224: Heavy Metal Twenty-Something Swagger

What makes a great tech demo? Besides killer tech, do you need theatricality? Stage presence? The risk of everything exploding at the seams at any moment? This week we look back on a ton of notable tech demos big and small, from the largest Apple and Microsoft stages to people in their living rooms, to reminisce about some of the most exciting reveals and try to locate the exact intersection where earnestness and carnival barking meet to create a truly memorable presentation.

Show notes and YouTube links for this ep: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-225-famous-tech-demos

Our Xbox 360 deep dive episode: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/183-hiroprotagonist-loves-an-inhale

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

Book club returns this week, now that we've both read id Software founder John Romero's memoir, Doom Guy: Life in First Person. Join us for an extremely nerdy chat about Romero's early days as a teenage Apple II developer learning 6502 assembly, the pre-id team's blistering one-game-a-month output at Softdisk, technical innovations that led to id's most groundbreaking games, the internal strife that ultimately split the company, retrospective thoughts on a very different mid-'90s Doom 3 than the one we got later, and a bunch more.

Pick up Doom Guy: https://www.amazon.com/Doom-Guy-Life-First-Person/dp/141975811X

Romero's fan mail to Jordan Mechner: https://twitter.com/jmechner/status/1253777950299873283

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 month's Q&A features another bumper crop of great topics, including installing in-wall speakers and hidden audio systems, the final word on the origins of WASD, doing A/V production on Linux (really), the relative value of the Raspberry Pi in 2024, how we use bookmarks these days, our feelings on mechanical versus smart watches, and a long-awaited update on the wi-fi sheep shed.

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

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

News has been happening (when hasn't it?) and this week we're rounding up some of the stories that caught our attention in recent days. First, the launch of OpenAI's generative-video product Sora, as we consider what this thing is actually going to be used for, and what sorts of havoc it may wreak. Next, the effects of the EU's Digital Markets Act and the stringent ways that some large platform holders are starting to respond to it (looking at you, Apple). Lastly, the talk out of DICE about the state of the video game business and the likelihood of getting new projects off the ground.

Notes and links for this episode: http://tinyurl.com/techpod-222-news-roundup

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're pleased to welcome Tested's Norman Chan back to the show, fresh off of his first week with the Apple Vision Pro and ready to fill us in on everything from the fitting process at the store to UI shortcuts with your mouth, connecting to an external Mac, the ins and outs of the video passthrough (and your loved ones appearing as ghosts atop Mount Hood), and everything in between.

Check out Norm's upcoming Vision Pro video, plus all his other work: https://www.youtube.com/@tested

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 graphics settings have only gotten more complex in recent years, with new options around AI-driven supersampling, ray tracing, latency reduction, and a bunch of other stuff joining classics like SSAO. We attempt this week to step through the most common settings, with basic explanations and recommendations, as well as our experiences getting things like variable refresh to work, choosing between borderless and fullscreen, debating whether you should just let GeForce Experience do all this for you, and more.

Show notes for this ep: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-220-gfx-settings

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 begin this month's Q&A with a slightly mind-bending discussion of questions that exist in a quantum state, before falling back to more grounded topics like charging your EV out your apartment window, real-life keyboard shortcuts, why we all ended up on WASD, crowdfunding a Moon landing, speeding up your bulk photo-scanning, and the shameful faux pas of changing your profile picture.

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

Will unearthed a venerable SpaceOrb 360 in his garage recently, which sent us down a rabbit hole chasing all the weird, experimental input devices of the late '90s, back when everyone was just figuring out 3D control in the first-person shooter. Before we all standardized on mice and dual analog sticks, there were apparently a lot of different ways to Frankenstein together trackballs, dials, joints, hinges and more, and this week we try to catalog as much of it as we can.

Notes for this ep, including pics and a bunch of links to all these devices (and some ongoing efforts to keep them working): https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT-lwdhF-FAZmBOaWimIr1ExIcNW0ZYy4plcw_BKtZA7xQB5c0ZLjxRbaTCSBv2wzJk4otzOhjXRTGt/pub

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

Another Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone, and we've sifted through the highs and lows to bring you a casual discussion about the stuff that actually mattered (Nvidia's Pulsar G-SYNC tech and Super GPUs, better wireless charging, new screen technologies), the strange and ridiculous (AI-powered cat doors, a robot that parks cars, a whole-mouth toothbrush), plus a bonus lightning round where we attempt to stump each other with real versus fake products.

Digital Trends' report on the self-emissive quantum dot (or "nanoLED") display tech Brad mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eONWY3kbZc0

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 seasonal metaphors continue as we weather a blizzard of great questions from you for the monthly Q&A, this time covering everything from Swiss army knife roles in game development to replacing USB ports, the mythical petabyte retail drive, extending wi-fi across hundreds of feet, whether we'll ever see a 128-bit CPU, L-shaped desks, our auditory sleep strategies, and more.

The GDC talk about Bungie's Production Engineering role: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025970/Bungie-s-Force-Multipliers-Production

The one sheep-herding video you simply must watch: https://www.tiktok.com/@seanthesheepman/video/7312752825379884321

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