Get a peek behind the scenes of THWACKcamp, the free virtual learning event for SolarWinds customers. Hosts Chrystal Taylor and Sean Sebring talk to THWACKcamp Executive Producer Matt Murray about the extensive preparation, creativity, and deep knowledge that goes into this year’s “love letter” to the THWACK community. © 2024 SolarWinds Worldwide, …

This week we attempt to unpack the recent, historic security breach in the open source world, after the discovery of a secret backdoor that was inserted by a malicious actor into the the xz-utils package, with a focus on which specific Linux distros were targeted and why, how the attacker socially engineered their way into the position of authority…

We're doing a follow-up Q&A this week while we sort out some scheduling hurdles on the backend, and taking a bunch more of your questions from the last six months about ideal pixel density on monitors, what the heck Salesforce does, a portable gaming-focused Windows, when in the product cycle to buy, how the Clapper might integrate into your home a…

March's Q&A features a wide array of questions that inspired discussions about such wide-ranging topics as our love of screensavers, a world without Gmail, Will's strong opinions on Ethernet termination standards, wearing shoes inside the house (or not), the lack of 9s in product naming, Proton-like cross-platform game support on MacOS, and a bunch…

Inspired by what's probably the most common subject we see questions about on our Discord, this week we're doing an updated primer on home networking, with a refresher on some basic terms and concepts and our thoughts on a wide array of topics from modern mesh networks to fiber in the home, ISP-provided equipment, whether you should separate your w…

We've got a two-fer this week, with a pair of topics that might not have filled a whole ep on their own but turn out to be two great podcast tastes that, uh, taste great together... anyway, first we talk about the benchmark Will is currently creating in Unreal Engine to push CPUs and GPUs in a game development context, and then we check in on how t…

In this conversation, hosts Sean Sebring and Chrystal Taylor talk with Derek Daly, Principal AIOps Product Manager at SolarWinds. He discusses his career journey and the role of AI and machine learning in the company's products. He shares insights into the process of introducing AI and machine learning into product features, the impact of AI on job…

What makes a great tech demo? Besides killer tech, do you need theatricality? Stage presence? The risk of everything exploding at the seams at any moment? This week we look back on a ton of notable tech demos big and small, from the largest Apple and Microsoft stages to people in their living rooms, to reminisce about some of the most exciting reve…

Book club returns this week, now that we've both read id Software founder John Romero's memoir, Doom Guy: Life in First Person. Join us for an extremely nerdy chat about Romero's early days as a teenage Apple II developer learning 6502 assembly, the pre-id team's blistering one-game-a-month output at Softdisk, technical innovations that led to id's…

This month's Q&A features another bumper crop of great topics, including installing in-wall speakers and hidden audio systems, the final word on the origins of WASD, doing A/V production on Linux (really), the relative value of the Raspberry Pi in 2024, how we use bookmarks these days, our feelings on mechanical versus smart watches, and a long-awa…

News has been happening (when hasn't it?) and this week we're rounding up some of the stories that caught our attention in recent days. First, the launch of OpenAI's generative-video product Sora, as we consider what this thing is actually going to be used for, and what sorts of havoc it may wreak. Next, the effects of the EU's Digital Markets Act …

They say the grass is always greener in another office. Right? In an era of job hopping and layoffs, working for a startup versus an established global company is an evergreen debate. Chrystal Taylor and Sean Sebring talk pros and cons of both. Tune in to help yourself find your ideal patch of grass. © 2024 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights res…

We're pleased to welcome Tested's Norman Chan back to the show, fresh off of his first week with the Apple Vision Pro and ready to fill us in on everything from the fitting process at the store to UI shortcuts with your mouth, connecting to an external Mac, the ins and outs of the video passthrough (and your loved ones appearing as ghosts atop Moun…

PC graphics settings have only gotten more complex in recent years, with new options around AI-driven supersampling, ray tracing, latency reduction, and a bunch of other stuff joining classics like SSAO. We attempt this week to step through the most common settings, with basic explanations and recommendations, as well as our experiences getting thi…

We begin this month's Q&A with a slightly mind-bending discussion of questions that exist in a quantum state, before falling back to more grounded topics like charging your EV out your apartment window, real-life keyboard shortcuts, why we all ended up on WASD, crowdfunding a Moon landing, speeding up your bulk photo-scanning, and the shameful faux…

Will unearthed a venerable SpaceOrb 360 in his garage recently, which sent us down a rabbit hole chasing all the weird, experimental input devices of the late '90s, back when everyone was just figuring out 3D control in the first-person shooter. Before we all standardized on mice and dual analog sticks, there were apparently a lot of different ways…

Another Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone, and we've sifted through the highs and lows to bring you a casual discussion about the stuff that actually mattered (Nvidia's Pulsar G-SYNC tech and Super GPUs, better wireless charging, new screen technologies), the strange and ridiculous (AI-powered cat doors, a robot that parks cars, a whole-m…

I wonder what’s next? Sean Sebring and Chrystal Taylor discuss the tech trends and predictions published by Gartner, Forrester, and VMblog, with Global Tech Evangelist for Observability Sascha Giese. Can they predict the future? © 2024 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reservedBy SolarWinds

The seasonal metaphors continue as we weather a blizzard of great questions from you for the monthly Q&A, this time covering everything from Swiss army knife roles in game development to replacing USB ports, the mythical petabyte retail drive, extending wi-fi across hundreds of feet, whether we'll ever see a 128-bit CPU, L-shaped desks, our auditor…

On the final day of 2023, Will is joined by Adam Patrick Murray from PC World to discuss the year that was. We run down the last twelve months of PC and mobile hardware, pick this year's winners (and a few losers) and call out the trends and hardware that we were most excited about in 2023! Plus, scene drama! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech…

This week, Will is joined by Kishore Hari, who takes us on scientific journey through some of the biggest science stories of the year. Topics include advancements in cancer research, a cure for sickle cell anemia, the Nine Boundaries graph, advances in brain science, the cheapest way to land on the Moon, long-standing math problems solve by amateur…

We had such a surplus of good questions in October and November that this week we're shattering our own precedent and doing a supplemental mid-month Q&A to catch up on topics like how (or whether) to block YouTube ads, the increasing costs of midrange GPUs, the eternal struggle of inputting text with controllers, mixing chocolate milk and lemonade …

The SolarWinds podcast crossover event you’ve all been waiting for: Chrystal Taylor and Sean Sebring talk with Movies & Mainframes host Andy Garibay about the best, weirdest, and most confusing tech gifts you can give your loved ones (or, let’s be honest, yourself) this year. © 2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved…

The temperature outside is plummeting, but the number of cold opens in this episode is skyrocketing! We convene once again this week for our sort-of-semi-annual block of short segments about everything from video game Yule logs to neighbors waging holiday decoration warfare, keeping your CPU from (almost) melting, neglecting your cast iron, maximiz…

A cornucopia of great questions graced our podcasting table this month, and from it we drew such topics as (not) mixing and matching your RAM, fishing for game saves in AppData, an appreciation of the demoscene past and present, the redundant measurements that are totally the power company's fault, and the unmitigated decadence of the Tim Tam slam.…

Will's been fortunate to spend a chunk of time with the new Steam Deck OLED, and now it's time to talk through both his firsthand impressions and the list of small-yet-significant upgrades Valve has made to just about everything on the device, from screen size to weight to battery life, heat and cooling, memory bandwidth, and even the color of the …

It's nearly Turkey Day here in the US once again, so it's time to discuss another round of tech we're thankful for, which includes such topics as the year USB-C finally happened (for real), freeing yourself from the single critical computer, the joys of both wireless and wired headphones, powering one computer off of another computer, learning to l…

If you think attending a tech industry event is chaotic just imagine trying to organize one. SolarWinds’ Senior Manager of Events Valerie Rivir chats about the ins and outs of trade shows. From the history to the horror stories, she’s seen it all. © 2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved…

We've been thinking about troubleshooting lately (because it feels like we've all been doing a lot of it), so in this ep we did a formal rundown of how we approach solving technical problems, both in PCs and otherwise. From the analytical joy of log files to A/B testing and eliminating variables, the dos and don'ts of both searching for and contrib…

We're firing up the time machine again this week for another visit to the era when computer coverage was "printed" on "paper" in bound volumes called "magazines." This time, we take a look at the voluminous December 2000 issue of PC Gamer, with a look at the early MMO boom brought on by Ultima Online and EverQuest, a preview of EA's weird social ga…

October's terrifying batch of questions hits us like an airborne jack-o-lantern this month, as we discuss topics like: why it's RGB and not RYB, the origin of the computer "wizard," the ethics of tracking your family's movements around the house, the usefulness of a nut milk bag (seriously) for filtering coffee, and perhaps the most Tech Pod email …

This week we're doing some follow-ups on recent episodes to fill in a few blanks. Spurred on by the PS5's Spider-Man 2, we wanted to talk about the recent advent of gaming at 40Hz, and that led us to finally talk in some more depth about Brad's new television set. Will has also been testing a coffee brewer FROM SPAAAACE!!!! or at least co-designed …

We've got a pleasantly floral potpourri this week, mainly focused on Will's trip report from this weekend's Bay Area Maker Faire, the first time the DIY science and tech show has been held since 2019. If you want to hear about model-size mag-lev trains, personal undersea robots, the cottage industry of R2-D2 replica builders, and more, this is your…

Join host Sean Sebring as he talks to SolarWinds CISO Tim Brown about the 2023 threat landscape after an unprecedented number of cyberattacks. You’re going to want to buckle up, type in the code, scan your retinas, say Beetlejuice three times, and download this episode. © 2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved…

Following on from our consideration of Google's many terminated products in episode 74, we turn our attention to another graveyard this week, one with a big "Microsoft" on the sign. The company's decades-long policy of trying to supplant market leaders with Microsoft-made equivalents has left us with plenty to talk about, from phones to joysticks, …

A crisp Fall batch of questions has found its way to the show this month, as we attempt to deliver answers about such things as trusting your devices with your biometric data, whether to color-calibrate your screens or not, whether bigger and better screens even matter in the age of ultra-compressed video, the relative utility of network racks and …

Intel held its annual Innovation event this week, and our friend Adam Patrick Murray from PC World was there. Now he's here to fill us in on all the details about the company's big shift to Meteor Lake and beyond, including the embrace of chiplet-style modular CPU design, their ever-shrinking process nodes, major changes to how the CPUs are named, …

Sometimes the events are so current we can't help discussing them, and such is the case with this week's act of self-immolation on the part of Unity and its relationship with the many developers who use its engine to make their games. Plus, iOS 17 and friends are imminent and Will has installed every available *OS beta and is here to talk about som…

Will dons the game developer hat again this week for a deep dive into how a game gets built. No, not the coding and design and art and all that -- we mean how a game gets literally built into a package that you can run on your PC or console, with some in-depth chat about everything from build servers to source and version control of both code and b…

Going it alone is ok sometimes, but having a partner with skills and experience will make any rodeo better and more efficient. Aldo Masoni, Observability Practice Lead with longtime SolarWinds Partner SHI, joins hosts Sean Sebring and Ashley Adams to explain the “value” in value-added resellers. © 2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved…

We're back this week with another round of hot tips for making your computing life less annoying, including super secret UI settings, methods of bending digital voice assistants to your will, a low-level Windows hotkey not even Will knew about, the latest PowerToys (since the last time we talked about PowerToys), an easy way to trim videos without …

Another piping-hot batch of questions is here straight out of the oven (where "the oven" is Discord and our inbox), and we do our best to deliver answers about amassing a collection of Allen wrenches, the seeming fragility of OLED panels, service-nagging from your smart appliances, running dynamic DNS for your home VPN, books about computer history…

Since Brad just went through the new-TV-buying-and-setup process (for someone else), we decided it was time for us to look past our classic plasmas and take stock of the modern TV landscape. In this ep we attempt to casually dissect HDMI 2.1 features and HDR standards, and think about why format wars are never going away, which legacy audio connect…

Our friend Wes Fenlon is back, this time to talk about his experiences daily-carrying Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip series of foldable smartphones. By interrogating such topics as whether glass is really meant to bend like that, when a screen protector isn't just a screen protector, how great the Game Boy Advance SP was (very great), and whether Apple mi…

Do you ever get the feeling that your computer has gained self-awareness and is trying to take over the world? AIOps expert Aswin Kumar joins hosts Ashley and Sean to talk about AI's impact today, tomorrow, and beyond, as well as some of the ethical questions we will need to answer before it’s too late. © 2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights …

We're back this week with the mythical three-peat of updates on topics we've discussed either recently or in the distant past. First, following up on last month's patron episode, we dig into our recent experiences with Wireguard and discuss why it's pretty much the only home VPN game in town. Next we dissect the lessons Will learned about operating…

It's that Q&A time again, so in between waxing philosophical about meteor showers and shipwrecks, we take a few of your questions this week, about the etiquette of color-matched bidet installs, the current state of AM5, a growing army of robot chore-doers, a check-in on our download folders, and the amount of that sweet, sweet pre-war steel in the …

Will gets to dispense his considerable knowledge of coffee this week as Brad gets into cold brew and consuming way too much caffeine, with a medium-bodied discussion covering the cherry-esque fruit that houses the sacred bean, ratios for brewing a world class cup, some of the flashier and more modern brewing methods out there these days, and a bunc…

We're dusting off the ol' projector this week for a discussion about the 1983 nuclear-warfare classic WarGames (which Brad had never seen!). Did you know the original movie had nothing to do with hacking or nukes? What exactly was inside WOPR, anyway? Is the movie somehow more relevant now than it was then? How much did all that gear in Matthew Bro…

THWACK, the SolarWinds community, is 20-years-old and thriving. Two former THWACK MVPs and current SolarWinds employees, Kevin Sparenberg and Michael Kent, join hosts Ashley Adams and Sean Sebring to talk about what makes this community so successful. © 2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved…