We kick off with the Oct 20, 2025 AWS outage (US-EAST-1)—why “Amazon” going down can break apps you use daily (Reddit, Coinbase, Snapchat, Roku, even some smart-home gear). Shawn explains how DNS resolution at scale works and why a failure there feels like the internet lost its street map. We also touch on a real-world consequence: some Eight Sleep smart beds overheated or got stuck until the company shipped an “outage mode.
That leads us straight into streaming vs. physical media. Prices, ad tiers, and licensing whiplash have many folks rebuilding local libraries. We share practical tools for ripping and transcoding discs you own (MakeMKV for Blu-ray, HandBrake for format/size control) and talk Plex for organizing and streaming your files at home.
Quick tip of the week: WinGet, Microsoft’s built-in Windows Package Manager, can bulk-update your desktop apps from the command line. Shawn runs it live and finds half his studio stack out of date!
Anne in Green Valley sent us a Question about Windows 11 S Mode—who it’s for (locked-down, Store-only installs) and why most power users eventually exit S Mode (you can’t go back). Andy also shares a save-the-day studio story: repairing a Windows 10 install from DVD to keep legacy Adobe CS5.5 running offline for production work.
Shawn goes full kid-in-a-candy-store with TV.garden—a globe you spin to drop into live channels from around the world, no login or subscription. He liked how fast it is to discover niche stuff (he even pulled up MavTV–style motorsports and low-production Supercross feeds while we were talking), how you can browse by country or category, and how it’s perfect for “have-it-on-in-the-background” viewing. It’s free, click-and-watch, and the 3D globe UI makes it feel like channel-surfing planet-wide
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