Hands-On Tech 193 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on this episode of Hands-On Tech. We talk about recycling old gadgets and gizmos, we talk about exporting your photos and keeping all of that metadata intact, and we even talk more about charging your devices, plus so much more coming up on this episode of Hands-On Tech. Stay tuned. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech.

I am Mikah Sargent and, as you know, this is the show where we happily answer your tech questions that you send in, as well as review gadgets and gizmos from time to time. Today, we are taking a look at some great questions. I have to say real quick, I have thoroughly enjoyed and been a little humbled by seeing so many great questions come pouring in the more episodes of Hands-On Tech that go out. As we continue to put out episodes, I have seen an increase in the number of questions sent to hot@twit.tv and it has been pretty awesome to see, but also great, because it means I've got lots of questions to answer and you folks are asking some really great questions. Remember again that's hot@twit.tv is where you send in your questions for answering on the show. So this week we are going to kick things off with a question from Kelly.

Kelly has written in and has said the following I am writing to get some advice for what to do with the following devices that I found in my dad's garage. Do you think I can sell them? Are they worth anything? My dad used to build computer cases with them years ago, but I am thinking they are too outdated and should just find a place to recycle or dispose of it. Please advise.

Now, for those of you who are listening and not watching, Kelly has sent in two photos. One is of a power supply. It's from Antec and it says that it is a smart power supply. There's some writing on it that says it looks like it's kind of trying to indicate good as of October of 2004. Now, the other photo that Kelly sent in was a photo of a hard drive. This is a Western digital hard drive. It is a spinning disk hard drive not an SSD, but a hard drive and features a full 80 gigabytes of storage space, if you can believe it.

So this is a great question, because this is something that I see come up from time to time from people that I know in person, who will kind of come to me and go. Should I hold on to this. Could this be worth something someday? Is this going to be something that people might want to buy? And in many cases you can kind of ask yourself first and foremost this question, and now there are some caveats, so bear in mind that that's the case Again. You can email me, ask yourself first and foremost this question, and now there are some caveats, so bear in mind that that's the case Again. You can email me with your complaints, hot@twit.tv.

But rule of thumb if it's made in 2000 or after and it is just a computer component, chances are it's not worth anything, much of anything. The devices that you know the average person is going to have If it's before 2000,. That's where things might be different. But power supplies, hard drives that only have 80 gigs of storage, yeah, I doubt that you're going to be able to make any money off of it. That said, because I love to kind of hedge here, I want to say that you could still try, try to list them on eBay, but that could mean that you're unfortunately holding on to them for a long while. Okay, so you, if you're trying to get rid of stuff, if you're trying to clear out space, so, if you're trying to get rid of stuff. If you're trying to clear out space, listing them on eBay is not the way to go. Scooterx has helpfully provided an 80 gigabyte Western Digital Caviar hard drive and it is listed on eBay for $29. As it's sold, it's still on eBay for $29. So there's a chance, but I just really think you're going to end up holding on to it a lot longer than you would expect Now.

With all of that in mind, now we've said you know you're finding these things that 2000 or after and they're just computer components, you know now probably not worth something kind of some vicarious experience, which is the fact that when I moved to Portland, there was a lot of stuff that I needed to get rid of, a lot of electronic stuff that I needed to get rid of, and so the first thing I did was do some research. I looked into electronics recycling programs in my area. There are multiple options often available. Sometimes there are electronics recycling drives, and by that I don't mean hard drives, I mean drives as in times, where people gather together and they give them over and then they are. It's usually for free or for a reduced rate versus in some cases where you would take it to an electronics recycling place and you'd have to pay. Now you should still shop around because there are chances that the place will, that there's a place somewhere that would take it for free. Do your due diligence in terms of checking that they truly are actually recycling the devices as best as you can and then kind of go from there.

I'm kind of branching out from what Kelly's talking about to a more standard thing. I had a lot of compact fluorescent bulbs that ugh, no reason to use those A lot of old batteries, some car batteries, some different things that I needed to get rid of and wanted to recycle, and there was a local place called Batteries Plus and I called them up and they took the car batteries for free and they just had like a small charge for recycling the rest of it, and it's usually by weight. So chances are you would be able to find something in your neck of the woods that would provide the recycling options that are necessary. But ultimately there's no good reason to use a very old power supply and no good reason really to use a very old hard drive, especially with that little amount of storage space I think you're going to have. You're going to have trouble trying to find someone who's going to want to purchase those things.

