Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

This week we sat down with the 2018 documentary General Magic, about the early '90s startup of the same name that was full of Macintosh veterans who were way ahead of their time about mobile computing, online communications, and a lot of other stuff. Were they really trying to make the iPhone more than a decade before the iPhone? Did they seriously invent early precursors to USB, Java, and emoji long before those things became commonplace? Why did they fail so catastrophically? Join us as we discuss the movie to ponder these and other questions about a really heady, innovative era of computing.
The documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek
AT&T's 1994 video for PersonaLink and "the Cloud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbNrqe2IgSA
1994 Wired story about General Magic: https://www.wired.com/1994/04/general-magic/

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We're back with another hodgepodge of user-submitted topics this week to clear out some of our backlog from the summer, leading us to talk about everything from uses for a PC's real-time-clock wake feature to domain hijacking and protecting your custom email address, the origins of the octothorpe, a very cool virtual operating system museum, and lots of stuff in between.
The Virtual OS Museum: https://virtualosmuseum.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 show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

The Q&A returns for August with a variety of topics including pet-related tech mishaps, the contentious multimeter pronunciation debate, arcade boards and Super NES expansion chips, the return of physical keyboard phones, and an accidental grip of AI-related questions about web-scraping statistics, podcasters putting on new vocal identities, cyberattacks on infrastructure, and the growing societal backlash that might (maybe) blunt all this at some point.

Arcade board cases discussed in this ep:

https://www.scanlinecity.com/mortal-kombat-ii-3-layer

https://github.com/emilianoarlettaz/arcade-pcb-case

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's been a while since we checked in on note-taking apps and ways to wrangle their data, and a lot has changed with our personal use cases on that front. Will has gone deep on Notion's relational capabilities and seen how well they can support a shared knowledge base for a team of a couple dozen people. Meanwhile, Brad has done a survey of apps targeted at the individual end user, with the goal of fully owning the data and controlling how and where it's synced. We round up everything we've discovered in this week's episode, with some detours into things like rclone cloud mounts, the amazing utility of the (nearly) universal format conversion tool pandoc, 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 reach into the grab bag again this week for a selection of topics we hope will delight and/or inform. On the AI front, Twitch stepped in it this week with a belated ability to opt your streams out of use in Amazon's AI training, raising questions about just how long this practice has been going on, and we also look at some emerging novel techniques for defeating web scrapers taking fresh training data. We also touch on the California Extreme arcade and pinball show, including obscure prototype cocktail cabinets and some updates on the open source CRT chassis we talked about a couple of years ago. Finally, we briefly look at the state of refurbished MacBook Pros now that un-refurbished (that is, new) machines have gotten so pricey.

Brad's video of the td-crt demo cabinet: https://imgur.com/a/california-extreme-26-td-crt-demo-cabinet-5s2gB1k

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