Solid State Podcast

Episode 33 - The thing about CES 2023

This shows mere existence is evidence to the fact that when you get two or more tech enthusiasts together… craziness ensues… 
What happens, then, when you get over 100,000 tech enthusiasts, journalists, marketers, and visionaries together in the middle of the desert for a week and surround them with a year’s worth of development, innovation, and just-plain-hard-work? Yeah… craziness doesn’t even start to describe it…
This sand and booze-fueled masterpiece is none of than CES… the annual top-of-year kickoff to everything from TVs, to smart homes, dancing robots...
2023 was absolutely no different, with a number of standouts we’re here to talk through today, a few of which might even see a store shelf someday…
So full-blow Solid State style let’s grab an energy drink, charge those batteries, and full-on sprint through just a handful of our favorites from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show…

Episode 32 - What’s next... for Cassette Tapes (and nostalgia)?

It’s funny to me how “famous last words” are very rarely the actual “last words” on any subject… today’s episode is absolutely no different…
In an episode just a few months ago we took a deep-dive on the still growing resurgence of all-things-vinyl, and yours truly uttered the fateful words that, at the very least, we’d never have to circle back on the subject to cover other now-defunct formats like, for example, cassette tapes…
Fast forward to today’s episode and we’re here to do exactly that… peruse the digital merch table on the ongoing resurgence of everyone’s “favorite” once-ultra-portable medium… 
Grab your #2 pencil, rewind those reels, and let’s talk cassettes, why we loved them, and are they really worth our love once once again? 

Episode 31 - What’s next... for Storage?

Storage space is one of those funny things you rarely think about until you run out of it… this is true if you’re talking about the spice shelf of your pantry or the “free” 15GB that comes with your Gmail account… But when it’s full, your options are clean out what you don’t need or expand capacity. 
Across every gadget we own, every account we maintain, and every press of the shudder button on your camera… one universal truth is we’re adding to that digital storage footprint every second of ever day. And as the technology evolves, every image file becomes bigger and seemingly every AAA title fills your Xbox hard drive that much faster…
Today we’re pulling forward a topic we actually recorded a while back (so, as usual, forgive our earlier audio quality sins) but felt here and now as everyone prepares to unbox shiny new phones and install countless DLC packs, was just the right time to talk all things digital storage.
Now excuse me while I go figure out how to add another shelf to our spice rack…

Episode 30 - What’s in the box... Amazon Kindle Scribe

Some brands are just… known. People play Ping Pong, not table tennis and I simply have never heard someone say “have you tried Bing’ing it yet” on purpose… Sometimes the name simply becomes synonymous with the category…
Amazon is amongst the largest names not just in Tech but in business full-stop… and one of the many products that got them there is a simple slab of plastic with a black-and-white display and a name that is indeed synonymous with the category.
Let’s face it, you see someone reading a book on the subway and there’s not folded paper in their hands, they’re probably using a Kindle…
The development of the Kindle product line has been one of slow, steady iteration on a few key themes: Provide an easy-on-the eyes display attached to a seemingly endless battery and get them in people’s hands as cheaply as possible.
This year though, something new arrived… with a sizably larger display, non-symmetrical stance, and a pen floating to one side, today we’re taking a good look at Amazon’s newest entry, the Kindle Scribe…

Episode 29 - Parts Bin: Holiday Deals, Pixel 7 Pro, Apple Watch Ultra, M2 iPad Pro

Last week we talked about what Black Friday has become for tech, gadgets, and everything else we love around here… a marketing stunt
But, as we touched on, that doesn’t necessarily means deals don’t exist you just have to do your homework on what you’re buying and, sometimes even more importantly, who you’re buying it from…
In follow-up to that idea, we're diving back in "Parts Bin style" to sprint through several of the latest and greatest products to hit this gadget season and where they fall in the equation of must-buy game changer versus overpriced re-hash…
So, in the wrap-up to this year’s coverage of the holiday shopping season for all-things-tech, let’s check out the gear that should be in everyone’s virtual shopping cart and the ones best left collecting dust… at least until it goes on sale next year… 

Episode 28 - Black Friday 2022: The Real Deal(s) or Crazy Hype?