So, kelly, thank you for writing in with that question and do follow up to let us know what you ended up doing with them. You know, if all else fails, you can always make art out of them. That's something that I noticed happening quite a bit in the city that I came from Lots of garbage being repurposed as art, which is interesting. So thank you, kelly, for that question. Let us move on to our. Actually, before we move on to our next question, I am seeing some great messages in the chat about Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As we record this show on Sunday, december 1st and tomorrow, sunday. Tomorrow, sunday, december no. Tomorrow, monday, december 2nd, is technically Cyber Monday.

Quick little history, if you would like to know, if you've always wondered why they call it Black Friday. But you don't know why Black Friday is called Black Friday? Because it has to do with the people who are in charge of the budget and the balance for a company, and when you are in the black, that means that you have properly balanced the budget, you've sold what needs to be sold, everything's right as rain, essentially. And so Black Friday is called that because it is, after you know, it's aiming to get the budget back into the black. So there is one main site that I trust to do my Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals hunting and that is, as you might imagine, wirecutter from the New York Times. So if you are looking for good deals and you're looking for sorting out the crud from what is actually of value, the Wirecutter is a great place to go. New York Times property, so newyorktimescom, it's nytimescom slash Wirecutter. Property, so New York Times, it's nytimescom slash Wirecutter. There you're going to find your information.

And yes, just quickly, keith's 512 is reminding me it came to be called In the Black versus Not, because originally, originally, in those old accountant books, those ledger books, you would write in red if you were in debt, you would write in black if you are not in debt, and so black was kind of the balanced value. So you wanted to get back into the black, which is what it became known as, which is where Black Friday was named after being in the black. So thank you, keith512, for taking us back even a few more years to the OG accountant. So anyway, wirecutter is my first stop when it comes to looking at deals, and that means deals that exist outside of just tech deals. There are great sets of deals that the Wirecutter takes care of looking at to make sure that you're getting again valuable stuff as opposed to stuff that's just crud. I highly, highly, highly, highly highly recommend avoiding the front page of Amazon, for example, because that is just filled with lights and sounds, essentially trying to draw you in to some kind of goofy stuff that you probably don't need. Also, then, from there, if you're looking for specific tech deals, that's where you might turn to places like the Verge or CNET for the folks who are working around the clock to keep up to date with the best tech deals for Cyber Monday and again, black Friday.

Of course, this is a thing that's spread out across multiple weeks. At this point, in fact, there was just one site I was browsing the other day and they had started their Black Friday deals at the end of October and are carrying them on until a few days from today, tuesday, december 3rd, and so a lot of times you're going to see these exclusive early Black Friday deals as the companies kind of toward the end of the year, start to change that price. Anchor always has some great deals that are available, as Loquacious has said in the chat, from YouTube Govee devices, g, youtube gov devices, gov ee devices have gone on sale. The lights that are behind me that are providing just a touch of color, those are gov lights, and so you may see some great deals there for my crafting corner pals. A lot of the little miniature kits that I have been working with, like the one that is behind my left shoulder those are on sale right now. So you'll find a lot of different deals available to you. But yeah, if you're wanting to cut through the noise, wirecutter is where I would start and then go from there and just be careful. They're all trying to get you to buy, so try not to fall into the trap, if you can avoid it. Scooterx also suggests 9to5toys. That is a great site around the year round to be able to find good deals for products. The 9to5 folks are fantastic and are looking for great deals with good reviews as well.

All right, moving along, we'll hit another question. We'll take a little break. Ray has written in and Ray says this. I heard your recent comments about iPhone battery usage and thought I would ask you about an annoying problem I have with my iPhone 12 mini running iOS 18.1.1. And then, in parentheses, ray says it does happen with iOS 17 as well.

Every night I place my phone on an alarm clock equipped with a wireless charger on top. At various times during the night the phone will wake up with a boink sound. The screen will illuminate briefly. Also, my phone is in do not disturb mode during this time. Just for information, how can I disable the sound and possibly the screen lighting up? So first and foremost, ray, this is what I want to let you know that boink sound and that screen lighting up is actually the phone, indicating that it has sensed that you have placed it on a wireless charger and lets you know that at that point it is charging.

If you're having this happen multiple times throughout the night, that means that your phone and that wireless charger do not have a good connection, and that is a problem. I've had this happen with a few wireless charging stands. As phones have gotten bigger over time, the alignment of the charging coils on the stand and the phone itself are misaligned, and that causes issues with the proper full charging of the device. That's part of the reason why Apple brought along MagSafe and then later Qi started to support magnetic charging, because what the magnets do is they help properly align the coils. Now here's something to understand, ray the more aligned the coils are, the more efficient the charging is, which means the less heat there is produced by those charging coils. Heat there is produced by those charging coils. Heat is the enemy of battery health. So you want to have as best alignment as you can possibly have between your smartphone and its charging coils and the thing that is charging it.

If you are having a misalignment, which is the case here, that your phone over the course of the night continues to wake up, you need to take a look at the charging target on the top of your alarm clock and better align your phone to that charging spot. A great way to do that is if you have an iPhone that has, or if you have an iPhone case that has the little circle there. You immediately know that this circle is kind of the central point of where those charging coils are. Then you need to look at the charging spot on the top of your alarm clock and you want to kind of try to place them there. After that, do something for yourself to indicate where you should place your phone. Maybe it's as simple as taking a little bit of painter's tape and putting it along the four sides of the alarm clock or some other means of showing you this is exactly as you want to do it Again if you want to continue to use wireless charging, as out of sync is said in the chat room, or just want to do it Again.

If you want to continue to use wireless charging, as out of sync has said in the chat room, or just plug in a cable, yes, you could always do that, so that's the first thing. If it's doing this, then there's either something wrong with the charging puck that is built into the alarm clock and it's for some reason it's connecting and disconnecting, which is an issue Again. Again, that results in heat, it results in poor charging performance, it results in a whole lot of other concerns, and so you want to get that sorted first and foremost. But if you get that sorted and you're still annoyed by having the phone boink at night when you put it on the charger, you can turn on silent mode on your phone. That's the first thing that will do it.

So it used to be. You just use the little switch on the side to turn on silent mode. Now you can do it through control center. You can set it up in settings. There are lots of places to go to do that. But silent mode will disable the boink. And then really, what you can do is Ray, on your phone you set up a little shortcut, a little automation that says, when my phone goes into do not disturb mode, enable silent mode, which will turn off that boink sound. Lastly, if you have decided that you never want to hear the boink ever and you don't want to know if your phone is properly aligned and you don't want to know if your phone is connecting and disconnecting throughout the night, you can completely disable the sound.

Again, I highly recommend that you pay attention to this and try to fix the issue first before you go about doing this. But, as I've said, I always try to provide as much information as I possibly can because ultimately it is in the hands of the person who's asking the question what they do with the information I provide. You can go into settings, then sounds and haptics and then system haptics. You'll scroll down until you find system haptics and you'll see a little toggle Toggle that off and that will turn off the boink sound. That indicates that you're wirelessly charging your device. So if you want to get rid of it entirely, you have to toggle off system haptics. Better thing, silent mode, better thing. Address the problems with your wireless charger, because then it will boink the first time but it won't boink throughout the rest of the night Because it will be properly charging. And hey, cyber Monday deals on right now. Now would be the perfect time to get a little wireless charging puck to place beside your alarm clock or, as someone else has suggested, just plug it in. That's also an option. But I understand, I love the convenience of being able to just walk my phone onto a wireless charger next to my bedside and be good to go, all righty.

We are going to take a quick little break here on Hands-On Tech before we come back with some other great questions. Again, you can email me. H-o-t at twittv is how you get in touch and it's been my absolute pleasure answering these first questions. We'll have more in just a moment.

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All righty, back from the break and it is time to continue on with our show. I remind you, email us H-O-T at twittv with your questions. Those of you who have written in with your beautiful, fantastic and wonderful questions, we'll get to them as we can. They're pouring in now, but it's been great to see. All right, I hope you do feel like I take your questions seriously, I consider them and I really care about making sure that you get the answer that you're looking for.

All right, Sean has asked a wonderful question that resulted in some experimentation on my part to make sure we got this all sorted. Sean has written in and said this I downloaded all of my Google photos in order to back them up on an external drive. Is there a way to get my photos out of the zip files and keep the original photo name, etc? So, Sean, I think what you are looking at here because when you use Google Photos to back up your photos, or if you use it with your iPhone or if you use it with your Android device, it is sort of uploading all those photos to Google Photos and you might make changes to them on the Google Photos site or in the Google Photos app, wherever that happens to be. But when you sort of give them a name, you change the title of it, you add a description, maybe add a caption, that kind of thing. All of that information is stored in the metadata for that photo. It's not the file name that gets changed. The file name is left alone, unless, of course, you actually manually change the file name.

