How-To Geek

It’s dark and you need to be able to see. It’s fine—whip out your trusty Android phone and put the camera flash to work as a flashlight. Here’s how to do it.

Honestly, this couldn’t be simpler, as it’s merely a toggle away on pretty much all Android phones. First, pull down the notification shade. Then find the flashlight icon and tap it.

Left: Off; Right: On

Really, that’s it! If you can’t find the flashlight icon, you may need to tug the notification panel a second time to show the entire Quick Settings menu. At that point, you should see the flashlight.

Now that you’ve found the flashlight, however, let’s go ahead and eliminate that second tap by moving the flashlight icon to the top row of the Quick Settings panel.

To do that, tap the little pencil icon at the bottom of the expanded panel.

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The headphone jack is fast disappearing from high-end phones and even bigger devices like the new iPad Pro. So it’s time to head out and get a decent pair of USB-C headphones, right? Not so fast.

Unlike the accommodating analog port that’s been around for decades, getting audio out of a USB-C port alone requires a little digital finagling. And that’s a problem, because digital formats are more complex, and all too often incompatible.

While there are a few sets of headphones on the market with a USB-C port, they’re generally of pretty middling to poor quality, unlike some of the options available for Apple’s similar Lightning port. Between a poor selection and poor compatibility, they’re just not worth bothering with, at least until the market settles on a more reliable standard.

The Selection Sucks

Your fancy new phone might come with a pair of USB-C headphones as a sort of apology for being incompatible with all the other ones you already have. If it does, hang on to them. Odds are that you’re not going to find a better pair any time soon.

While there are a handful of vendors of USB-C headphones on Amazon on the like, there are precious few options from reliable manufacturers… most of whom seem more interested in selling Lightning-equipped headphones, if they want to go for a non-analog option at all. Google sells a set of wired Pixel buds for its phones and Chromebook laptops, and they’re reasonable at $30. Ditto for HTC, OnePlus, and Xiaomi. But beyond that, your choices get progressively slimmer, especially if you don’t care for in-ear buds.

Razer sells a pair of USB-C “Hammerhead” buds, which are poorly-reviewed even if you do like the lime green color and gamer branding. JBL makes a set of buds called the Reflect Aware C, but they’re not even being sold anymore—and perhaps that’s for the best, since users say they had a nasty habit of simply dying. The best choice for a premium set of USB-C buds appears to be the Libratone Q Adapt, which sport hardware noise cancellation in multiple levels. But $120 is a lot to pay for a pair of wired headphones that only work with one of your gadgets.

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One of the questions I get asked most often about my landscapes is “What settings did you use?” Beginner photographers often feel that there is some magic combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO that will make their photos amazing. While there’s a lot more to it than that, understanding what settings to use makes it easier to take photos that match your vision. Let’s dig in.

RELATED: How to Develop a Better Eye for Taking Good Photos

What Gear You Need for Landscape Photos

Landscape photography is incredibly accessible. All you need is a camera, any lens, and a landscape for your subject. Most landscape photographers favor a wide angle lens since it lets you better show the scale of the landscapes you’re photographing.

The good news is that the 18-55mm kit lens that comes with most DSLRs is, at the wide end, pretty firmly in the range of focal lengths that work really well. It’s equivalent to about 28mm on a full frame camera. If you get really into landscape photography, you can invest in a wider lens but, at least to start with, any standard lens will do.

With that said, you can even take landscape shots with long telephoto lenses. They will have a different look, but that doesn’t mean they’re not great shots.

When you’re taking landscapes, you are often working in the low light around dawn or dusk with narrow apertures. This means, as we’ll see in a moment, you can use a slower shutter speed than you can use handheld without getting blurry shots. Your first purchase if you get into landscape photography should be a good, stable tripod. It will open up a wide range of shots you otherwise wouldn’t be able to take.

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Wi-Fi 6 is the next-generation wireless standard that’s faster than 802.11ac. More than speed, it will provide better performance in congested areas, from stadiums to your own device-packed home. It’s coming in 2019.

Wi-Fi Has Version Numbers Now Wi-Fi Alliance visuals for device manufacturers.

Yes, Wi-Fi now has version numbers! Even those old confusing Wi-Fi standard names like “802.11ac” have been renamed to user-friendly names like “Wi-Fi 5.”

