Changed a few things around the site. Contemplated going with a completely new theme, but decided that the effort will not be worth my time, especially as I really like the current layout.

Quite some time back, I wrote about how I discovered 5by5 studios, and how switching to it (from the deteriorating TWiT network) gave me new enjoyment as I discovered, along with other like minded listeners, Marco Arment and John Siracusa.

Then the whole John Gruber-Dan Benjamin fallout thing happened, and 5by5 lost The Talk Show. It was, however, not a huge loss for 5by5, for by then Build and Analyze and Hypercritical were way bigger shows than The Talk Show ever was, and John Gruber’s own relaunch received universal criticism for the lack of polish.

Then, the unthinkable happened. In late 2012, both Marco Arment and John Siracusa ended their shows on 5by5 studios. There was apparently no falling out between Dan Benjamin and either of the two bigwigs, and the termination of shows was reportedly on good terms.

Marco Arment, John Siracusa and their friend Casey Liss eventually went on to do their own car podcast, Neutral in early 2013…… and accidentally created a tech podcast in the process.

The Accidental Tech Podcast is, today, arguably the most popular Mac-related podcast amongst like-minded Mac podcast nerds, and is what I look forward to most every Friday.

Jim Dalrymple and Dan Benjamin on Amplified. Need I say more? Jim is the nicer version of John Gruber and the combination of Mac stuff and rock music is just awesome (I am into rock music and band stuff).

The Talk Show with John Gruber, Gruber’s relaunch of the popular The Talk Show on 5by5, is third, and only because the other choices are not very promising. Gruber is still a pretty bad host despite marked improvements, and there are episodes where I could not bear to continue listening after the first fifteen minutes. Very often though, the show is saved from extreme boredom by his interesting guests, who often ask the right questions in order to extract interesting replies from Gruber. The main problem with the current The Talk Show? The current host should be the one being asked questions, not the other way round.

To finish the list, I listen to the Vergecast from time to time. A bunch of noisy tech nerds talking industry-wide tech stuff is often interesting so long you can overlook the complete mess that is the Vergecast.

With the drought of interesting Mac news these days, these shows provide me, and probably many others, much needed relief from the boredom that is life.

You can follow MacRyu at @ryuworks on Twitter and @ryu on App.net.