So I think what probably happens, Sean, is you downloaded your Google Photos via Google Takeout and you went into that's one part that was not mentioned in your question, the excerpt of your question using Google takeout for this, you downloaded it and you opened it up and you saw a zip file and or zip archive, you open that archive and inside you saw, you know, 873942.jpegjson JSON. And you wondered oh well, where's the information for my photos? How do I make it so that the original photo name is kept, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, when you export your photos using Google Takeout, first and foremost, you should understand that what Google does is, upon accepting your photo, it sort of has that main copy that's maintained and that main copy is left alone. From that point forward, the metadata that's included, what took the photo, the device that took the photo, if there's any GPS information, basically all of that metadata is stored within that, the EXIF information, right. And if you are then making changes to the photo, the photo that is then exported and adjusted by way of the JSON file. All of the changes that you make to the photo in Google Photos are recorded by way of the JSON file. And so if you have gone into Google Photos after importing your photos and then you've added, you know, information from that point, you're going to want to kind of merge that data together. And so, first and foremost, Sean, what I recommend is looking at any of the photos, opening them in a photo viewer of some sort whatever photo viewer you use and seeing if the information that you're wanting is already there. If the information that you're wanting is already there, then you're done. You don't need to do anything else.

I ran a little test by doing a Google takeout of a small Google Photos library, and the metadata from the original photo that I imported into Google Photos was the same when I didn't change the photo at all in the exported version in the JPEG file on its own. If you make a change to the photo using Google Photos, that's where things are in that again that JSON file At which point then, if you are using Google Photos to kind of edit your photos and manage your photos, you will want that information. So in order to do that, you can use a great open source tool called Exif Tool. We'll include a link in the show notes. It's at exiftoolorg, though, and Exiftool lets you yeah, the site is not entirely pretty, it is just a really great toolkit for doing exactly this. I ran this test.

I just used a terminal on my Mac and you essentially go to the directory where your photos are stored. And what's great about it is it? Basically, it's aware of how Google takeout works. And so you go to the directory where your photos are stored. Make sure that the JPEG files and the JSON files are in the same place and that they're left alone. Don't change them.

Um, make sure you have a backup of this library, um, or rather, yeah, yeah, your library of photos, and then you can run a simple tool. It's or rather, run a simple little script exif tool. I'm not gonna go into detail with it, but essentially you tell it, take the JSON information that matches with the JPEG and put those together, and then this tool takes care of that for you. It'll pop in all of that metadata right into the photo and save it in that EXIF for that JPEG. At that point, then you can take those JPEGs and put them onto the hard drive or wherever it is. You're trying to back them up after that to an external drive. So, Sean, that is how you take care of that. Exiftoolorg has loads of information on how to use it. You can also, you know, do a simple search and you'll find, uh, you know, reddit threads and other places where you can get information about how to use exit tool. If you need specific help with exit tool, uh, you can always email me again hot@twit.tv. That won won't make it onto the show, but it's something that I can kind of provide some further advice for If you've already, you know, tried to research it yourself. That's important to do first.

As I said, I've got a lot of questions that come through. All right. This next question comes in from Dan and, believe it or not, it's another battery and charging question. I've really sparked something here, haven't I? So Dan writes in and says I am writing about Brad's question from episode 192. He had asked about it being safe leaving his phone always plugged in. I have optimized battery life option turned on for my 16 Pro Max. When I'm in bed or on the couch, my phone is always plugged in too.

My thinking was that if I'm using the phone on and off for two to three hours, it might be better to leave it plugged in. I figured, if it wasn't plugged in and I ran it down 30%-ish then when I charged it up, then ran it down again later, etc. That this was worse for the battery because I'm constantly letting it go up and down. Perhaps I'm completely incorrect, but I thought leaving it plugged in at home allowed me to work from the power and spare my battery long-term somewhat. What do you think? So, first of all, dan, this is one of those things that is a little bit bizarre to me, because I didn't realize that so many people had so much battery anxiety over their batteries and their devices, to the point that they're really trying to just manage it down to the nth of it. Just to take the time to think about every little aspect of the battery enough to go. If I do this, it might hurt the battery. If I do that, it might hurt the battery. That's a lot of work to put in all of that thought, and so the first thing I would say, dan, is it's okay, it's going to be okay, everything's okay.

You don't really need to be doing all of those calculations yourself, because you're doing something that the system is designed to do already. It pays attention to how you plug in your device, when you charge your device. That's what optimized battery life does. So it's looking at when you charge it for two to three hours and then unplug it and then charge it and do that. So you doing it yourself is just putting more work on your plate that you don't necessarily need to.

