We've got a project potpourri this week of things we've been getting our hands on, literally in the case of Will and his brand new Steam Controller. We talk through the ins and outs of Valve's first new hardware in a while, including button feel, a variety of use cases, what you can do with it if Steam isn't present, and more. Will's also been in the mouse labs, testing an 8000Hz polling rate and glass feet, and finally, he reports on what he's gotten out of his first month with a new 3D printer. Brad's also been down a rabbit hole on 2D printing (and has the battle scars to prove it) with some news and revelations about paper printers new and old. Projects!

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After all these monthly Q&A episodes, you folks continue to send us great Qs every month, and this time around we dig into such topics as the MacBook Neo's target audience, Windows running on Linux, technical and corporate work jargon bleeding into your personal life, Apple's relatively quiet 50th anniversary, ultrawide monitors versus lots of monitors, using Home Assistant for everything (or not), the likelihood that every home will one day have a 3D printer, and the marvel of redundant, deterministic computing that is the Artemis flight control system.

Links for Artemis and shuttle program flight computers:

https://cacm.acm.org/news/how-nasa-built-artemis-iis-fault-tolerant-computer/

https://www.ghs.com/news/20260423_int-178_orion_lockheed.html

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900015844/downloads/19900015844.pdf

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 time to fix Windows 11. OK, that might be a little ambitious for one podcast episode, but it's at least time to step through the plan Microsoft unveiled recently for improving Windows 11 and addressing some of its shortcomings (and perhaps salvaging its brand a bit in the process). We go over forthcoming changes around the taskbar and Start Menu, File Explorer, notifications, native WinUI interface components, WSL2, device drivers, and a bunch of other stuff, plus bring plenty of our own large and small, realistic and far-fetched ideas for making Windows tolerable again.

"Our Commitment to Windows Quality:" https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-commitment-to-windows-quality/

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

Friend of the show and all-around science guy Kishore Hari joins us once again, this time to dig into humanity's return to the Moon in NASA's Artemis program. We explore everything from the astronauts' wakeup playlists and diets to the wireless and camera tech onboard, how observing this kind of mission from Earth has changed since 1972, the history of and political context around the program, our favorite uplifting moments from Artemis II, astronomy opportunities that might be enabled by a continued presence on the Moon, and a bunch more.

Show notes and links: https://tinyurl.com/techpod-334-artemis-ii

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Brad's out this week, so Norman Chan takes the guest chair to talk us through the current state of the art in 3D printing. We cover the latest in FDM printers, whether resin printers are right for you, the best places to find 3D models to print, how you can edit and adjust the models you want to print, and a whole lot 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

Is it time for another Q&A again already? How the months just fly by. This month we address everything from auto-generated podcast chapters and episode links to computer class-action lawsuits, corporate remote administration of your personal devices, how to move a PC across the ocean, the dream of permanent standard time, why you probably still shouldn't clean your computer with a vacuum cleaner, and a bunch 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

It's been a while since we got down to brass tacks with a tips and tricks episode, so that's what we're doing this week with a new list of tech that's making our lives a little more pleasant lately. Will extols the tiling window manager once again -- not just in Linux, but also what's going on with this unique workflow in Windows and MacOS -- and talks over his brute-force strategy for iMessaging in Windows and making his Nest thermostat less evil. And Brad talks about why everyone should buy a $20 USB video capture dongle, how recent additions to PowerToys are making Windows 11 just slightly less crappy, and urges us all to stock up before the grim, optical disc-less future arrives.

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

There's kind of a mountain of hardware news from the last week, so we're rounding it up this week, starting with Microsoft's Project Helix (a.k.a. the next Xbox), interrogating what exactly that box is going to look like inside and out, how much machine learning is going to factor in, and more. There's also the tiny, cheap MacBook Neo (and a surprising theory about future tiny iPhones), Intel's refreshed Arrow Lake CPUs, upscaling improvements on PS5 Pro (and Sony's anything-goes history of system settings), DLSS 4.5, Valve's continued supply-chain struggles, and more. That's a lot of podcast!

Links for this episode:

From GDC: Building the Next Generation of Xbox - Xbox Wire

GDC 2026: Announcing new tools and platform updates for Windows PC game developers - Windows Developer Blog

Upgraded PSSR upscaler is coming to PS5 Pro – PlayStation.Blog

Say hello to MacBook Neo - Apple

Intel's cheaper, faster new Core Ultra CPUs still have a lot to prove | PCWorld

NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Delivers Major Upgrade With 2nd Gen Transformer Model For Super Resolution & 6X Dynamic Multi Frame Generation | GeForce News | NVIDIA

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