DaveMason.com
ComputerTalk with Dave Mason
The official archive of all available ComputerTalk with Dave Mason radio shows. Spend some time with Dave. Listen to a full show or explore clips by topic.
3,475 unique clips. Each clip appears in one section. Historical conversations, not current advice. Full episodes remain available separately by date.
1414 clips, strongest first.
Dr. Dave illustrates social engineering with a person who simply walks into a business dressed like a technician, asks for a password and receives it, showing how ordinary trust can defeat technical safeguards.
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Dr. Dave describes using a DNS report when an Internet provider insisted that a long running connection problem was local. He says the tone changed and the case was escalated once he could identify a failing server, showing how collected evidence can make a support conversation productive.
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Using a company's Outlook-versus-Gmail decision, Dr. Dave explains that a technically superior product is not automatically the right choice. A consultant must also ask how it works with the people, the job environment, the tasks it should support and the productivity it actually produces.
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After restoring the live stream, Dr. Dave explains that one bad motherboard capacitor made the server work and fail unpredictably, imitating a BIOS problem and eventually affecting the processor and drive data. A dramatic smoking failure would have been easier; the subtle one consumed far more time before the repaired system brought internet listeners back.
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After weeks of inconsistent symptoms and repeated calls, a provider technician finally sees constant modem reboots in an inaccessible log; isolating two old cable runs removes the noise and ends the failure.
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Dr. Dave explains that he does not enjoy being negative and would prefer to fill the program with positive developments. Even so, he believes the show must alert listeners to a product's potential roadblocks before they buy so that an appealing design does not become an avoidable disappointment.
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Dr. Dave recalls urging Sprint to address a network design that left customer systems exposed. His account distinguishes the customers' technical responsibility from the provider's duty to recognize a predictable real-world risk.
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A Facebook lockout makes Dr. Dave ask the question a skilled technologist can easily miss: if the system is this confusing to him, what is the experience like for somebody who finds everything about a computer baffling? His concern turns a personal frustration into a concise case for humane software design.
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Frank Henslick explains that Wi-Fi certification tests products for interoperability across manufacturers. He and Dr. Dave then distinguish certification from draft 802.11n products, which could work well within one brand but had no guarantee of compatibility or an upgrade to a standard that did not yet exist.
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Dr. Dave says that half of his work can feel like psychology. When a frightened client reports that nothing works, he identifies each thing that still does, asks for the exact message and discovers a sixteen-device license limit. Turning off one unused connection restores access and turns panic into a specific, manageable problem.
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Dr. Dave explains from recovery experience how an underpowered portable drive can behave unreliably and damage its partition even when the drive itself is still mechanically sound.
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An AVG update that reportedly trapped some Windows 7 computers in a boot loop gives Dr. Dave a striking example of protective software becoming the source of a serious failure.
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A severed cable left northern Arizona without Internet access and stopped card transactions at local businesses. Dr. Dave uses the outage to ask clients what they would do if connectivity or power disappeared for a day: keep some cash, know which data is available offline and preserve a workable manual procedure instead of discovering every dependency during the emergency.
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A client's Internet connection is completely dead even though the provider's account page reports no problem. Unable to get a useful answer by phone, Dr. Dave drives through the neighborhood, finds the field technicians and confirms that several surrounding blocks are down—solving the information problem even before the service itself is restored.
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At the hurried end of the show, Dr. Dave marks the public Windows 7 beta as major news while giving the durable warning that promising unfinished software belongs on a testing machine, never the computer a person needs to work.
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Reports of old Hotmail archives disappearing during an upgrade give Dr. Dave another reason to keep independent local copies: a failure affecting only hundreds of accounts is still total loss to each person involved.
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Dr. Dave explains that several backup drives are useful only if they cannot all fail or disappear together. One copy can stay attached for routine backup, but another should be moved away from the computer so a theft or fire does not take every copy at once.
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After describing years of security tools, Dr. Dave says the first and most important protection remains the user's own behavior. A convincing message can exploit urgency and fear, so his advice at the moment of compulsion is physical and memorable: back away from the keyboard.
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Ray’s respectful disagreement lets Dr. Dave distinguish buying replacement chips from downloading firmware. Keep both sides and admitted exceptions.
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Before Vista reaches ordinary consumers, Dr. Dave advises listeners to let early adopters expose the first problems rather than rushing to install it. He also rejects breathless claims that inevitable flaws make the operating system a total failure, asking listeners to step outside the reflex that a product must be either perfect or worthless.
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As early smartphones combine calendars, email, keyboards and cameras, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve keep returning to the most basic test: can the device reliably make a call? Their contrast between an attractive feature rich device and one that works as a phone captures the practical standard Dr. Dave brought to emerging technology.
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Still reacting to the studio failures, Dr. Dave declares that the show will have backup CDs, hard drives, network connections and scripts so the crew can recover when something goes wrong. Evil Steve jokes that they will need a wheelbarrow to bring it all in.
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Discussing the newly released Kinect, Dr. Dave points to the tape over his laptop webcam and says that a camera’s intended permissions do not make unauthorized access impossible, before he and Evil Steve defuse the warning with jokes about the microphone.
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Dr. Dave notices that scams have shifted from promises of sudden wealth to warnings designed to trigger panic. His response is deliberately simple: do not use the email link, slow down, open the account through the normal route or call the verified number on the card after the adrenaline has passed.
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Browse by year, then month, to find the episodes from that month.
442 proposed broadcast dates, plus 2 undated entries. Dates are based on archive filenames and may be approximate. Some broadcasts survive as separate parts or incomplete recordings.
