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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Samsung announcements, SpaceX satellites falling back to Earth, Bezos’ super yacht and its bridge problems, Silverado EV delays, Discovery and Warner Media’s merger, North Korea attacking a US hacker, deorbiting the space station, Meta’s bad financial report, and more.
Jeff in St. Cloud, Minnesota participating with the App and asked: “I’m looking for a Wi-Fi system for my house. It’s a 3600 square foot, three-story house. The system I have now doesn’t always pick up in all the corners properly and I’m just looking for whatever is the best out there to help out with a house this size.”
Jeff, 3600 square feet is probably too much for a single router to handle reliably.
Your best option is to buy a mesh system. Mesh systems consist of several different devices that you place in different parts of your house to get full coverage.
Each component is an individual access point, but the system works as a single WiFi network, so you dont have to worry about switching networks depending on which part of the house youre in. You just connect to one and the mesh network hands off the connection to the component with the best signal in the background.
There are several systems you can look into, Googles Nest WiFi system is probably about as cheap as they get, a 3 point system will cost you $350 dollars.
An Eero 3 pack will cost you considerably more, think around $600. An Netgear Orbi with WiFi 6 support will add another digit.
No matter what system you choose, you can always add more access points as you go, so you may be able to start out with a 2 point system and see if that happens to work for you, but given the size of your home its likely that youll need at least 3 access points.
Cutiss in Ridgecrest, California listens Online and asked: “Dave, what I’d like to hear from you is sort of how can you contrast the collapse of CES with COMDEX. I know CES was, I think, just money. But the current problems at CES hopefully are only Covid. What do you think are the chances that CES can recover?”
Thats an interesting question, Cutiss For our listeners who might not know, COMDEX was a huge computer convention held in Las Vegas every year from the late 70s until 2003. For many years, it was the big daddy with many people feeling that it was more important to the industry than CES. We even broadcast our show from there, the first several years we were on the air.
Around 99 or 2000, major companies like Apple, IBM and Compaq began pulling out of COMDEX to hold their own corporate events – which is a trend that continues today. That, combined with changes the organizers made that allowed bloggers and anyone wo declared themselves legitimate media to attend, started a downward spiral.
The show went from 2,500 exhibitors and 225,000 attendees at its peak, to just 500 exhibitors and 40,000 attendees in its final year, in 2003. Ironically, thats about the attendance we saw at CES this year – if that.
I would assume that CES wouldve rebounded better if there hadnt been a new Covid variant making the rounds at the same time, and that it will rebound better next year. Having said that, they didnt put on a show for 2 years and no one really missed them, so the show may have proven itself to be less useful and necessary than CTA would like it to be.
James in Murfreesboro, Tennessee listens Online and asked: “I finally got a PS5. I’m wondering what kind of SSD memory expansion I should get for it. Do you have any recommendations?”
James, Sony narrowed down your options as to what you can even consider.
Only NVME PCIe 4.0 drives are compatible with the PS5s extension port.
Those drives come in different form factors so youll need to make sure you buy one that fits the expansion slot. That shouldnt be too hard since the form factors are relatively standard, but some will not fit perfectly.
Since this is a console, a heatsink wouldnt be the worst thing to have so you can look at drives with them built in like the WD Black 850 which at $140 for 1TB wont cost you much more than other compatible drives.
Steer clear of anything with less than a 5,500 MB/s write speed. Those wont work with the PS5.
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