This week, Will is joined by Tested's Norman Chan to dig deep into their extensive hands on testing with the Steam Machine, including how it fits into Valve's burgeoning hardware ecosystem, performance testing, how console-y it actually is, whether you could use it as a more traditional desktop, pricing in the rampocalypse, and even answer some questions from the audience. 

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This week, Will is joined by tech journalist Florence Ion, of PC Mag, Material Podcast, and Android Faithful to talk about what Google's been up to, the inevitable encroachment of Gemini into Android, and the shocking revelation that she uploaded her Livejournal archive to Gemini. It's a wide-ranging conversation about the state of tech, good and bad uses of AI, what it's like working for a long time in tech journalism, and a whole lot 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

Brad's out of town this week, so Will welcomes Expedition: Handheld and The Full Nerd's Adam Patrick Murray to run down the current state of the handheld gaming console market. We talk about Intel's new GPU-first handheld processor, the current state of x86 emulation on ARM handhelds, the pros and cons of the Analog Pocket, and a bunch more! 

Make sure you check out Adam's work on Expedition: Handheld and The Full Nerd!

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

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference happened this week, and there was enough going on that we wanted to unpack the whole thing, primarily due to the company's uncharacteristic backpedaling on its... controversial Liquid Glass UI language, not to mention the unusual focus on CPU scheduling and numerous other performance refinements across the board in this year's OS updates, rather than the more typical long list of new features. It was enough to get us saying the words "Snow Leopard," which is always a good feeling. We also consider new broader parental controls, the apparently final state of Apple Intelligence and Siri AI features, and more.

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Computex happened this week, and there was enough to talk about to devote this week's episode to rounding up the high points, including Nvidia's attempt to dominate the consumer Windows market with RTX Spark, the first RGB mini-LED monitors, 8GB laptops becoming common again, PC hardware production shifting back to DDR4 and old CPU sockets, Intel's entry into the handheld gaming market, the (unsurprising) absence of any news about Zen 6 and Nova Lake, and other stuff!

Show notes and links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-342-computex-26

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Question time again! This month we discuss quite a wide range of topics, such as tracking down printer dots with a USB microscope, the dream of going to SIGGRAPH, the legality of scanning and uploading "lost" old magazines, how to stay objective about new stuff as you get older, steady fan curve strategies for CPU air cooling, how to cope when you find out that cool new open source project was made by AI, renaming files like a pro, and the enduring mystery of ICQ's event sounds.

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Brad's tired of throttling his CPU due to an inadequate heatsink. Will's been spending a lot more time testing PC hardware of late. Between those two things, we thought it was a good time to do a check-in on CPU cooling, and primarily liquid cooling, so we can establish the facts on the ground about modern AIOs and custom loops with an eye toward helping Brad decide what to get. Turns out, there's more to know than ever, and yet it's also never been simpler. We also talk a little about modern air cooling, CPU spikes in Windows, and other stuff!

The GamersNexus video on AIO placement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbGomv195sk

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After a couple years off, we're returning to our annual tradition of each picking a year for our birthdays that we want to review in-depth from a tech and science perspective. This time Will picked 2002 because... well, you'll see, but it gave us the opportunity to reflect on a bunch of just-post-turn-of-the-century tech trends, like weird pre-smartphone mobile devices, the venerable WRT54G, all the Y2K techno-optimistic design trends, digital filmmaking going mainstream, a truly momentous March in the Linux world, the state of file sharing and music piracy, and plenty of other stuff.

How Dinosaurs May Have Cursed Us With Aging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWOErbTL9N4

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Somehow the news just keeps happening, so we're here to round up and chew over another handful of headlines this week. Discussed on this episode are stories about canary traps in political databases, AMD bringing true HDMI 2.1 support to Linux, Microsoft's latest efforts to open-source its history, the trend of small hardware makers releasing source assets for their devices, the long-awaited arrival of Wildcat Lake, and more, plus fun digressions into printer tracking dots, the era of DOS before MS-DOS, and more!

