Crossed Wires

In what’s starting to become a Crossed Wires tradition, James, Jae and Alex gather to discuss Apple’s latest event, which was scarily short at just over 30 mins long, making this possibly our shortest event coverage episode to date!

We unpack what the new m3 powered Macs mean in terms of performance, with Apple specifically targeting those who have yet to convert from Intel based Macs and early m1 adopters, why 8 GB of memory is probably enough for most average users. 

We’re also very honoured to join our friends at The Iconfactory in celebrating 20 years of xScope. Make sure you listen to the end of the episode for a wonderful offer.

Apologies this episode has been delayed in releasing, a few family issues have meant James has been rather distracted from his editing duties. We are working to get episodes out on a more frequent schedule, but we really do thank you all for your patience and continued support of the show.

What do you think to the new m3 lineup, is there anything you think Apple should have done differently? We’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

Of course, if you’ve decided it’s time for a new Mac, you’ll want to make sure all your important data is kept backed up – especially when you’re on the go and maybe don’t have access to that huge external drive you use for Time Machine. 

Well, may we recommend Backblaze’s cloud backup, at just $9 / month for unlimited backups your new Mac will thank you. Use this link to sign up for your free 15 day trial and help support us here at Crossed Wires.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

When we think of programming, we may tend to think of Matrix-esque nerds sat in front of green-on-black screens absorbed in code that makes less sense than a chocolate teapot, or we may think of super-star game developers bashing out the latest GTA or similar.

The reality is that programming is very much a problem solving exercise, and languages like Ruby provide a set of tools for how to map out logic and present results to the average computer user. 

Our guest this week is a long-time friend of the show, Joel Drapper, who has recently been working on some powerful new open-source Ruby libraries that can help developers speed up their work and save a lot of confusion. Joel also tells us a bit about his own journey to becoming a programmer, and points to some great resources for those who are interested to get started themselves.

We’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

If you want great pricing with fantastic customer support for all your Linux based cloud computing needs, you can get $100 of free credit with Linode, cloud computing by Akamai, when you sign up here.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

Accessibility is essential to allow everyone to enjoy experiences that they may have, in the past, missed out on due to a lack of vision, a lack of hearing, or so many other factors.

As many of you will know, both Jae and James are visually impaired, and so making one of our favourite pastimes more accessible for those with a wide range of sight conditions is a truly exciting topic for us. 

So, Jae reached out to Brandon Cole, an incredibly talented and respected accessibility consultant with credits within the Forza series, not to mention his incredible work on The Last of Us games, so we could sit down and have a chat about all of the work he does as well as a discussion on why accessibility for the blind and visually impaired poses many challenges we may not have considered before.

Do you have any experience with accessibility features in games, or maybe the lack of them? We’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

If you want great pricing with fantastic customer support for all your Linux based cloud computing needs, you can get $100 of free credit with Linode, cloud computing by Akamai, when you sign up here.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

Before we go into this week’s new episode, we’d like to thank everyone for their patience whilst both Jae and James have had what can only be described as an insanely busy (and great!) summer. We’re planning to keep new episodes coming out weekly going forward, and we really do have some great episodes already recorded.

We sat down to record with good friend of the show, Alex Lowe of The Interface, to take a look at Apple’s most recent event and their new iPhone and Watch product lines. We’ve tried to focus on the big features, rather than rattle through the entire keynote verbatim, and we really hope you enjoy our analysis.

We’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

With macOS Sonoma recently released, in fact on the day we recorded this episode, it’s always important to remind ourselves to ensure we have good backups before any major system update. 

Our friends at Backblaze make backing up your Mac, or even your Windows PC, incredibly easy with truly automated backups with simple restoration should anything happen. Their recent pricing change means that now for just $9 / month per computer everyone gets the same great unlimited storage but now with a year of file history at no extra cost.

Find out more, and get your 15 day free trial, by following this link.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

Cloud Gaming is something you might have heard about; you may have even used a service like GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud Gaming or even the recently departed Google Stadia.

Jae and James sat down with Jay Hamilton and Omega of Thoughtable Network to talk about OnLive and also the modern cloud gaming services. OnLive is the technology that PlayStation Now is built on and understanding the past is important to understanding the present. We wanted to look at the past to learn how it may portend to the future of cloud gaming.

Have you used OnLive? Have you used a Cloud Gaming service? What is your experience? We’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

Interested in launching your own cloud gaming service or any type of online service? Then you need an amazing hosting platform like Linode by Akamai. If you want great pricing with fantastic customer support for all your Linux based cloud computing needs, you can get $100 of free credit with Linode, cloud computing by Akamai, when you sign up here.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

It’s been over 6 years since Nintendo released their hybrid-console, the massively popular Switch to the world and it would be fair to say that this combination home console and portable gaming device has had a huge impact on the gaming world. 

