310: Target Has a GitHub Account

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. 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

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.Windows 10 ESU: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/extended-security-updatesWindows LTSC FAQ: https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_linksTiVo is done: https://cordcuttersnews.com/tivo-stops-selling-dvrs-marking-the-end-of-an-era/Pioneer sells off its BD-ROM business: https://www.techpowerup.com/336803/pioneer-has-ended-production-of-computer-blu-ray-drives-transfers-pddm-business-to-shanxi-group 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 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.Reverse-engineering the Sandisk high-endurance Micro SD card: https://ripitapart.com/2020/07/16/reverse-engineering-and-analysis-of-sandisk-high-endurance-microsdxc-card/Oasis driver for Windows Mixed Reality headsets: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3824490/Oasis_Driver_for_Windows_Mixed_Reality/ 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

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.‘SIM Farms’ Are a Spam Plague. A Giant One in New York Threatened US Infrastructure, Feds Say | WIREDThat annoying SMS phish you just got may have come from a box like this - Ars TechnicaWhy iRobot’s founder won’t go within 10 feet of today’s walking robots - Ars TechnicaWhy Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity – Rodney BrooksSteam will wind down support for 32-bit Windows as that version of Windows fades - Ars Technica 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

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.Decky Loader for Steam Deck homebrew: https://decky.xyz/MagicPods for ear buds on the Steam Deck: https://magicpods.app/steamdeck/The deep rabbit hole about PCIe and ASPM: https://z8.re/blog/aspm.html 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'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!Links for this episode:WinRing0: Why Windows is flagging your PC monitoring and fan control apps as a threat: https://www.theverge.com/report/629259/winring0-windows-defender-fan-control-pc-monitoring-alert-quarantineNoctua on fan placement and beat frequencies: https://noctua.at/en/fan-speed-offset-explainedStackable hard drive feet Brad bought: https://sednashop.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=95Seasonic pinout and cable compatibility info: https://seasonic.com/cable-compatibility/How to de-pin a power supply cable with two staples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6gQ5ie2Dw0Brad's NAS/hard drive setup and de-pinned cable: https://imgur.com/a/WKPwhCQ 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

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. 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

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.Skin Deep on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/301280/Skin_Deep/Blendo has a lot of fascinating writeups about their dev process and tools: https://blendogames.com/news/Sanjay's work as a games programming consultant: https://loophole.games/ 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

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.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/1m9ufwz/rpi_dev_finally_done_youtube_and/The Chicago dog: https://www.wienerschnitzel.com/food/hot-dogs/chicago-dog/ 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

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.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