Notes and links:  https://tinyurl.com/techpod-338-news

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We've got a project potpourri this week of things we've been getting our hands on, literally in the case of Will and his brand new Steam Controller. We talk through the ins and outs of Valve's first new hardware in a while, including button feel, a variety of use cases, what you can do with it if Steam isn't present, and more. Will's also been in the mouse labs, testing an 8000Hz polling rate and glass feet, and finally, he reports on what he's gotten out of his first month with a new 3D printer. Brad's also been down a rabbit hole on 2D printing (and has the battle scars to prove it) with some news and revelations about paper printers new and old. Projects!

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

After all these monthly Q&A episodes, you folks continue to send us great Qs every month, and this time around we dig into such topics as the MacBook Neo's target audience, Windows running on Linux, technical and corporate work jargon bleeding into your personal life, Apple's relatively quiet 50th anniversary, ultrawide monitors versus lots of monitors, using Home Assistant for everything (or not), the likelihood that every home will one day have a 3D printer, and the marvel of redundant, deterministic computing that is the Artemis flight control system.

Links for Artemis and shuttle program flight computers:

https://cacm.acm.org/news/how-nasa-built-artemis-iis-fault-tolerant-computer/

https://www.ghs.com/news/20260423_int-178_orion_lockheed.html

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900015844/downloads/19900015844.pdf

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 time to fix Windows 11. OK, that might be a little ambitious for one podcast episode, but it's at least time to step through the plan Microsoft unveiled recently for improving Windows 11 and addressing some of its shortcomings (and perhaps salvaging its brand a bit in the process). We go over forthcoming changes around the taskbar and Start Menu, File Explorer, notifications, native WinUI interface components, WSL2, device drivers, and a bunch of other stuff, plus bring plenty of our own large and small, realistic and far-fetched ideas for making Windows tolerable again.

"Our Commitment to Windows Quality:" https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-commitment-to-windows-quality/

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Friend of the show and all-around science guy Kishore Hari joins us once again, this time to dig into humanity's return to the Moon in NASA's Artemis program. We explore everything from the astronauts' wakeup playlists and diets to the wireless and camera tech onboard, how observing this kind of mission from Earth has changed since 1972, the history of and political context around the program, our favorite uplifting moments from Artemis II, astronomy opportunities that might be enabled by a continued presence on the Moon, and a bunch more.

Show notes and links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-334-artemis-ii

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Brad's out this week, so Norman Chan takes the guest chair to talk us through the current state of the art in 3D printing. We cover the latest in FDM printers, whether resin printers are right for you, the best places to find 3D models to print, how you can edit and adjust the models you want to print, and a whole lot 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

Is it time for another Q&A again already? How the months just fly by. This month we address everything from auto-generated podcast chapters and episode links to computer class-action lawsuits, corporate remote administration of your personal devices, how to move a PC across the ocean, the dream of permanent standard time, why you probably still shouldn't clean your computer with a vacuum cleaner, 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

It's been a while since we got down to brass tacks with a tips and tricks episode, so that's what we're doing this week with a new list of tech that's making our lives a little more pleasant lately. Will extols the tiling window manager once again -- not just in Linux, but also what's going on with this unique workflow in Windows and MacOS -- and talks over his brute-force strategy for iMessaging in Windows and making his Nest thermostat less evil. And Brad talks about why everyone should buy a $20 USB video capture dongle, how recent additions to PowerToys are making Windows 11 just slightly less crappy, and urges us all to stock up before the grim, optical disc-less future arrives.

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

There's kind of a mountain of hardware news from the last week, so we're rounding it up this week, starting with Microsoft's Project Helix (a.k.a. the next Xbox), interrogating what exactly that box is going to look like inside and out, how much machine learning is going to factor in, and more. There's also the tiny, cheap MacBook Neo (and a surprising theory about future tiny iPhones), Intel's refreshed Arrow Lake CPUs, upscaling improvements on PS5 Pro (and Sony's anything-goes history of system settings), DLSS 4.5, Valve's continued supply-chain struggles, and more. That's a lot of podcast!

