Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

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 | WIREDThat annoying SMS phish you just got may have come from a box like this - Ars TechnicaWhy iRobot’s founder won’t go within 10 feet of today’s walking robots - Ars TechnicaWhy Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity – Rodney BrooksSteam 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

We've been tinkering with a lot of esoteric PC hardware stuff lately, so we're here with a roundup on what we've been up to this week that you'll hopefully find informative. We get into Microsoft's crackdown on the vulnerability in FanControl and other popular monitoring software, attempting to corral fan settings in UEFI as an alternative, and doing battle with the dreaded beat frequencies that can result from adjacent fan placement. Brad also gives a full trip report on his attempt to power a stack of hard drives with an external ATX power supply, with a detour into handy tips for de-pinning a modular power supply cable, stacking multiple hard drives, and more. And Will touches on his recent experience building a new studio PC in a rack-mounted case, plus some tidbits about the last electronics flea market of the year, Linux thread scheduling, Brad's first trip to Micro Center, Will's shiny new CRT (yes, another one), and more!Links for this episode:WinRing0: Why Windows is flagging your PC monitoring and fan control apps as a threat: https://www.theverge.com/report/629259/winring0-windows-defender-fan-control-pc-monitoring-alert-quarantineNoctua on fan placement and beat frequencies: https://noctua.at/en/fan-speed-offset-explainedStackable hard drive feet Brad bought: https://sednashop.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=95Seasonic pinout and cable compatibility info: https://seasonic.com/cable-compatibility/How to de-pin a power supply cable with two staples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6gQ5ie2Dw0Brad's NAS/hard drive setup and de-pinned cable: https://imgur.com/a/WKPwhCQ 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 really brought the goods to its iPhone 17 event this week, with a freakishly thin phone in the new iPhone Air, major production-level video features and accessories in the 17 Pro, significant health and sleep features in the next Apple Watch, third-gen AirPods Pro, ceramic coating all over basically everything, and perhaps most importantly, Pro-level features and a pretty generous starting storage option trickling down to the base iPhone 17 model. We sit down to run through all this new tech, ponder our upgrade likelihood, marvel at vapor chambers and unibody phone frames, 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

For years, Blendo Games has been releasing its unique brand of systems-driven games on open source id Software tech, most recently with this year's Skin Deep running on a modified version of the Doom 3 engine. Sounds like a Tech Pod topic to us! We're delighted to be joined by Brendon Chung and Sanjay Madhav this week to dig into all the ins and outs of their process making Skin Deep, including working with 20-year-old code, making smart use of features that existed in the original game, restoring algorithms whose patents have since expired, figuring out what to enhance and what to rip out, and plenty of other intriguing subjects.Skin Deep on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/301280/Skin_Deep/Blendo has a lot of fascinating writeups about their dev process and tools: https://blendogames.com/news/Sanjay's work as a games programming consultant: https://loophole.games/ 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 few links from this episode:The musical No BS Podcast #100: https://archive.org/details/no_bs_podcast_100A particularly cool cyberdeck: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/1m9ufwz/rpi_dev_finally_done_youtube_and/The Chicago dog: https://www.wienerschnitzel.com/food/hot-dogs/chicago-dog/ 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

Some handy links if you want to start playing with your own virtual Windows 95 machine:https://86box.net/https://winworldpc.com/homehttps://www.vogons.org/ 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

