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A couple of old-fashioned IT engineers/consultants turned college professors ranting about IT
156 Episodes
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When we started this podcast, AI was a quirky sidekick—good for autocomplete, bad at facts, and mostly harmless. Fast-forward three years and suddenly it’s writing code, composing music, summarizing our thoughts before we finish them, and politely asking whether it should schedule the meeting instead. In this episode, we look back at how ChatGPT and other AI tools evolved alongside our podcast—from novelty demos and broken prompts to always-on copilots and mildly unsettling digital coworkers. We talk about what genuinely improved, what’s still gloriously flawed, and how our expectations quietly shifted from “this is fun” to “wait, this actually works.” A nostalgic, slightly sarcastic progress report on watching AI grow up—while our microphones, workflows, and existential questions remained suspiciously unchanged.
Education has spent the last three decades trying to upgrade itself, but somewhere along the way the installer froze and nobody noticed. In Rebooting Education… Error 404: Vision Not Found, we dig into how a system once built on curiosity slowly became a patchwork of outdated curricula, mismatched expectations, and copy-paste reforms. From tech that arrived too early to ideas that arrived too late, we explore why the classroom feels stuck in perpetual safe mode—and what it would take to finally hit “Restart.”
In this episode, we put three very different beasts into the same neural arena and see who comes out smiling from our perspective - or smoking. The NVIDIA DGX Spark flexes its data-center muscles, the Mac Studio arrives with calm M-series confidence, and the modern RGB-infested PC shows up like a caffeinated overclocker ready to prove a point. We test how each handles running local LLMs, feeding them PDFs, crunching embeddings, and surviving real workloads rather than benchmark fairy tales. If you’ve ever wondered which machine actually delivers the best blend of speed, thermals, and sanity, this is the showdown you’ve been waiting for.
In this episode, we unpack how artificial intelligence keeps tripping over its own marketing pitch. Every week brings another “revolutionary” breakthrough that turns out to be… just autocomplete with better PR. From chatbots that can’t stay factual to copilots that need copilots, we explore why the tech that was supposed to change everything keeps disappointing everyone. It’s not sabotage — it’s self-inflicted hype fatigue, where bold claims outpace real progress, and trust becomes the first true casualty of innovation.
Forget everything you've heard about “greenfield projects” and “starting fresh” — because in real-world IT, the only thing truly clean is the marketing deck. Every new system we build carries the fingerprints, ghosts, and existential dread of every system that came before it. Legacy data, legacy decisions, legacy “temporary” hacks that became cultural heritage. In this episode, we’re diving into the myth of the clean slate, exploring why every “fresh start” is really just a remix of yesterday’s chaos — and why pretending otherwise usually results in today’s budget crying and tomorrow's engineers filing therapy claims. Buckle up: reset buttons are fake, and tech baggage travels free.
Evidently, chewing gum, IAM policies, and blind optimism bind the world's most enormous cloud together. One sneeze in a single AWS AZ and half the planet suddenly remembers they never actually tested their DR plan—unless “panic refreshing the status page” counts as testing. A DevOps team is furiously marking "multi-AZ" in yellow, treating it as a novel innovation, while another CTO mutters, "But the slide deck stated we had high availability." Meanwhile, microservices that were supposed to be “resilient” instantly curled up like Victorian children catching a light breeze. So buckle up—we’re diagnosing yet another case of architectural pneumonia, caused by an unhealthy dependency on hope-driven engineering and the eternal belief that “it’ll probably be fine.”
Ever wondered what chaos fits inside an IT guy’s backpack? In this episode — “Portable pandemonium: Everyday carry for the every-day mayhem” — we unzip the madness. From cables that could start a data center to gadgets that probably shouldn’t be allowed on planes, we’re diving into the tech survival kit that keeps life running when servers crash and coffee spills. You’ll hear about the must-haves, the just-in-cases, and the “why do I even have this?” gear that somehow always saves the day. Whether you’re a sysadmin, tinkerer, or serial over-packer, this episode’s your backstage pass to everyday digital chaos — one adapter, one dongle, and one questionable power bank at a time.
Welcome to The Half-Speed Revolution—the episode where we question why 2.5 and 5-gigabit Ethernet even exist. In reality, "multi-gig" is more akin to a speed bump than a bridge connecting 1G and 10G. This "revolution" feels incomplete, with overpriced switches, overheating NICs, and cable runs that fail certification upon inspection. We’ll talk about flaky drivers, weak firewalls, pointless uplinks, and why the smartest move might just be skipping straight to 10G.
Welcome to The Update About No Updates — the episode where the most prominent tech headline is that there isn’t one. No earth-shattering iPhone redesign, no revolutionary CPU launch, not even a new USB connector to argue about. Instead, we’re stuck in that strange IT twilight zone where the “new” feels suspiciously like the “old,” and version numbers creep forward without anyone really noticing. So, what do we do when the industry runs out of drama? Simple: we update you on our own week. From small victories to questionable troubleshooting adventures, consider this episode less of a patch and more of a change log for life itself. Spoiler: it’s mostly bug fixes and coffee refills.
Who says you need a roaring server rack or a studio the size of a garage to sound professional? This week, we’re diving into the wonderful world of mini PCs — those tiny boxes that look like they should be running a cash register but somehow power full podcasts, video editing, and entire workflows without breaking a sweat. We’ll push buttons, twist knobs, and occasionally question whether we’ve downsized our brains along with our computers. From pocket-sized powerhouses to shoebox studios, we’ll show you how these pint-sized machines sneak their way into podcast setups and why sometimes the smallest box makes the biggest noise.