But much like I tell the people who think that they need to force quit their apps after they use them. It becomes for people you know. I can say as many times as I want to that you don't need to force quit your apps. There's no point in force quitting your apps. You force quit your apps and the battery life is actually impacted in a negative way, because every time you open your app, you are making it have to start from fresh instead of being able to start from running in the memory. It doesn't matter what I say to a person that force quits their apps. They're still going to do it because it's something that they do and it makes them feel better. And it doesn't matter what you say if for them, it is first and foremost muscle memory, but secondarily is just part of their routine. At that point, I guess that's still sort of muscle memory, it doesn't matter. So if, dan, it makes you feel better to do this battery management, go ahead, but you don't need to. Now let's talk, though, about people who are maybe thinking about hopping on the Dan train and starting to manage their battery in this way.

The biggest issue and I've already said this once in this episode, but I'm going to repeat it because it's important. The biggest issue when it comes to the average person's interaction with their batteries is heat. Heat is the enemy of battery health. You do not want the battery getting hot. So if you're using your phone plugged in and you notice that the battery gets hotter the phone rather gets hotter while it's plugged in then it would be if it was unplugged or connected to a battery, or worse, connected to a wireless charging device, that's, you know, mobile. Or even if it's not mobile, if you're sitting on your couch and you thwack a wireless charger at the back of it and it's getting hot, you're doing the wrong thing for battery life, you battery health, battery longevity you're doing the wrong thing. You don't want that. You want the thing to remain cooler. So if any of your behaviors are resulting in more heat for that battery, stop those behaviors. They're not helping, they're hurting.

Secondarily, if you do plan to continue to use your phone plugged in most of the time, there is one thing that I recommend actually changing in your settings. You head to settings, you head to battery and you head to charging, and in this you will see an option that says charge limit and it's a slider. In this case I recommend setting that charge limit all the way to the left to 80%. Lithium ion batteries, because of their nature, because of the chemistry, experience less stress when they're operating between 20% and 80% charge capacity, and so by having it plugged in and saying don't charge past 80%, you are just helping the battery last longer in that way. So it's important to understand though, dan, when you turn on the charge limit, it does disable optimized battery charging or optimized battery life, because this is a different sort of feature where you're more just don't charge it past 80%. That is a newer feature that Apple has added. Because of what we know about lithium ion batteries and keeping them in between 20 and 80% charge being better for them than being at 100% and you have looked at long-term storage for a device. They recommend discharging it a little bit before you store it away and, of course, pulling it out from time to time, using it and then charging it up again, letting it discharge just a hair, because the battery health is improved by having it at less than 100%. You'll also notice that when you get a new device, be it from Apple or another company, many of them already come with a charge. That is because of the impact that that would have, if it didn't have a charge or if it was charged to 100%, on the life and health of the battery. So those are all things to bear in mind life and health of the battery. So those are all things to bear in mind, dan, when it comes to your battery behavior and using it whenever you are just sitting around.

All right, our last question comes from Alan, who has written in with another theme that we're starting to experience here on the show, this one about routers. Hmm, so Alan has written in and said this I have a question about my present router situation. I have three routers a Netgear R7000 that is connected to my Sonic modem and two other routers, a Netgear 6700 and a TP-Link AX3000, that I am using as access points. So, to be clear, alan has one main router and two routers being used as access points, both different models. They are connected by Cat5e cables, and by that Alan means connected to the main router. Via those Cat5e cables I get great speeds throughout the house 900 megabits per second on Ethernet and 30 to 50 megabits per second on the 2.4 gigahertz, 200 to 300 megabits per second on the 5 gigahertz. I have the access points set up with different SSIDs for both the wireless network and the guest network, 2.4 and 5 gigahertz each. This seems like an overkill of networks, but also means that, as I use my iPhone and iPad in different parts of the house, I am constantly having to go into settings and change the SSID to the router closest to me. Is there a way to uncomplicate this situation short, causing them more headache than they need to have in front of them?

My first recommendation is, if you want to maintain this three router, three different router setup with one main router, two access points, so let's pretend that that's where we're starting. Well, that is where we're starting, with you doing what you asked, which is not to swap it out for mesh. Give all of your routers the same SSID. So right now, what you're doing is you're maybe calling, you know, one main floor, one second floor, one third floor, for example, and so then you go to the second floor and you hop in your iPad and you change it to second floor. That is this idea of exercising control, because you want to make sure that, absolutely for certain, you're getting the best possible speeds that you possibly can get and that you're connected to the right one. Sure, but you're causing yourself more work by doing so. So giving all of the routers the same SSID will help those devices to roam across your entire network.

