Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

By Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith

Technology

What's Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. about?

Each 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.

Support the pod on Patreon: http://patreon.com/techpod

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LAST EPISODE

169: Don't Trust Alberta's ...

01.29.2023

You sent some serious Qs for this month's Q&A, which got us talking about the intermingling of control schemes in online shooters, the best sci-fi robots, the absurdity of discount medical care, pronounceable file extensions, AI-driven customer service, putting Airtags ...

Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod. episodes:

01.29.2023 169: Don't Trust Alberta's Lies You sent some serious Qs for this month's Q&A, which got us talking about the intermingling of control schemes in online shooters, the best sci-fi robots, the absurdity of discount medical care, pronounceable file extensions, AI-driven customer service, putting Airtags ...
01.22.2023 168: It's Cool to Be Cool It was a pretty heavy week for a variety of reasons, so we decided to discuss a few shorter topics to try to take it in, starting by touch on the mass layoffs sweeping the tech industry and elsewhere. Then ...
01.15.2023 167: We Can't Give Them the Heads Will does the unthinkable this week and PODCASTS WITH HIS BOSS, as Stray Bombay head Chet Faliszek joins us on the one-year anniversary of the release of The Anacrusis to talk all things running a small video game studio. From ...
01.08.2023 166: Someone Else's Cables It's (belatedly) time to answer more of your questions, and this time you posed Qs that resulted in As about an iPhone without charging ports, cured meats, hyphy dark roast, favorite classic screensavers, favorite console boot-up animations, the rise of ...
01.01.2023 165: I Don’t Believe in Adverbs On our first show in 2023, we rejoin our epic task of ranking all of humanity's software. Will we actually start putting things in order this week? Or will we get sidetracked by our love of dot matrix-printed banners? Or ...
12.25.2022 164: Truly Lawless Here at the tail end of 2022, are we nuts enough to attempt to rank every piece of software ever written? OK, not quite, but we're going to do our best to assemble a list and put it in an ...
12.18.2022 163: JWST (Just Wonderful Science and Technology) Our friend Kishore Hari becomes our first three-time guest by joining us this week to run down some of our favorite science and tech stories of 2022, including the latest developments in nuclear fusion, some ML-driven mid-podcast protein prediction, the ...
12.11.2022 162: Storage Wars Will's recent clean-slate PC build and newfound abundance of extremely fast storage got us thinking about all things storage. So this week we had a top-to-bottom chat about our current storage strategies, including the ways we are and aren't still ...
12.04.2022 161: Get Stretchy Brrr, is it cold in here? It's time to deliver our semi-annual Cube of Cold Opens: Holiday Edition, with short and pithy conversations about cramming your Fortnite homework, that loud phone life, running your laptop off of your PC, reckless ...
11.27.2022 160: Gelatinous Soup Tube We're thankful for the copious bounty of questions sent in by you this month, which got us talking about all kinds of stuff. Stuff like our love of treehouses (and mushroom soup), mouse pad technology, advanced s'more techniques, people who ...
11.20.2022 159: It's Good Brain Techsgiving is here again, as we wax thankful about some of the stuff we love in our own specific nerdy spheres. Join us for some chill discussion of everything from defying gravity (under the desk) to the simple joy of ...
11.13.2022 158: Twitastrophe Elon Musk's Twitter disaster has been impossible to look away from, and since we probably owe some amount of our careers to everyone's favorite social media platform, we had to spend this ep running down and trying to make sense ...
11.06.2022 157: Cereal's Dark Legacy This week we decided to do something radically different and "record" a "podcast" to answer some of your "questions." In the course of doing so we revealed shocking details about breakfast cereal, ran down our three-day weekend preferences, discussed the ...
10.30.2022 Special Ep: Don't Pull the Frenulum Brad is feeling under the weather this week, so we weren't able to turn Qs into As, but we did manage to find a classic Halloween episode of the Patron cast deep in the Tech Pod Vault. Brad and Will ...
10.23.2022 156: The People's Benchmark It's been too long since PC World's hardware expert Gordon Mah Ung dropped by, and what better occasion than the big launch of new CPUs from both AMD and Intel? Gordon runs down all his recent experience with the Ryzen ...
