Dave’s Garage: Shop Talk
by Dave Plummer and Glen Hodges
Dave Plummer, a retired operating systems engineer for Microsoft going back to the DOS and Windows 95 days, and his co-host Glen talk about technology and answer questions from his YouTube channels: Dave’s Garage and Dave’s Attic. Just 2 high school friends from 40 years ago hangin’ out, talkin’ tech and usually sharing some kind of prairie anecdotes from their youth growing up in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Dave is now in Seattle, WA and Glen is in Vancouver, BC.
Episodes
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Is AI Writing Broken Software? | Shop Talk EP101
Could AI rescue your favourite discontinued software—or recreate an application you already use? And how would you know the result actually works?This week on Shop Talk, Dave and Glen tackle your questions about AI software cloning, reverse engineering, and the difference between a convincing...
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What Would 1996 Dave Think of Today’s AI? | Shop Talk 100
What would 1996 Dave think of rebuilding Task Manager with AI? Dave and Glen celebrate 100 episodes of Shop Talk with Windows stories, retro computing, fresh viewer questions, and a look at the community behind the show.Across the first 99 episodes, our comment archive contains more than 23,000...
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Windows War Stories, AI and the PDP-11 | Shop Talk EP99
Windows war stories meet AI-assisted retro computing in this week’s Shop Talk. Dave and Glen explore AI development on the PDP-11, how they prompt and review generated code, and what older computers can still teach us.Dave discusses improving top for BSD, compiler changes for ksh, and getting…
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Meet PDP Gary: AI Meets Old-School Computing | Shop Talk #98
PDP Gary has a personality—but how did Dave define it? This week on Shop Talk, Dave and Glen start with Gary, then explore Dave’s recent work using AI on BSD, the PDP kernel, and its peripherals. From there, we turn to viewer questions about AI control, trust, and why the same question can…
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What Stops an AI Agent That Won’t Stop? | Shop Talk #97
What happens when AI stops being a useful tool and starts becoming a crutch? This week, Glen brings Dave your questions about confidently wrong AI, learning programming fundamentals in the age of LLMs, what an AI agent actually is, how multiple agents cooperate, whether system prompts encourage...
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Software Doesn’t Need Sentience to Be Dangerous | Shop Talk #96
Can autonomous AI agents cause serious harm without being conscious, sentient or malicious? This week, Dave returns to the unsettling AI-agent experiment from his recent Dave’s Garage episode. He explains air-gapped testing, token limits, rewards, “permadeath,” agent cooperation and the role of...
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What’s Next for TMOG? Dave Responds to Your Ideas | Shop Talk #95
Could Task Manager OG become part of Windows—and what should Dave add next?Following the release of TMOG Beta 3, viewers returned with questions, bug reports and a substantial wish list. Dave responds to requests for making TMOG the default Windows Task Manager, Windows 10 and portable versions,...
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What’s New in Task Manager OG? Dave’s Latest Updates | Shop Talk #94
Dave opens with another look at Task Manager OG, walking through the features added since his first update. Then he and Glen dive into your questions about where TMOG goes next. We cover Windows 10 support, Linux compatibility, Mac quirks, sensors, performance, licensing—and the request for a…
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TMOG: Dave Answers Your Questions + Rates 23 Feature Requests | Shop Talk #93
The response to our first Task Manager OG episode was extraordinary—so we invited Dave back to answer your questions, respond to bug reports and discuss where TMOG goes next.We cover Windows 10 and Linux support, Mac adoption, licensing and TMOG Pro, security warnings, sensor compatibility,...
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Windows Task Manager’s Creator Rebuilt It 30 Years Later | Shop Talk #92
In 1994, Dave Plummer wrote the original Windows Task Manager. Three decades later, he has rebuilt the idea for modern hardware as Task Manager OG—and in this episode, he gives us a complete tour.Dave demonstrates TMOG running on a Mac, including its real-time performance graphs, long-term…
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The Internet Still Runs on 40-Year-Old Ideas | Shop Talk #91
In Shop Talk #90, Dave and Glen answer a deceptively simple viewer question: when you send something online, how does the Internet find the right computer—possibly on the other side of the world?We follow the journey from Ethernet’s electrical signals and MAC addresses through switches, routers,...
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The Hidden Computer Network in Your Car | Shop Talk #90
In Shop Talk #89, Dave and Glen dig into viewer questions about CAN bus: the hidden computer network inside modern cars. This week starts with the scarier version of the question: can the network inside your car be hacked? Viewers asked about CAN bus theft, headlight attacks, OBD dongles flooding...