Here are the versions of Wi-Fi you’ll  be seeing:

• Wi-Fi 4 is 802.11n, released in 2009.
• Wi-Fi 5 is 802.11ac, released in 2014.
• Wi-Fi 6 is the new version, also known as 802.11ax. It’s scheduled for release in 2019.

The Wi-Fi Alliance also announced would like to see these numbers appear in software so you can tell which Wi-Fi network is newer and faster while connecting on your smartphone, tablet, or laptop. You may be seeing Wi-Fi numbers on your phone, tablet, or laptop soon.

Older versions of Wi-Fi aren’t widely in use and aren’t officially being branded. But, if they were, here’s what they’d be called:

• Wi-Fi 1 would have been 802.11b, released in 1999.
• Wi-Fi 2 would have been 802.11a, also released in 1999.
• Wi-Fi 3 would have been 802.11g, released in 2003.

Faster Wi-Fi

As usual, the latest Wi-Fi standard offers faster data transfer speeds. If you’re using a Wi-Fi router with a single device, maximum potential speeds should be up to 40% higher with Wi-Fi 6 compared to Wi-Fi 5.

Wi-Fi 6 accomplishes this through more efficient data encoding, resulting in higher throughput. Mainly, more data is packed into the same radio waves. The chips that encode and decode these signals keep getting more powerful and can handle the extra work.

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In 1922, Phone Lines In The U.S. Were Silenced To Observe What?

1. Dedication of the Lincoln Memorial
2. Succession of Pope Benedict XV
3. Alexander Graham Bell's Funeral
4. The New Year

Think you know the answer?

Bulleted lists are standard fare in PowerPoint presentations, and sometimes you want to tweak those bullets to look just right. PowerPoint gives you a fair amount of control by letting you align and adjust the text after a bullet point. Here’s how.

Aligning the Bulleted Text Horizontally in Its Text Box

First, open your PowerPoint presentation and go to the slide that contains the bulleted text. Highlight the text on the bullet you want to adjust.

On the “Home” tab, you’ll see four different alignment options—the same ones you use for aligning regular text.

From left to right, these options are:

• Align Left (Ctrl+L)
• Center (Ctrl+E)
• Align Right (Ctrl+R)
• Justify (Ctrl+J)

Hovering over each option with your mouse gives you the alignment type, respective shortcut key, and alignment description.

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Windows Updates need a lot of disk space, which is a problem on devices with small amounts of internal storage. Microsoft is fixing this by “reserving” some disk space for updates in the next version of Windows 10, codenamed 19H1.

Microsoft has been pushing cheap laptops with small hard drives for years now. But anyone who has ever used one has quickly run into a major issue: They usually don’t have enough storage left over to install major updates. This leaves them without important patches, security fixes, and new features. While you shouldn’t update to the latest version of Windows on the first day, you do want to eventually get there. So this is a serious problem.

Right now, the workaround is to either delete as many files and programs as possible or download the update to external storage. Neither answer is always easy, especially for a college student who has a cheap device, no USB drive, and a need to keep all their files and programs.

Microsoft is trying to address this with a method that is bound to be controversial. Starting in the next major release (and available to Insiders now), Microsoft will reserve at least 7 gigabytes of space on your hard drive.

The space won’t go completely wasted. Windows will store temporary files here when space isn’t needed for updates. Files created by apps and processes that would have taken space anyway will now go into this reserved storage. When it’s time to update, Windows will automatically delete all the files in reserved storage and use the space for downloading update files.

Microsoft says it isn’t using a virtual drive to make this happen. As Microsoft’s Craig Barkhouse explains in the TechNet comments:

Instead we designed an elegant solution that would require new support being added to NTFS. The idea is NTFS provides a mechanism for the servicing stack to specify how much space it needs reserved, say 7GB. Then NTFS reserves that 7GB for servicing usage only. What is the effect of that? Well the visible free space on C: drops by 7GB, which reduces how much space normal applications can use. Servicing can use those 7GB however.

How much space is reserved depends on what optional features and languages you have installed. The more features and languages on the system, the more space will be reserved so that those features can be properly updated as well. If you later uninstall a feature or language, the reserved space will shrink.

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At CES 2019, Lenovo has introduced two new smarthome products: the Smart Clock with Google Assistant and the Smart Tab with Alexa. The former is sort of a mini version of the company’s existing Smart Display, while the latter is a tablet and Echo Show in one.

