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 Arizona. Settle in for a wide-ranging chat about the upcoming Panther Lake architecture, why Intel won't have a new desktop part for a while longer, the future of next-gen chiplet interconnects, the difficulty of scheduling between big and little cores, suiting up to enter the fab, 30mph FOUPs whizzing around overhead, EUV machines the size of multiple school buses, getting served beer by tiny horses (??), and more.

It's that time again for more of your questions, and this month we discuss medical equipment conducting secret data collection, dangerously fast CD-ROMs, what we'd want in a brand new operating system (assuming we'd even want one), open source software made by big-box retail chains, OLED vs. LCD TVs, impassioned views on McMaster-Carr, whether or not to invest the effort to digitize all your documents, the difficulty of preserving online content for coffee table books, and more.

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 or not, the venerable TiVo line of set-top TV recorders was still in service right up until this past week, so we pay tribute to this product that changed everything in the television space (and apparently the open source licensing space). Of course, we also have to do a check-in with Windows 10 now that its EOL date has come and gone, and the options for extended support have become clearer. Lastly, we wrap up with some tidbits about the rapid disappearance of the BD-ROM drive from retail, the end of AOL's dial-up service, and more.

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 talks about USB-C-to-SATA adapters that can power 3.5" hard drives, Switch 2 grips that actually work, a long term stress test of the under-desk hanging PC, and radical innovations in nanotape technology. Meanwhile, Brad tries out high-endurance SD cards that will hopefully be the last storage you'll need to buy for your Raspberry Pi, plus the unexpected homebrew driver resurrecting Windows Mixed Reality headsets, a much-improved experience with the PlayStation VR2 on PC, and more.

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 favorite subject, SMS spam, one involving an organized crime ring and the other vulnerable everyday infrastructure. Then we move on to a recent blog post by one of iRobot's founders, in which he expresses extreme wariness about the safety of humans interacting with humanoid robots. Lastly, with only a week and change to go until Windows 10 EOL, we look at Valve's ending support for the 32-bit Steam client (and the end of 32-bit Windows in general) and some predictions for how things might go when the deadline comes... assuming Microsoft doesn't blink at the last minute.

Question time is here again, and this month we attempt to provide answers about subjects such as homebrew on the Steam Deck, outsourcing the university network support, buying phones just to trade them in, grifters getting angry about game engines, why storefronts still bog down and crash in 2025, monitoring your home server energy use, how to distinguish drop-shipped knock-offs from the genuine article, and more.

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 hopefully find informative. We get into Microsoft's crackdown on the vulnerability in FanControl and other popular monitoring software, attempting to corral fan settings in UEFI as an alternative, and doing battle with the dreaded beat frequencies that can result from adjacent fan placement. Brad also gives a full trip report on his attempt to power a stack of hard drives with an external ATX power supply, with a detour into handy tips for de-pinning a modular power supply cable, stacking multiple hard drives, and more. And Will touches on his recent experience building a new studio PC in a rack-mounted case, plus some tidbits about the last electronics flea market of the year, Linux thread scheduling, Brad's first trip to Micro Center, Will's shiny new CRT (yes, another one), and more!

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 features and accessories in the 17 Pro, significant health and sleep features in the next Apple Watch, third-gen AirPods Pro, ceramic coating all over basically everything, and perhaps most importantly, Pro-level features and a pretty generous starting storage option trickling down to the base iPhone 17 model. We sit down to run through all this new tech, ponder our upgrade likelihood, marvel at vapor chambers and unibody phone frames, and more.

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 Skin Deep running on a modified version of the Doom 3 engine. Sounds like a Tech Pod topic to us! We're delighted to be joined by Brendon Chung and Sanjay Madhav this week to dig into all the ins and outs of their process making Skin Deep, including working with 20-year-old code, making smart use of features that existed in the original game, restoring algorithms whose patents have since expired, figuring out what to enhance and what to rip out, and plenty of other intriguing subjects.

The end-of-month question session is here, bringing discussions about the sudden retail disappearance of optical drives, the cyberdeck phenomenon, why some game-streaming services look better than others, inconsistent tray behavior and other user-interface pet peeves, periodic keyboard maintenance, pickle relish faux pas, that time Will turned a Maximum PC podcast into a musical, and more.