For more than a decade, Meta has been on a quest to glue screens to our faces, and the results have been pure comedy gold. From the puke-inducing Oculus Rift to the forgettable Oculus Go, from overpriced Quest headsets to the Ray-Ban Stories nobody asked for, Zuckerberg keeps promising the future while delivering awkward toys. Now, the Ray-Ban Display glasses arrive with Jedi-style controls and a cooking AI that forgets recipes mid-demo. Add a failed video call and the classic “bad WiFi” excuse, and you’ve got another chapter in Meta’s never-ending sitcom of AR/VR fails.
So, you’ve heard whispers about Linux, seen memes about penguins, and maybe even wondered if Fedora is just a fancy hat. In this episode, we unpack the Fedora Linux experience in a way that feels more like opening a starter kit than tackling a sysadmin exam. We’ll talk about why Fedora is often the go-to distro for trying out the cutting edge without slicing your fingers off, how it stacks up as a desktop OS, and what makes it both approachable and quirky. From the first boot to customizing your environment, we’ll explore how Fedora sneaks Linux onto your desk—and maybe into your daily workflow—without demanding you abandon everything you know.
What happens when you try to dress up your desktop with three decades of operating systems? You get a fashion show where Windows 95 struts in with its shiny Start button, Windows 10 insists it’s the only adult in the room, Windows 11 keeps rearranging the furniture, and Linux shows up in 42 different outfits to prove a point. In this episode, we delve into the decades of GUIs, crashes, updates, and “features” nobody asked for, asking the fundamental question: Did Windows 95 actually change everything? Does Windows 11 even know who it wants to be? And why does Linux keep laughing from the corner?
Picture this: your server room has turned into a disco floor, and every drive is demanding its own spotlight. Thirty disks whirl in perfect sync, but then a rogue 31st struts in, and suddenly your operating system starts sweating like it’s at a math exam it didn’t study for. This episode dives into the hilarious chaos of kernels that choke on too many spindles. These OS quirks make disk handling a balancing act, and why storage can feel less like engineering and more like herding caffeinated hamsters on a wheel. Buckle up—we’re about to spin straight into madness.
Grab your raincoats and your root passwords, because today’s forecast calls for 100% chance of OpenStack with scattered Linux kernels drifting in from the west. We’re diving headfirst into the swirling weather patterns of the open-source cloud—where compute storms, storage showers, and networking gusts all collide to form your perfect private cloud climate. From tempestuous deployments to sunny scalability, we’ll chart the isobars of orchestration and explain why this penguin-powered forecast might be the most predictable thing in IT.
They say logs never lie—but reading them sure can feel like decoding ancient scrolls in a server room dungeon. In this episode, we saddle up with the mighty ELK stack—Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana—and ride into the wild frontier of log aggregation, search, and visualization. Whether you're drowning in microservice mayhem or just trying to figure out why your app threw that 500 error at 3 a.m., ELK has your back. We'll break down what each beast in the stack does, why they're better together, and how to tame the chaos of modern observability. Warning: may contain traces of groan-worthy puns and dangerously useful insights.
Once upon a terminal, Linux was the domain of the bold, the bearded, and the bash-literate. But something strange has been happening—quietly, in the background, like a daemon you forgot was running. The Linux desktop, once synonymous with fragmented UIs and endless configuration, now boasts polish, design consistency, and dare we say… user-friendliness? From Pop!_OS to Deepin, modern distros are flirting with UX principles once reserved for the likes of macOS. But has anything really changed? Is this evolution or just lipstick on a penguin? In this episode, we explore whether the Linux desktop has genuinely crossed the usability chasm—or if we’re just too deep in the shell to notice.
Tired of Linux being all command-line and no charisma? This episode delves headfirst into the world of desktop-ready Linux distributions that aren't just functional—they have style. From the suave allure of Deepin to the minimalist grace of Elementary OS, the nerdy efficiency of Pop!_OS, and the undercover classic vibes of Linux Mint, we’re exploring the personalities behind the penguin. Whether you're a long-time distro hopper or just flirting with the idea of ditching Windows or macOS, we’ll unpack what makes these systems tick, click, and sometimes crash spectacularly. Expect opinions, laughs, and maybe even a few controversial takes—because not all desktop environments are created equal.
Many thought it was lost in the dust of attic boxes and the echoes of dial-up tones, a plastic prophet stirs once more. With keys that clack like sacred relics and ports that whisper forgotten spells, the old oracle of the home computing age boots back to life—probably after five minutes of awkward disk grinding. This isn’t just a comeback; it’s a keyboard-clad resurrection, an 8-bit miracle wrapped in beige plastic and retro static. Somewhere, a CRT flickers in approval. And thanks to Perryfractic and his valiant crew of pixel archaeologists, this relic now speaks again. Grab your joystick, plug in the prophecy, and prepare for the pixelated second coming.
Birthdays used to be a moment of genuine connection – a card, a call, a gathering. Today, it’s a flood of shallow Facebook notifications, auto-generated LinkedIn greetings, and automated Slack shoutouts. In this episode of “The Birthday Alienation Attack,” we delve into how birthdays have become just another engagement metric in the digital world. Are we celebrating people or feeding algorithms? From bots that wish “happy birthday” to the privacy risks of exposing your birth date, join us as we explore how technology has turned a human ritual into a tool of alienation.
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