Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

After a couple years off, we're returning to our annual tradition of each picking a year for our birthdays that we want to review in-depth from a tech and science perspective. This time Will picked 2002 because... well, you'll see, but it gave us the opportunity to reflect on a bunch of just-post-turn-of-the-century tech trends, like weird pre-smartphone mobile devices, the venerable WRT54G, all the Y2K techno-optimistic design trends, digital filmmaking going mainstream, a truly momentous March in the Linux world, the state of file sharing and music piracy, and plenty of other stuff.

How Dinosaurs May Have Cursed Us With Aging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWOErbTL9N4

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

Somehow the news just keeps happening, so we're here to round up and chew over another handful of headlines this week. Discussed on this episode are stories about canary traps in political databases, AMD bringing true HDMI 2.1 support to Linux, Microsoft's latest efforts to open-source its history, the trend of small hardware makers releasing source assets for their devices, the long-awaited arrival of Wildcat Lake, and more, plus fun digressions into printer tracking dots, the era of DOS before MS-DOS, and more!

Notes and links:  https://tinyurl.com/techpod-338-news

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 got a project potpourri this week of things we've been getting our hands on, literally in the case of Will and his brand new Steam Controller. We talk through the ins and outs of Valve's first new hardware in a while, including button feel, a variety of use cases, what you can do with it if Steam isn't present, and more. Will's also been in the mouse labs, testing an 8000Hz polling rate and glass feet, and finally, he reports on what he's gotten out of his first month with a new 3D printer. Brad's also been down a rabbit hole on 2D printing (and has the battle scars to prove it) with some news and revelations about paper printers new and old. Projects!

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

After all these monthly Q&A episodes, you folks continue to send us great Qs every month, and this time around we dig into such topics as the MacBook Neo's target audience, Windows running on Linux, technical and corporate work jargon bleeding into your personal life, Apple's relatively quiet 50th anniversary, ultrawide monitors versus lots of monitors, using Home Assistant for everything (or not), the likelihood that every home will one day have a 3D printer, and the marvel of redundant, deterministic computing that is the Artemis flight control system.

Links for Artemis and shuttle program flight computers:

https://cacm.acm.org/news/how-nasa-built-artemis-iis-fault-tolerant-computer/

https://www.ghs.com/news/20260423_int-178_orion_lockheed.html

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900015844/downloads/19900015844.pdf

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 time to fix Windows 11. OK, that might be a little ambitious for one podcast episode, but it's at least time to step through the plan Microsoft unveiled recently for improving Windows 11 and addressing some of its shortcomings (and perhaps salvaging its brand a bit in the process). We go over forthcoming changes around the taskbar and Start Menu, File Explorer, notifications, native WinUI interface components, WSL2, device drivers, and a bunch of other stuff, plus bring plenty of our own large and small, realistic and far-fetched ideas for making Windows tolerable again.

"Our Commitment to Windows Quality:" https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-commitment-to-windows-quality/

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