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

As our politicians and elected officials debate the dangers of TikTok and end-to-end-encryption (E2EE), we need to look beyond the hysteria and scapegoating to the actual issues and how we have sensible discussions about what the risks of social media platforms actually are.

We’re joined by Rachel Hanson, a parent and elected official herself, to try to unpack what the real issues are and why simply banning social media services can lead to far more dangerous information control by our governments that could lead to more and more marginalisation of those already in need of accurate and verified information.

We know this episode may spark some different views and discussions, and we really do want to give you space to share thoughts thoughts. As long as you can follow our community guidelines, 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

As I’m sure long time listeners will know, we use Ferrite by Wooji Juice for all of our editing here, it really has become indispensable to our production workflows. From being able to remove sections of unwanted audio with a simple swipe, quickly strip away swathes of silent audio, and easily exporting audio in the format we need to get the podcast out to you.

So, it was my great honour to sit down with Canis to talk about his developer pedigree, going all the way back to the BBC Micro and the birth of ARM, all the way through to wrangling multi-channel audio, digging through a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory to find details about the ALAC format, and turning what can be a frustrating experience into one of the easiest audio editing tools I’ve used for a very long time.

Do you have stories of audio editing nightmares, have you used Ferrite to produce audio, or maybe you’ve got some questions about editing audio on the iPad. Whatever your experiences, 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

We’ve probably all had fun recently giving ChatGPT, or other AI chatbots from the likes of Google, Microsoft and others, what we think are fun and innocent prompts to work on, but do we stop to consider what we’re actually feeding these tools and where the data they return comes from and what biasses may be in the machine learning models they’ve been trained on?

We’re delighted to have Catherine join us again to take a deep dive into the ethics that surround the hype that is AI. We talk about the issues around copyright, data accuracy and vetting, biasses in datasets, as well as how these AI tools can never be sentient in the way that everyone’s favourite artificial intelligence, Lt. Cmdr Data was shown to be in Star Trek.

What are your views on the world of AI, do you have experience using machine learning and AI models in your own work or studies? 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

We’ve all had those moments, when the WiFi signal drops right in the middle of our favourite episode, or in that long-overdue catch up call with a friend or family member. But, do we know why our WiFi can drop out, or do we simply refer to any internet issues as “The WiFi is down again!” when really it’s a problem with the ISP and nothing to do with our home WiFi network.

Our guest, and good friend of the show, Alex has worked with wireless technologies for quite some time and kindly agreed to give a fair chunk of his time to help us explore some of the common myths around WiFi, the history of the technology, how mesh WiFi is a far better solution than the plethora of range extenders and boosters that really don’t help a poor WiFi signal.

What’s your experience with the wonderful world of WiFi, do you have any burning questions you want us to address, or pro tips you’ve found for your own setup? We’d love to hear from you, so please send us a note to [email protected], or why not come join the disscussion 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

Hello it’s Jae here, let me set the stage for this episode: Hop in your Delorean and travel back in time with me, to the year of our Lord 2018 when World of Warcraft was soon to be heading into its 15th year, and World of Warcraft Classic was due to come out in Summer of 2019. 

Back then, I went by the name of Frazley and ran FrazlCast, which was a World of Warcraft fan podcast. I showed this episode to James, and we both thought that it would be great to bring this episode to you as our first in a series we’re lovingly calling “From the Archives”.

I was given the honour to sit down with John Staats, who designed and built half of Vanilla WoW’s dungeons and raids. This was a lovely look into game design and the challenges that John and his team faced while building the iconic game of World of Warcraft. My friend Ali of the Dungeon Fables podcast joined me for this fun interview! I know some of you will be have been listeners of my former podcast as well! Thank you for being along for my journey.

Did you ever play World of Warcraft or Vanilla WoW? We’d love to hear from you, so please do send a note over to [email protected], leave a comment on the post, or join the discussion over 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.

Whilst your WoW data is nice and safe in the Blizzard cloud, you’ll definitely want to make sure that your preciously crafted macros, your carefully configured add-ons and UI settings, and those all important DPS reports (Hello, Peter?) are backed up. For simple, stress free, cloud backups from just $7 per month, try our friends Backblaze for 15 days for free, and get your backups in order.

Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, Sega were in a console war with their fellow Japanese rivals, Nintendo. Keen to show what they could do, they created more and more add-ons for the Mega Drive (or Genesis to our North American friends) like the Mega CD and 32X. Sega were really doing what Nintendon’t, for very good reasons!

As the 90s came closer to the millennium we also saw a new craze from Japan for dancing games, notably Dance Dance Revolution by arcade legends Konami, or Dancing Stage as it was known in Europe. These dance based games really saw a following and even to this day dance games are incredibly popular.

My guest this week is here to talk about both nostalgic experiences, especially as he’s working on a one-quarter sized all-in-one DDR mini-Arcade build using an Intel NUC, a custom input board and more lights than Blackpool Illuminations.

We delve into lots of nerdy details on the famed ‘Sega Tower of Power’, as well as pondering what may have been if Sega hadn’t ended their console hardware with the too-little-too-late DreamCast.

We’re sure this conversation is going to spark some debate, especially as we may have trash talked more than a few rivals, so we’d love to hear from you; send a note over to [email protected], leave a comment on the post, or join the discussion over 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 for 60-days when you sign up here with our friends Linode, cloud computing by Akamai

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW