Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

317: Schrödinger's AirPod

14 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's briskly, unusually cold here in the Bay Area this year, so what better time to crack open another tray of cold opens for your bite-size listening...

316: I Don't Like the Sparkle

07 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Things are getting so dire in the PC-building space that we had to revisit the subject again this week, primarily to discuss the sudden and shocking e...

315: Work-in-Progress Till I Die

30 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The end of November brings a fresh crop of your questions, this month addressing subjects like getting lost in a corporation's Kafka-esque support inf...

314: We Hope, We Wish, We Ask, We Request

23 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's a news roundup this week, with a ton of recent goings on to discuss, including the sudden explosion in RAM prices (and a similar looming problem ...

313: Chan's on the Move

16 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It seems like this week's big salvo of Valve hardware announcements is all anyone's talking about right now, particularly the Steam Machine, and who b...

312: The Original Tree Puncher

09 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Online game design veteran Raph Koster recently posted a new piece about how he thinks about game design, which got us talking about the history of on...

311: The Fab Floor

02 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

PC World's Adam Patrick Murray stops by this week to discuss the trip he and Will recently took to visit Intel's new 18A chip fabrication facility in ...

310: Target Has a GitHub Account

26 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's that time again for more of your questions, and this month we discuss medical equipment conducting secret data collection, dangerously fast CD-RO...

309: Tivoization

19 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A bunch of products and services seem to be going end-of-life all at once right now, so we did a round-up of some notable ones this week. Believe it o...

308: NEW Lake???

12 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's been a bit since we did a roundup of tools and tricks that are making our tech lives a little easier, so we're doing that again this week! Will t...

307: I Hate Smishing

05 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A handful of news stories have caught our eye recently, so we're rounding them up this week. We start with a pair of stories about everyone's least fa...

306: The Worst Thing About Bluetooth Is "Sometimes"

28 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Question time is here again, and this month we attempt to provide answers about subjects such as homebrew on the Steam Deck, outsourcing the universit...

305: Hardly an Off-the-Shelf Knob

21 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We've been tinkering with a lot of esoteric PC hardware stuff lately, so we're here with a roundup on what we've been up to this week that you'll hope...

304: Gamify Your Sleep

14 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Apple really brought the goods to its iPhone 17 event this week, with a freakishly thin phone in the new iPhone Air, major production-level video feat...

303: Spaceships Built for Cats

07 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For years, Blendo Games has been releasing its unique brand of systems-driven games on open source id Software tech, most recently with this year's Sk...

302: The System Tray Is No Man's Land

31 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A few links from this episode:The musical No BS Podcast #100: https://archive.org/details/no_bs_podcast_100A particularly cool cyberdeck: https://www....

301: Will Ruined the Internet

24 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Some handy links if you want to start playing with your own virtual Windows 95 machine:https://86box.net/https://winworldpc.com/homehttps://www.vogons...

300: Never Stop Talking

17 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Have we really done 300 episodes of this podcast? We have now! To mark the occasion, we're taking a look back at a lot of the things that have changed...

299: Donkey Kong Is a Florida Man

10 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's a topic two-fer! Brad's refrigerator died last week, which gives us a chance to talk about online appliance-buying on a budget in 2025, some refr...

298: Don't Accidentally Become a Bank

03 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The situation we talked about in the episode is evolving pretty rapidly; here are some of the latest updates since we recorded:Info on how to contact ...

297: The AI-Content Centipede

27 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's the monthly question time again, and this month we talk about what's going to happen when AI is only left with AI-generated content to consume, o...

296: The Slopposite

20 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What better way to beat the summer heat than with another stack of cold opens for your listening micro-pleasure? This time around we delve into such s...

295: Hacker Tourism

13 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Wired 04.12, December 1996: https://archive.org/details/wired-magazine-04.12-1996-decemberShow notes with page numbers for everything we discuss: http...

294: The God-Tier GPU

06 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Brad's historic YouTube video, "Here's Like 18 Minutes of Destiny 2 at 4k60:"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIipgLFxpt4 Support the Pod! Contribut...

293: J-ing and K-ing

29 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The monthly Q&A ep is here again, and this time around we field emails and Discord Qs about managing the cognitive load of your hobbies, doing jury du...

292: Winning the Hummingbird War

22 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's ep, we take inventory of upcoming tech projects we've been looking into, to evaluate our use cases and pick each other's brains about w...

291: Evil Finder Icon

15 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Apple's WWDC and Google I/O have both come and gone, and... well, we took a look at I/O and it was practically all AI this year, so we skipped that. B...

290: Earn Your Nintendo License

08 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Will got a chance to attend the Switch 2 launch event at Nintendo's brand new San Francisco store and then started feverishly digging into the fundame...

289: Computer Shangri-La

01 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Will's here with a two-fer trip report this week, one of which was a literal trip to the grand opening of the brand new Bay Area Micro Center. We dig ...

288: High Quackuracy

25 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

That Q&A time is here again, and this month we field emails and Discord Qs about such things as the hopeful return of the webring, what to do with the...

287: Never Click "Show More"

18 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We're reaching deep into the grab bag again this week, with a wide array of topics like the fascinating world of shorthand and stenography machines (p...

286: SheevQuest 2025

11 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

With Brad spending most of his week in a courtroom for the rest of May, we may be doing some looser episodes here and there until we're back on our no...

285: More Free Space Than Free Time

04 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

By listener request, we're talking about our personal file organization and storage layouts this week, with a focus on our desktop computers--includin...

284: Shatner's Sap Shack

27 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Where does Robocop's data spike rank on our big list of connectors? What do you do with an old cable modem or cable box? What's the fastest discontinu...

283: Nook NUC: A NUC for Your Nook

20 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's been 16 frigid months since our last all-intro episode, but now we're pulling the ice tray out of the freezer and offering you another cube of co...

282: You Can't Contest the Knob Feel

13 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We've both gotten our hands on CRT televisions recently--Will's one from his youth and Brad's a much more modern set--and we've spent a bunch of time ...

281: Fully Ray-Traced Metal Mario

06 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

With the wraps finally being taken off the Switch 2 this week, PC World's Adam Patrick Murray joins us for a handheld state of the union this week, wi...

280: Pay-to-Reject Cookies Should Be Illegal

30 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Links mentioned on this episode:ShaderGlass: https://mausimus.itch.io/shaderglassArticles on Apple's sealed/immutable system layout in recent MacOS ve...

279: $30,000 to Take Off a Pair of Glasses

23 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Game Developers Conference has come and gone for another year, and this week we have a potpourri mostly focused on our experiences at the show, wi...

278: rare-platypus-1372

16 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Email hasn't gotten any less complicated since the last time we covered it, but we have tried a few new options for wrangling our ever-increasing numb...

277: Very Ultra

09 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The PC hardware market has finally settled down with the release of AMD's new Radeon 9000 series and no more major CPU or GPU product launches later t...

276: The Greatest Treasure of the Sith

02 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We've done it: we've brought on Rob Zacny -- host of (among many other things) A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast -- to dissect and attempt to ...

275: The Bottomless Q Hole

23 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We had quite a PC-heavy Q&A this month, with multiple questions about Windows 10 and 11 with the former's end-of-support date looming in October, as w...

274: A Little Bit Less Good

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Will is trying on a new hat soon, with a newsletter about the ongoing enshittification of our collective computing experience, and some tips and trick...

273: The Requisite DeepSeek Episode

09 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's been a couple of weeks since the Chinese firm DeepSeek released its new R1 large-language model and sheared an enormous amount of value off of Am...

272: Mac OSX Snow Leopard 2

02 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Questions! The time to answer them is here again, and this month we do our best with such topics as the relative scarcity of nuclear energy, nested co...

271: Big Honkin' Die

26 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Will's gotten his hands on Nvidia's fancy new RTX 5090 in advance of its release at the end of the month, and he's spent the last several days feveris...

270: Cat o' Five Tails

19 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The work of ages continues as we return (for the last time this month) to our tier list of every-ish cable and connector ever made. Such heavy hitters...

269: Comically Tall Laptops

12 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's the Consumer Electronics Show once again, and there's a lot to talk about this year, so we chat this week about all the most interesting topics o...

268: We're Pro-Thunk Around Here

05 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We note the tragic passing this week of our good friend and tech reporting legend Gordon Mah Ung, with a short tribute and a bit of reminiscing about ...