Links for this episode:

From GDC: Building the Next Generation of Xbox - Xbox Wire

GDC 2026: Announcing new tools and platform updates for Windows PC game developers - Windows Developer Blog

Upgraded PSSR upscaler is coming to PS5 Pro  – PlayStation.Blog

Say hello to MacBook Neo - Apple

Intel's cheaper, faster new Core Ultra CPUs still have a lot to prove | PCWorld

NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Delivers Major Upgrade With 2nd Gen Transformer Model For Super Resolution & 6X Dynamic Multi Frame Generation | GeForce News | NVIDIA

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 just passed the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 3, which felt like a good reason to dust off the April 2001 issue of Maximum PC. We reflect on both a quarter-century of programmable pixel shaders -- the tech that's defined 3D rendering ever since -- and Will's cover story on the new GPU, including the secretive trip to Nvidia to benchmark it, a random Tim Sweeney interview, and more. There's also plenty of other fun retro tech to dish about in here, including super-early home wi-fi devices, the reveal of Windows XP, Pentium 4 RD-RAM weirdness, some classic Gordon Mah Ung hijinks, and more.

The Maximum PC issue for this episode: https://archive.org/details/maximum-pc-the-nearly-complete-collection/Maximum%20PC/2001/031%20Maximum%20PC%204-1-2001/page/n1/mode/2up

A clip of the Jack Matthews Metroid Prime interview (full interview also on the channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oiIm5Ymu6s

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 another glorious bounty of listener questions for the monthly Q&A, touching on a bunch of subjects like modern HDMI switchers, enormous turn-of-the-century TVs, MikroTik network gear, Pluribus, why the PCIe retaining clip exists (and how to defeat it), Unix on the desktop, our wishlist ESP32 projects, and the exact moment when cell phones became widespread -- and whether phone numbers are increasingly useless, at least in the US.

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

There's... a lot going on lately, so we're rounding up some of that news this week, starting with Discord's forthcoming age verification policy rolling out globally, with cursory discussion of some of the alternative platforms starting to assert themselves out there. We also touch on the targeting and compromise of Notepad++ by state-level actors, and the latest effects of the computing supply crisis on hard drives, the Steam Machine, and the PlayStation 6. Lastly, we talk about the bizarre case of the autonomous AI agent that started a flame war against an open source maintainer that... well, you really need to just hear/read about that one yourself.

Discord's age verification announcement: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally

Notepad++ compromised: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-update/

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

(Much more has emerged about the AI agent story since we recorded, including contact with the agent's operator, all described at the link above.)

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

Magnets have been replacing potentiometers in a variety of places for a while now, especially as Hall effect and TMR joysticks have started popping up in fancy game controllers. Now magnetic switches are becoming more common in mice and mechanical keyboards, and Will has spent some time with new products in both of those categories, so we figured it was a good time to lay out how these kinds of switches work, how resistant to wear and electrical "bouncing" they are, what the heck a transducer is, whether there's quantum mechanics involved or not, and what effect these new switches are going to have on the input devices of the future.

Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-326-mag-switches

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 been a while since we did a deep dive on our home networking and server infrastructure (what some might call a "homelab"), so it's time for the 2026 check-in to run down what we're working with these days. By request, we spend a big chunk of the episode on Brad's plain Linux NAS/server, detailing components like Samba, Docker (or Podman), and Sanoid that you'd need to set up yourself to replicate the functionality of something like TrueNAS or Unraid. We also survey Will's more granular approach, once again pine longingly after Wildcat Lake, and more.

Show notes with all the hardware and software we mentioned: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-325-homelab-update

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

After two months of accumulated Qs, we felt we still had plenty of As to dispense, so we're wheeling back around to a supplemental questions episode this week, touching on such topics as generating negative mileage in an EV, what the iOS low battery mode actually does, tiny network racks for your desk, a shocking amount of discussion about shells like zsh, fish, PowerShell and Nushell, the whereabouts of Intel's successor to the Alder Lake-N... and, for that matter, why (nearly) everything at Intel is a Lake.

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 questions piled up over the holidays and now it's time to answer them in this, the first Q&A of 2026. This month we touch on topics like the splendor Gateway 2000's cow boxes, the mystery of the ENIAC, whether a shed qualifies as off-site backup, what the heck volt-amps are (and how calculus is involved), the glory days of multi-user computing, what tech today's kids will be nostalgic for in 20 years, using LLMs for troubleshooting and command line assistance, 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 get into the nitty gritty this week with a grab bag of home computing projects that's really more like a set of cautionary tales. Will discovers the perils of hanging your entire household's Internet access on a couple of older, neglected Raspberry Pis. Brad learns some harsh lessons about the power draw of a space heater and not maintaining the automation settings on your UPS. And, well, our third topic is about using an Xbox Series X or S as a Moonlight client, which is actually pretty great so far. We suppose one out of three isn't bad?

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 new year means another CES means another roundup of CES news. This year we cover all the announcements from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia (or at least one of those), plus some legitimately exciting stuff like smart Legos, the first vehicle shipping with a solid state battery, computers in keyboards, Stream Decks in keyboards, big-name repairable laptops, what appears to be a real-life Star Wars vibroblade, all the things like memory inflation and tariffs that nobody was talking about at the show, and more.

Notes and links for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-321-ces-2025

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 to start the new year with the second and final installment of our ranking of startup sounds. To close out the tier list we consider later consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, more recent Windowses that we didn't even realize had startup sounds, most of the handhelds from Nintendo and Sony, and even some offbeat entries like Analogue's FPGA consoles and older operating systems like BeOS and OS/2. It's an aural extravaganza!

The final tier list: https://tiny.cc/tp320-sounds

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

As is tradition (?) around here, over the holidays we're doing another extended ranking, and this year it's a two-part tier list of... every startup sound we could find across video game consoles, handhelds, and computer operating systems. Where does a startup sound end and menu music begin? Is it possible for a sound to sound the way that khakis look? Just how dank is the Dreamcast sound, anyway? We explore those and other questions in this part one of two!

The tier list as of the end of this episode: https://tinyurl.com/tp319-sound-tiers-684jfsdi

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

As the end of the year rolls up on us, we attempt a little personalized year-in-review, looking back at 2025 without dwelling on the various tech crises we've already talked about ad nauseam. Instead we focus on things we thought were cool or uplifting this year, including Will's ongoing Linux desktop adventures, the inevitability of electric cars (and bicycles), when it's worth it to buy the good earbuds, convenience improvements in screen protectors, rediscovering the joy of CRTs and nerdy community, plus some listener nominations and a couple of Andy Rooney-esque rants for good measure.

Linux Unplugged podcast on bcachefs: https://linuxunplugged.com/644

Switch 2 grips Will mentioned: https://amzn.to/48IpFXE

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 briskly, unusually cold here in the Bay Area this year, so what better time to crack open another tray of cold opens for your bite-size listening pleasure. This time we discuss such micro-topics as what happens when the building fire alarm gets too old, the joy of a temperature-controlled bed, remotes that nag too much, yet another way Windows 11 is worsening, when good naps go bad, the mystery that is NixOS, and more.

The possible future Windows 11 GUI we mentioned: https://mastodon.online/@grumpy_website/115673036992705122

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

Things are getting so dire in the PC-building space that we had to revisit the subject again this week, primarily to discuss the sudden and shocking end of longtime RAM and SSD maker Crucial, with a deeper dive into the way the memory supply chain works and a glimpse into a very dark future where building your own PC might be out of reach for many. We also dig into some new reporting about the Steam Machine's HDMI output, and why open gaming platforms are going to be in conflict with proprietary HDMI standards going forward. Plus, the latest AI nonsense (and how to work around it) in Firefox and Google News.

