• 304: Gamify Your Sleep
    Sep 14 2025

    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

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    1 hr and 13 mins
  • 303: Spaceships Built for Cats
    Sep 7 2025

    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

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    1 hr and 26 mins
  • 302: The System Tray Is No Man's Land
    Aug 31 2025

    A few links from this episode:

    The musical No BS Podcast #100: https://archive.org/details/no_bs_podcast_100

    A 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

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    1 hr and 20 mins
  • 301: Will Ruined the Internet
    Aug 24 2025

    Some handy links if you want to start playing with your own virtual Windows 95 machine:

    https://86box.net/

    https://winworldpc.com/home

    https://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

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    1 hr and 28 mins
  • 300: Never Stop Talking
    Aug 17 2025
    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. 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
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    1 hr and 26 mins
  • 299: Donkey Kong Is a Florida Man
    Aug 10 2025
    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. 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
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    1 hr and 15 mins
  • 298: Don't Accidentally Become a Bank
    Aug 3 2025

    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 payment processors yourself: https://aftermath.site/steam-itch-porn-censorship-collective-shout-visa-mastercard-paypal

    itch.io reindexes NSFW content: https://itch.io/t/5149036/reindexing-adult-nsfw-content

    Valve comments on payment processors: https://kotaku.com/mastercard-denies-pressuring-steam-to-censor-nsfw-games-2000614393

    Here's the RTINGS article on types of OLEDs mentioned toward the end: https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/qd-oled-vs-woled

    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

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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • 297: The AI-Content Centipede
    Jul 27 2025
    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. 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
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    1 hr and 13 mins