For the longest time, the Switch was my only games system (not including my iPhone and iPad of course), and the wide range of games certainly makes it an attractive system for many people. Many a family gathering has inevitably ended up in a Mario Kart Grand Prix, or a humiliating defeat at the hands of my nephew in Super Smash Brothers Ultimate.

I’m joined this week by Chris from Switch Weekly to take a look back at the last 6 years of the Switch, why it’s so appealing, where there are some potential improvements, and what the future may hold for Nintendo’s next system.

Do you have a Switch, have you experienced joy con drift, or maybe you’ve got a game recommendation from the vast eShop library! We’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

If you want great pricing with fantastic customer support for all your Linux based cloud computing needs, you can get $100 of free credit with Linode, cloud computing by Akamai, when you sign up here.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

If you’re like me and enjoy a good novel, with gripping stories, fleshed out characters, and developed worlds of intrigue then you may wonder how it all comes together into the finished product. 

My guest this week is self-published author and tech nerd, Matt Gemmell. We talk about how Matt uses just his iPad to plan and write his stories, how he self-publishes his work and all the elements that need to come together to get a novel onto the bookshelves, both digital and physical.

We also talk about the importance of a good keyboard, and do a bit of a beginners guide into the world of mechanical keyboards, a hobby that has no doubt raised many a financial question in any writer’s relationship!

Have you delved into the world of writing, or maybe you’re a mechanical keyboard nerd who has stories to tell of your most intrepid builds? We’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

If you want great pricing with fantastic customer support for all your Linux based cloud computing needs, you can get $100 of free credit with Linode, cloud computing by Akamai, when you sign up here.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

First of all, sincere apologies for the delay in getting this episode out to you all. Editing a nearly four hour recording session down really is somewhat of a mission, especially with a full-time job and live streaming in the mix. Fear not, though, we’ll be back to our weekly episodes from now on, with new episodes every Monday morning (UK time) to cure those Monday blues!

It wouldn’t be a big Apple event without gathering in a SquadCast session to dissect all of announcements and give our take on what’s coming up in the next major software releases, as well as looking at the latest hardware, especially the Vision Pro. We’re delighted, as always, to be joined by Alex Lowe and the occasional contribution from our live-stream chat!

What was your opinion on what Apple showed off this year? Whatever your thoughts, we’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

Over the last few months, we’ve been looking for a home for all of the data we generate for the whole of Crossed Wires, everything from artwork, show notes, episode plans, all of our stream layouts, and much more.

We tried iCloud shared folders, since we’re both firmly in the Apple ecosystem, but to be blunt they just aren’t built for large amounts of data or more flexible sharing options. We were reluctant to trust our data to Google, and we certainly didn’t need all the functionality of Office 365.

Then, along came Nextcloud, an open-source, self-hosted solution that brings together so many different features like file storage across multiple storage solutions, collaborative document editing and much more.

This week, we talk with Jos Poortvliet, the co-founder and marketing director over at Nextcloud, to dig deep into the history of Nextcloud, what makes it such a compelling option and a genuinely strong alternative to things like Office 365 and Google Workspace, as well as nerding out on some of the available apps and other little gems.

Do you use a cloud service for your own data, or maybe you look after the systems for your business, big or small. Whatever your experience, we’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

If you want great pricing with fantastic customer support for all your Linux based cloud computing needs, including running your very own Nextcloud instance, you can get $100 of free credit with Linode, cloud computing by Akamai, when you sign up here.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

As many of you may know, or figured out very quickly, I’m a massive Star Trek fan, to the point that I can probably quote many episodes and movies line-for-line, with or without my dubious Shatner impression.

Growing up in the late 80s and through the 90s, there was always Trek on TV, be it re-runs of the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and even Voyager. 

Seeing the wealth of technology, like a computer you could talk to, devices as thin and light as a paper notebook that you could work on and view data on wherever you went. It seemed so far into the future, but yet here we are in 2023 with more voice assistants than Tribbles, iPads as far as the eye can see, and wireless communication that would make even Data jealous.

This week, my returning guest is a fellow Trek nerd and all round interface design guru, Gedeon Maheux from The Icon Factory. It was so much fun to nerd out with Gedeon, whilst narrowly avoiding Picard season 3 spoilers for you all. We dissect how technology has been inspired by Star Trek, and where we may have advances beyond some of the things we saw, certainly in earlier Trek.

Are you a Trek nerd like us, or maybe you’ve just seen bits of it but don’t know your Warp Core from your Genesis Device? Whatever your experience of Star Trek, good or bad, we’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

If you want great pricing with fantastic customer support for all your Linux based cloud computing needs, you can get $100 of free credit with Linode, cloud computing by Akamai, when you sign up here.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW