The Register's Kettle podcast, published August 31, 2026, brings together host Brandon Vigliarolo, FOSS reporter Liam Proven and Microsoft reporter Richard Speed to talk about three unrelated tech revivals: Windows XP, Casio watches and paper password books.

Windows XP hit its 25th anniversary of release to manufacturing this week, the point in 2001 when Microsoft finalized the code before mass-producing installation discs. Speed notes that XP merged the business-grade NT kernel with the consumer 9x line, raising the minimum RAM requirement from 16 megabytes on Windows 98 to 64 megabytes, while delivering far greater stability. OEM machines with XP preinstalled reached shelves on September 24, 2001, with boxed retail copies following on October 24. Proven still runs Windows XP Professional x64 Edition on a Core 2 Duo ThinkPad with 8GB of RAM and a 200GB SATA SSD, saying the system handles Firefox, Chrome, Office 2007, Gmail and Slack without trouble. Speed contrasts XP's old footprint with Windows 11, which Microsoft is struggling to shrink to an 8GB minimum, a jump he calls disproportionate to any gain in usability. Windows 10 LTSC remains supported until 2031, and according to StatCounter data cited on the show, Windows 11 only overtook Windows 10 in market share earlier this year, running at roughly 60 to 65 percent against Windows 10's 25 to 30 percent.

Proven also covered Casio's update to its long-running digital watch line, which adds step counting synced once a day to a phone over Bluetooth Low Energy while keeping a two-year battery life. The updated model sells for about $55, matches the size of the classic Casio design that has sold 300 million units over four decades, and lands close in price to Proven's own budget Amazfit Neo smartwatch. Higher-end Casio G-Shock models add heart-rate monitoring and two-way notification scrolling, at the cost of battery life.

The panel closes on a Register story by security reporter Connor Jones about an Australian post office chain selling paper password notebooks for three to four dollars each. Reddit commenters and the podcast's guests argue paper storage resists remote hacking and suits users who will not pay for a password manager or need family members to find login details after they die. Speed and Proven expect passkeys to eventually make such books obsolete, but for now recommend pairing a written password with a passphrase built from unrelated words, the approach popularized by the XKCD comic's "correct horse battery staple" example.