It's our first-ever solo Q&A episode, and Will takes on a backlog of awesome questions from the audience. Topics include Will's favorite way to make popcorn, under-volting for fun and profit, good books about the history of modern computing, the problem with Peltier/thermo-electric coolers, and what's going on with the Internet of Shit?

Content Warning: I discuss self-harm in the context of taking health advice from LLMs from 55-58 minutes.

Links:

• Intel SR-IOV driver note on Github
• The Idea Factory
• Soul of a New Machine
• In the Beginning.... Was the Command Line
• Fire in the Valley
• Hackers
• Reddit List of Computer History Books
• Whirley-Pop

Links contain affiliate codes. Buying stuff using them helps support the pod!

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

In a wide-ranging conversation, Nextlander's Vinny Caravella sits down with Will to ask a cavalcade of questions. Topics include whether paid search engines are worth the cash, what happens when your NAS needs new hard drives in 2026, why Fastmail rules, when you do (and do not) need to hire an electrician, and what can only be described as group therapy session about the horrors plumbers face every day.

If you want to try Fastmail, consider using Will's Fastmail affiliate link to get a 10% discount on your first year and Fastmail throws a few bucks Will's way.

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

PC Gamer and Read Only Memo's Wes Fenlon joins us on the pod this week to talk about the latest retro game recompilations for N64, PSX, and Xbox 360 games, with a big bonus helping on the latest MiSTer UI and maintenance updates. Sign up for Wes's Read Only Memo newsletter, it's awesome and free!

We talked about:

• Wes's Decomp and Recomp List
• MiSTer Companion
• Juaniwck's Mister Retroarch Save Sync Github
• PC Ports of Old Console Games Are the New AI Vibe Coding Battleground

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, Will is joined by Tested's Norman Chan to dig deep into their extensive hands on testing with the Steam Machine, including how it fits into Valve's burgeoning hardware ecosystem, performance testing, how console-y it actually is, whether you could use it as a more traditional desktop, pricing in the rampocalypse, and even answer some questions from the audience.

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, Will is joined by tech journalist Florence Ion, of PC Mag, Material Podcast, and Android Faithful to talk about what Google's been up to, the inevitable encroachment of Gemini into Android, and the shocking revelation that she uploaded her Livejournal archive to Gemini. It's a wide-ranging conversation about the state of tech, good and bad uses of AI, what it's like working for a long time in tech journalism, and a whole lot 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

Brad's out of town this week, so Will welcomes Expedition: Handheld and The Full Nerd's Adam Patrick Murray to run down the current state of the handheld gaming console market. We talk about Intel's new GPU-first handheld processor, the current state of x86 emulation on ARM handhelds, the pros and cons of the Analog Pocket, and a bunch more!

Make sure you check out Adam's work on Expedition: Handheld and The Full Nerd!

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's Worldwide Developers Conference happened this week, and there was enough going on that we wanted to unpack the whole thing, primarily due to the company's uncharacteristic backpedaling on its... controversial Liquid Glass UI language, not to mention the unusual focus on CPU scheduling and numerous other performance refinements across the board in this year's OS updates, rather than the more typical long list of new features. It was enough to get us saying the words "Snow Leopard," which is always a good feeling. We also consider new broader parental controls, the apparently final state of Apple Intelligence and Siri AI features, 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

Computex happened this week, and there was enough to talk about to devote this week's episode to rounding up the high points, including Nvidia's attempt to dominate the consumer Windows market with RTX Spark, the first RGB mini-LED monitors, 8GB laptops becoming common again, PC hardware production shifting back to DDR4 and old CPU sockets, Intel's entry into the handheld gaming market, the (unsurprising) absence of any news about Zen 6 and Nova Lake, and other stuff!

Show notes and links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-342-computex-26

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