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Are Flock Cameras Public Safety or Public Surveillance? | Shop Talk #88
In Shop Talk #88, Dave and Glen dig into the debate around Flock cameras, license plate readers, public surveillance, cell-phone tracking, and the difficult line between public safety and privacy. The core viewer question this week: if our phones already track us everywhere, why are people more...
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Why Does a 3K Notepad Use 502MB of RAM? | Shop Talk #87
This week on Shop Talk, Dave and Glen dig into the viewer questions from Dave’s tiny Notepad experiment: if TinyRetroPad is only a few kilobytes on disk, why does Task Manager show it using hundreds of megabytes of RAM? That question opens the door to executable size, DLLs, Windows memory...
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Why Engineering Is Harder Than It Looks | Shop Talk #86
Why put a microcontroller in the trunk instead of simply tapping into the brake lights or turn signals? In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and Glen dig into the hidden trade-offs behind Dave’s Mark III RGB lighting project: reading outputs instead of inputs, handling hazard lights and reverse...
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When Did We Stop Optimizing Software? | Shop Talk #85
What happened to software optimization—and does understanding what's happening underneath still make you a better programmer? In Shop Talk #85, Dave Plummer answers viewer questions about software optimization, engineering discipline, abstraction, and whether modern developers are losing touch…
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Everything Is a File? | Shop Talk #84
What does it really mean when programmers say "everything is a file"? In Shop Talk #84, Dave Plummer and Glen Hodges answer viewer questions inspired by the recent fopen() discussion and explore one of the most influential ideas in computing: abstraction. The conversation begins with a question...
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Are We Teaching Programming Wrong? | Shop Talk #83
Are we teaching programming wrong? In Shop Talk #83, Dave Plummer and Glen Hodges explore how programmers learned to think about computers in the early days of personal computing—and whether something important has been lost along the way. The discussion begins with a viewer question about…
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Windows: What's Really Happening Under the Hood? | Shop Talk #82
Dave and Glen explore what’s really happening under the hood of modern computers. From memory allocation and malloc to page faults, caches, printf, BitLocker, networking APIs, and software complexity, this episode digs into the systems most people use every day but rarely understand.Along the…
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Why Is Windows Built Like This? | Shop Talk #81
Shop Talk #81 explores the strange engineering decisions that still shape modern Windows systems today.Dave and Glen dig into GUIDs, COM, APIs, the Windows Registry, backwards compatibility, CPU scheduling, interrupts, abstraction layers, and why software architecture often becomes far more...
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Why Old Tech Feels More Trustworthy | Shop Talk #80
Shop Talk #80 explores why old technology often feels more understandable — and sometimes more trustworthy — than the systems we use today. Dave and Glen dig into retro payphones, massive 1980s hard drives, cloud dependency, hardware ownership, restoration projects, and the strange comfort of...
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Will AI Flood the World With Security Vulnerabilities? | Shop Talk EP 79
What happens when AI can find every vulnerability in software? This week on Shop Talk, Dave and Glen dig into the real-world implications of powerful new AI systems that can identify—and potentially exploit—security flaws across major platforms. Are we about to see a flood of CVEs? Should these...
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AI Won’t Fix This (And Might Make It Worse) | Shop Talk #78
We’ve been told AI is going to fix everything—but is that actually true? In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and Glen dig into viewer questions about where AI falls short, what it can’t fix, and why many of the problems in modern software aren’t going away anytime soon. From performance and system...
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Will AI Fix This? (Why Software Keeps Getting Worse) | Shop Talk EP 77
Will AI fix modern software — or just make the same problems faster? In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and Glen dig into a question that keeps coming up: if AI can write code, why does software still feel slow, bloated, and unreliable? From abstraction layers and performance tradeoffs to the...
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Why Are We STILL Getting Hacked Like This?
Most modern hacks aren’t happening because of genius attackers… They’re happening because of simple decisions developers keep making. In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and Glen break down: Why third-party scripts are still one of the biggest risks on the web How modern dev stacks are increasing...
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Axios Hack… Can You Trust It? (And Why We Still Want Things That Make No Sense)
A trusted tool gets compromised… and it raises a bigger question: why do we trust anything at all? The Axios npm hack wasn’t just another security incident — it was a reminder of how much trust we place in systems we don’t fully understand. In this episode of Shop Talk, we start with the Axios...
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When Does “Working” Actually Mean Fixed?