The Smart Clock has a 4-inch display and is meant to be a bedside clock for your nightstand. You can use it to set alarms, play music, look at your calendar appointments for the day, and even use it with Google Assistant’s Routines feature, like creating routines for going to bed and waking up in the mornings. There’s even a USB-A port on the back to plug in and charge your smartphone, which is a nice added touch.

The Smart Clock works very similarly to other Google Assistant smart displays, like the Home Hub and Lenovo’s existing Smart Display. However, it’s not an identical experience by any means, since the Smart Clock is running Android Things. The good news, though, as that the user interface and various swiping actions and taps are still very similar and familiar to those who use a traditional smart display.

The Lenovo Smart Clock will retail for $79 and be available at some point in the spring this year.

Can for size reference. It’s little. It’s perfect.

As for the Smart Tab, it’s essentially an Android tablet that comes with Alexa, but it also has a dock that also has a built-in Bluetooth speaker. So you can use it as an Android tablet, then dock it and use it as an Echo Show.

There two different models of the Smart Tab that will be available, the M10 and the P10. Both are running Snapdragon 450 processors and have 10″ 1920×1200 displays. The M10 comes with either 2GB or 3GB of memory, 16GB or 32GB of storage, a 2MP front camera, and a 5MP rear camera starting at $199. Whereas the P10 can have up to 4GB of memory and 64GB of storage, 5MP front camera and an 8MP rear camera starting at $299.

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All-in-ones tend to come in two flavors: a budget machine for novice users or an all-out monster with style and flexibility. Lenovo has taken the latter option with its new Yoga A940, a top-of-the-line machine meant for artists and creators.

Announced at CES, the 27-inch machine includes a 4K touchscreen and a double-hinged display stand, which can move from a 90-degree vertical to a drawing-friendly 25-degree angle with a smooth sweep. The internal components, featuring Intel Core 8th-gen processors and up to 32GB of memory, plus a Radeon RX 560 GPU, are housed in a beefy base. But it’s the stuff around the guts that’s interesting. The top of the main assembly is a shelf for the included wireless keyboard when you’re ready to go full touch, and the smaller area on the side can recharge your Qi-enabled smartphone. Five Dolby Atmos speakers hide inside as well.

Take a look ’round the back and you’ll find four USB 3.0 ports, HDMI-in (for using the display with another machine), and Ethernet if you need something faster than Wi-Fi. On the side, accessible without reaching is another USB 3.0, USB-C, a headphone jack, and an SD card reader, handy for pro photographers who don’t often need MicroSD. Other nice touches include a work light on the bottom edge of the screen and a manual shutter over the webcam.

But it’s the included “Smart Dial” that will make artists do a double take. This gadget is analogous to Microsoft’s Surface Dial but comes with the package for free. It also displays some surprising ergonomic thought, docking into a dedicated USB port on either the right or left side for easy use in folded-down mode. (Southpaws thank you, Lenovo, for ambidextrous design.) Lenovo’s management software can assign different scrolling tools for different applications, like Adobe’s Creative Cloud, with a color-coded LED ring to let the user know which mode it’s in without checking the app.

All of this, plus a powered stylus, keyboard and mouse, and the usual array of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a three-month trial of Creative Cloud come in at $2350 when the Yoga A940 launches in March. The base specs, with 8GB of memory and a 128GB SSD or 1TB hard drive, are a bit disappointing…but this all-in-one has one more trick up its sleeve. The panel beneath the keyboard shelf can be removed, granting the user access to the memory and storage slots. Laptop-grade DDR4 RAM and SSDs can be replaced without further disassembly, keeping the warranty intact.

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It’s all too easy to end up with messy disorganized drawers. Spend less time looking for stuff and more time on the important things by upgrading your drawers, big and small, with these great organizers.

Now, all these drawer organizers are fairly interchangeable. You don’t have to use the one we suggest for the task we suggest. We’re just saying that the particular one in mind is extra good for that purpose. Ultimately, the effectiveness will come down to the size of your drawers and what you intend on filling them with.

Either way, here are some of the best drawer organizers for helping you claim back the drawer space within your home.

A Drawer Organizer For The Kitchen: Bellemain Bamboo Utensil Drawer ($25)

Few drawer organizers look great but the Bellemain Bamboo Utensil Drawer is a rare exception. It’s made from fully matured bamboo so it’s very strong and it looks great too. The makers reckon it might even last longer than the drawer you place it inside of.

