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Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

Brad Shoemaker, Will Smith

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.

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27 episodes
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Avg 1 hr 13 min
English

Episodes 27

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#357
Sunday · 1 hr 10 min
357: Drag Your PC Into the Back Yard
Following up on our bonus Steam Frame episode earlier this week, Tested's Norman Chan stops by to go much deeper on Valve's new standalone headset, unpacking topics like the pros and cons of pancake optics, local Alyx versus streamed Alyx, a headset with hot-swappable batteries, prescription lens inserts, FEX x86-to-ARM translation, and more. We also wrap up with a holistic look at the entire Valve hardware ecosystem now that all the pieces are in place, pondering what it might all mean for the
September 14 · 25 min
356 Extra! - Steam Frame Edition
Valve sent us a review unit of their new standalone VR headset, the Steam Frame and we're here with first impressions, after testing it for about 40 hours over the course of a week. We talk about the FEX x86 to ARM emulator, how well it works with local and streaming VR as well as playing 2D games on a big, giant virtual monitor.
#356
September 13 · 58 min
356: Small Team, Big Thinking
This week we sat down with the 2018 documentary General Magic, about the early '90s startup of the same name that was full of Macintosh veterans who were way ahead of their time about mobile computing, online communications, and a lot of other stuff. Were they really trying to make the iPhone more than a decade before the iPhone? Did they seriously invent early precursors to USB, Java, and emoji long before those things became commonplace? Why did they fail so catastrophically? Join us as we dis
#355
September 6 · 1 hr 15 min
355: Spindly, Greebly
We're back with another hodgepodge of user-submitted topics this week to clear out some of our backlog from the summer, leading us to talk about everything from uses for a PC's real-time-clock wake feature to domain hijacking and protecting your custom email address, the origins of the octothorpe, a very cool virtual operating system museum, and lots of stuff in between.
#354
August 30 · 1 hr 9 min
354: The Dog Nose Knows
The Q&A returns for August with a variety of topics including pet-related tech mishaps, the contentious multimeter pronunciation debate, arcade boards and Super NES expansion chips, the return of physical keyboard phones, and an accidental grip of AI-related questions about web-scraping statistics, podcasters putting on new vocal identities, cyberattacks on infrastructure, and the growing societal backlash that might (maybe) blunt all this at some point.
#353
August 23 · 1 hr 18 min
353: Notes About Notes
It's been a while since we checked in on note-taking apps and ways to wrangle their data, and a lot has changed with our personal use cases on that front. Will has gone deep on Notion's relational capabilities and seen how well they can support a shared knowledge base for a team of a couple dozen people. Meanwhile, Brad has done a survey of apps targeted at the individual end user, with the goal of fully owning the data and controlling how and where it's synced. We round up everything we've disc
#352
August 16 · 1 hr 11 min
352: Tell the Robots to Eff Off
We reach into the grab bag again this week for a selection of topics we hope will delight and/or inform. On the AI front, Twitch stepped in it this week with a belated ability to opt your streams out of use in Amazon's AI training, raising questions about just how long this practice has been going on, and we also look at some emerging novel techniques for defeating web scrapers taking fresh training data. We also touch on the California Extreme arcade and pinball show, including obscure prototyp
#351
August 9 · 1 hr 28 min
351: if Name == "Will Smith" { Grade = "A" }
Brad and Will reconvene this week to talk about their recent adventures in the real world. Brad returns from the Vintage Computer Festival West once again with a recap of this year's highlights, including projects to resurrect everything from classic America Online to obscure software distribution kiosks from 1980s Japan, panels with some fun details about things like the creation of Ethernet and programming heroics on the Atari 2600, plus some Quake deathmatch against today's youth. And Will re
#350
August 2 · 1 hr 19 min
350: Mice Make Bad Decisions
Our friend Steve Lin joins Will this week for a broad discussion about hobbies, learning new skills, and preserving the past. Topics include everything from the multidisciplinary practice of maintaining arcade cabinets and pinball tables, the Video Game History Foundation's new archive of E3 materials, watch repair, model trains, preserving the institutional knowledge of diehard hobbyist communities, how to get started picking up new skills and knowing when to call it quits on a project, and ple
#349
July 26 · 1 hr 2 min
349: We're Gonna Do Some Popcorn Science Here
It's our first-ever solo Q&A episode, and Will takes on a backlog of awesome questions from the audience. Topics include Will's favorite way to make popcorn, under-volting for fun and profit, good books about the history of modern computing, the problem with Peltier/thermo-electric coolers, and what's going on with the Internet of Shit?
#348
July 19 · 1 hr 42 min
348: Vincent Caravella, Back Alley Electrician
In a wide-ranging conversation, Nextlander's Vinny Caravella sits down with Will to ask a cavalcade of questions. Topics include whether paid search engines are worth the cash, what happens when your NAS needs new hard drives in 2026, why Fastmail rules, when you do (and do not) need to hire an electrician, and what can only be described as group therapy session about the horrors plumbers face every day.
#347
July 12 · 1 hr 15 min
347: Is That The Monster from Godzilla?
PC Gamer and Read Only Memo's Wes Fenlon joins us on the pod this week to talk about the latest retro game recompilations for N64, PSX, and Xbox 360 games, with a big bonus helping on the latest MiSTer UI and maintenance updates. Sign up for Wes's Read Only Memo newsletter, it's awesome and free!
#346
July 5 · 1 hr 23 min
346: Are Steam Sales Even That Good?
This week, Will is joined by Tested's Norman Chan to dig deep into their extensive hands on testing with the Steam Machine, including how it fits into Valve's burgeoning hardware ecosystem, performance testing, how console-y it actually is, whether you could use it as a more traditional desktop, pricing in the rampocalypse, and even some questions from the audience.
#345
June 28 · 1 hr 12 min
345: I Covered This On My Livejournal
This week, Will is joined by tech journalist Florence Ion, of PC Mag, Material Podcast, and Android Faithful to talk about what Google's been up to, the inevitable encroachment of Gemini into Android, and the shocking revelation that she uploaded her Livejournal archive to Gemini. It's a wide-ranging conversation about the state of tech, good and bad uses of AI, what it's like working for a long time in tech journalism, and a whole lot more.
#344
June 21 · 1 hr 5 min
344: A Fistful of Videogames
Brad's out of town this week, so Will welcomes Expedition: Handheld and The Full Nerd's Adam Patrick Murray to run down the current state of the handheld gaming console market. We talk about Intel's new GPU-first handheld processor, the current state of x86 emulation on ARM handhelds, the pros and cons of the Analog Pocket, and a bunch more!
#343
June 14 · 1 hr 13 min
343: Siri Lives on Dynamic Island
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference happened this week, and there was enough going on that we wanted to unpack the whole thing, primarily due to the company's uncharacteristic backpedaling on its... controversial Liquid Glass UI language, not to mention the unusual focus on CPU scheduling and numerous other performance refinements across the board in this year's OS updates, rather than the more typical long list of new features. It was enough to get us saying the words "Snow Leopard," which
#342
June 7 · 1 hr 18 min
342: Faster Thinner Quieter Cooler Cheaper
Computex happened this week, and there was enough to talk about to devote this week's episode to rounding up the high points, including Nvidia's attempt to dominate the consumer Windows market with RTX Spark, the first RGB mini-LED monitors, 8GB laptops becoming common again, PC hardware production shifting back to DDR4 and old CPU sockets, Intel's entry into the handheld gaming market, the (unsurprising) absence of any news about Zen 6 and Nova Lake, and other stuff!
#341
May 31 · 1 hr 20 min
341: F2 Is My Most Used F
Question time again! This month we discuss quite a wide range of topics, such as tracking down printer dots with a USB microscope, the dream of going to SIGGRAPH, the legality of scanning and uploading "lost" old magazines, how to stay objective about new stuff as you get older, steady fan curve strategies for CPU air cooling, how to cope when you find out that cool new open source project was made by AI, renaming files like a pro, and the enduring mystery of ICQ's event sounds.
#340
May 24 · 1 hr 10 min
340: Like a Bong for Your CPU
Brad's tired of throttling his CPU due to an inadequate heatsink. Will's been spending a lot more time testing PC hardware of late. Between those two things, we thought it was a good time to do a check-in on CPU cooling, and primarily liquid cooling, so we can establish the facts on the ground about modern AIOs and custom loops with an eye toward helping Brad decide what to get. Turns out, there's more to know than ever, and yet it's also never been simpler. We also talk a little about modern ai
#339
May 17 · 1 hr 22 min
339: Billionaires Versus Dinosaurs
After a couple years off, we're returning to our annual tradition of each picking a year for our birthdays that we want to review in-depth from a tech and science perspective. This time Will picked 2002 because... well, you'll see, but it gave us the opportunity to reflect on a bunch of just-post-turn-of-the-century tech trends, like weird pre-smartphone mobile devices, the venerable WRT54G, all the Y2K techno-optimistic design trends, digital filmmaking going mainstream, a truly momentous March

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