361: The Definitive Hoth Level

It was a pretty momentous week in US politics this week with a historic midterm election outcome that inspired us to sit down and discuss our media consumption on election night, including the Kornacki Cam and the Giant Bombification of the Internet, plus algorithmic social media bubbles and more. We also caught up on some recent news we've been meaning to get to, like the touchscreen MacBook Pros, (minor) problems with the iPhone Duo, Reddit moving to a logged-in-only site, and the end of the Cybertruck. Lastly, we touch on some low-cost 10 gigabit network hardware and Steam Frame insert optics that we've been hands-on testing. It's a pretty packed podcast!Notes 'n links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-364-kornacki 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

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-deliveryValve's Pyrowave beta update: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/564794422009744473The 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=JQymn5flcekAT&T's 1994 video for PersonaLink and "the Cloud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbNrqe2IgSA1994 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