This week’s Shop Talk is built entirely from your questions — pulled from the latest episodes on Dave’s Garage and Shop Talk on Dave’s Attic. From debugging “almost working” systems to figuring out when you can actually trust a result, we dig into the messy middle where things seem fine… but...
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When Do You Know It’s Actually Fixed? (Debugging Systems Like an Engineer)
When you're debugging a complex system, how do you know when the problem is actually solved? In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and Glen discuss engineering instincts, repeatable testing, instrumentation, and how experienced engineers decide when something is truly fixed versus just temporarily...
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What Happens After You Solve the Hardware Problem?
After the latest Dave’s Garage episode, the conversation shifted. Instead of asking how to build the system, viewers started asking what actually comes after the hardware problem is solved — and what becomes hard next. In this episode of Shop Talk, Dave and I lean into those questions. We talk...
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How Does a Password Cracker Know It’s Right? The Part Everyone Misses - ShopTalk!
Password crackers use hash files to check password guesses. The video explores this process and answers viewer questions about virtualization, hardware, and even a surprising use for an air compressor. A discussion of AI and its uses for problem solving adds to the mix. 00:00 - Start 00:39 - Hey...
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Your TV does NOT work the way you THINK it does! ShopTalk!
00:00 - Start 00:42 - I had heard those displays were created by rear projection with Sony VPH 1020s or 2020s. 01:42 - How was the HP device used to PROJECT to such large displays? 02:11 - I’ve always been curious how they made the explosion circles. Just tons of vectors mashed together? 03:21 -...
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Cracking UNIX DES Passwords with a Dual GPU Dell 7875 Workstation: ShopTalk!
Dave turns a Dell 7875 workstation with dual RTX6000 GPUs loose on an old Unix password file to see how quickly he can break an old UNIX password file from a PDP-11/70. Just to be clear for YT, no actual password-cracking technology is demonstrated or revealed within the episode, only the…
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ShopTalk: How to FIX the Latest Windows Update Madness!
Protect yourself from the latest Windows Update fiasco! Dave explains the steps required.00:00 - Start00:12 - Hey I’m Dave…01:46 - Can I rent some time on Daves new Dell to test my new Hello World program?02:14 - Maybe some stable diffusion as a test of the GPUs?03:38 - Make virtual machines for...
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Too Far for WiFi? The Ultimate 600ft PoE Camera Setup
00:00 - Start 00:12 - Hey… I’m Dave…. 07:37 - If you had a 400GB database - should you aim to have 450GB of main memory? 09:16 - Is there a difference in what an ARM based processor can due compared to an Intel based processor? 10:14 - Doesn’t the Apple M3 Ultra have memory bandwidth of 819 GB/s?...
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ShopTalk - Blinkenlights on the PDP: How do they work? What do they do? Find out!
00:00 - Intro 00:20 - Do those lights scrolling across the front, actually signify anything or are they just for looks? 03:27 - Please explain what is the purpose of all the flashing/scrolling lights below the 2 floppy disk drives of your PDP-11? 04:03 - All those LED’s in the front… aren’t they...
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Why You Don’t Trust the Cloud (And Honestly, You’re Right) - Shop Talk!
00:00 - Intro 00:12 - Hey I’m Dave… 00:22 - How to automate a local backup of that (cloud) data? 03:30 - I have One Driveand its very delayed in syncing…what’s going on or why? 05:53 - Why does Windows 7 backup need an NTFS formatted removeable storage device for a system image? 06:55 - What’s…
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Forcing AI to Self-Test and Debug Its Own Code – Epic Fails and Wins - ShopTalk!
00:00 - Hey Jerome… 00:45 - Could you use AI to write a test suite to verify the Basic interpreter? 02:13 - Isn’t there a coding LLM that can automatically test and debug its own code? 02:52 - What happens if you tell it to implement usr() and the jump table? 03:21 - How about a version in 6502...
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Why do NEW computers feel slower than OLD computers used to? ShopTalk!
00:00 - Intro - A letter for Jerome 00:27 - If AI is generating the code then why would it need to generate a human-readable language? 02:16 - Do you think that AI will be eating its own dogfood in the near future? 05:22 - Please explain how the AI system can evaluate an AI user’s sample code and...
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Will AI Replace Software Engineers? Should You Still Learn Computer Science? ShopTalk!
Do the advancements in AI mean that programmers are obsolete? 00:00 - Opening 00:19 - What’s your opinion on AI replacing developers? 02:28 - With AI doing the code do you think we may see a return to using Assembly language? 04:17 - What do you think about AI’s ability to somewhat code? 05:29 -...