10.16.2022 155: Cyberplunk The sizable slab of silicon known as the Geforce 4090 has landed in Will's computer, so this week we did a deep dive on his experiences with it so far, ranging from basic performance to impressions of how DLSS 3 ...
10.09.2022 154: Gas Station Tri-Tip Will and family just did the Southern California theme-park circuit, so this week we had a casual chat about some of the more technical aspects of visiting Disneyland and Universal Studios in 2022. How well do the old animatronics hold ...
10.02.2022 Special FOSS Ep: OctoPrint With Gina Häußge This week, we're checking back in with the FOSS Pod--now that we're several months (and more than a dozen episodes) into its run--by presenting our recent chat with Gina Häußge, founder and maintainer of OctoPrint, along with a new intro ...
09.25.2022 153: A Time for Questions Summer may be over, but we're still here and ready to answer the hot questions from you, the listener. This month we field everything from automating household chores to HDMI-CEC woes, that time one of the Mythbusters (guess who!) built ...
09.18.2022 152: Three Pfizers to the Wind This past Friday EVGA made the shocking and abrupt announcement that it's exiting the GPU market after two decades of making Nvidia cards. We drew on Will's many years of reviewing PC hardware to look back on that span of ...
09.11.2022 151: A Dynamic Island Getaway The annual Apple event has come and gone, and we're here to run down the goings on with the latest iPhones, Watches, and AirPods. Learn more about satellite SOS and crash detection, privacy concerns around body temperature sensors, camping out ...
09.04.2022 150: Things You Plug Into Your TV We're thinking a lot about the ways you receive and watch TV this week, with a look back at the last 20-ish years of set-top boxes beginning with the venerable TiVo. Remember paying a monthly fee for TV listings, or ...
08.28.2022 149: The Rhythm Nation Test Suite We're doing some navel-gazing on this month's Q&A with a bevy of questions that came in about this very podcast: the business of hosting and advertising, research and production work, how we choose topics, and more. Plus: creating your own ...
08.21.2022 148: Neither Fish Nor Fowl: The Foo VR Story Hey, did you know Will ran a VR animation company before we did this podcast? By popular request, this week we talk through the history of Foo VR start to finish, touching on all kinds of topics like leaving behind ...
08.14.2022 147: Why Thread Matters Together, Matter and Thread are the new software and networking standards that promise to make all of your home automation and IoT gear work together, regardless of manufacturer. After Home Assistant's Paulus Schoutsen piqued our interest on the FOSS Pod, ...
08.07.2022 146: Nothing Beats Parachute Day A grab bag, a smorgasbord, a potpourri -- whatever you call it, we've assembled another batch of micro-topics to wend our way through. This time around, precision German podcasting plugins, Will's new green screen-free life (and growing array of tiny ...
07.31.2022 145: Fat Stacks of DIMMs Look, it's getting harder to think of intro text for a Q&A episode -- but it's ever easier to record one with so many great Qs! This month we tackle our fantasy space missions, a bidet breakdown, dirty dishes on ...
07.24.2022 144: The Anamorphic Squinch Brad's birthday has come and gone, which gives him the privilege of choosing our next tech year in review. This time, the banner year of 1997, which saw everything from Dolly the cloned sheep to IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue, the ...
07.17.2022 Special Ep: A Flickr Group for Martian Photographers With the James Webb telescope in the news and Will convalescing from COVID-19, we're bringing back one of our favorite patron-exclusive eps this week: the first appearance of our friend Doug Ellison from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, in which he ...
07.10.2022 143: The Ol' Dirty Bastard Adapter Will and family have made their annual month-long pilgrimage to the desert once again, so this week we ended up having a free-wheeling conversation about portable tech and working on the road. Topics include tech-savvy AirBnb hosts, optimizing your electric ...
07.03.2022 142: Flanders Is Dead. Long Live Neddy Will's longtime home server Flanders has finally given up the ghost, and now he's streamlined his life by moving to an integrated Synology box. After significant hands-on time, we get into the ins and outs of what it's like running ...
06.26.2022 141: Poor Pour Pore Technique It means being bad at researching how to use a spout. Oh, right, this is a Q&A episode! This month we discuss the potential of open smartphones, Fermi's paradox, French toast supremacy, electronics in the bathroom (yea or nay), Brad's ...
06.19.2022 140: Wes and Norm Were Right Will got his hands on his very own Steam Deck and he's bursting at the seams to talk about it, so we're back with a follow-up to our first Deck ep with an updated trip report. How has compatibility, performance, ...