This version has room for 6 compartments and you can slide the long edge segments in and out to accomodate the width of your drawer. There’s plenty of room here for spatulas, knives, forks, and all those other utensils that are all too easy to lose track of in a poorly organized kitchen drawer. Appearance wise—it’ll make all those utensils look far better and more appealing too than your current method of dumping them in one big drawer.

Buy on Amazon A Drawer Organizer For Your Dresser: Simple Houseware Closet Underwear Organizer Drawer Divider ($14)

It’s easy for your dresser to end up a chaotic mess of underwear, socks, and other bits and pieces without any sense of order. The Simple Houseware Closet Underwear Organizer Drawer Divider counteracts this while being very simple. It’s made up of 4 bins of slightly varying size. The thinking is that one can be for your underwear, one for socks, one for ties, and one for mostly whatever you feel like throwing in.

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At CES 2019, Lenovo reps told us that they’re moving the “Yoga” brand beyond the convertible form factor of the original Yoga laptop. Now the company is using it for a variety of premium offerings, making it more of an aesthetic than a feature.

That’s why the Yoga S940, despite its flexible name, is a conventional clamshell laptop without a double rotating hinge or a touchscreen display. But the thing is so pretty you might not notice its more button-down build.

The 13.9-inch laptop is an eye-grabber, with a bright 4K screen covered in contoured glass as you might expect on a smartphone. (A 1080p option is available on the base model for the frugal buyer.) Tiny bezels recall Dell’s much-loved Infinity Display laptops…but this one has enough space for forward-firing speakers on either side of the keyboard. They’re rated for Dolby Atmos, and the screen matches them with Dolby Vision certification.

Core specs include 8th-gen Intel Core processors, either 8GB or 16GB of RAM, and between 256GB and 1TB of SSD storage. Lenovo says the laptop will last for up to 15 hours on a charge with the 1080p screen, though that gets significantly chopped to 9.5 hours with the 4K option. Ports are triple USB-C, two of which feature Thunderbolt video capability, plus a headphone jack.

There’s not much to set the Yoga S940 apart in terms of stand-out specs, and it’s neither the lightest (2.64 pounds) nor thinnest (12.2mm) laptop here at CES. But the package is appealing enough that it might win some fans when it debuts in May—we feel that it’s a clear winner among Lenovo’s consumer-facing laptops. It will start at $1500 for the base configuration.

If you’ve used a recent iPhone, iPad Pro, or 2018 MacBook Pro, you might have come across a new switch in your display settings. True Tone is intended to make the color of the display appear more natural, and it works.

True Tone first made an appearance in the 2017 iPad Pro lineup, but Apple has since brought the feature to the iPhone, starting with the 2017 iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X. Since then, it’s released the 2018 iPad Pro and the 2018 MacBook Pro, both with the feature built in. No matter which of those devices you’re using, True Tone is designed to take the surrounding light levels and temperature and then adjust the color and intensity of the device’s display to match. Apple believes this lets the display appear more natural while also preventing eye strain.

And you know what? It does a pretty good job.

What Exactly is True Tone Doing?

Like we mentioned earlier, Apple is using multichannel sensors to monitor the surrounding light and then adjust the display to match. That means that as you go about your life and the light changes, you will see that your iPhone, iPad Pro, or MacBook Pro’s display changes, too. If you’re in direct sunlight, True Tone will alter the temperature of your display to make colors appear more natural without blowing them out. If you’re in a room with white lights, True Tone will go to work to make sure everything doesn’t look washed out.

It’s difficult to describe in words, but once you’ve used a device with True Tone enabled, you’ll never want to go back.

Should You Use True Tone?

As much as we think True Tone is a great addition to the devices that support it, there are downsides. If you’re a professional who works with images and photographs, you probably want True Tone disabled so you can make sure you see your work in its unfettered state. It’s impossible to do color work on a photo if your MacBook Pro or iPad Pro is changing how colors look on the device you’re using. Thankfully, disabling and then re-enabling True Tone requires just a simple flick of a switch.

How to Enable and Disable True Tone on an iPhone or iPad Pro

To get started, open the Settings app and select “Display & Brightness.”

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Blacklights are a great party piece, and they’re especially useful after the party is over. Why? Well, you can use a blacklight to find any critters or bodily fluids that may have stuck around.

