Studio: Jeffrey Powers
Category: Tech News
What It Is
Every day, a guy gives significant milestones in technology related to that date.
Technical Details
This show comes out every single day and episodes are generally around about ten minutes, give or take. The iTunes page has the most recent sixty episodes. The official show page has an archive that always features the most recent years- worth of episodes; at any given time, you can access 365 episodes.
What About It
This is a very interesting high concept podcast. It reminds me of The Writer’s Almanac, which comes out every day and gives trivia and such related to authors & literature that ties to the particular day, like, you know, talking about E.M. Forster on his birthday or talking about Jhumpa Lahiri on the anniversary of her Pulitzer Prize win, etc. Likewise, this podcast features milestones in the history of technology; it’ll talk about MySpace on the anniversary of the launch of the site or the development of the first e-mail program on the official day it was launched. Sometimes, it stretches the limits of what we might think of as technology; a recent episode talked about the day the first Tootsie Roll was sold back in 1896 and ties it to the theme of the show by talking about the technology that allowed for its manufacture and how it actually aided in certain war efforts. Like The Writer’s Almanac, it doesn’t go in depth or anything, since it’s limited by the time constraints of the show, but I still found the bits of trivia the show throws out there to be really quite interesting. Unfortunately, this one’s a victim of podcast oversaturation – I enjoyed listening to it for a while and found it interesting, but I’m not really a tech guy, so it was probably never going to get into my permanent rotation. And at a show a day, even a relatively short one, it just isn’t a show I could ever keep up with. But this isn’t a negative review at all. Especially not if you’re a techie.
Essential If
You found my review of The Writer’s Almanac interesting, but wondered why Garrison Keillor couldn’t talk about iPhones.
Avoid Like the Plague If
You’re Amish.
Best Entry Point
Cop out again. Just download the most recent one. Each episode covers so many little trivia episodes, I can’t really remember which bits were in which episodes and it’s kind of impossible to make a judgment about one being better than another.