Right smack dab on its 30th birthday, we're here this week to celebrate three decades of Windows 95 with a wide-ranging conversation about what might still be the most hyped computing product in history. We cover everything from the state of PCs beforehand to the enormous marketing blitz, delivery day, the install and upgrade process, bundled software, the multimedia goodies on the CD, the transformative power of built-in TCP/IP and Internet support, Will's shocking participation in the Eternal September, and a bunch of other stuff.

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 in the tech world since we posted our first ep in September 2019. Turns out, uh, a lot has happened since then, from scammy Valley bros pivoting through crypto, NFTs, and AI, to streaming services going from beloved to reviled, electric vehicles actually becoming a practical thing, a lot of unsuccessful attempts to knock the dominant social platforms off their pedestals, handheld gaming becoming incredibly robust, and a bunch of other trends to consider.

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 refrigeration and food-safety basics, product minimalism and applying the Unix philosophy to home ownership, and more. And Will just got back from Super Mario Land in Hollywood, so we go through a (literal) trip report about the experience and the tech underpinning it, from Amiibo wristbands to augmented-reality Mario Kart, ways to stay off your phone in a theme park, and a startling encounter with Bowser Jr.

Steam and itch.io have recently come under fire from some of their payment processors for hosting adult content, leading to the removal of a lot of that content and a resulting backlash about whether these sorts of financial companies should have this kind of influence at all. So this week we did a primer on what exactly a modern payment processor is, how it relates to banks, where it sits in the tech stack that facilitates a modern purchase or other financial transaction, the sorts of terms and rates it offers to merchants, and more. We also ruminate on the specific situation playing out in the online games retail space, and also take a few more of your questions at the end of the episode.

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, our thoughts on ad-blocking as people who used to subsist on ads, how to blog about a tech project, why you shouldn't listen to podcasts (or maybe anything) on Spotify, a whole bunch about electricity and power supplies, why geolocating sometimes gets weird, the surprising prevalence of WhirlyBall even 30 years later, plus tidbits about Cheerwine, bears, and a bunch of other stuff.

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 short topics as etiquette at the EV charging station, why kids hate charging their phones, how to dispose of (or maybe just use) slightly-too-old gasoline, the everlasting value of the office crap table, how procedural generation is weighted in game content, why more products should be like the modern glue stick, and more.

It's time to reach back into the tech magazine archive again, and this time we landed on the December 1996 issue of Wired, from the early, independent years before the magazine became part of a massive corporation. The whopping 300-page issue features an enormous cover story by Neal Stephenson, who follows the laying of what was at the time the longest undersea fiber optic cable in the world, plus stories that are still relevant today about digital surveillance, AI-driven financial trading, the evolution of the laptop, the beginning of modern ad tracking and consumer data collection, and plenty more. Join us as we do our best to dig through this time capsule and remember that uniquely '90s spirit of the times around the early Internet.

We're back with another installment in our (annual?) series of Products That Changed Everything (cue the theme music). This time it's the venerable Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, which we chose on the occasion of Nvidia recently announcing that it's preparing to wind down driver support for the 10 series and end-of-life the card. We get into why this was a killer bang-for-the-buck GPU with such unusual longevity, how it ushered in 4k gaming, what set it apart from previous Ti cards, how it changed expectations for PC gaming hardware going forward, some viable upgrade paths for people still looking to replace a 1080 Ti on the cheap, and more.

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 duty in a movie theater, site discovery on the indie web, safe ways to repair damaged power cords, websites getting pushy about passkeys, even MORE accurate network time, the high technology of modern sports broadcasting, and more.

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 what's worth sinking the time and/or money into in the near future. For Brad, that's getting a proper travel router and GaN charger for easier networking on the road, jailbreaking his Kindle to try out that KOReader magic, and, uh, maybe someday setting up a local network time server. On Will's side, there's getting set up to take advantage of the Twitch 1440p beta, finding ways to utilize a USB-connected multi-foot pedal, and building an outdoor IP camera rig with the optics and shutter speed to properly document the ongoing hummingbird fracas outside his house. An episode as ambitious as it is speculative!