267: Cold Boot, Fresh Browser

29 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It's our last pod of 2024, and thus, another batch of year-ending questions meets our entirely professional and learned answers. This month we talk ab...

266: Connector Mouthfeel

22 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As the end of the year is here again, we're finally doing it: we're ranking every plug and connector in existence, or at least all the ones we can thi...

265: Shuck 'Em If You Got 'Em

15 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Will and family just got back from the final show of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, so this week we dig into some of the technical aspects of a modern aren...

264: Will's Congressman's Enormous Wang

08 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Two momentous events have recently rocked the computing world: First, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger abruptly stepped down this week, less than four years af...

263: The Smith Chart Is S-Tier

01 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The monthly Q&A commenceth again, with emails and Discord Qs positively pouring in about the origin of the flange effect, why all the electrical outle...

262: Mrs. Collier Was a Real One

24 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

American Thanksgiving draws near, so it's time again for our annual recitation of techie stuff that we're thankful for. From tangible products on your...

261: A Big Black Slab of Shame

17 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We're back again with that floral favorite, the potpourri episode. This time it's a project potpourri, touching on some tech-related projects we've ei...

260: CPUs Have Been Juicing for Too Long

10 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It's been a wild few months in CPUs, with next-generation releases from both AMD and Intel in their respective Zen 5 and Arrow Lake categories. Now th...

259: Hey Google, It's Time for Bed!

03 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We're here at the end of the spookiest month and ready to field your questions once again, this time addressing subjects such as alternative file mana...

258: Some Real MacGyver #$@!%

27 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Brad's back from Western North Carolina, so it's time for a casual debriefing on being out there for two and a half weeks dealing with the Hurricane H...

257: Fire Copilot Down the Cortana Hole

20 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Wes Fenlon stops by this week to help Will run down all the new features and changes in the 24H2 update to Windows 11, from better quick settings to W...

256: Gotta Get That Smooth 40

13 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Adam Patrick Murray, PC World's handheld PC gaming expert, drops by to talk about the current state of the handheld union. We discuss what's going on ...

255: Don't Ask the AI For a Recipe

06 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Norman Chan has seen the future of eyewear and it is... well, not something you can buy, or even try. But he's donned Meta's Orion AR glasses and has ...

254: How to Hide Your Sardine Bricks

29 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Questions! You ask 'em, we answer 'em. This month, we field Qs about such subjects as migrating search engines to Kagi (or at least just away from Goo...

253: My Three DACs

22 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Will's out this week, so Nextlander's Vinny Caravella stops by for a freewheeling gab session about what he's been up to in tech lately, including the...

252: Frames Win Games

15 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It was a really big week for hardware announcements, with Sony finally filling in the details on the PlayStation 5 Pro, and Apple announcing new phone...

251: That 6GHz Really Tied the Spectrum Together

08 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The world is steadily moving on to Wi-Fi 7 (or 802.11be, if you like), so we figured it's about time we sit down and attempt to understand what separa...

250: The Arbiters of Authentication

01 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week we put our security expert* hats back on to talk about the latest hotness in login technology, passkeys. Find out how passkeys work, how the...

249: Good Enough Is Good Enough

25 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Qs that we attempt to A in this month's question-fest include: What are some less obvious benefits of portable apps? How trustworthy is a package ...

248: Peace, Love, and Old Computers

18 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Our good friend Steve Lin joins us to run down the trip he and Brad recently took to the Vintage Computer Festival: West Coast Edition, hosted in Moun...

247: What's in Your Tray?

11 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We got a listener request to talk about our ride-or-die software, the apps we just can't live without, and we thought a good way to focus that subject...

246: The Guy-in-Chicago Problem

04 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Matchmaking: it's hard. Wait, not the online dating kind (well, maybe that too) but the kind where you have to match a bunch of different players with...

245: RGB Has Gone Too Far

28 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Q&A time! The last episode of July sees us discussing topics such as turning a childhood computer into a VM, mandatory open source software in governm...

244: Otaku Christmas

21 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We're putting the time machine back into service again this week with another magazine review, this time of Next Generation issue 36 from December 199...

243: "F***ing Boeing, Holy S***"

14 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week we discuss a three-fer of mini-topics from current events. First we take a look at Boeing's troubled Starliner test flight that's left a pai...

