We've both gotten our hands on CRT televisions recently--Will's one from his youth and Brad's a much more modern set--and we've spent a bunch of time tinkering with them, getting our MiSTers to play nicely with them, and generally enjoying some warm analog video. On this week's ep we dig into our time reacquainting ourselves with what TVs used to be like, with a freewheeling conversation that touches on all kinds of minutiae like when it might be time to replace your aging set's capacitors, trying to understand signal standards from RGsB to YPbPr, remembering the time when the only inputs on your TV were a couple of screws, and a bunch more.

Will's TV: General Electric 10AB3406WF02

Brad's TV: https://crtdatabase.com/crts/toshiba/toshiba-14af42

This is a great teardown and servicing video for the Toshiba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ij0i-xnvic

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With the wraps finally being taken off the Switch 2 this week, PC World's Adam Patrick Murray joins us for a handheld state of the union this week, with a closer look at some of the technical aspects of the new Nintendo handheld including the specs on the screen and TV output, the innards of the dock, the new MicroSD Express storage standard, and more. Then we get into the pervasive rumors about a forthcoming Xbox handheld made by Asus, analyze Microsoft's opportunity for a more gaming-centric Windows experience in the space, speculate about where the Steam Deck might be going next, 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

Links mentioned on this episode:

ShaderGlass: https://mausimus.itch.io/shaderglass

Articles on Apple's sealed/immutable system layout in recent MacOS versions:

https://eclecticlight.co/2021/10/29/how-macos-is-more-reliable-and-doesnt-need-reinstalling/

https://eclecticlight.co/2024/10/22/boot-volume-layout-and-structure-in-macos-sequoia/

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 Game Developers Conference has come and gone for another year, and this week we have a potpourri mostly focused on our experiences at the show, with a particular focus on some emerging dev tools like Nvidia's AI-driven text-to-animation system and how they relate to current labor and economic issues in the industry, some of the cool maker-esque projects Will saw at alt.ctrl.GDC, and more.

Videos to all the alt.ctrl.GDC projects we discussed: https://gdconf.com/alt-ctrl-gdc

The blog post referenced later in the episode: https://www.joewintergreen.com/if-you-want-shorter-games-with-worse-graphics-made-by-people-who-are-paid-more-to-work-less-graphics-tech-advancements-should-please-you/

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

Email hasn't gotten any less complicated since the last time we covered it, but we have tried a few new options for wrangling our ever-increasing number of inboxes. This week we dig into some of our current strategies, with a focus on Will's time using Fastmail, a paid-only service that purports to let you throw out your Gmails and Outlooks and more fully control your email addresses on domains that you own. We also touch on some of the other popular services like Hey and Proton Mail, grouse about Google's tenacious AI features, dig into our latest trip to the electronics flea market a bit, 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

The PC hardware market has finally settled down with the release of AMD's new Radeon 9000 series and no more major CPU or GPU product launches later this year. So we assess the state of the PC union a bit this week, with a focus on the new AMD cards and their dramatically improved upscaling, ray-tracing, video encoding, and perhaps most of all, price. Plus, some updates on Intel's low-end Battlemage, Nvidia's mounting 50-series woes, the possible delay of Intel's next-gen Panther Lake CPU to 2026, new rumored low-power CPUs for Brad to get excited about running a Linux router on, 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

We've done it: we've brought on Rob Zacny -- host of (among many other things) A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast -- to dissect and attempt to make sense of the rules of technology in the Star Wars universe. Join us as we consider questions such as: What exactly is it that comes out of a lightsaber? Is there a bathroom in the X-wing? How many Imperial officers does it take to fire a giant laser? Does hyperspace make any sense at all? And is there room in this podcast to discuss droid liberation? (At least that last question has a definitive answer: yes, of course.)

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 had quite a PC-heavy Q&A this month, with multiple questions about Windows 10 and 11 with the former's end-of-support date looming in October, as well as Qs about pronouncing country-code domains, the latest Nvidia 50-series electrical-connector drama, why we haven't seen much Gallium Nitride in PC power supplies yet, ways to get e-books besides Amazon, combatting the dreaded bit rot, and what it would actually mean to print a podcast.

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