ID10T Techcast
ID10T Techcast is a weekly podcast where Tyler Woodward, a broadcast engineer, goes over the past week's news in Linux, tech and broadcasting and tells you what he thinks about it. Episodes run 15 to 30 minutes.
Every episode runs through the week's stories, like Linux security holes and open source, Big Tech and AI companies, the FCC, and radio and TV, then ends with one longer opinion piece. Some weeks it's a security hole, some weeks it's why radio isn't dead yet.
The show is for right to repair, privacy, a real nationwide US privacy law like Europe's GDPR, decentralized social media like Mastodon and Bluesky, and independent and community radio. It's critical of big corporations, tech billionaires and AI companies, and it calls out both political parties when they earn it. Everything's explained in plain English, no jargon.
More at ID10T.fm.
Episodes
53 episodes
Why Podcasting Metrics Matter: The RSS Enclosure Tag
The entire podcast industry runs on one tiny XML tag that nobody owns. The enclosure tag is why podcasting stayed open when everything else got platformed, and it's also why measuring an audience is so much messier than anyone admits.I c...
What Is RDS? The Data Hiding in FM Radio
There's a tiny data protocol still riding inside FM signals after all these years, and it's the reason your car's dashboard knows what song is playing. RDS and its US cousin RBDS are quietly holding up more than most people realize.I cov...
Why Cable News Audio Doesn't Work as Radio
Cable news channels have the staff, the brand recognition, and news gathering operations most radio stations can only dream of. Instead of building real audio products, they route the 24/7 TV feed to a streaming platform and call it done. CNN o...
What's Really Happening to AM Radio Infrastructure
The fight over AM radio isn't really about whether you listen to it. It's about what happens when the land under a tower is worth more than the station on it. Licenses keep declining, copper theft keeps getting worse, and the push to pull AM fr...
Ted Turner's Satellite Loophole That Built Cable News
Ted Turner died on May 6, 2026, at 87. Most tributes will focus on CNN and the billion dollars to the UN. But the moment that mattered most for broadcast history happened on December 17, 1976, when Turner beamed a struggling UHF station up to R...
Why Broadcast Engineers Are Vanishing From Radio
Most of America's radio stations no longer have a chief engineer, and nobody notices until a tower goes dark or the FCC fines start piling up. One station sat silent for six months because no one knew the transmitter had failed. That's not an a...
Why the FCC Public File Can Cost Your Station
The FCC's public file used to be a dusty binder in your lobby. Since 2018 it's a searchable, timestamped online record anyone can dig through, and the political file alone has produced some of radio's biggest enforcement fines, running into six...
LocalSend: Free Cross-Platform File Transfer Tool
Moving a file three feet shouldn't require a round trip to a distant server. LocalSend is a free, open source app that moves files, folders, and text directly over your own network with end-to-end TLS and no accounts, ads, or tracking. If you l...
Why Crowded Buildings Kill Your Cell Signal
You walk into a big box store with full bars and walk out to a flood of missed notifications. It's not your phone and it's not your carrier. It's physics and congestion colliding. Buildings act like leaky shields, and crowds create digital traf...
Your Satellite Calls Aren't Encrypted. Here's Why.
Your phone call might have traveled 22,000 miles through space with zero protection, and someone with an $800 satellite dish could have heard every word. A new study from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland intercepted real, unencrypted...
Why Local Radio Stations Are Really Going Dark
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 ...
MaxxCasting: Fixing FM Radio's Coverage Problem
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 "...
Broadcast Network Security After the FCC Router Ban
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 st...
I Built My Own Networking Cheat Sheet. Here's Why.
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 d...
CBS News Radio Shuts Down After 100 Years
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 spre...
Getting Tested For Autism And ADHD At 40
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...
YouTube Music Paywalled Lyrics. Here's the Problem.
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 f...
Why Ending Weather Radio Canada Hurts Storm Alerts
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 ...
The TV Guide Channel: Cable's Original Doomscroll
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. Lo...
Do Smart Appliances Really Need Wi-Fi?
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...
Skip a New PC: Switch to Zorin OS Instead
Windows 10 support ended, and Microsoft's answer is hardware requirements that sideline perfectly capable machines. There's a smarter path than buying a new PC: Zorin OS, a Linux desktop built to feel familiar while staying fast and secure on h...
Why Smart TVs Track You And How To Stop It
Your TV is not just a screen. It's an ad tech computer with a giant display, and it's hungry for your viewing data. Automatic content recognition fingerprints what's on screen, even over HDMI from your cable box or console. App usage and button...
Why Your Laptop Feels Slow (It's the Storage)
Your laptop shouldn't feel like it's wading through syrup, and the fix is usually storage, not a new machine. This episode untangles the acronyms that confuse everyone: HDD, SSD, NVMe, and M.2, and what each one actually means for boot times, g...
How to Use AI Tools Without Getting Burned by Them
Forget the hype cycle. This episode breaks AI into pieces you can actually use: the broad umbrella term, machine learning underneath it, and generative tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot on top. These models predict tokens to produ...
Why Google Search Results Got So Much Worse
You asked for a library and got a shopping mall. This episode digs into why search results slid downhill: crowded ad units, affiliate-heavy pages, and AI summaries that sound confident while averaging mediocre sources.I walk through the ...
