Crossed Wires

If you’re like me and enjoy a good novel, with gripping stories, fleshed out characters, and developed worlds of intrigue then you may wonder how it all comes together into the finished product.  My guest this week is self-published author and tech nerd, Matt Gemmell. We talk about how Matt uses just his iPad to plan and write his stories, how he self-publishes his work and all the elements that n...

First of all, sincere apologies for the delay in getting this episode out to you all. Editing a nearly four hour recording session down really is somewhat of a mission, especially with a full-time job and live streaming in the mix. Fear not, though, we’ll be back to our weekly episodes from now on, with new episodes every Monday morning (UK time) to cure those Monday blues! It wouldn’t be a big Ap...

Over the last few months, we’ve been looking for a home for all of the data we generate for the whole of Crossed Wires, everything from artwork, show notes, episode plans, all of our stream layouts, and much more. We tried iCloud shared folders, since we’re both firmly in the Apple ecosystem, but to be blunt they just aren’t built for large amounts of data or more flexible sharing options. We were...

As many of you may know, or figured out very quickly, I’m a massive Star Trek fan, to the point that I can probably quote many episodes and movies line-for-line, with or without my dubious Shatner impression. Growing up in the late 80s and through the 90s, there was always Trek on TV, be it re-runs of the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and even Voyager.  Seeing the wealth of...

As our politicians and elected officials debate the dangers of TikTok and end-to-end-encryption (E2EE), we need to look beyond the hysteria and scapegoating to the actual issues and how we have sensible discussions about what the risks of social media platforms actually are. We’re joined by Rachel Hanson, a parent and elected official herself, to try to unpack what the real issues are and why simp...

As I’m sure long time listeners will know, we use Ferrite by Wooji Juice for all of our editing here, it really has become indispensable to our production workflows. From being able to remove sections of unwanted audio with a simple swipe, quickly strip away swathes of silent audio, and easily exporting audio in the format we need to get the podcast out to you. So, it was my great honour to sit do...

We’ve probably all had fun recently giving ChatGPT, or other AI chatbots from the likes of Google, Microsoft and others, what we think are fun and innocent prompts to work on, but do we stop to consider what we’re actually feeding these tools and where the data they return comes from and what biasses may be in the machine learning models they’ve been trained on? We’re delighted to have Catherine j...

We’ve all had those moments, when the WiFi signal drops right in the middle of our favourite episode, or in that long-overdue catch up call with a friend or family member. But, do we know why our WiFi can drop out, or do we simply refer to any internet issues as “The WiFi is down again!” when really it’s a problem with the ISP and nothing to do with our home WiFi network. Our guest, and good frien...

Hello it’s Jae here, let me set the stage for this episode: Hop in your Delorean and travel back in time with me, to the year of our Lord 2018 when World of Warcraft was soon to be heading into its 15th year, and World of Warcraft Classic was due to come out in Summer of 2019.  Back then, I went by the name of Frazley and ran FrazlCast, which was a World of Warcraft fan podcast. I showed this epis...

Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, Sega were in a console war with their fellow Japanese rivals, Nintendo. Keen to show what they could do, they created more and more add-ons for the Mega Drive (or Genesis to our North American friends) like the Mega CD and 32X. Sega were really doing what Nintendon’t, for very good reasons! As the 90s came closer to the millennium we also saw a new craze f...

As we hear more stories of systems and services being compromised by malicious attackers, often simply referred to as ‘hackers’, we need to be aware of the basics of how these attacks work and what we should be looking out for in our daily tech lives. We’re probably all fed up of the increasing complexity of logging into our favourite websites and apps, but the reality is that passwords, multi-fac...

Do you remember sitting in front of your computer with a miniDV camcorder hooked up by FireWire and waiting patiently for the footage to capture to your editor of choice, possibly iMovie or Windows Movie Maker? Maybe you were a professional editor who had to log and capture hours of footage into Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, or even AVID, and then crafting your masterpiece only to then have to rend...

