We note the tragic passing this week of our good friend and tech reporting legend Gordon Mah Ung, with a short tribute and a bit of reminiscing about Gordon's illustrious career and the impact he made on everyone he came into contact with. Then we return to the very serious work of ranking every cable and connector in existence, with a pivot this week from numbered rankings to one of those newfangled tier lists, plus considerations of quarter-inch stereo, TOSLINK, DisplayPort, the legendary SCART, and more.

GoFundMe to support Gordon Mah Ung's family: https://www.gofundme.com/f/join-us-in-supporting-dara-glenn-and-marianne

The Cable Bible: https://amiaopensource.github.io/cable-bible/

Recompute's port roundup: https://recompute.co.zw/buying-guides/a-complete-guide-of-every-type-of-computer-port/

The current cable tier list: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-cable-rankings

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 our last pod of 2024, and thus, another batch of year-ending questions meets our entirely professional and learned answers. This month we talk about improving your Bluetooth quality in Windows, our personal mouse grip, tech-related anime we've seen, when to throw in the towel on learning new skills, weird freebies with your tech purchases, questionable Black Friday purchases, how many browser tabs is too many, and the oppression of the Elf-on-the-Shelf surveillance state.

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

As the end of the year is here again, we're finally doing it: we're ranking every plug and connector in existence, or at least all the ones we can think of. Join us as we evaluate the relative merits in multiple categories -- like ease of use, reliability, versatility, and that satisfying tactile X factor -- of everything from BNC to XLR, Apple's Lightning and old 30-pin dock connector, DB-15 (you know, VGA), the enormous pile of USB types, and more. Will we get through the whole list in one week? Uh, sure!

Follow along with pictures and info about all these connectors with these links:

The Cable Bible: https://amiaopensource.github.io/cable-bible/

Recompute's port roundup: https://recompute.co.zw/buying-guides/a-complete-guide-of-every-type-of-computer-port/

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

Will and family just got back from the final show of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, so this week we dig into some of the technical aspects of a modern arena mega-concert, from turning the audience into a human light show to innovations in ticket-sharing QR code technology and metrics on the mobile data being used in the vicinity. Meanwhile, Brad's been harvesting some extra cheap hard drives in the wake of Black Friday, so we also lay out a primer on what exactly hard drive shucking is, including price-per-terabyte, the best models to look out for, foolproof methods for getting those enclosures open, and more.

Links for this episode:

Wired on the Swift concert tech: https://wired.me/technology/the-tech-behind-taylor-swift-concert-wristbands/

Audience bracelet fun: https://x.com/swifferupdates/status/1644415217445609508

ShuckStop: https://shucks.top/

Easy shucking with guitar picks: https://forums.truenas.com/t/easystore-drive-shucking-like-a-pro-by-a-pro/1498

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

Two momentous events have recently rocked the computing world: First, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger abruptly stepped down this week, less than four years after taking the company's helm, and before completing the ongoing transition to its next-generation chip fabrication, and second, Microsoft has removed the venerable WordPad from current and future versions of Windows. We convene to try to make sense of both of these unexpected happenings (and talk a lot about word processors along the way).

Cling to WordPad for dear life: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2376881/how-to-get-wordpad-back-windows-11-24h2.html

The Microsoft Fandom wiki: https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_95

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 monthly Q&A commenceth again, with emails and Discord Qs positively pouring in about the origin of the flange effect, why all the electrical outlets are upside down, gaming on an M4 Mac Mini and how Apple's move to a 16GB minimum affects their status as a family recommendation, the value of moving to the Bay Area for a computer science degree, the race to the bottom in electronics parts and accessories, Will's holiday board game recommendations, an impromptu ranking of charts, 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

American Thanksgiving draws near, so it's time again for our annual recitation of techie stuff that we're thankful for. From tangible products on your desk, around the house, and on the road, to more abstract things like moderating your social media intake, finding alternatives to Amazon, and the ease of fixing your foolish eyewear mistakes, we find more than a few things to fill out our lists.

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're back again with that floral favorite, the potpourri episode. This time it's a project potpourri, touching on some tech-related projects we've either tackled recently or are planning to get to soon. Learn the full story of how Will more or less Frankensteined his ultrawide monitor back from the dead, listen to Brad's plans for a virtual private cloud server and why Black Friday might be the time to jump in, scorn him for the utterly shameful state of his NAS backups, 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