Best Nice Segue Podcasts (2025)

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Episode 91: Wow, Nice Flood 42:48

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1h ago42:48

42:48

The gang’s back and somehow thirstier than ever with a new Sip or Skip drink review to kick things off. From there, we tackle the unspoken rules of elevator etiquette before flawlessly (well… sort of) segueing into a deep late-night debate about cereal after dark. Then it’s on to Sam’s Club survival tips, a wild story about Airbnb shuffling thanks …

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313: Chan's on the Move 1:23:28

27m ago1:23:28

1:23:28

It seems like this week's big salvo of Valve hardware announcements is all anyone's talking about right now, particularly the Steam Machine, and who better to fill in a bunch of hands-on details with that li'l box, plus the new Steam Frame VR headset and refreshed Steam Controller, than our old friend Norm Chan of Tested.com, who went up to Valve t…

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312: The Original Tree Puncher 1:26:25

7d ago1:26:25

1:26:25

Online game design veteran Raph Koster recently posted a new piece about how he thinks about game design, which got us talking about the history of online multiplayer, so then we figured, why not talk about that subject in a (slightly) more comprehensive way on this podcast? So that's what we did this week, dipping into topics like pre-TCP/IP netwo…

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311: The Fab Floor 1:28:43

14d ago1:28:43

1:28:43

PC World's Adam Patrick Murray stops by this week to discuss the trip he and Will recently took to visit Intel's new 18A chip fabrication facility in Arizona. Settle in for a wide-ranging chat about the upcoming Panther Lake architecture, why Intel won't have a new desktop part for a while longer, the future of next-gen chiplet interconnects, the d…

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310: Target Has a GitHub Account 1:12:51

21d ago1:12:51

1:12:51

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 n…

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309: Tivoization 1:03:52

18d ago1:03:52

1:03:52

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 appare…

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308: NEW Lake??? 1:03:54

1M ago1:03:54

1:03:54

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 technolo…

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307: I Hate Smishing 1:07:13

1M ago1:07:13

1:07:13

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 express…

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306: The Worst Thing About Bluetooth Is "Sometimes" 1:19:42

2M ago1:19:42

1:19:42

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 dist…

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305: Hardly an Off-the-Shelf Knob 1:24:26

2M ago1:24:26

1:24:26

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 doi…

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304: Gamify Your Sleep 1:13:15

2M ago1:13:15

1:13:15

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, P…

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303: Spaceships Built for Cats 1:26:24

2M ago1:26:24

1:26:24

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 ou…

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302: The System Tray Is No Man's Land 1:19:46

3M ago1:19:46

1:19:46

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 Patr…

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301: Will Ruined the Internet 1:27:50

3M ago1:27:50

1:27:50

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 sho…

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300: Never Stop Talking 1:25:48

3M ago1:25:48

1:25:48

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 go…

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299: Donkey Kong Is a Florida Man 1:14:41

3M ago1:14:41

1:14:41

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 (litera…

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298: Don't Accidentally Become a Bank 1:08:27

4M ago1:08:27

1:08:27

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-…

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297: The AI-Content Centipede 1:12:50

4M ago1:12:50

1:12:50

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 …

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296: The Slopposite 54:02

4M ago54:02

54:02

What better way to beat the summer heat than with another stack of cold opens for your listening micro-pleasure? This time around we delve into such short topics as etiquette at the EV charging station, why kids hate charging their phones, how to dispose of (or maybe just use) slightly-too-old gasoline, the everlasting value of the office crap tabl…

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295: Hacker Tourism 1:20:36

4M ago1:20:36

1:20:36

Wired 04.12, December 1996: https://archive.org/details/wired-magazine-04.12-1996-december Show notes with page numbers for everything we discuss: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-295-wired-dec-96 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 …

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294: The God-Tier GPU 59:17

4M ago59:17

59:17

Brad's historic YouTube video, "Here's Like 18 Minutes of Destiny 2 at 4k60:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIipgLFxpt4 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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293: J-ing and K-ing 1:15:30

5M ago1:15:30

1:15:30

The monthly Q&A ep is here again, and this time around we field emails and Discord Qs about managing the cognitive load of your hobbies, doing jury duty in a movie theater, site discovery on the indie web, safe ways to repair damaged power cords, websites getting pushy about passkeys, even MORE accurate network time, the high technology of modern s…

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292: Winning the Hummingbird War 1:07:38

5M ago1:07:38

1:07:38

On this week's ep, we take inventory of upcoming tech projects we've been looking into, to evaluate our use cases and pick each other's brains about what's worth sinking the time and/or money into in the near future. For Brad, that's getting a proper travel router and GaN charger for easier networking on the road, jailbreaking his Kindle to try out…

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291: Evil Finder Icon 1:20:20

5M ago1:20:20

1:20:20

Apple's WWDC and Google I/O have both come and gone, and... well, we took a look at I/O and it was practically all AI this year, so we skipped that. But Apple's annual developer's conference was surprisingly light on AI features -- in fact, the continuing absence of the AI-driven Siri and other features announced last year is itself a notable story…

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290: Earn Your Nintendo License 1:09:03

5M ago1:09:03

1:09:03

Will got a chance to attend the Switch 2 launch event at Nintendo's brand new San Francisco store and then started feverishly digging into the fundamentals of the new hardware, so this week we had an impromptu discussion about his hands-on impressions so far. Turns out there's a lot going on in this thing, from the delightfully musical new controll…

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289: Computer Shangri-La 1:03:05

6M ago1:03:05

1:03:05

Will's here with a two-fer trip report this week, one of which was a literal trip to the grand opening of the brand new Bay Area Micro Center. We dig into what a big-box retailer oriented around building PCs is like in 2025, reflect a bit on the history of other screwdriver and computer shops past, and muse about retiring into PC-builder-helper sta…

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288: High Quackuracy 1:23:55

6M ago1:23:55

1:23:55

That Q&A time is here again, and this month we field emails and Discord Qs about such things as the hopeful return of the webring, what to do with the hardware if your PC is compromised by a bad actor, Nvidia cards in Linux, using game consoles as streaming media boxes, human stenography in courtrooms being replaced by recordings (and maybe AI), an…

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287: Never Click "Show More" 1:13:01

6M ago1:13:01

1:13:01

We're reaching deep into the grab bag again this week, with a wide array of topics like the fascinating world of shorthand and stenography machines (plus an open source project to build your own, naturally), replacing your thermostat (there's open source stuff for that too), the perils of running out of data on a small mobile carrier, questionable …

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286: SheevQuest 2025 55:46

6M ago55:46

55:46

With Brad spending most of his week in a courtroom for the rest of May, we may be doing some looser episodes here and there until we're back on our normal schedule again. This week, a grab bag of tech topics for your consideration, including Will's recent work for PC World quantifying and graphing micro-stutter in game performance, the wretched use…

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285: More Free Space Than Free Time 1:23:03

7M ago1:23:03

1:23:03

By listener request, we're talking about our personal file organization and storage layouts this week, with a focus on our desktop computers--including how we use our OS-level home folders, whether to interact with the root system drive or not, and how much data we even keep on those machines these days--and also how we attempt to organize media, a…

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284: Shatner's Sap Shack 1:14:36

7M ago1:14:36

1:14:36

Where does Robocop's data spike rank on our big list of connectors? What do you do with an old cable modem or cable box? What's the fastest discontinued product in tech history (and is it the Microsoft Kin)? Where do ISPs get their Internet? Is it time to stop ripping Blu-ray discs? Is Zachtronics actually gone? Just who listens to this podcast, an…

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283: Nook NUC: A NUC for Your Nook 1:10:45

7M ago1:10:45

1:10:45

It's been 16 frigid months since our last all-intro episode, but now we're pulling the ice tray out of the freezer and offering you another cube of cold opens, covering everything from surge protector safety to thermal paste application methods, stacking storage bins without crushing them, the crazed monitor murderer who's struck again, artifacts o…

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282: You Can't Contest the Knob Feel 1:12:20

7M ago1:12:20

1:12:20

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 b…

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281: Fully Ray-Traced Metal Mario 1:18:35

7M ago1:18:35

1:18:35

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 m…

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280: Pay-to-Reject Cookies Should Be Illegal 1:13:07

8M ago1:13:07

1:13:07

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 th…

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279: $30,000 to Take Off a Pair of Glasses 1:07:43

