Meltdown (Premium)

Like many of you, I'm the person that family and friends turn to when they have issues with PCs, phones, or other personal technology products and services. But every once in a while, I encounter a problem I just can't solve in the moment or at all. And it is in these darkest of times that I wonder. I wonder how normal, mainstream users would ever get past these issues. And I wonder why technology, which is composed entirely of 1s and 0s, can be so fickle and unpredictable.

Curiously, these moments often occur when I'm recording Hands-On Windows (HOW), which is unique among the podcasts in which I participate for many reasons, but most notably because it requires me to record my screen and then send it to Benito, the wonderful producer at TWiT who creates each episode by combining that recording with the Zoom recording he made of me.

I spend more time on this than you may believe.

Generally speaking, we record three episodes of HOW every three weeks or so. The podcast roughly parallels my Windows 11 Field Guide book, which has grown to become one of my longest-ever at nearly 1,100 pages and counting. This wasn't my intent: Indeed, one of my goals with this book was to cover as much content as possible as concisely as possible, and, well, that's another story. But as a tale, it has certainly grown in the telling.

Most HOW episodes are straightforward from a production standpoint. I come up with the episode topics, create notes for each episode, ensure that a PC is ready for recording, and then we connect at the agreed-upon time on Zoom, I record the screen, Benito records the call, and we step through each episode in turn. Afterward, we figure out the next time and day for recording, and I upload my videos to Benito's Google Drive.

If only it were that simple.

As it turns out, each part of what I described above is more complicated than it may sound, some parts dramatically so. And I am absolutely positive that no one reading this will ever truly understand how much work I put into this, how much time I spend, and how much I stress over this and the need to get it right. The only person who knows and understands this is my wife, who has watched as I fritter away entire days just preparing for the hour-ish that we spend in actual HOW recording.

Individual HOW episodes aren't that long, maybe 7 to 20 minutes, depending. But for each, I create a set of notes in Notion to guide my discussion. This is not a script, it's just a set of talking points, things I want to make sure I don't miss, with a structure that has an order, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Once the notes for each are complete, I sign in to the same account I use for the book screenshots, which is clean and unmodified for consistency. And I step through my notes again, to make sure the PC I'm using for recording has the necessary bits in place.

I record the screen with OBS Studio, a free and open source video recording solution. Like so many complex app...