Crossed Wires

If you’ve ever purchased a new laptop, you’ll know only too well the pain of configuring your new system to get your dream setup. With some manufacturers, looking at you here Apple, your choice of storage and memory are there for the lifetime of the laptop.

Worst still, if you have a failed component on your laptop you’re often faced with expensive and proprietary repair options that can often cost nearly as much as the laptop ...

It’s our pleasure to be joined again by The Iconfactory’s Gedeon Maheux, this time we’re talking less Star Trek and more Tapestry, no not that episode with Q and Picard!

Project Tapestry is their latest KickStarter project, and the goal is to create a one-stop-shop for reading the influx of things that matter to you on the web. As long as the site has an open and accessible endpoint for you to get the data, yo...

With so many choices in browsers on desktop, mobile, and even our vehicles, it’s important to look under-the-hood to understand the differences between the engines that power your favourite browser. 

Be that Chromium, WebKit, or Gecko, not all browsers are created equal and have varying features and views on the rights of their users. We’re honoured to be joined by Jon von Tetzchner, the CEO of Vivaldi, an open...

Whether you work in tech, produce tech content, or just happen to use a smartphone, a single question can spark debate and an explosion of extreme views from both sides. That question is simple, iPhone or Android?

We’re joined by our Zack, one of Jae’s nephews and a longtime Android user and advocate to have an honest discussion about why we like the platforms we’ve settled on and where we see potential issues...

You’ll have heard James and Jae wax lyrical about their love for the UniFi line of networking gear on our live streams and in past episodes with Alex, as well as with Cody from MacTelecom Networks, but this episode is a fairly deep look into why we love UniFi.

We’re joined by Alex Lowe and Evan McCann, the hosts of UI Chat, a monthly Ubiquiti focussed podcast that is definitely our go-to resource for the latest news...

Imagine a time when internet access meant using an analogue modem to dial a phone number in order to connect to the internet at speeds of up 7 kilobytes a second! Now imagine trying to play online games such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Euro 96, and even Bridge, over that connection.

Our guests this week, Phil and Stu Ashby, helped to create and run Wireplay, a dial-up based online gaming service from BT (yes, the telephone c...

In what’s starting to become a Crossed Wires tradition, James, Jae and Alex gather to discuss Apple’s latest event, which was scarily short at just over 30 mins long, making this possibly our shortest event coverage episode to date!

We unpack what the new m3 powered Macs mean in terms of performance, with Apple specifically targeting those who have yet to convert from Intel based Macs and early m1 adopters, why 8 GB...

When we think of programming, we may tend to think of Matrix-esque nerds sat in front of green-on-black screens absorbed in code that makes less sense than a chocolate teapot, or we may think of super-star game developers bashing out the latest GTA or similar.

The reality is that programming is very much a problem solving exercise, and languages like Ruby provide a set of tools for how to map out logic and present results to th...

Accessibility is essential to allow everyone to enjoy experiences that they may have, in the past, missed out on due to a lack of vision, a lack of hearing, or so many other factors.

As many of you will know, both Jae and James are visually impaired, and so making one of our favourite pastimes more accessible for those with a wide range of sight conditions is a truly exciting topic for us. 

So, Jae reached out to Brando...

Before we go into this week’s new episode, we’d like to thank everyone for their patience whilst both Jae and James have had what can only be described as an insanely busy (and great!) summer. We’re planning to keep new episodes coming out weekly going forward, and we really do have some great episodes already recorded.

We sat down to record with good friend of the show, Alex Lowe of The Interface, to take a l...

Cloud Gaming is something you might have heard about; you may have even used a service like GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud Gaming or even the recently departed Google Stadia.

Jae and James sat down with Jay Hamilton and Omega of Thoughtable Network to talk about OnLive and also the modern cloud gaming services. OnLive is the technology that PlayStation Now is built on and understanding the past is important to understanding the presen...

It’s been over 6 years since Nintendo released their hybrid-console, the massively popular Switch to the world and it would be fair to say that this combination home console and portable gaming device has had a huge impact on the gaming world. 

For the longest time, the Switch was my only games system (not including my iPhone and iPad of course), and the wide range of games certainly makes it an attractive system for...

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 need to come together...

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 Apple event without g...

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 reluctant to...

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 technology, like...

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 simply banning social media s...

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 down with Canis to talk abo...

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 join us ...