It’s hard to believe that we’ve already hit our 50th episode, but it’s here and a lot of that is thanks to you, our amazing community who keep listening, subscribing, and intereacting with us across social media, email, and our Discord. For this milestone episode, we thought you may like a bit of an insight into how each episode of the show reaches you after we record and edit it.  We reached out...

Whilst many of us have grown up with technology being such a core part of our lives, often glued to our devices for far more of the day than we’d like to admit, the older generations have had technology thrust upon them without nearly enough though about how to make it accessible. My guest this week is Nancy May of the Eldercare Success podcast; we have a chat about how technology can be used to h...

With more and more cloud services hosted in data centres consuming massive amounts of energy, our devices becoming ever more power-hungry, and the constant pressure to always have the latest tech, it’s probably fair to say that we don’t always consider what the cost of our tech ownership and usage has on the environment. We’re thrilled to have Chris Adams join us for this week’s episode. We take a...

James and Jae both have a family history of health problems. One of the biggest areas of concern is heart health. Family members have had heart attacks, had to have stints added, had bypass surgeries, and struggled with strokes, seizures, and more. That’s why for Heart Month 2023, and every February since 2021, we have been supporting the American Heart Association on Twitch. We also plan to begin...

Over the years, I’ve switched operating systems many times; the big one being from Windows to macOS, but there have been many periods of time when I’ve chosen Linux as my OS of choice. However, the term Linux can get somewhat confusing, does it refer to the underlying kernel or a specific distribution and its desktop experience? It doesn’t help that some Linux fans can become very passionate when...

To many people, the idea of Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games (MMORPGs) can be summed up by the image of an individual sitting in their parent’s basement, endlessly defeating dungeon bosses whilst consuming copious amounts of Mountain Dew and less-than-healthy snack foods. To challenge this perception, we take the opportunity to sit down and talk with Bezerker of Unshackled Fury on as...

If your experience in business IT has, like mine, been very heavily focussed on Microsoft’s ecosystem and lots of propriety systems that have a strong “Don’t look behind the curtain” vibe to them then my guest today may help shine some light on how open source solutions can be a great fit in the business. It’s my pleasure to have Tom join us, having been a fan of his YouTube content for quite some...

When Apple announced new M2-based Macs, a new HomePod, and the launch of Advanced Data Protection with little more than a press release and video on their site, we were caught a little off guard. Whilst we’re not a news show, per se, we wanted to chat about the impact these new systems, particularly the M2 Pro-powered Mac Mini would have on the Apple ecosystem. Returning guest, Jeff Butts of The M...

The last week or so has seen some extraordinary rubbish behaviour from Twitter regarding their API for third-party clients, like Twitterrific and Tweetbots. Users found themselves unable to access their timelines via anything but the official app and website, and developers had no communication to tell them what on earth was going on. On Thursday, Twitter announced that this was intentional and th...

For those of us who grew up with Game Boys and Game Gears, maybe even an Atari Lynx, the concept of full desktop gaming in a portable form factor has been on our wishlist for a very long time. So, the question we discuss with Noah from Steam Deck HQ can be summed up as “Has Valve’s Steam Deck made that dream come true?”. We talk about the hardware itself, the impressive software stack built upon S...

The idea of a non-taxed, non-regulated, digital currency can sound incredibly appealing for many uses, but are cryptocurrencies all they’re cracked up to be and should we be advocating their use? That’s what we discuss with the published researcher, Dr Catherine Flick, known on BBC local radio as being able to explain Bitcoin in 15 seconds. Catherine brought so much insight to help us understand w...

As many of you know, we use SquadCast to record every episode of Crossed Wires, and indeed Charging Status. It’s been such a genuine pleasure to build a relationship, mostly thanks to Jae’s existing connection, with the team at SquadCast. In this episode, Zachariah Moreno joins me again, this time to talk about how things have been going for them since we last spoke, including their hugely ambitio...

With the Macintosh having such a long history, and Apple doing so much over the platform’s life I wanted to get a panel together to discuss all things Mac collecting and our thoughts on past and present. I’m really pleased to be joined by returning guests Dan Vincent and Sean from Action Retro, as well as new guest Steve from Mac84TV. We had a truly enjoyable and insightful chat about Apple’s worl...