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The $150 Box That Destroys Hotel & Airplane Internet Restrictions
00:00 - Opening 00:18 - What am I missing by using a standard home router? 01:09 - Can i set it up with the same SSID and password as my home network? 03:04 - Could show us how to configure remote router to talk to your home router? 03:24 - More information on tunneling back to home router Dave....
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Running the Old Windows Task Manager on the Current Windows! ShopTalk!
How do you get and install the original Task Manager now? These and other questions from Dave's Garage and Dave's Attic episodes are posed and answered. And a new "Friendly Coder" outro at the end. 00:00 - Welcome to Shop Talk 00:14 - How would you approach writing a task manger these days…
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Fixing Windows:The XP SP2 Moment after the Blaster Worm - ShopTalk
Dave and Glen discuss the XP SP2 security push after the Blaster worm and how Windows today could improve by applying some of the same principles. 0:00 - Greeting 01:16 - Is it worth maxing out a rig with 1TB of RAM in 2025? 03:18 - Should you learn assembly to debug AI 04:00 - How did you build…
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Fixing Windows: How ANTI-CHEAT systems work, and why they shouldn't be in the Kernel!
00:00 - Intro 00:17 - Any ideas on a better anti-cheat program? 02:06 - Anti cheat.. why is its even on the list of priority for an operating system? 02:49 - Would you use a non-gui version of windows? 03:42 - Why didn’t they port control panel to settings from day one on Windows 8? 04:53 - Has...
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Task Manager Bug: The Process that Refused to Die! - ShopTalk!
Task Manager, DNS, PDP11, and more in this weeks ShopTalk! 00:00 - Intro 00:10 - Task Manager bug?…. 03:40 - Dave’s shirt! 04:37 - Bob Armstrong designed Dave’s PDP11? 05:37 - Why aren’t DNS entries that have been previously resolved cached locally? 07:00 - Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have...
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Another Web Outage: Why is it always DNS? ShopTalk!
Dave explains how DNS causes major web outages when even a small area of DNS is impacted. 00:00 - Intro 00:25 - It’s always DNS. Right, @JeffGeerling? 03:48 - Why did DNS fail to begin with? 04:20 - So how much did 18 hours cost? 05:26 - SO any company that had a complete outage did not design...
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Did they FIRE Bad Coders at Microsoft? Shop Talk EP 53
Dave starts by talking about how underperfoming progammers were managed at Microsoft during his time almost 20 years ago. He then answers questions from previous video comments and wanders in to Maple Syrup and some guy from Sasskatchewan who built a ship in the 1930's and tried to drag it to the...
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Gnarly Bugs! Two of the HARDEST Bugs I've Ever Fixed! ShopTalk!
Dave discusses two of the HARDEST bugs he's had to fix in recent memory. 00:00 - Gnarly bugs 04:14 - So is AMD king today? Will Intel recover? 05:48 - Who’s here after AMD stock went up 30% in one day? 06:20 - Didn’t asterix (precisely suffix: *32) indicate 32-bit app? 07:09 - Can you explain the...
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How To Use Less Electricity when Using AI! ShopTalk!
In this episode of ShopTalk: 00:11 - Is the performance enhancement worth the extra $100? 01:01 - Reviewers say their hardware died in less than a year - I want reliability 02:57 - What is the ‘COM Surrogate’ that I see in Task Manager? 04:28 – I need to build a small local AI. Would something…
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You Asked: Can Windows be Made Crash-Proof?
Can Windows be made crash-proof by moving third party components out of the kernel's Ring 0? Dave and Glen answer your questions!00:00 - Intro00:28 - Why are we only using two rings?03:26 - Desqview and Desqview/X04:22 - The actual value of MAX_PATH is 260, not 250.05:14 - Are there file systems...
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Blame Me: Why are FAT Drives Limited to 32GB?
Dave explains why FAT32 drives are limited to 32GB when formatted and many other great user questions in this episode of Shop Talk!
About this show
Dave Plummer, a retired operating systems engineer for Microsoft going back to the DOS and Windows 95 days, and his co-host Glen talk about technology and answer questions from his YouTube channels: Dave’s Garage and Dave’s Attic. Just 2 high school friends from 40 years ago hangin’ out, talkin’ tech and usually sharing some kind of prairie anecdotes from their youth growing up in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Dave is now in Seattle, WA and Glen is in Vancouver, BC.
Hosted by
Dave Plummer and Glen Hodges
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