Brad Shoemaker And Will Smith Podcasts

Tech news is getting a little too surreal for us lately, so we're taking a brief trip back to a simpler time. This week we go through the very first issue of Boot (later Maximum PC) from 1996, which has everything from Jean-Louis Gassée on the launch of the BeBox to Bill Gates on the x86 PC's murder of SGI, the very first cable modem service, a mot…

Our desks have evolved since the last time we talked about our personal workspaces (Brad has even achieved the elusive Cord Zero), so we're doing an updated check-in to talk about the current gear we're working with, aspirational cable-routing, portable camera setups, gaming on ultra-wide monitors, custom corkboard cutouts, and a bunch of other rel…

Remember when pop-up ads looked like they were part of Windows XP? Dark patterns are all around us, even when we don't realize it, and this week we cover a wide range of these insidious methods of manipulating our online behavior, touching on everything from tricks to make you play games longer than you want to subtly enticing you to rope in your f…

Brad spent a whole bunch of time in the PlayStation VR 2 this past week, and given Will's previous life as the proprietor of a VR-related business, we're pairing hands-on (or maybe face-on) experience with institutional knowledge this week to dissect the ins and outs of the new headset, comparing it to the current PC fare, speculating about its pot…

Some scheduling switcharoos mean we're doing February's Q&A episode one (1) whole week early! This month we field Qs about public Unix servers, noisy hard drives, the desirability of your own phone booth, an update on that attempt at roasting weed coffee, our experiences with house plants, a goblin who handcuffs people to chairs, and more. Support …

This week we're thrilled to be joined by Marcin Wichary, author of the upcoming and extensively detailed history of the keyboard, Shift Happens. We get into all kinds of typing-related subjects like QWERTY dominance, the shift wars of the late 1800s, and 150-year-old designs that have trickled down to software keyboards, plus a fascinating discussi…

Artificial intelligence, machine learning--whatever we're calling it, it sure is in the news a lot all of a sudden. Everything about the use of AI feels uncanny enough lately that we sat down and had a free-wheeling conversation about the subject, from some basic (fuzzy) terms and definitions to Will's use of machine learning at Foo, the endless et…

We couldn't do a podcast about open source without exploring a major Linux distribution, and there's hardly a more influential or enduring distro out there than Debian. So we're delighted to be joined on this episode by the current Debian Project Leader, Jonathan Carter, who spoke with us about a wide range of topics including progress on his goals…

You sent some serious Qs for this month's Q&A, which got us talking about the intermingling of control schemes in online shooters, the best sci-fi robots, the absurdity of discount medical care, pronounceable file extensions, AI-driven customer service, putting Airtags in other devices, and the northern plight of the humble brown rat. Support the P…

It was a pretty heavy week for a variety of reasons, so we decided to discuss a variety of shorter topics this week to try to take it in, starting by touching on the mass layoffs sweeping the tech industry and elsewhere. Then we make a... Musk sandwich, first by covering the New York Times Magazine's extensive article on Tesla's Full Self-Driving i…

Will does the unthinkable this week and PODCASTS WITH HIS BOSS, as Stray Bombay head Chet Faliszek joins us on the one-year anniversary of the release of The Anacrusis to talk all things running a small video game studio. From Steam and Xbox backend tools to current engine tech, the difficulty of getting noticed in today's ultra-crowded market, man…

It's (belatedly) time to answer more of your questions, and this time you posed Qs that resulted in As about an iPhone without charging ports, cured meats, hyphy dark roast, favorite classic screensavers, favorite console boot-up animations, the rise of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, and social acceptance of CRT filters. Last month's questions, t…

On our first show in 2023, we rejoin our epic task of ranking all of humanity's software. Will we actually start putting things in order this week? Or will we get sidetracked by our love of dot matrix-printed banners? Or by reminiscing about the excitement of IRC channel takeover wars? Will Brad be flabbergasted that Will has never played Gorilla.b…

Here at the tail end of 2022, are we nuts enough to attempt to rank every piece of software ever written? OK, not quite, but we're going to do our best to assemble a list and put it in an order... eventually. If you've ever wanted to hear someone debate the relative merits of the LAMP stack versus the Video Toaster versus Super Mario 64, you've com…

Our friend Kishore Hari becomes our first three-time guest by joining us this week to run down some of our favorite science and tech stories of 2022, including the latest developments in nuclear fusion, some ML-driven mid-podcast protein prediction, the latest addition to the dark energy debate, extremely American asteroid deflection strategies, on…

Will's recent clean-slate PC build and newfound abundance of extremely fast storage got us thinking about all things storage. So this week we had a top-to-bottom chat about our current storage strategies, including the ways we are and aren't still using local drives, our fondness for portable apps, how many cloud storage services is too many, the p…