NOTE: We're working on freeing ourselves from the need for Adobe products, so bear with us if the podcast sounds a little different this week. Feedback welcome!

Crucial press release: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-exit-crucial-consumer-business

GamersNexus video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A-eeJP0J7c

Steam Machine and HDMI 2.1: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/why-wont-steam-machine-support-hdmi-2-1-digging-in-on-the-display-standard-drama/

Disable Firefox AI features: https://flamedfury.com/posts/disable-ai-in-firefox/

The Verge on Google News AI headlines: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/838354/googles-ai-news-bot-is-still-confused-but-no-longer-replacing-our-headlines

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The end of November brings a fresh crop of your questions, this month addressing subjects like getting lost in a corporation's Kafka-esque support infrastructure, video game voice chatting with Internet celebrities, how often to change your CPU paste, consumer tech that we think has plateaued, trenching Ethernet cable for an intra-yard network, the very cool concept of all-sky cameras, the glory of text expansion, and a bunch of other topics!

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 a news roundup this week, with a ton of recent goings on to discuss, including the sudden explosion in RAM prices (and a similar looming problem with SSDs), Microsoft announcing plans to shove AI agents directly into the Windows taskbar, Google killing off first-gen Nest thermostats (with some open options for resuscitating them), and ongoing changes in compatibility for third-party Switch 2 docks. Plus, with Thanksgiving coming up in the U.S., we dig into another round of tech we're thankful for.

RAM/SSD price news: https://www.pcmag.com/news/ssd-storage-prices-to-climb-as-ai-demand-meets-tight-nand-supply

Agentic Windows impressions: https://www.theverge.com/report/822443/microsoft-windows-copilot-vision-ai-assistant-pc-voice-controls-impressions

No Longer Evil: https://nolongerevil.com/

Sett Thermostat: https://sett.homes/

Switch 2 dock news: https://kotaku.com/nintendo-just-blocked-third-party-switch-2-docks-and-it-sucks-2000644081

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 seems like this week's big salvo of Valve hardware announcements is all anyone's talking about right now, particularly the Steam Machine, and who better to fill in a bunch of hands-on details with that li'l box, plus the new Steam Frame VR headset and refreshed Steam Controller, than our old friend Norm Chan of Tested.com, who went up to Valve to see it all. If you want to hear about everything from the Steam Machine's performance and potential price to the Frame's x86 emulation and foveated remote streaming, plus a ton of stuff in between, listen to this podcast!

Tested's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tested

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

Online game design veteran Raph Koster recently posted a new piece about how he thinks about game design, which got us talking about the history of online multiplayer, so then we figured, why not talk about that subject in a (slightly) more comprehensive way on this podcast? So that's what we did this week, dipping into topics like pre-TCP/IP network gaming, the early video game consoles' various half-baked online solutions, how Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies were both way ahead of their time, how much the infrastructure has evolved for facilitating multiplayer -- and how expected it is as a feature these days -- and plenty more.

Koster's new piece: https://www.raphkoster.com/2025/11/03/game-design-is-simple-actually/

PC Gamer's Everquest history: https://www.pcgamer.com/breaking-the-internet-the-story-of-everquest-the-mmo-that-changed-everything/

Dreamcast online functionality and Sega.net history (with links to similar pages for PS2, GameCube etc. at the bottom): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast_online_functionality

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

PC World's Adam Patrick Murray stops by this week to discuss the trip he and Will recently took to visit Intel's new 18A chip fabrication facility in Arizona. Settle in for a wide-ranging chat about the upcoming Panther Lake architecture, why Intel won't have a new desktop part for a while longer, the future of next-gen chiplet interconnects, the difficulty of scheduling between big and little cores, suiting up to enter the fab, 30mph FOUPs whizzing around overhead, EUV machines the size of multiple school buses, getting served beer by tiny horses (??), 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