Have we really done 300 episodes of this podcast? We have now! To mark the occasion, we're taking a look back at a lot of the things that have changed in the tech world since we posted our first ep in September 2019. Turns out, uh, a lot has happened since then, from scammy Valley bros pivoting through crypto, NFTs, and AI, to streaming services going from beloved to reviled, electric vehicles actually becoming a practical thing, a lot of unsuccessful attempts to knock the dominant social platforms off their pedestals, handheld gaming becoming incredibly robust, and a bunch of other trends to consider. 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 topic two-fer! Brad's refrigerator died last week, which gives us a chance to talk about online appliance-buying on a budget in 2025, some refrigeration and food-safety basics, product minimalism and applying the Unix philosophy to home ownership, and more. And Will just got back from Super Mario Land in Hollywood, so we go through a (literal) trip report about the experience and the tech underpinning it, from Amiibo wristbands to augmented-reality Mario Kart, ways to stay off your phone in a theme park, and a startling encounter with Bowser Jr. 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 situation we talked about in the episode is evolving pretty rapidly; here are some of the latest updates since we recorded:Info on how to contact payment processors yourself: https://aftermath.site/steam-itch-porn-censorship-collective-shout-visa-mastercard-paypalitch.io reindexes NSFW content: https://itch.io/t/5149036/reindexing-adult-nsfw-contentValve comments on payment processors: https://kotaku.com/mastercard-denies-pressuring-steam-to-censor-nsfw-games-2000614393Here's the RTINGS article on types of OLEDs mentioned toward the end: https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/qd-oled-vs-woled 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 the monthly question time again, and this month we talk about what's going to happen when AI is only left with AI-generated content to consume, our thoughts on ad-blocking as people who used to subsist on ads, how to blog about a tech project, why you shouldn't listen to podcasts (or maybe anything) on Spotify, a whole bunch about electricity and power supplies, why geolocating sometimes gets weird, the surprising prevalence of WhirlyBall even 30 years later, plus tidbits about Cheerwine, bears, and a bunch of other stuff. 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 better way to beat the summer heat than with another stack of cold opens for your listening micro-pleasure? This time around we delve into such short topics as etiquette at the EV charging station, why kids hate charging their phones, how to dispose of (or maybe just use) slightly-too-old gasoline, the everlasting value of the office crap table, how procedural generation is weighted in game content, why more products should be like the modern glue stick, 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

Wired 04.12, December 1996: https://archive.org/details/wired-magazine-04.12-1996-decemberShow notes with page numbers for everything we discuss: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-295-wired-dec-96 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 historic YouTube video, "Here's Like 18 Minutes of Destiny 2 at 4k60:"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIipgLFxpt4 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 monthly Q&A ep is here again, and this time around we field emails and Discord Qs about managing the cognitive load of your hobbies, doing jury duty in a movie theater, site discovery on the indie web, safe ways to repair damaged power cords, websites getting pushy about passkeys, even MORE accurate network time, the high technology of modern sports broadcasting, and more.Link aggregators for the indie web we mentioned include https://rss.joy and https://ooh.directory 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

On this week's ep, we take inventory of upcoming tech projects we've been looking into, to evaluate our use cases and pick each other's brains about what's worth sinking the time and/or money into in the near future. For Brad, that's getting a proper travel router and GaN charger for easier networking on the road, jailbreaking his Kindle to try out that KOReader magic, and, uh, maybe someday setting up a local network time server. On Will's side, there's getting set up to take advantage of the Twitch 1440p beta, finding ways to utilize a USB-connected multi-foot pedal, and building an outdoor IP camera rig with the optics and shutter speed to properly document the ongoing hummingbird fracas outside his house. An episode as ambitious as it is speculative!Links for this episode:The Kindle Modding Wiki: https://kindlemodding.org/A pretty good basic explainer about Kindle jailbreaking and demoing KOReader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtk7ERwlIAk The style of travel router Brad's looking at (not sponsored!): https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-axt1800/ 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 WWDC and Google I/O have both come and gone, and... well, we took a look at I/O and it was practically all AI this year, so we skipped that. But Apple's annual developer's conference was surprisingly light on AI features -- in fact, the continuing absence of the AI-driven Siri and other features announced last year is itself a notable story -- so this week we recapped what Apple brought to WWDC instead, including its first major UI refresh in a decade, interesting additions to smaller stuff like Wallet and Shortcuts, the ever-more-laptop-like nature of the iPad, the end of x86 support and beginning of annual versioning for MacOS, and a bunch of other stuff. 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 got a chance to attend the Switch 2 launch event at Nintendo's brand new San Francisco store and then started feverishly digging into the fundamentals of the new hardware, so this week we had an impromptu discussion about his hands-on impressions so far. Turns out there's a lot going on in this thing, from the delightfully musical new controller haptics to the surprisingly low-tech magnetic Joy-Con attachment, upgraded Switch 1 performance, GameCube emulation, and a bunch of other interesting 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

Will's here with a two-fer trip report this week, one of which was a literal trip to the grand opening of the brand new Bay Area Micro Center. We dig into what a big-box retailer oriented around building PCs is like in 2025, reflect a bit on the history of other screwdriver and computer shops past, and muse about retiring into PC-builder-helper status. Also, Nvidia has finally released a proper GeForce Now client for the Steam Deck, and we get into what Will's recent testing of the service has been like, whether the various pricing tiers are worth it, how viable it is as a replacement for owning an actual PC, 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