242: Skittles Exterior, M&Ms Interior

07 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We're back with another hot month's worth of your questions to answer, this time addressing such wide-ranging subjects as easy ways to defeat Blu-ray ...

241: The Computruth About Computex

30 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week, Friend of the Show Adam Patrick Murray from PC World joins Will to share the ground truth about Computex. Freshly returned from Taipei, Ada...

240: The Mouse That Changed Everything

23 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We're taking another close look at a product that broke out and redefined its entire category, this time the venerable IntelliMouse Explorer. These da...

239: Calculator on an iPad?!

16 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference has come and gone again, and frankly there were enough interesting additions to the company's various OSs tha...

238: The Dread of Sitting in the Cone Zone

09 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Will just traded in the ol' Chevy Bolt for a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5, so it's time to run down all the pros and cons of this newer and more robust electr...

237: Should We Really Be Teaching Machines to Lie?

02 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Microsoft has announced some... controversial new AI-driven features coming to Windows 11, so we thought it was time to dissect the Copilot+ PC spec a...

236: Not an Egg, Not Yet a Chicken

26 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It's another Q&A episode, and this month we get into a wide range of topics including our haul from the electronics flea market, our growing appreciat...

235: The Diabolical Nature of Ear Bones

19 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We've got another two-fer of mini-topics this week around projects we've been tinkering with lately. First, Will has been investigating ways to get th...

234: One Step Closer to Bringing Back Webrings

12 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Hey, remember RSS? Friend of the show Wes Fenlon joins us for a record fourth (!!) time to reminisce about the glory days of really simple syndication...

233: My Wife Is a LaserDisc Guy

05 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We're embarking on a two-part rundown of home video formats this week, with part one focusing on analog video up through the mid-1990s and covering bi...

232: Secret Search Engine!

28 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

April concludes with another round of questions, during which we entertain the idea of inviting Q to assist us with Qs, Will teases a historic search ...

231: What on Earth Would Ordinary People Want With Computers?

21 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The time has come for our deep dive into Pirates of Silicon Valley, the 1999 made-for-TNT movie that chronicles the parallel rises of Apple and Micros...

230: Maybe Gentoo Was Right All Along

14 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week we attempt to unpack the recent, historic security breach in the open source world, after the discovery of a secret backdoor that was insert...

229: IMAX, the TikTok of Film Projection

07 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We're doing a follow-up Q&A this week while we sort out some scheduling hurdles on the backend, and taking a bunch more of your questions from the las...

228: Never Forward a Port to Your Brain

31 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

March's Q&A features a wide array of questions that inspired discussions about such wide-ranging topics as our love of screensavers, a world without G...

227: A Donut of Good Internet

24 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Inspired by what's probably the most common subject we see questions about on our Discord, this week we're doing an updated primer on home networking,...

226: shooter.exe

17 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We've got a two-fer this week, with a pair of topics that might not have filled a whole ep on their own but turn out to be two great podcast tastes th...

225: The Goldblum Conjecture

10 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What makes a great tech demo? Besides killer tech, do you need theatricality? Stage presence? The risk of everything exploding at the seams at any mom...

224: Heavy Metal Twenty-Something Swagger

03 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Book club returns this week, now that we've both read id Software founder John Romero's memoir, Doom Guy: Life in First Person. Join us for an extreme...

223: Our Favorite Corporate Besties

25 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This month's Q&A features another bumper crop of great topics, including installing in-wall speakers and hidden audio systems, the final word on the o...

222: War of the Chatbots

18 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

News has been happening (when hasn't it?) and this week we're rounding up some of the stories that caught our attention in recent days. First, the lau...

221: Cluck to Home Screen

11 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We're pleased to welcome Tested's Norman Chan back to the show, fresh off of his first week with the Apple Vision Pro and ready to fill us in on every...

220: Hit That Optimize Button

04 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

PC graphics settings have only gotten more complex in recent years, with new options around AI-driven supersampling, ray tracing, latency reduction, a...

219: The Mark of Expertise

28 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We begin this month's Q&A with a slightly mind-bending discussion of questions that exist in a quantum state, before falling back to more grounded top...

218: Products People Love

21 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Will unearthed a venerable SpaceOrb 360 in his garage recently, which sent us down a rabbit hole chasing all the weird, experimental input devices of ...