There’s no preamble to the fact that it’s Thanksgiving week in the United States, and while for many this conjures images of Turkey, stuffing, and post-dinner naps on the couch, for a huge number of us it also means that just a few short hours after that nap begins standing in endless lines for "Black Friday", one of the most important shopping days of the year… 
Or… is it? The above would have been debatable over the last couple of years, and almost a certainty 5 or more years before then… But here, in 2022, is Black Friday actually a fixed day or has it actually become so much more that it’s lost any tangible meaning? 
As with so many things, especially in tech, the answer likely lies somewhere in between. It’s impossible to argue that Black Friday exists as a “thing”, even as a brand unto itself… just ask the emails that have been steadily filling my Inbox since mid-July. But as a singular event where the mother-of-all-deals is likely to be found, we’re just not so sure…
In true Solid State fashion, lets take a verbal stroll through Black Friday as it was, as we feel it is today, and where it might be headed in the future…

Episode 27 - Parts Bin: The Worst Tech We Ever Bought (with our own money)

The Fall months, for many people, are synonymous with new gadgets to play with… whether it’s the TV you’ve been waiting to go on sale, or the excuse you needed to splurge on that perfect mechanical keyboard… the options are endless and the promise of a new toy being just over the horizon is fun!
But every so often, especially for your three (somewhat) lovable presenters, things just go a bit sideways…
The next revolutionary widget turns out to be a dud, months or even years of pouring over rumors and reviews still leads you down a path to transistor-based disappointment… We’ve all been there…
So as we ramp up for a holiday season full of blowout sales, new device launches, and ever-rising hopes & dreams, we take a look back this week on some of the times those dreams just didn’t pan out…

Episode 26 - The Thing about the road to Recovery (Hurricane Ian follow-up)

If you happen to have watched the news, live in Florida, or listen to this show… you probably heard we had a hurricane…
Not just any hurricane though, Ian will likely continue to change record books for years to come… and while that experience has also changed lives, businesses, and the literal face of our homes… lessons also abound from these situations. What to do differently, how to prepare, can we be better? 
Many of those lessons, especially for the crew here, had to do with our technology. What worked as intended? Did anything underperform or just not get the job done? Or, more hopefully, what were the game changers that may have even saved lives? 
These are the questions we have been asking of ourselves for weeks now, and as a team decided the only thing worse than not asking them would be not telling people the answers… because if, buried in those details, is the one thing that saves someone the next go around… well that’s just why we do this… 

Episode 25 - Our early PC gaming... a History

If being gadget and “tech” people describes who we are on this show (and let’s face it, it does)… then at the core of that identity is a common thread that runs all the way back to the beginning, even to childhood, for each of us. 
It led us to build our first PC, edit those first lines of code, and break FAR more things than we ever fixed on the road to somehow turning this passion for ones-and-zeroes into a life-long career. 
Yep, that common thread is gaming… it influences the gear we buy, the way we will many hours of downtime, and too much of the stuff littering my shelves, walls, and library. 
You’ll notice a dip in audio quality compared to other recent episodes, and that’s because we frankly recorded this months ago but decided the time needed to be right to release stores like these so near and dear to our hearts. So with the Holiday game release season in full-swing, what better time to step back and think fondly on our early titles, quests, and energy-drink-fueled weekends that led as all the way to where we are today… 
Game on, Solid State.

Episode 24 - What’s in the box... Canon EOS R6 cameras

It’s a pretty common topic in technology-circles these days to “what is a photo”…
With AI, computational photography, and just outright opinions being expressed creatively at the device level, the answer to that question has never been more up for grabs… 
But in this week’s episode, we’re getting way down beneath that question to the types of photos take far less often than the ones you’re endlessly scrolling past on Instagram…
Yep, I’m talking about photos taken on an actual, purpose-built, Camera… 
No, not the camera on your smartphone or the app on your Lock Screen, but the  dusty hunk of metal, glass, and plastic taking up space on your shelf assuming you’ve even owned one in the last decade..
So, in true Solid Station fashion, we set out to get hands-on with a couple rather exceptional examples of these f-stop laden gadgets to see what we might all be missing out on by relying too heavily on the camera you always have with you versus the one you should have brought all along…