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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and Chris discuss iRobot’s Roomba Empire filing for bankruptcy and the involvement of Amazon Europe, Ford’s security features for the F-150 pickup truck, Discord’s Windows 11 app using excess memory, and the new automatic restart feature, Hotels focusing on engaging travelers through content strategies for loyalty, Amazon’s smart speakers accounting for 60% of all smart speaker purchases in the market, and more.
“News Pick of the Week” with Ralph Bond
Water strider insects have the remarkable ability to effortlessly walk across water. This week our science and technology news reporter Bond, Ralph Bond, tells us scientists inspired by this bug have created a soft robot with the same amazing ability.
Read more here.
Dan in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania asked: “I am interested in any information you can share about using 2.4 GHz cameras in and around a home when you have a 5G system coming in from say T-Mobile or Spectrum or Xfinity and the service is 5G. It seems that I can’t connect anything that requires 2.4 GHz. Is there a workaround?”
Dan, there are two potential problems we should address.
1) 5G as in the cellular technology. If that’s what you’re using and are trying to connect the cameras directly, that won’t work unless the cameras themselves have cellular capabilities. This is probably the less likely problem, but since the tech industry decided to more or less reuse the term 5G, it seemed worth mentioning.
2) If you’re talking about 5Ghz WiFi and 2.4Ghz WiFi, the two won’t mix either. They’re just completely different frequencies and the cameras may just lack the hardware to be able to detect and connect to 5Ghz signals.
The good news is that most 5Ghz routers will allow you to also enable 2.4Ghz as a second frequency.
Look into your router’s settings, under the WiFi options, it should be pretty clear, manufacturers usually just call it 2.4Ghz, they don’t call it by any other marketing name. T-Mobile, Spectrum, and Xfinity all offer routers with a 2.4Ghz option, so youll likely be able to enable it and connect your cameras.
Rich in Purcellville, Virginia asked: “It’s that time of year again… time to get a new TV. Last time I asked you about this you had some pretty good advice but now I’m seeing that there’s even more screen types to consider. You had OLED and QLED in the past. Now there’s New QLED, and Mini LED and probably a couple others I can’t think of right now. Is there really that much of a difference between them and which would you recommend?”
Dan, there are meaningful differences between OLED, QLED, Mini LED, and the best one for you will depend on where you’re going to place your TV.
OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) TVs produce their own light, allowing for deep blacks, infinite contrast, and excellent viewing angles. They have extremely fast response times making them great for gamers. They have two downsides: they are not as bright as LED-based technologies, which can be a problem in well-lit rooms, and they’re expensive. They can also be subject to burn-in, though it’s not as common as it was with Plasma TVs.
QLED stands for Quantum-dot Light Emitting Diode, it was developed by Samsung and it uses a “quantum dot layer” with an LED backlight. QLED offers great colors and better peak brightness than standard LED TVs but typically has lower contrast than OLED due to less precise local dimming.
Mini LED is an advancement over traditional LED backlights, using thousands of smaller LEDs for better local dimming and better contrast. It’s meant to bridge the gap between standard LED and OLED and offer good brightness and good blacks in one package.
Neo QLED is Samsung’s brand for its high-end Mini LED TVs, so you’re looking at basically the same technology, just with a less generic name.
In terms of prices, from least to more expensive you’re looking at: QLED, followed by Mini LED and Neo QLED, and then OLED as the most expensive option.
For OLEDs you can pretty much expect to have to spend figures in the thousands, the rest can be had from anywhere from the low hundreds to the thousands depending on size, brand, and overall quality.
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