Martin Owens joins us on this episode to talk about the popular open source vector graphics package Inkscape, where he serves as both a developer and a member of the project's leadership committee. Martin shares his perspective on everything from the position of Inkscape in the digital creative market to its exceptionally distributed, consensus-bas…

Brrr, is it cold in here? It's time to deliver our semi-annual Cube of Cold Opens: Holiday Edition, with short and pithy conversations about cramming your Fortnite homework, that loud phone life, running your laptop off of your PC, reckless Thanksgiving leftovers, game console quality modes, the etiquette of (not) asking for your controller back, t…

We're thankful for the copious bounty of questions sent in by you this month, which got us talking about all kinds of stuff. Stuff like our love of treehouses (and mushroom soup), mouse pad technology, advanced s'more techniques, people who hold their phone in the toast position, more on setting up your own blog, the iPad apps Apple doesn't want yo…

Techsgiving is here again, as we wax thankful about some of the stuff we love in our own specific nerdy spheres. Join us for some chill discussion of everything from defying gravity (under the desk) to the simple joy of playing guitar into your computer, wearable tech, wireless charging, intergalactic space inside your drinking bottle, good old sim…

Elon Musk's Twitter disaster has been impossible to look away from, and since we probably owe some amount of our careers to everyone's favorite social media platform, we had to spend this ep running down and trying to make sense of a series of events that's almost impossible to believe. We also dig into some of the feasible alternatives to Twitter,…

This week we decided to do something radically different and "record" a "podcast" to answer some of your "questions." In the course of doing so we revealed shocking details about breakfast cereal, ran down our three-day weekend preferences, discussed the latest in sleep and robe technology, talked about spooky names, considered future Steam Decks, …

The MiSTer project is the most exciting thing going in classic video game emulation, and José Tejada Gómez--better known as jotego--is one of the developers at the forefront of this open-source effort to revive dozens of old game consoles and computers. José joins us for a fascinating chat about the ups and downs of programming FPGA chips, balancin…

Brad is feeling under the weather this week, so we weren't able to turn Qs into As, but we did manage to find a classic Halloween episode of the Patron cast deep in the Tech Pod Vault. Brad and Will turn Qs into As and talk about the true horrors of the technological world, self-closing doors. Enjoy!…

It's been too long since PC World's hardware expert Gordon Mah Ung dropped by, and what better occasion than the big launch of new CPUs from both AMD and Intel? Gordon runs down all his recent experience with the Ryzen 7000 and 13th gen Core parts, sits through a lightning round of hardware vendor Qs, considers whether undervolting is just overcloc…

The sizable slab of silicon known as the Geforce 4090 has landed in Will's computer, so this week we did a deep dive on his experiences with it so far, ranging from basic performance to impressions of how DLSS 3 impacts micro-stutter and game feel, installing the massive three-slot card and dealing with its new power connector, some speculation abo…

The classic open source audio editor Audacity has been around for over two decades, but the Muse Group and product head Martin Keary only came onto the project within the last two years. In this ep we talked to Martin about his extensive background in UX and how he's bringing that expertise to a project as old as Audacity, its recent rapid growth a…

Will and family just did the Southern California theme-park circuit, so this week we had a casual chat about some of the more technical aspects of visiting Disneyland and Universal Studios in 2022. How well do the old animatronics hold up? What's up with all that new Star Wars stuff? Just how much do you need your phone, really? What goes on in the…

This week, we're checking back in with the FOSS Pod--now that we're several months (and more than a dozen episodes) into its run--by presenting our recent chat with Gina Häußge, founder and maintainer of OctoPrint, along with a new intro and outro by us. Gina covers topics like the work that goes into supporting endless printer models, transitionin…

Summer may be over, but we're still here and ready to answer the hot questions from you, the listener. This month we field everything from automating household chores to HDMI-CEC woes, that time one of the Mythbusters (guess who!) built a buzzsaw-equipped drone of death, our dream interviews from throughout history, 140-year-old fire safe technolog…

Jeremy Allison has been working in open source almost as long as "open source" has existed, largely on the Samba project that facilitates filesharing between Windows and the Unix world. In this ep we chatted with Jeremy not just about where Samba has been and where it's going, but also a wide range of other topics like the Silicon Valley Unix Wars,…

This past Friday EVGA made the shocking and abrupt announcement that it's exiting the GPU market after two decades of making Nvidia cards. We drew on Will's many years of reviewing PC hardware to look back on that span of time, ponder the circumstances around the decision, and consider what's next for all involved. Plus, we dig into the slightly le…

The annual Apple event has come and gone, and we're here to run down the goings on with the latest iPhones, Watches, and AirPods. Learn more about satellite SOS and crash detection, privacy concerns around body temperature sensors, camping out overnight at the Apple Store, the Apple Watch as status symbol, Will's secret history as a diver (!), Brad…