8M ago1:07:43

1:07:43

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…

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278: rare-platypus-1372 1:04:42

8M ago1:04:42

1:04:42

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 mor…

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277: Very Ultra 1:19:15

8M ago1:19:15

1:19:15

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, pri…

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276: The Greatest Treasure of the Sith 1:51:44

9M ago1:51:44

1:51:44

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 man…

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275: The Bottomless Q Hole 1:08:13

9M ago1:08:13

1:08:13

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…

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274: A Little Bit Less Good 1:03:49

9M ago1:03:49

1:03:49

Will is trying on a new hat soon, with a newsletter about the ongoing enshittification of our collective computing experience, and some tips and tricks for... unshittifying it a bit. So this week we're digging into both the subject matter itself, and also the ins and outs of launching a newsletter, the features and policies of some of the bigger pu…

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273: The Requisite DeepSeek Episode 1:01:05

9M ago1:01:05

1:01:05

It's been a couple of weeks since the Chinese firm DeepSeek released its new R1 large-language model and sheared an enormous amount of value off of American AI companies. Now that the dust has settled, we don our AI-skeptic hats again and try to unpack what makes this model different, including how it was made so much more efficiently, what opening…

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272: Mac OSX Snow Leopard 2 1:28:20

10M ago1:28:20

1:28:20

Questions! The time to answer them is here again, and this month we do our best with such topics as the relative scarcity of nuclear energy, nested comment systems, USB thumb drives versus portable SSDs, browser RAM usage, why CPUs get faster from one model to the next, the difficulty of naming operating systems, phones without camera bumps, learni…

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271: Big Honkin' Die 1:18:14

10M ago1:18:14

1:18:14

Will's gotten his hands on Nvidia's fancy new RTX 5090 in advance of its release at the end of the month, and he's spent the last several days feverishly benchmarking it and testing its new features, so this week we dive into the raw performance numbers he's seeing, consider the card's mammoth power requirements, talk about some of the most promine…

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270: Cat o' Five Tails 1:06:32

10M ago1:06:32

1:06:32

The work of ages continues as we return (for the last time this month) to our tier list of every-ish cable and connector ever made. Such heavy hitters as DisplayPort, SATA, and USBs both mini- and micro- enter the fray this week, with digressions about obscure entries like the DFP (digital flat panel?) cable, powering bare hard drives straight out …

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269: Comically Tall Laptops 1:20:23

10M ago1:20:23

1:20:23

It's the Consumer Electronics Show once again, and there's a lot to talk about this year, so we chat this week about all the most interesting topics out of the show, including the Nvidia 50 series and its reliance on DLSS 4, new mobile chips from Intel and AMD, SteamOS-powered third-party handhelds, some eyebrow-raising Switch 2 leaks, new HDMI and…

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268: We're Pro-Thunk Around Here 1:08:35

11M ago1:08:35

1:08:35

We note the tragic passing this week of our good friend and tech reporting legend Gordon Mah Ung, with a short tribute and a bit of reminiscing about Gordon's illustrious career and the impact he made on everyone he came into contact with. Then we return to the very serious work of ranking every cable and connector in existence, with a pivot this w…

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267: Cold Boot, Fresh Browser 1:24:05

11M ago1:24:05

1:24:05

It's our last pod of 2024, and thus, another batch of year-ending questions meets our entirely professional and learned answers. This month we talk about improving your Bluetooth quality in Windows, our personal mouse grip, tech-related anime we've seen, when to throw in the towel on learning new skills, weird freebies with your tech purchases, que…

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266: Connector Mouthfeel 1:08:51

11M ago1:08:51

1:08:51

As the end of the year is here again, we're finally doing it: we're ranking every plug and connector in existence, or at least all the ones we can think of. Join us as we evaluate the relative merits in multiple categories -- like ease of use, reliability, versatility, and that satisfying tactile X factor -- of everything from BNC to XLR, Apple's L…

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265: Shuck 'Em If You Got 'Em 1:03:23

11M ago1:03:23

1:03:23

Will and family just got back from the final show of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, so this week we dig into some of the technical aspects of a modern arena mega-concert, from turning the audience into a human light show to innovations in ticket-sharing QR code technology and metrics on the mobile data being used in the vicinity. Meanwhile, Brad's been …