Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

The year's most horrifying crop of questions has arrived (accompanied by some fun spooky usernames), and we bare our fangs as we address such topics as: 5AM air travel hacks, what to do with decommissioned Ring cameras, extending your devices' lives in these uncertain times, home VPN options in a world of rapidly increasing security issues, choosing a monitor refresh rate, Halloween candy rankings, the AI-driven Eternal September, whatever happened to the Optimus keyboard, launching your own CubeSat, and a bunch of other stuff.

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Inspired by the recent 30th anniversary of the Nintendo 64's release in North America, we decided to do some reading this week and try to gain at least a layperson's understanding of how the system worked under the hood. Join in for a mostly structured discussion about the N64's unique hardware architecture, the forward-looking 3D graphics techniques it used years before Nvidia's Geforce, the origins of SGI's involvement in the consumer games space, the hype around Rambus, and a bunch of other stuff.
Show notes and links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-361-n64

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 on the road this week, so we shook up another potpourri of mini-topics to discuss, including DIY VR mods, the questionable wisdom of working remotely on a brand new laptop, backing into creating a site-to-site VPN, a those vibe-coded clones of Adobe apps like Photoshop and Lightroom, high-tech tire technology, baby's first attempt at Nix (or in this case Lix), 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

This week we round up some news items that have caught our interest in the last few weeks. Google and Walmart have rolled out a backyard drone-delivery program for small orders. Valve is beta testing a unique ultra-low-latency video codec for Steam Remote Play. A recent circuit court decision may have wide-ranging precedent for copyright penalties around AI training data. And the Dutch government is the latest in Europe to pursue its digital sovereignty by moving from Windows to... NixOS? Seems like a lot to talk about!
The Verge on Walmart drone deliveries: https://www.theverge.com/report/1002172/potato-by-air-wing-drone-delivery
Valve's Pyrowave beta update: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/564794422009744473
The Pyrowave author's deep dive on the codec: https://themaister.net/blog/2025/06/16/i-designed-my-own-ridiculously-fast-game-streaming-video-codec-pyrowave/
Third Circuit finds AI training is copyright theft: https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/
Dutch government turns to NixOS for a sovereign desktop: https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/09/28/dutch-government-turns-to-nixos-for-a-sovereign-desktop/5299501

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

It turns out we haven't answered all the questions that have ever been asked yet, so we figured we'd take a few more from you, the listener, this week, covering topics like cell phone signal strength and the way your carrier prioritizes your traffic, ARM vs. x86 in the context of efficiency, how much vibe-coding is going on in OSs and drivers right now, open source wearable devices, how to store a Nintendo Switch for the very long term, the long and mysterious legacy of the D-subminiature standard, and more.
Sparkfun's D-sub blog post: https://news.sparkfun.com/14298

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