That’s right, most bodily fluids contain chemicals that glow under UV light. But you don’t have to lug around a full sized blacklight to find the source of that rancid cat pee smell. You could easily get the job done with a small, portable blacklight.

You can also use a portable blacklight to detect any unwanted guests that may be waiting in your bedroom or hotel room. Bedbug poop trails glow under UV light, so you can use a portable blacklight to quickly scan your hotel mattress for any of these disgusting monsters. Some scorpions and spiders also glow under UV light, which is good to know if you live in an area that has a lot of deadly scorpions.

There are all kinds of portable blacklights, and it can be hard to find the one that suits your needs. That’s why we’ve taken the time to find the best portable blacklights, for every situation.

A quick note before we dive in: strong UV lights are no joke and if you’ll be using them with any regularity you should buy a pair of UV blocking safety glasses. For ~$7 you can grab a pair of regular safety glasses or for a few bucks more you can get an over-your-glasses model.

INFRAY Pocket-Sized Blacklight Pen ($18)

Some portable blacklights are a little bulky. The bulky lights are really bright, which is nice, but you can’t really hide them in your pocket. If you need a discreet little blacklight that you can take on a plane or on the job without much fuss, then you should check out the INFRAY blacklight.

There’s not much to say about this blacklight. It’s a solid product at an affordable price. It’s a handy device for people that travel frequently, and it’s especially useful for people that need a blacklight in a professional environment (checking money, cleaning houses, dentistry, etc). The only real downside to the INFRAY blacklight is that it produces a smaller beam of light than larger blacklights. But it’s a small price to pay for a blacklight that’s the size of a highlighter.

Buy on Amazon LIGHTFE 3 Watt High Power Pocket Blacklight ($36)

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There are two kinds of balance in photography: formal and informal. Understanding both—and knowing how to them—is an important part of composition. Let’s dig in.

Balance has been a part of composition since long before photography came along. It’s an integral part of most renaissance paintings. It’s also a slightly slippery concept. It relies on an idea called “visual weight” that is, in and of itself, a metaphor. The idea is that different objects in a scene all have different visual weight. People, brightly colored things, high-contrast objects, and unusual subjects, for example, all have high visual weight. Other things like large areas of space, sky, water, or ground, have low visual weight. The only way to get a handle on it is to see it in action and play around.

Formal or Symmetrical Balance

Formal balance is symmetry. It’s where the frame is split in half, either vertically or horizontally, and both sides are given equal visual weight. Have a look at this portrait.

It’s essentially perfectly symmetrical along the vertical axis.

Both sides of the image have equal visual weight. There is nothing that pulls our eyes to one side of the image or the other.

Here’s another portrait where, again, the model is central, so it’s pretty much symmetrical.

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CES is underway, and D-Link has already announced a new 5G router. But while 5G might sound great, you probably don’t have it in your area right now. So, you shouldn’t plan to jump on this router just yet.

It’s a 5G Modem and Router

The D-Link 5G NR Enhanced Gateway (what a name!) is a cellular modem that happens to provide Wi-Fi. It’s not a standard Wi-Fi router. Think of it like a more powerful Mobile Hotspot that isn’t mobile. You’ll connect this to a carrier (like Verizon or AT&T if they allow it), and then broadcast the Internet throughout your home.

You can only use this if you have 5G Internet in your area.

Unfortunately, the naming for Wi-Fi and cellular protocols are similar and confusing. The Wi-FI Alliance is trying to improve this with a simplified naming scheme, but while that will go a long way in keeping track of which Wi-Fi protocol is better, it won’t help keep the difference between Wi-Fi 5 and 5G straight.

It’s Not A Plain 5 GHz Wi-Fi Router

5G and 5 GHz Wi-Fi aren’t the same things.

With a name so close, it’s easy to get confused. 5G is cellular service like your smartphone uses. And 5 GHz refers to the wireless spectrum your Wi-Fi router can use. You can’t take your existing Wi-Fi router and connect it to 5G cellular service. And you can’t take this device and connect it to your existing home Internet provider to give your house Wi-Fi.  You need 5G service in your area to take advantage of this device.

5G Probably Isn’t Available For You Yet

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Laptops and desktops often get the short end of the stick when it comes to audio: the former because of space constraints, the latter because pack-in accessories tend to be of low quality. If you want an upgrade for either, these Edifier speakers will do nicely.