06.12.2022 139: Grill Drama Is Real Drama As summer heats up, we're cooling things down with another (now-semi-annual?) cube of cold opens. Thrill! to the long and sordid tale of Will's Stripe fraud saga. Chill! at the campsite mishap that demolished someone's data plan. Spill! your drink ...
06.05.2022 138: Crank: The Unofficial Game of the Movie We've been mulling the idea of donning our game dev hats and attempting to make our own little Playdate game as an educational exercise, and this week we commit ourselves to this task publicly with a consideration of the hardware ...
05.29.2022 137: Emails Qs Are Qs Too It seems like it was only last month that we answered our last batch of questions, and yet here we are with another one. This time we address subjects like getting squashed by an asteroid (or meteorite), who in the ...
05.22.2022 136: The Hubble-ub Part two of our 1993 retrospective is here, with our consideration of the following: Power Computing's Macintosh clones, Apple's first Newton, the proving of Fermat's last theorem, happenings in SPAAAAACE including the Hubble mirror kerfuffle, the loss of Mars Observer, ...
05.15.2022 135: This Machine Is a Server!! On the occasion of Will's birth we're back for another year in review, this time taking a look at the year he went off to college, 1993 (or at least as much of it as we can fit into one ...
05.08.2022 134: Another Lane Disaster Waiting to Happen This week we're putting ourselves to the test by bringing a list of PC and tech peeves, and then passing judgement on our own complaints. Do we have a legitimate grievance, or are we just being crotchety about things like ...
05.01.2022 133: The Lady and the Samba Problem Queeeeeestions and aaaaaaanswers. This month we field Qs from you, the listener, about better electric vehicles versus better mass transit, the mysteries of the L-shaped desk, extreme climate-change preparedness, throwing bread like a frisbee (??), monitors that double as modems, ...
04.24.2022 132: The Coldest Open With Will briefly trapped in the great frozen north(ern California), we got together for a chilly, scrappy two-fer this week with a couple of short topics. First we chat about Panic's Playdate, with an emphasis on our time spent compiling ...
04.17.2022 131: Booth by GWAR It's time for another visit with Stewart Cheifet and the Computer Chronicles. This time we're heading back to 1995 for a computer games special that includes Microsoft's ill-fated DirectX event Judgment Day, a very silly Bill Gates promo video, demos ...
04.10.2022 130: The Last Home Button Standing Well, we're only about check's Apple Watch a month late to the most recent Apple event, which we're using as an excuse to talk about a whole range of topics like: the (potential) death of millimeter-wave 5G, whether the Mac ...
04.03.2022 129: Main Character Territory Will sure had a wild, weird week on Twitter following last week's, uh, historic showdown at the Oscars, and now he's here to decompress. What were the first 24 hours like? How close did he get to being on cable ...
03.27.2022 128: An Elevator Named Otis The monthly questions came in, and now the answers go forth, pertaining to such topics as these: weirdly named folders on our desktops, regrettable usernames, paltry American downstream speeds, Brad's delusions of cross-coastal VPN grandeur, an unprecedented round of answers ...
03.21.2022 Special Episode: Return of Manhattanhenge The United States Senate proved to be full of Tech Pod listeners this week as it passed a measure to make Daylight Savings Time permanent. But wait, did they pick the right time? This week we're reissuing our in-depth DST ...
03.13.2022 127: "fear, sex" Will just happened to watch a whole bunch of Star Trek: TNG when he was laid up recently, so we got together this week to decidedly NOT talk about Best of Both Worlds, Measure of a Man, Darmok, or The ...
03.06.2022 126: Welcome to the Question Store Another round of your questions meets another round of our answers this week, with queries about delayed eating habits, the "break-even" point on fixing or replacing old appliances, the mystery of cryptic crosswords, a theoretical number of monitors that's too ...
02.27.2022 125: A NUC With a Screen It's a little reunion this week as our Steam Deck-equipped friends Norman Chan (of Tested) and Wes Fenlon (of PC Gamer) join us for a deep dive into Valve's new handheld after a couple of rigorous weeks of trying it ...
02.20.2022 Special Episode: FOSS NAS Solutions Building a NAS served as the gateway into free and open source software for both of us, so in this ep we're looping back around and checking in on the current state of FOSS-y network attached storage options like OpenMediaVault, ...

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