Solid State Podcast

Episode 107 - This year at CES 2025

Jeremy Clarkson once said, rather infamously on Top Gear, “New is better…”… Now he was talking about new cars being, at the end of the day, objectively better than the “classics” we love and revere with a healthy (and often rose-colored) dose of nostalgia… they may be beautiful works of art and make a great noise, but so often those same classics are uncomfortable, unreliable, and… well… just not as “good” as we remember them!
Each year at CES, it seems I end up going through the same series of emotions with the pieces of tech (and, these days, the parade of car reveals that show up) at this gadget-palooza in the desert… 
I have several gadgets in my life that I continue to use quite literally every single day, and without fail each of them either have a new version or a new competitor on the scene as of about 72 hours ago… because that’s how tech works! My devices work great, they more than get the job done, and they’re all in better-than-average condition… but the newer ones are better, right? 
Based on specs, this is a pretty simple conversation… The newest laptops, TVs, handhelds, and assorted gizmos are faster, lighter, and more capable across the board… seemingly meaningless AI trickery on the box notwithstanding… so they’re “better”… right?
The funny part is, I also once had an old Porsche 944… it was nothing particularly special… my “daily driver” at the time was more comfortable, wildly more reliable… and I STILL grabbed the 944 keys and drove it every chance I got… 
New might well be better, but is it good? TBD… 

Episode 106 - What's next for Tech in 2025...

The New Year, like so many things, seems to mean many different things to many different people… but its also not much of a stretch to say that some things are at least ubiquitous… if not universal…
Time to focus on your health? Oh do I have a thousand spam emails for you… Looking to finally make that big move in your career? Indeed’s marketing budget sure seems to hope so… Time to clean up the house and sell a bunch of the crap you don’t need and never use? Ebay will happily cut you a once-in-a-lifetime discount to do exactly that and even give you a fraction of the money back to… well… buy more crap you don’t need and will likely never use…
Some other things in tech especially, though, are just as predictable and hopefully at least a little more useful… CES starts in mere days, Samsung is loading the confetti cannons for yet another flagship unpacked event, and across the globe Product Managers are plastering whiteboards with their sure-fire bet on how their AI-driven product is going to totally work this time, revolutionize your life, and simultaneously empty your wallet…
While we may not love the spam, the scams, and the incessant promises of “It will definitely be better this year...”, it is all part of what makes this space so wild, crazy, and special. 
So as we have freshly bid adieux to 2024, it’s time now to fix our sights on what we think 2025 has in store for us… I mean, am I finally going to get my flying car? Let’s find out…

Episode 105 - A look back at the Tech-of-it-all in 2024

This week on the Solid State Podcast, we start our seemingly-annual tradition of turning our eyes forward by… looking behind us. Yep, as 2024 approaches its final days, we feel the single best way to ground our predictions for 2025 (and beyond) is to take an honest look back at the wins and losses, bangs and busts, and frankly some outright snoozers that still managed to dominate both the headlines and this very podcast through the year…
It’s safe to say that “newsworthy” and “good” are not always synonyms… to be honest it sometimes seems like they rarely are. Was it a year of AI, for example? You bet, there’s just no deny thing that. Was it the year that AI became “good” or even meaningful in our daily life? No freakin way. 
And that’s just one example, it’s not a new phenomenon. For every iPod there’s a Zune, and hopefully there will be a day ahead where we look even further back, for example, at a chunk of red plastic that promised to change our lives by using the internet for us for… reasons… and say “you know what, that really was where it all began...”
But that’s ahead of us, pages of the story still to be written and that, well, is for a very different episode! Today, again, we’re going to take a stroll in reverse and see if we can figure out what central theme this “year in tech” might have had, and then see what direction it points us down the road…

Episode 104 - End of Year Cybersecurity Best Practices

We’ve all gotten that email, right? It was from someone you knew, about a topic you might even expect from them, but something just didn’t seem quite right… 
Once upon a time, those suspicious emails stuck out like a sore thumb… Poor grammar, a “from” address that was longer than your monitor is wide, and no matter how giving you grandma is at Christmas time it just doesn’t seem likely that she has 15 Bitcoin to send you IF you get her your wallet address before 5pm…
Today though, with the advent of advanced AI models and an ever-increasing quantity of… well, crap coming to our Inboxes, timelines, and feeds every minute… being vigilant isn’t just a best practice, it’s becoming a key part of survival. 
I wish I could say, dear listener, “Just tune in for an hour, do these five things every day, and you’ll be 100% guaranteed to be safe from cyber criminals and their hijinks…” but that would be about as big a lie as the Bitcoins promised a few moments ago…
You see, there is no silver bullet, no impenetrable shield of protection on the internet… It’s about layers of security, an ongoing need to improve and educate, and the acknowledgment that someday a real problem is going to arise and it’s up to you to have a plan in place to identify, respond, and recover from it…
These may sound like training materials for a bank, law firm, or investment advisor… and you’d be right. But they’re also sound best practices for every single one of us that intends to exist online and participate in the global web… 
Now, first go update your phone, your apps, and your thermostat… then hit Play and let’s talk about how we can all protect ourselves and each other as we wrap up 2024 and continue to look for what’s ahead…

