Tonight on GeekNights, we consider scanners. Ancient devices used to convert paper documents and photos into files on computers, often using something called TWAIN. For many consumers, they have been replaced by "smart phones." In the news, NVIDIA releases open source GPU drivers, hell has frozen over, Russia appears to have lost custody of a relatively intact Krasukha-4.

Tonight on GeekNights, we consider tech debt. Where it comes from, what it means, and what you can do about it. Rym's made a career of owning and addressing the tech debt of legacy systems, and there aren't really "correct" answers here. In the news, Microsoft is offering an Edge VPN, Ukrainian drones are shockingly effective against the Russian Navy, and you should check your home to see if it has any of these strange old holes.

Also don't forget that the GeekNights Book Club is a thing!

Tonight on GeekNights, we talk about display cables. The standards can be confusing, S-Video was not that common, VGA was king for a long long time, and we grew up in the days of RF. In the news, web scraping is perfectly legal, the bad man is trying (and failing) to buy Twitter, and Rym got a 3080Ti.

Tonight on GeekNights, we revisit the topic of hosting we last covered in 2006. From simple web hosting to SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and even Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service), a lot has changed. Amazon EC2 didn't even exist when we did that first episode. In the news, Vimeo moves further into B2B, Twitch pauses its "porn on the front page" feature, Amazon is reportedly censoring interesting words like "union" in its new internal app.

Tonight on GeekNights, we consider the concept of lock-in in technology. From platforms to software, app stores to physical connectors, it's actually a fairly complex topic. In the news, reason 499 not to buy a Tesla, Facebook collapses in the manner we have always expected, and Facebook is in trouble in Europe.

Tonight on GeekNights, we talk about package managers. We've covered Linux package management specifically in the ancient past. In the news, Rym's gonna do the Tunnel Run once it's safe to travel again, Europe has better vaccination policies than the US, Canon reminds you that the chips in their printer ink cartridges are unnecessary, Zynga was worth $12.7 BB, a nefarious developer set off a logic bomb in two popular NPM packages, and the James Webb Space Telescope is extremely important.

Tonight on GeekNights, we discuss software libraries. Most of you are probably too old to remember DLL Hell, but you probably don't want to be proving how square roots are calculated just to calculate them in your program. In the news, Amazon has had multiple outages, the log4j zero-day is a nightmare, and VR is edging into the mainstream with its first real consumer maturity milestone.