Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

Magnets have been replacing potentiometers in a variety of places for a while now, especially as Hall effect and TMR joysticks have started popping up in fancy game controllers. Now magnetic switches are becoming more common in mice and mechanical keyboards, and Will has spent some time with new products in both of those categories, so we figured it was a good time to lay out how these kinds of switches work, how resistant to wear and electrical "bouncing" they are, what the heck a transducer is, whether there's quantum mechanics involved or not, and what effect these new switches are going to have on the input devices of the future.
Show notes for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-326-mag-switches

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It's been a while since we did a deep dive on our home networking and server infrastructure (what some might call a "homelab"), so it's time for the 2026 check-in to run down what we're working with these days. By request, we spend a big chunk of the episode on Brad's plain Linux NAS/server, detailing components like Samba, Docker (or Podman), and Sanoid that you'd need to set up yourself to replicate the functionality of something like TrueNAS or Unraid. We also survey Will's more granular approach, once again pine longingly after Wildcat Lake, and more.
Show notes with all the hardware and software we mentioned: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-325-homelab-update

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 two months of accumulated Qs, we felt we still had plenty of As to dispense, so we're wheeling back around to a supplemental questions episode this week, touching on such topics as generating negative mileage in an EV, what the iOS low battery mode actually does, tiny network racks for your desk, a shocking amount of discussion about shells like zsh, fish, PowerShell and Nushell, the whereabouts of Intel's successor to the Alder Lake-N... and, for that matter, why (nearly) everything at Intel is a Lake.

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 questions piled up over the holidays and now it's time to answer them in this, the first Q&A of 2026. This month we touch on topics like the splendor Gateway 2000's cow boxes, the mystery of the ENIAC, whether a shed qualifies as off-site backup, what the heck volt-amps are (and how calculus is involved), the glory days of multi-user computing, what tech today's kids will be nostalgic for in 20 years, using LLMs for troubleshooting and command line assistance, 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 get into the nitty gritty this week with a grab bag of home computing projects that's really more like a set of cautionary tales. Will discovers the perils of hanging your entire household's Internet access on a couple of older, neglected Raspberry Pis. Brad learns some harsh lessons about the power draw of a space heater and not maintaining the automation settings on your UPS. And, well, our third topic is about using an Xbox Series X or S as a Moonlight client, which is actually pretty great so far. We suppose one out of three isn't bad?

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