Our good friend Steve Lin joins us to run down the trip he and Brad recently took to the Vintage Computer Festival: West Coast Edition, hosted in Mountain View, CA's wonderful Computer History Museum. Did you ever wonder about the strange arrow-key layout of early Soviet computers? Or how to build your own CRT out of a tube you found on the sidewalk? Or what it takes to rebuild the entirety of the early online service Prodigy from scratch? Or about the time Intel shoved a hundred 286s into a single computer? Then this is the episode for you!

Show notes and links for this episode: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-248-vcf-west

Our photos and videos from the festival: https://photos.app.goo.gl/KW4WX6tYLyjyamYXA

You should really see the home page for the VCF Midwest in Chicago: https://vcfmw.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

We got a listener request to talk about our ride-or-die software, the apps we just can't live without, and we thought a good way to focus that subject was to step through everything we've got on our taskbar, running in the system tray, and pinned to the Start menu. Listen in as we talk through our workflows that feature all sorts of both well known and obscure software for media editing and playback, hardware monitoring, file management, Windows GUI tweaks and tricks, and plenty of other stuff. Hopefully, you'll come away with some new favorite apps, too!

Links to some of the more obscure applications we discussed:

Everything: https://www.voidtools.com/

mpv: https://mpv.io/

MusicBee: https://www.getmusicbee.com/

EarTrumpet: https://eartrumpet.app/

SumatraPDF: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/

WinMerge: https://winmerge.org/

WizTree: https://diskanalyzer.com/

LosslessCut: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

Auto Dark Mode: https://github.com/AutoDarkMode/Windows-Auto-Night-Mode

WinDynamicDesktop: https://github.com/t1m0thyj/WinDynamicDesktop

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

Matchmaking: it's hard. Wait, not the online dating kind (well, maybe that too) but the kind where you have to match a bunch of different players with different hardware and different geographic locations together over high-speed Internet and let them have fun in a game together. Prompted by Activision's release of a white paper about Call of Duty's skill-based matchmaking methodology, this week we dig into the technical and sociological ins and outs of creating a rewarding online experience for players, from server types to hosting heuristics, player behaviors, ranking types, and a bunch more.

Activision's COD white paper about matchmaking: https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/CallofDuty_Matchmaking_Series_2.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