3D printing has come a long way in a short time, and the open-source web interface OctoPrint has been easing and extending the 3D printing experience for a decade now. On this ep we had a fascinating chat with creator and maintainer Gina Häußge about the project, covering topics like the work that goes into supporting endless printer models, transi…

We're thinking a lot about the ways you receive and watch TV this week, with a look back at the last 20-ish years of set-top boxes beginning with the venerable TiVo. Remember paying a monthly fee for TV listings, or hacking your old Xbox to run an open-source media player? How frustrating is it that content has become so balkanized, just when all t…

We're doing some navel-gazing on this month's Q&A with a bevy of questions that came in about this very podcast: the business of hosting and advertising, research and production work, how we choose topics, and more. Plus: creating your own Wikipedia page (or not), Will's other life as an ageless and all-powerful being, too much discussion about sof…

Hey, did you know Will ran a VR animation company before we did this podcast? By popular request, this week we talk through the history of Foo VR start to finish, touching on all kinds of topics like leaving behind a steady paycheck to bet on an emerging technology, the overwhelming shininess of venture capitalist offices, the meaning of "bad signa…

Together, Matter and Thread are the new software and networking standards that promise to make all of your home automation and IoT gear work together, regardless of manufacturer. After Home Assistant's Paulus Schoutsen piqued our interest on the FOSS Pod, we decided to do a deep dive this week to demystify exactly what the two standards are and how…

A grab bag, a smorgasbord, a potpourri -- whatever you call it, we've assembled another batch of micro-topics to wend our way through. This time around, precision German podcasting plugins, Will's new green screen-free life (and growing array of tiny pixel art screens), a bit of desk efficiency chat, graphite pads versus thermal paste, and the shee…

Look, it's getting harder to think of intro text for a Q&A episode -- but it's ever easier to record one with so many great Qs! This month we tackle our fantasy space missions, a bidet breakdown, dirty dishes on the desktop, the future collectability of current tech, WFH survival strats, filling drives to the brim, the origin of "software," cloud-c…

We briefly covered Blender in our sixth episode, and now it's time to delve deep into the past, present and future of this sprawling 3D animation package with team members Pablo Vazquez and Dalai Felinto, who walk us through Blender's closed-source origins and early crowdfunding efforts, the increasing importance of Blender both in developing marke…

Brad's birthday has come and gone, which gives him the privilege of choosing our next tech year in review. This time, the banner year of 1997, which saw everything from Dolly the cloned sheep to IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue, the nuclear-powered Cassini probe to Saturn (and protests to match), the American launch of DVD, Steve Jobs' return to Apple…

With the James Webb telescope in the news and Will convalescing from COVID-19, we're bringing back one of our favorite patron-exclusive eps this week: the first appearance of our friend Doug Ellison from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, in which he regales us with stories about taking photos not of Mars but on it, data throughput from another planet, wha…

Will and family have made their annual month-long pilgrimage to the desert once again, so this week we ended up having a free-wheeling conversation about portable tech and working on the road. Topics include tech-savvy AirBnb hosts, optimizing your electric car, dealing with Xbox development away from home, the moment that USB-C finally happened, t…

If you're reading this, odds are good you've used VLC before. The most capable video player out there got its start in surprising ways, and on this ep we're joined by project founder Jean-Baptiste Kempf to talk about both VLC's origins and everything else, from '90s MPEG2 decoder hardware to the French Minitel system, the state of modern DRM and up…

Will's longtime home server Flanders has finally given up the ghost, and now he's streamlined his life by moving to an integrated Synology box. After significant hands-on time, we get into the ins and outs of what it's like running network storage in this sort of turnkey, integrated box, including ease of setup, hardware specs and limitations, Will…

It means being bad at researching how to use a spout. Oh, right, this is a Q&A episode! This month we discuss the potential of open smartphones, Fermi's paradox, French toast supremacy, electronics in the bathroom (yea or nay), Brad's dwindling sardine hoard, a bunch of barbecue-related subjects, mispronouncing tech, and more. Support the Pod! Cont…

The simple data transfer tool curl, and its associated library, are estimated to be installed on roughly 10 billion computers, VMs, and embedded devices around the world. For this ep we had a wide ranging conversation with Daniel Stenberg, curl's longtime author and maintainer, about starting up such an essential project back in the '90s, juggling …

Will got his hands on his very own Steam Deck and he's bursting at the seams to talk about it, so we're back with a follow-up to our first Deck ep with an updated trip report. How has compatibility, performance, and system software shaped up in the months since the device first started shipping? What are some of the fun third-party apps you can ins…

As summer heats up, we're cooling things down with another (now-semi-annual?) cube of cold opens. Thrill! to the long and sordid tale of Will's Stripe fraud saga. Chill! at the campsite mishap that demolished someone's data plan. Spill! your drink everywhere when you realize that the innocent Roblox scammers of today may become the business leaders…