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Steve in Lake Villa, Illinois listens to the podcast and is calling via the app and asked: “I’ve started a brand new job with the health department doing Covid tracing. Looking for a nice headset – something that sounds good so people can hear me and I can hear them. I’m using an iPhone, also using my government-issued laptop. Maybe something Bluetooth, or wired. Just hoping you could give me some advice on that.”
Steve, look at gaming headsets. There are both wired and wireless ones, so you have your choice in that department, but mainly, they are very well suited to what you want.
Gamers wear them for long hours, so theyre built to be comfortable for long term wearing. They usually come with microphones that you can adjust so you can be better heard, and theyre typically clear sounding since sometimes gamers even demand immersive 3D sound.
Prices and quality vary, for example a wireless Turtle Beach Stealth 600 will cost you $100, while a wired Recon will only cost you $40, Razer has models that go for more than $150, and HyperX has models that dont get to $30.
Youll have plenty to choose from at every price point, but if you stick to well known brands youll probably end up with a product that will work well for what you need.
Brandon in Jackson, Mississippi listens on SuperTalk 97.3 and is calling via the app and aseked: “Wanted to know what you thought about data mining as it pertains to the blockchain mining rigs and revenue that they might produce.”
Brandon, if youre thinking cryptocurrencies in particular, if you go with a new one you may get some return, but generally speaking at current prices you will spend more in electricity than you will get back.
That mostly goes for the popular currencies, some of the new ones are still simple enough to mine that they may give you more of a return, but it will still likely be below what youre spending to power your machine.
There are people that still do it successfully to an extent, but that requires having the right equipment and know what currencies to stick to.
If youre mining a different kind of data, your mileage may vary, there are a lots of other blockchain projects and if you found one that can make you some money and you already have a machine set up to try, you might as well, but dont expect huge returns.
Terry in Carthage, Missouri listens to the podcast and is calling via the app and asked: “I’m having trouble getting a wireless signal to my Ring cameras outside my house. Wondering if there’s anything I can do to help with that. Bought a new router that’s supposed to have better signal coverage but still having trouble.”
Terry, your Ring cameras are just WiFi devices, so you need to somehow make your network stronger outside your house.
You can look at all weather, external access points, for example the Wavlink AC600 will cost you around $85 and can be mounted outside.
Having said that, it sounds like you may have cameras all around your house, so the house itself may block the signal from an outside access point to the rest of the cameras that are not line of sight.
If the cameras are mounted on the walls of the house rather than away and pointed at it, a mesh system is probably all you need. Those are systems like the Eero and Orbi that allow you to keep adding stations that talk to each other and repeat the connection in order to eliminate dead spots.
If you place enough repeaters close to where the cameras are mounted, you should be able to get each of them a usable signal.
If the cameras are too far away from the house, though, you may be stuck with outdoor access points.
Tom in Toledo, Ohio listens on AM800 CKLW and asked: “I have a flat screen TV that I just bought that is Wi-Fi connected to the Internet and has WebOS on it. Wondering if I have to worry about getting any kind of virus if I do use the WebOS Internet connection.”
Tom, theres no need to worry about viruses on TVs.
Much like with phones, smart TVs are built differently from computers and they run sandboxed software that cant interact with other software outside of its very limited domain.
On top of that, theyre very unattractive targets on account of many of them running on different proprietary systems and not storing any information that anyone could profit from stealing. That means that bad actors tend to focus on devices that have a better potential of giving them a return on their investment.
You dont need to worry about your TV, stream away and enjoy the benefits of using it online if thats what you want.
Ken asked: “Former LEO here friend referred me to you. I am looking for options to put movies on a storage device to stream through my house on HDMI over Ethernet. Do you know about of any good sources for this? And second if I buy movies on sources like Vudu, Movie Anywhere and others do I own the movie and cant I covert it to off line or am I stuck with online. I would like to get my source up I have a TV671 NAS for storage.”
Ken, to be honest we havent heard much about HDMI over Ethernet for a while, it still does work if you get the adapters and you can feed the signal to several TVs, but it sounds to us like you may be in the market for something else.
HDMI over Ethernet is mostly popular in the world of things like digital signage in which a single video source can feed lots of signs and the signals can be managed by a single cable.
It sounds like you already have a very powerful storage solution, so the easier and more flexible way to go may just be to share the content to a receiver on every TV, you can even build them yourself for little more than $15 with single board computers if youre into that kind of thing.
That would allow you to stream independently on each device the way you watch Netflix using free software like Plex rather than sending the same signal to all TV.
In terms of buying movies from streaming sources, no you dont own them and cant legally convert them and store them yourself, youre just paying for a license, basically a long term permit to stream from the source, but you dont own the content.
Clifton in Toledo, Ohio listens on AM800 CKLW and asked: “I have a Windows 7 computer. Do I have to buy another computer to upgrade to Windows 10?”
Clifton, you probably dont. Windows 10 was famously compatible with almost all Windows 7 machines.
You may need to buy a new Windows 10 license, though, officially the free upgrade program ended in 2016.
Having said that, we hear that if you go to Microsofts own Download Windows 10 page, the installation will transfer the license. That may change at any time, though, since its officially not the case since 2016.
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Atlanta, GA