Brad's on the road this week, so we shook up another potpourri of mini-topics to discuss, including DIY VR mods, the questionable wisdom of working remotely on a brand new laptop, backing into creating a site-to-site VPN, a those vibe-coded clones of Adobe apps like Photoshop and Lightroom, high-tech tire technology, baby's first attempt at Nix (or in this case Lix), and a bunch of other stuff.

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This week we round up some news items that have caught our interest in the last few weeks. Google and Walmart have rolled out a backyard drone-delivery program for small orders. Valve is beta testing a unique ultra-low-latency video codec for Steam Remote Play. A recent circuit court decision may have wide-ranging precedent for copyright penalties around AI training data. And the Dutch government is the latest in Europe to pursue its digital sovereignty by moving from Windows to... NixOS? Seems like a lot to talk about!

The Verge on Walmart drone deliveries: https://www.theverge.com/report/1002172/potato-by-air-wing-drone-delivery

Valve's Pyrowave beta update: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/564794422009744473

The Pyrowave author's deep dive on the codec: https://themaister.net/blog/2025/06/16/i-designed-my-own-ridiculously-fast-game-streaming-video-codec-pyrowave/

Third Circuit finds AI training is copyright theft: https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/

Dutch government turns to NixOS for a sovereign desktop: https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/09/28/dutch-government-turns-to-nixos-for-a-sovereign-desktop/5299501

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It turns out we haven't answered all the questions that have ever been asked yet, so we figured we'd take a few more from you, the listener, this week, covering topics like cell phone signal strength and the way your carrier prioritizes your traffic, ARM vs. x86 in the context of efficiency, how much vibe-coding is going on in OSs and drivers right now, open source wearable devices, how to store a Nintendo Switch for the very long term, the long and mysterious legacy of the D-subminiature standard, and more.

Sparkfun's D-sub blog post: https://news.sparkfun.com/14298

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Following up on our bonus Steam Frame episode earlier this week, Tested's Norman Chan stops by to go much deeper on Valve's new standalone headset, unpacking topics like the pros and cons of pancake optics, local Alyx versus streamed Alyx, a headset with hot-swappable batteries, prescription lens inserts, FEX x86-to-ARM translation, and more. We also wrap up with a holistic look at the entire Valve hardware ecosystem now that all the pieces are in place, pondering what it might all mean for the next Steam Deck and beyond.

Check out Norm's Steam Frame coverage on the Tested YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9JyWAVj94E

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Valve sent us a review unit of their new standalone VR headset, the Steam Frame and we're here with first impressions, after testing it for about 40 hours over the course of a week. We talk about the FEX x86 to ARM emulator, how well it works with local and streaming VR as well as playing 2D games on a big, giant virtual monitor.

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This week we sat down with the 2018 documentary General Magic, about the early '90s startup of the same name that was full of Macintosh veterans who were way ahead of their time about mobile computing, online communications, and a lot of other stuff. Were they really trying to make the iPhone more than a decade before the iPhone? Did they seriously invent early precursors to USB, Java, and emoji long before those things became commonplace? Why did they fail so catastrophically? Join us as we discuss the movie to ponder these and other questions about a really heady, innovative era of computing.

The documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek

AT&T's 1994 video for PersonaLink and "the Cloud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbNrqe2IgSA

1994 Wired story about General Magic: https://www.wired.com/1994/04/general-magic/

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We're back with another hodgepodge of user-submitted topics this week to clear out some of our backlog from the summer, leading us to talk about everything from uses for a PC's real-time-clock wake feature to domain hijacking and protecting your custom email address, the origins of the octothorpe, a very cool virtual operating system museum, and lots of stuff in between.

The Virtual OS Museum: https://virtualosmuseum.org/

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The Q&A returns for August with a variety of topics including pet-related tech mishaps, the contentious multimeter pronunciation debate, arcade boards and Super NES expansion chips, the return of physical keyboard phones, and an accidental grip of AI-related questions about web-scraping statistics, podcasters putting on new vocal identities, cyberattacks on infrastructure, and the growing societal backlash that might (maybe) blunt all this at some point.

Arcade board cases discussed in this ep:

https://www.scanlinecity.com/mortal-kombat-ii-3-layer

https://github.com/emilianoarlettaz/arcade-pcb-case

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