It's that time again for more of your questions, and this month we discuss medical equipment conducting secret data collection, dangerously fast CD-ROMs, what we'd want in a brand new operating system (assuming we'd even want one), open source software made by big-box retail chains, OLED vs. LCD TVs, impassioned views on McMaster-Carr, whether or not to invest the effort to digitize all your documents, the difficulty of preserving online content for coffee table books, 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

A bunch of products and services seem to be going end-of-life all at once right now, so we did a round-up of some notable ones this week. Believe it or not, the venerable TiVo line of set-top TV recorders was still in service right up until this past week, so we pay tribute to this product that changed everything in the television space (and apparently the open source licensing space). Of course, we also have to do a check-in with Windows 10 now that its EOL date has come and gone, and the options for extended support have become clearer. Lastly, we wrap up with some tidbits about the rapid disappearance of the BD-ROM drive from retail, the end of AOL's dial-up service, and more.

Windows 10 ESU: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/extended-security-updates

Windows LTSC FAQ: https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

TiVo is done: https://cordcuttersnews.com/tivo-stops-selling-dvrs-marking-the-end-of-an-era/

Pioneer sells off its BD-ROM business: https://www.techpowerup.com/336803/pioneer-has-ended-production-of-computer-blu-ray-drives-transfers-pddm-business-to-shanxi-group

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 been a bit since we did a roundup of tools and tricks that are making our tech lives a little easier, so we're doing that again this week! Will talks about USB-C-to-SATA adapters that can power 3.5" hard drives, Switch 2 grips that actually work, a long term stress test of the under-desk hanging PC, and radical innovations in nanotape technology. Meanwhile, Brad tries out high-endurance SD cards that will hopefully be the last storage you'll need to buy for your Raspberry Pi, plus the unexpected homebrew driver resurrecting Windows Mixed Reality headsets, a much-improved experience with the PlayStation VR2 on PC, and more.

Reverse-engineering the Sandisk high-endurance Micro SD card: https://ripitapart.com/2020/07/16/reverse-engineering-and-analysis-of-sandisk-high-endurance-microsdxc-card/

Oasis driver for Windows Mixed Reality headsets: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3824490/Oasis_Driver_for_Windows_Mixed_Reality/

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 handful of news stories have caught our eye recently, so we're rounding them up this week. We start with a pair of stories about everyone's least favorite subject, SMS spam, one involving an organized crime ring and the other vulnerable everyday infrastructure. Then we move on to a recent blog post by one of iRobot's founders, in which he expresses extreme wariness about the safety of humans interacting with humanoid robots. Lastly, with only a week and change to go until Windows 10 EOL, we look at Valve's ending support for the 32-bit Steam client (and the end of 32-bit Windows in general) and some predictions for how things might go when the deadline comes... assuming Microsoft doesn't blink at the last minute.

‘SIM Farms’ Are a Spam Plague. A Giant One in New York Threatened US Infrastructure, Feds Say | WIRED

That annoying SMS phish you just got may have come from a box like this - Ars Technica

Why iRobot’s founder won’t go within 10 feet of today’s walking robots - Ars Technica

Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity – Rodney Brooks

Steam will wind down support for 32-bit Windows as that version of Windows fades - Ars Technica

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

Question time is here again, and this month we attempt to provide answers about subjects such as homebrew on the Steam Deck, outsourcing the university network support, buying phones just to trade them in, grifters getting angry about game engines, why storefronts still bog down and crash in 2025, monitoring your home server energy use, how to distinguish drop-shipped knock-offs from the genuine article, and more.

Decky Loader for Steam Deck homebrew: https://decky.xyz/

MagicPods for ear buds on the Steam Deck: https://magicpods.app/steamdeck/

The deep rabbit hole about PCIe and ASPM: https://z8.re/blog/aspm.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