If they all have different SSIDs, you're going to have to, you're going to have to do it manually, um, so that's your first thing. I want to say that if you do this, I am assuming that you've done the important bits like disabling DHCP on the access points. I mean, it sounds like you have, based on a what you're talking about, and B the fact that you're getting you know connectivity is is good, uh, giving them static IPs, those access points, and also making sure they're serving as LAN access points by plugging the ethernet into the right port. Assuming you've done all of that, then again, give all of your routers the same SSID. And then here is here are a couple of things you can do kind of.

If you decide to go with this method to kind of improve things in this non-mesh roaming situation link, you can go in and manually set each access point and the router of course, to a different channel on the 2.4 gigahertz band so that way they don't overlap. A lot of times they're set auto by default. Setting them to a different channel might be able to help in terms of just kind of spreading things out and making sure that there's not a lot of overlap that results in crosstalk. And then, of most importance, I know Netgear has this option I'm not sure if your TP-Link does but you have the ability to adjust the transmit power. We'll include a link in the show notes to the page from Netgear that talks about adjusting the Wi-Fi transmit power.

So by default the transmit power is set to 100%. That is, telling the router send out as much signal as you possibly can, blanketing the house in as much Wi-Fi as you possibly can, or the area, I should say, in as much Wi-Fi as you possibly can. If you have, you know, like a ranch-style home, for example, try playing around with the transmit power of your devices so that there's only a little bit of overlap of the signal across the different routers that you have in your home or the router and the access points. So right now, with all of them set to 100, the overlap is probably so great that your phone or your iPad has no need to change to the other router that you have in your home because it's still seeing and connecting to the one that is in.

I don't know if you've got a three floor or however you've got it set up, but we're going to continue with a three floor model. So you move to the second floor from the basement. Because you've got it set to a hundred percent in the basement. It's still getting through to a point that the phone doesn't think it needs to disconnect and kind of relook for the signal, so it's staying connected to that one from before. If you drop the transmit power such that it has just a little bit of an overlap they're kind of bumping up against each other then there's more of a chance that your device is just going to switch over to the next one on its own and you're not having to do that manually. So changing that transmit power for each of those devices might help, as opposed to just making sure that there's a swath of Wi-Fi blanketing the home, overlapping each other.

But, as you might imagine, the best thing that you can possibly do, alan, is switching to mesh networking. It is the way of the future. It works very well and while it's in Black Friday, cyber Monday, perhaps now is the perfect time to make that change, because then you don't have to do all that stuff we just talked about and, more importantly, you don't have that anxiety in the back of your head that's scratching at the back of your head going. But is my phone currently connected to the one that's on this floor or is it on the? Is it connected to the one that's downstairs? Ah, I'm going to have to change them all back to their own SSID because I just want to have control over the whole system and I want to know exactly what's going on at all times. And every time I'm switching to a different floor, I'm running a speed test because I don't know if I'm getting the best possible speeds right now and that's really bothering me.

It's okay to take your hands off of that wheel and make it a little bit simpler for yourself, but again, if you want to maintain that control sort of living in the scope of your question, those are my recommendations for you on how to of your question. Those are my recommendations for you on how to use that system, and this is one for the chat room. Remind me, chat room, the name of the service, oh, I just remembered it Nmap. If you head to nmaporg as well, alan, you can use Nmap to help you look at your home network and see how well it's working. Nmap's ZenMap tool is the best way to take care of that, to see how well your wireless network is spread throughout your home and where you might have dead spots, et cetera. So it helps you map out your space and look at your connectivity. So then you will have the definitive answer and make sure that it is exactly as you want it. And Doc Rock, thank you.

In the chat has said if you use unified devices, that's kind of. I suggest Eero as the. I suggest Eero as the between Leo and myself. I'm perhaps the more frugal of the two of us. So the frugal consumer option is Eero and the upgrade, less frugal option is Unify. Unify has a tool called Wi-Fi man, as Doc Rock has pointed out. That will help you to check this out. I think it's short for Wi-Fi Manager and so there are different versions. Looks like, yeah, windows and macOS to help you figure out your system as well. So you can check out. Zenmap or Wi-Fi man are the two options for you to give you know, to understand your own network and its speeds. All right, Alan was the last question on this episode of Hands-On Tech For those of you tuning in via the live streams.

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