Crossed Wires

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

As we hear more stories of systems and services being compromised by malicious attackers, often simply referred to as ‘hackers’, we need to be aware of the basics of how these attacks work and what we should be looking out for in our daily tech lives.

We’re probably all fed up of the increasing complexity of logging into our favourite websites and apps, but the reality is that passwords, multi-factor authentication and now ‘passwordless’ ways of proving our online identity are more important than ever.

Talking with Sascz, we try to address some of the common questions around keeping ourselves safe in a digital world, as well as wincing at some of the painful examples we’ve seen of bad security habits that make even 16309, 12345, or 000 Destruct 0 look like strong password choices.

This is absolutely an episode where we want to hear your feedback, your experiences, and maybe things you’ve learned from our discussion. Maybe you have a different viewpoint on some of the things we’ve raised, so please 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 when you sign up with our friends Linode here.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

Do you remember sitting in front of your computer with a miniDV camcorder hooked up by FireWire and waiting patiently for the footage to capture to your editor of choice, possibly iMovie or Windows Movie Maker? Maybe you were a professional editor who had to log and capture hours of footage into Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, or even AVID, and then crafting your masterpiece only to then have to render your audio separately for some random reason.

Well, Jack and Sam braved the wild west of the early days of DV cameras and editing, even using an Amiga powered NLE, to produce a video on some old film cameras for their blog. We chat about not only the experience of capturing and editing, but also talk about how sometimes the older ways of capturing moments can be more enjoyable.

Do you have any fun, or even haunting, memories of working with digital video in the pre-iPhone and SD Card era? We’d love to hear from you, so why not 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 when you sign up here with our friends Linode.

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW

It’s hard to believe that we’ve already hit our 50th episode, but it’s here and a lot of that is thanks to you, our amazing community who keep listening, subscribing, and intereacting with us across social media, email, and our Discord.

For this milestone episode, we thought you may like a bit of an insight into how each episode of the show reaches you after we record and edit it. 

We reached out to Craig Hewitt the founder of Castos, our hosting provider for the podcast, and he kindly agreed to come and chat to us about what podcast hosting is, why good quality hosting is important, as well as looking at some of the challenges of distributing podcasts across so many platforms.

Are you a podcaster yourself, or maybe you’d like to learn more about Castos, or maybe you’ve had some fun stories with podcast hosting over the years. Whatever your experience, we’d love to hear from you, so please 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.

As you’ll hear in the episode, we’ve had our own data loss incident here at Crossed Wires and if we didn’t have Backblaze powering our backups we’d have had to spend hours re-exporting every MP3 we’d ever created for the podcast. They provide simple and elegant backups for just $7 a month, and because it’s running in the background, you never have to worry about if your files are being safely backed up to the cloud. Sign up for your 15-day free trial here and make sure you never lose those important files again.

Whilst many of us have grown up with technology being such a core part of our lives, often glued to our devices for far more of the day than we’d like to admit, the older generations have had technology thrust upon them without nearly enough though about how to make it accessible.

My guest this week is Nancy May of the Eldercare Success podcast; we have a chat about how technology can be used to help with the care of elderly relatives, how we can keep our older tech users safe online, how even the simplest gadgets can help in a care situation, and possibly most importantly we look at the concept of the accessibility of modern services which are taken over by digital payments, self-service checkouts, and ask the question if we’re doing tech for tech’s sake.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on how tech can be both a blessing and a problem for the older generation, especially if you have stories to share. Why not send a note over to [email protected], leave a comment on the post, or join the discussion over on our Discord server

During this episode, we talked a lot about keeping things simple for our older tech users. One of the most critical parts of our digital lives is ensuring we have proper backups of our treasured memories within our photos, videos, and many other documents and messages. Our friends at Backblaze provide a simple, set-and-forget, unlimited cloud-based backup solution for just $7 / month, why not start your 15-day free trial here.

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