Episode 103 - The Deals and Don'ts of Black Friday 2024

This week on the Solid State Podcast we try something genuinely novel… to provide actually useful Consumer advice…
No but seriously, please don’t ever take what we have to say that much to heart, but as we sat back to survey the landscape of “deals”  out there for 2024’s Black Friday day… week… month… oh I don’t even know any more… it became exceedingly obvious that there absolutely are dollar-saving opportunities out there to be had, heck some of them are really good! The problem is, they’re surrounded by hoodwinks, half-truths, and the occasional outright Scam…
An example of what I would kindly call an entry in the “half truth” category happened to me just this week… I’ve been without a gaming-capable laptop for a little while (Don’t get me started on my journey with that Minivan-sized Razer Blade a couple years ago…), and decided it was time… so the Deal Research commenced!
What I found was a very good field of laptop options out there in 2024, with the year being pretty quiet for GPU change but a ton happening in the CPU space… which finally lead me to a tried-and-true Asus Zephyrus line… 
You’d think… it’d be that easy… right? I know the make and more-or-less model… now just to find the best deal offered… or so I thought! 
Instead I had to dig into Model sub-numbers, Processor SKU’s, and the occasional bribe (I mostly kid) to finally land on the exact one I wanted… which, as luck would have it… was the only model not on sale this year because, even though is a “2024” model just like the rest, that particular one only came out a couple months ago and was deemed “to new” for a discount… 
So see, you can save, but its probably not on the latest/greatest option… and at the end of the day, is a couple hundred bucks off the top worth getting an inferior experience over years of use? 
You’ve all been listening long enough to know what I did… and oh, by the way, there was an Open Box option that was twice as much off as the Black Friday “Deal”… just sayin…

Episode 102 - Solid State games like it's 1994...

Several years ago, a now-long-forgotten false start of a gadget in the VR / AR space made the lofty claim that they were going to “hack the GPU of the human brain”… that their technology would be so advanced as to not need display trickery, but instead leverage our minds to create digital elements and worlds around us. If that sounds like the premise to a bad Science Fiction movie… well, you did hear me say “false start of a gadget” a moment ago, right? 
Funny enough, as I was considering that ill-fated device a few days ago, it occurred to me that while their implementation didn’t exactly work out… there have been wildly successful games played, worlds built, and stories told by doing exactly that for literally decades… that generated right there in our own brains, massive armies have clashed, new worlds explored, and lasting friendships made, all in vivid detail in front of our very “eyes”…
No, I’m not talking about some super-secret VR project pulled right from the pages of a never-produced Star Trek script… I’m talking about the power of story, leveraged on the processing power of imagination, and expressed in one of the most polarizing mediums around… 
Yep, I’m talking about reams of paper, bags of dice in every shape, size, and count, and more painted chunks of plastic than you can shake an Orc at…
Gaming is certainly not a new topic to this show, but taking a look back at the last five decades of table top games we realized… some very talented creatives, story tellers, and mostly-sober DM’s have been hacking the GPU of our brains this entire time…

Episode 101 - Return of the Mac (Mini)

Listen… we’re not going to beat around the bush here… when Apple’s fall Mac-centric event / infomercial / whatever they are these days turned into an outright string of glorified Press Releases I was… less than optimistic…
Apple loves their “big moment on stage”… at least historically. So if their collective decision was not not even bother just mere weeks after giving minutes of stage time to a new color treatment on a year old watch, this sure seemed to be shaping up into an iPad mini level of spec-bump fueled recycled yawns…
Well, dear friends... we… were… wrong…
Do the iMac and MacBook Pro look effectively identical to their predecessors save a few new color options? Sure do.
Did we get the larger (correctly) screened iMac option I’ve been holding space for on my desk for several years at this point? Not a chance. 
Was this potentially one of the most meaningful round of updates to the Mac lineup since the introduction of Apple Silicon? One hundred percent. 
MacBooks Pros? Fastest, most capable lineup from the baseline to the top with more battery life than ever before. 
iMacs start at enough RAM to actually recommend, get the same end-to-end performance bump, and are easier to recommend as an all-purpose hub computer than ever before. 
And then, finally, the most easily forgotten Mac got the biggest upgrade of them all…
We’ve said here countless times how the MacBook Air is the “laptop for everyone” (and with 16GB of secretly starting RAM mores than every, by the way), and we’re here to tell you the Mac mini is now firmly, without a doubt, with zero direct competition, the do-all desktop for nearly everyone…
Tiny footprint, incredible horsepower, ports front-and-back (finally), and a starting price of $599?
What can I say, we’ll take two…

Episode 100 - The one where they did 100 episodes...

