Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

Last week was a rough one in the annals of cybersecurity, with a major vulnerability in the PHP language that runs the majority of the web, and a grossly negligent lapse in the certificate chain of trust that validates the identity of major websites. There have also been very serious exploits in Plex, the Linux kernel, and plenty of other stuff lately, so we put on our amateur infosec hats and try to make sense of all this chaos, what's driving it, how you can protect yourself, and where this all might be going.

Show notes and links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-363-cybersec

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

The year's most horrifying crop of questions has arrived (accompanied by some fun spooky usernames), and we bare our fangs as we address such topics as: 5AM air travel hacks, what to do with decommissioned Ring cameras, extending your devices' lives in these uncertain times, home VPN options in a world of rapidly increasing security issues, choosing a monitor refresh rate, Halloween candy rankings, the AI-driven Eternal September, whatever happened to the Optimus keyboard, launching your own CubeSat, and a bunch of other stuff.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Inspired by the recent 30th anniversary of the Nintendo 64's release in North America, we decided to do some reading this week and try to gain at least a layperson's understanding of how the system worked under the hood. Join in for a mostly structured discussion about the N64's unique hardware architecture, the forward-looking 3D graphics techniques it used years before Nvidia's Geforce, the origins of SGI's involvement in the consumer games space, the hype around Rambus, and a bunch of other stuff.

Show notes and links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-361-n64

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Brad's on the road this week, so we shook up another potpourri of mini-topics to discuss, including DIY VR mods, the questionable wisdom of working remotely on a brand new laptop, backing into creating a site-to-site VPN, a those vibe-coded clones of Adobe apps like Photoshop and Lightroom, high-tech tire technology, baby's first attempt at Nix (or in this case Lix), and a bunch of other stuff.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

This week we round up some news items that have caught our interest in the last few weeks. Google and Walmart have rolled out a backyard drone-delivery program for small orders. Valve is beta testing a unique ultra-low-latency video codec for Steam Remote Play. A recent circuit court decision may have wide-ranging precedent for copyright penalties around AI training data. And the Dutch government is the latest in Europe to pursue its digital sovereignty by moving from Windows to... NixOS? Seems like a lot to talk about!

The Verge on Walmart drone deliveries: https://www.theverge.com/report/1002172/potato-by-air-wing-drone-delivery

Valve's Pyrowave beta update: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/564794422009744473

The Pyrowave author's deep dive on the codec: https://themaister.net/blog/2025/06/16/i-designed-my-own-ridiculously-fast-game-streaming-video-codec-pyrowave/

Third Circuit finds AI training is copyright theft: https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/

Dutch government turns to NixOS for a sovereign desktop: https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/09/28/dutch-government-turns-to-nixos-for-a-sovereign-desktop/5299501

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

It turns out we haven't answered all the questions that have ever been asked yet, so we figured we'd take a few more from you, the listener, this week, covering topics like cell phone signal strength and the way your carrier prioritizes your traffic, ARM vs. x86 in the context of efficiency, how much vibe-coding is going on in OSs and drivers right now, open source wearable devices, how to store a Nintendo Switch for the very long term, the long and mysterious legacy of the D-subminiature standard, and more.

Sparkfun's D-sub blog post: https://news.sparkfun.com/14298

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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 next Steam Deck and beyond.

Check out Norm's Steam Frame coverage on the Tested YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9JyWAVj94E

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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 discuss the movie to ponder these and other questions about a really heady, innovative era of computing.

The documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek

AT&T's 1994 video for PersonaLink and "the Cloud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbNrqe2IgSA

1994 Wired story about General Magic: https://www.wired.com/1994/04/general-magic/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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.

The Virtual OS Museum: https://virtualosmuseum.org/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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.

Arcade board cases discussed in this ep:

https://www.scanlinecity.com/mortal-kombat-ii-3-layer

https://github.com/emilianoarlettaz/arcade-pcb-case

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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 discovered in this week's episode, with some detours into things like rclone cloud mounts, the amazing utility of the (nearly) universal format conversion tool pandoc, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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 prototype cocktail cabinets and some updates on the open source CRT chassis we talked about a couple of years ago. Finally, we briefly look at the state of refurbished MacBook Pros now that un-refurbished (that is, new) machines have gotten so pricey.

Brad's video of the td-crt demo cabinet: https://imgur.com/a/california-extreme-26-td-crt-demo-cabinet-5s2gB1k

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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 returns from Los Angeles to talk about object show meetups and the latest from Disneyland, such as high-tech face projection mapping, why the Lightning Lane isn't so Lightning anymore, the joy of trackless dark rides, and more.

Notes and links for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-351-vcfw-disney

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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 plenty more.

The VGHF's E3 materials archive: https://gamehistory.org/e3-history/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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?

Content Warning: I discuss self-harm in the context of taking health advice from LLMs from 55-58 minutes.

Links:

• Intel SR-IOV driver note on Github
• The Idea Factory
• Soul of a New Machine
• In the Beginning.... Was the Command Line
• Fire in the Valley
• Hackers
• Reddit List of Computer History Books
• Whirley-Pop

Links contain affiliate codes. Buying stuff using them helps support the pod!

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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.

If you want to try Fastmail, consider using Will's Fastmail affiliate link to get a 10% discount on your first year and Fastmail throws a few bucks Will's way.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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!

We talked about:

• Wes's Decomp and Recomp List
• MiSTer Companion
• Juaniwck's Mister Retroarch Save Sync Github
• PC Ports of Old Console Games Are the New AI Vibe Coding Battleground

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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 answer some questions from the audience.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

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.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod