Archive
EP 18 18:56
Local stations are going dark across the country, and blaming streaming only tells half the story. Media consolidation, voice tracking, and corporate cost cutting hollowed out AM and FM from the inside. Strip out the local DJs, local news, and community connection, and you're left with a zombie…
EP 17 14:32
FM coverage maps look bold and confident, but the actual audience listens six feet off the ground, weaving between buildings and hills where signals get chewed up. That's where audio turns fluttery and listeners quietly tune away. And the old "just add a booster" fix can make things worse in the…
EP 16 20:40
The FCC put foreign-manufactured consumer routers on the covered list, and if your facility is running one of those boxes in a mission-critical spot, it's time for a hard look at the rack. I break down what the new rules actually say, what's still unclear for brands that design in the US but build…
EP 15 18:04
I stopped waiting for the "Ugly's Electrical Reference" of networking and built my own. When you're standing in front of a switch at 11 p.m. and need the exact Cisco IOS command, a clean Wireshark filter, or a subnet answer right now, generic documentation and endless search results are a trap. I…
EP 14 12:08
A nearly 100-year-old radio news network is going dark on May 22, roughly 700 affiliates are affected, and the radio news team is gone. This isn't a relic being retired. It's a working system being switched off because it stopped fitting a spreadsheet. The top-of-hour newscast is infrastructure.…
EP 13 13:28
I hit a point where rereading the same sentence three times stopped being funny and started being exhausting. I'm almost 40, and I finally decided to get evaluated for ADHD and autism, because "just try harder" is not a plan. I go back to school, when neurodivergence was poorly understood and kids…
EP 12 12:55
YouTube Music blurred the words to your favorite songs and called it premium. This episode digs into the decision to cap free lyric views and sell the unblur, and why charging for basic comprehension is the wrong kind of innovation. A working feature got downgraded to manufacture demand. There's a…
EP 11 16:28
Canada is shutting down Weather Radio Canada, and the timing could not be worse. Those 162 MHz VHF transmitters are a quiet 24/7 public safety backbone, and the replacement plan is apps, websites, and phone alerts. Anyone who has lived through a multi-day outage knows how that goes: power drops…
EP 10 12:21
Before infinite feeds, there was Channel 99: a scrolling list of what was on, and you sat there waiting for your channel to come back around like it was a small punishment. Turns out the system behind it was more interesting than the scroll. Local headends, satellite data, and a Commodore Amiga…
EP 9 11:56
Your dishwasher doesn't need a firmware update to clean plates, and your oven shouldn't require an account to roast dinner. This episode is about the gap between promised convenience and what connected appliances actually do: collect data, gate features, and creep ads into places they don't belong.…