I think its pretty fair to say most (if not all) of us could stand to have fewer “things” in our lives… if the town you live in is anything like mine, about the only things being built en masse are places for people to live, places to wash your car, and places to store your stuff… And honestly, if we’re having to pay someone to quietly hide away all the stuff we have that doesn’t already fit in our home then, well, maybe we actually do have too much stuff…
I for sure am counted among them, and while I do survive the occasional purge of “when was the last time we used this…”, some things I just can’t part with. It might be a memento from a long-past adventure, or a seemingly worthless trinket that ties back to a now-gone loved one, and other times… it’s literally a piece of paper.To me, at least, this is no ordinary piece of paper… Sure, its a pretty typical 6” x 4” sheet of lined yellow note paper with some worse-than-average bullet points scribbled on it, but to me it’s not only something I keep, it lives proudly on a shelf of admiration.
See, once upon a time, three friends decided they talk entirely too much about tech, gadgets, games, and… well, life… and eventually they started doing it in front of a microphone and shipping it out to the internet. A few people listed, a lot of laughs were had, and way too much caffeine was consumed…
The year was 2012, the podcast wasn’t even this one, but it’s still what I think about when contemplating the origins of the Solid State Podcast and how we got here twelve years later…
So that piece of paper, it was our very first topic list from our very first episode on a show long lost to the internet, but here in 2024 I still look at that piece of paper at least once a week. 
We definitely have too much stuff, but I’m going to go put this paper back up on the shelf where it belongs…

Episode 99 - New Sonos, "New" iPad Mini's, and Cybersecurity Awareness Month

A few years ago I wrapped up a particularly crazy work day performing some seemingly “normal” tasks. Several emails were sent and received, some accounts signed up for with a new online service, and we were remotely connected to a number of servers reviewing data. 
What made this specific evening different from most was the why behind those otherwise mundane tasks… The emails were being exchanged with a group of professional hackers and cyber criminals, the new accounts were for a bitcoin exchange service, and the servers we were connected to were riddled with ransomware and now-encrypted, useless data. 
The worst had happened. The “if” had become “when”. A company had been attacked, the bad guys had gotten through, and we received the call to try and save the day. 
Turning back the clock to “before the boom” as professionals in our space call it, the chain of events leading up to the one, terrible moment were border-line obvious and spanned years of single decisions that added up to a cocktail for disaster. A series of budget cuts led to not having the funds to authorize a modernization project that would have moved their backups immutably, to the cloud. An aging Line of Business application was “too important to risk upending” and left server infrastructure frozen in time at a now-unsupported, unpatched state. An email arrived that was hugely important, very time sensitive, and entirely fake. This, is the recipe for the very “boom” I mentioned before. 
The rest was history, the hackers struck and encrypted (but didn’t steal) their data. We received the call, made every effort to find a way out of it, to find there simply wasn’t one. And, as many business staring at a potentially endgame event have done, bitcoin was purchased, the criminals were paid off, and true to their word (this time) the ability to decrypt the data was handed over and many sleepless days later business was returning to normal. 
This is just one event of millions like it, and they’re getting worse every year. October, you see, is “Cybersecurity Awareness Month”, and while the vigilance we need to have never gets a break, its still good to take a beat, have the tough conversations, and decide for ourselves, our businesses, and as… people… what is the true cost of not being prepared…
PS - The link to this month's Cybersecurity Awareness "Tech Bytes" segment on SWFL's ABC 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQEQrRawnHI

Episode 98 - The thing about the Sony Playstation 5 "Pro"

This week on the Solid State Podcast things go… a little wide… I solemnly swear, we sat down for our “news” segment to simply touch on the fact that iOS 18 in all of it’s glory and missing features had dropped this week, with a little “tomorrow is new iPhone day” added in for flavor. Instead, dear friends and listeners, is a caffeine-fueled journey through our collective fix for everything wrong (apparently) in tech, media, gaming, and possibly intergalactic politics? I’m still a little fuzzy on that one…
As we burst out the other side, the thing we actually came to talk about takes shape in the early coverage of Sony’s upcoming Playstation 5 “Pro”… I know this is an audio format, but I so very sincerely hope you can both hear the air-quotes around the word and, frankly, see the eye roll now forever locked on my face… 
Is it an upgrade? Is the upgrade worth the price? What does the word “Pro” even mean any more? If you think that’s all you were going to get from this week’s feature… well… yeah you guessed it… it devolved into yet a second caffeine-fueled journey through our collective fix for everything wrong (apparently) in tech, media, gaming, and possibly intergalactic politics… No, really, I have no idea…
We usually record this in the wee hours of the morning, and due to all-things-life this one hit right after 5pm on a lovely September evening… and maybe that’s the problem with us being a little too awake when the record button was pressed… 
Either way, this is a fun one guys, so pause your current game of Astro Bot and let’s take a little journey…