Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

We're putting the time machine back into service again this week with another magazine review, this time of Next Generation issue 36 from December 1997. Notably, this was the issue when the venerable thinking-person's game magazine first declared the PC the best place to play games, along with an in-depth assessment of the N64, PlayStation, and Saturn's places in the market. Plus, we also run through a whole bunch of other interesting material, including an early call for an independent game development scene, a look at some entry-level mid-'90s game dev tools and early Dreamcast development kits, the surprisingly silly origins of Gran Turismo, a review of Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and a bunch of other stuff. Check the show notes for a link to the issue!

Follow along with the magazine here: https://archive.org/details/NextGeneration36Dec1997/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

This week we discuss a three-fer of mini-topics from current events. First we take a look at Boeing's troubled Starliner test flight that's left a pair of astronauts stranded on the International Space Station. Next up, Goldman Sachs has issued a scathingly negative report about the validity and sustainability of the current AI bubble. And last, with Windows 10's end-of-support date looming, we dig into the upgrade requirements that are going to leave millions of PCs stranded, and maybe proclaim the year of the Linux desktop along the way (well, not really (OK, maybe kind of)).

Links referenced this episode include:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/starliner-still-doesnt-have-a-return-date-as-nasa-tests-overheating-thrusters/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/10/openai-board-microsoft-apple-withdraw/

https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit/report.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

We're back with another hot month's worth of your questions to answer, this time addressing such wide-ranging subjects as easy ways to defeat Blu-ray region locks, tech tips for your fantasy new-home build, the sweet spot for solar panels paying for themselves, whether anyone actually needs a 10-gigabit home Internet connection, the ephemeral nature of knowledge locked up in Discord servers, ways to track subscriptions and to-do items with your partner, 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

This week, Friend of the Show Adam Patrick Murray from PC World joins Will to share the ground truth about Computex. Freshly returned from Taipei, Adam is a Computex veteran, and told us what it's like to attend and cover the most important PC hardware trade show in the world.

What Hardware Should You Use for UE5 Development?
PC World's YouTube Channel
The Full Nerd Podcast
How MSI Laptops are Designed Video
MSI's GPUs Through History Video

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 taking another close look at a product that broke out and redefined its entire category, this time the venerable IntelliMouse Explorer. These days it's hard to remember that it was Microsoft who banished the infernal ball and introduced the optical mouse to the mainstream, so we head back to 1999 and discuss what mice were like beforehand, how mechanical and optical sensors work, debate PS/2 versus USB, make an argument that the whole PC gaming accessory ecosystem owes its existence to this product, and more.

Our last game-changer product deep-dive, about the Xbox 360: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/183-hiroprotagonist-loves-an-inhale-a0zOAKKo

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 Developer's Conference has come and gone again, and frankly there were enough interesting additions to the company's various OSs that we figured an episode was warranted even before we got to "Apple Intelligence." We do our best in this jumbo episode to round up everything from silly corporate stunts to a (finally, maybe) context-aware Siri, an intelligent way to deal with too many notifications, build-your-own emojis, better vitals on the watch, MacOS's long-overdue window-snapping, and too many other features to list.

Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-239-wwdc-24

Watch the WWDC keynote here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXeOiIDNNek

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 just traded in the ol' Chevy Bolt for a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5, so it's time to run down all the pros and cons of this newer and more robust electric vehicle, and also check in on everything that's changed in the world of EVs in the three (!!) years since we did our Bolt episode. Listen on for our thoughts on everything from plug standards to the rapidly expanding charger network, how many driver assists are too many, the seemingly endless absurdities in automotive UX, and a bunch of other stuff.

Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-238-ioniq-5

Here's our episode on the Chevy Bolt and the basics of EVs: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/88-it-just-makes-the-lithium-angrier

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

Microsoft has announced some... controversial new AI-driven features coming to Windows 11, so we thought it was time to dissect the Copilot+ PC spec and particularly its Recall functionality, especially in light of the new Qualcomm ARM chips that are bringing more efficiency and more machine-learning compute power to the portable PC space. Is this stuff something you need? Is it something you should worry about? We do our best to answer these and other questions.

Show notes and links for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-237-copilot-plus-ai

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 Q&A episode, and this month we get into a wide range of topics including our haul from the electronics flea market, our growing appreciation for SCART, Micro Center's rapidly expanding operations, the open-source automotive self-driving solution, a farewell to mini-USB, a quick Steam patching explainer, 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've got another two-fer of mini-topics this week around projects we've been tinkering with lately. First, Will has been investigating ways to get the SteamOS experience on hardware that's not a SteamDeck, with both the full-on SteamOS rebuild HoloISO and the more general gaming-focused Linux distro Bazzite. Second, we've both had Fallout New Vegas (and its many necessary mods) on the brain a lot lately, and have been looking into the open-source mod manager Wabbajack and some of the other stuff going on around automating mods these days. Lastly, uh, enjoy the podcast!

Stuff discussed in this episode includes:

HoloISO: https://github.com/HoloISO/releases

Bazzite: https://bazzite.gg/

Wabbajack: https://www.wabbajack.org/

Viva New Vegas: https://vivanewvegas.moddinglinked.com/

Tale of Two Wastelands: https://taleoftwowastelands.com/

Rounds: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1557740/ROUNDS/

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