The R1280T is a set of fairly conventional bookshelf speakers, with lots of capability concentrated into two chunky wooden satellites with no subwoofer. With a street price of $100 and standard analog inputs, it’s a set that makes a serious upgrade for your desk’s audio without breaking the bank or adding too much bulk or complexity.

Want to upgrade your basic desktop speakers without getting into checkbook-busting audiophile territory? The R1280T is a rock solid upgrade pick.

While the fairly simple setup is unlikely to please audiophiles looking for wall-rumbling power or painstaking precision, they’re a marked improvement over the dusty old 2004-era Logitech set found on many desktops.

Covering the Basics

The powered bookshelf speakers boast 4-inch primary woofers and a dedicated tweeter in each unit, sharing 42 watts of power between them. Inputs are simple: two RCA audio jacks, both of which are constantly active. The right speaker holds adjustment knobs for master volume, bass, and treble, with no screen of any kind.

The connection panel is similarly Spartan, with double RCA inputs and the speaker wire jack for the left unit. The only other control is a power switch. The only indication of a more modern make is the included remote, which is spare, with only volume and mute controls. Oddly the adjustments for treble and bass aren’t available on the remote.

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The Wi-Fi Alliance already announced Wi-Fi 6 back in October. Today, it’s announcing the details of the Wi-Fi 6 certification process, which will launch in the third quarter of 2019. Expect many new Wi-Fi 6 devices later this year.

Some manufacturers have already released routers and other devices advertising Wi-Fi 6 support, but they’re not “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6.” That certification program ensures devices are compatible and that they have specific features. The Wi-Fi Alliance told us they expect manufacturers to have those already-existing Wi-Fi 6 devices certified when the program launches.

Wi-Fi 6 includes a variety of technologies,  but some are mandatory for certification. Devices must support WPA3 encryption for improved security to achieve certification. They must also support specific features, including OFDMA, MU-MIMO, beamforming, 1024-QAM, and target wake time (TMT). Together, these features provide a more efficient network with lower latency, improved speed with multiple devices, and improved battery life for those devices.

RELATED: Wi-Fi 6: What’s Different, and Why it Matters

But you don’t need to know about all those technical terms. That’s the point of the new “Wi-Fi 6” name, which is a friendlier term for 802.11ax. Up until now, Wi-Fi standards have been named things like 802.11n, 802.11g, and 802.11ac. Can you put them in the correct order? (Hint: No, it’s not alphabetical!)

The correct order for Wi-Fi standards from oldest to newest is 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11ac, and 802.11ax. Don’t worry if you can’t remember, though—the Wi-Fi Alliance found that only 5% of people surveyed could put these standards in the correct order.

So, forget all that stuff—just look for “Wi-Fi 6 Certified.” You don’t even need to worry about the WPA3 certification, as Wi-Fi 6 certified devices must support WPA3.

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You couldn’t escape the 5G hype at CES 2018 and the same is holding true for 2019. Everyone—from Samsung and Intel to cellular carriers and smartphone companies—wants you to know how amazing 5G will be. Samsung called it “wireless fiber”, promising super-fast low latency internet everywhere. 5G is supposed to be faster than a typical home cable internet connection today…and it’s wireless, too.

What Is 5G?

RELATED: What Is 4G LTE?

5G is the industry standard that will supersede the current widespread 4G LTE standard, just as 4G supplanted 3G. 5G just stands for “fifth generation”—it’s the fifth generation of this standard.

This standard is designed to be much faster than current 4G LTE technology. It’s not just about speeding up smartphone internet connections, though. It’s about enabling faster wireless internet everywhere for everything from connected cars to smarthome and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

In the future, your smartphone and all the other devices you have with cellular connectivity will use 5G instead of the 4G LTE technology they likely use today.

How Fast Will 5G Be?

RELATED: The Best (Actually Useful) Tech We Saw at CES 2018

Tech companies are promising a lot from 5G. While 4G tops out at a theoretical 100 megabits per second (Mbps), 5G tops out at 10 gigabits per second (Gbps). That means 5G is a hundred times faster than the current 4G technology—at its theoretical maximum speed, anyway.

For example, the Consumer Technology Association pointed out that, at this speed, you could download a two-hour movie in just 3.6 seconds on 5G, versus 6 minutes on 4G or 26 hours on 3G.

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It’s no secret that the cable industry has been slowly crawling toward death. The convoluted cable packages, which are somehow becoming more expensive than ever, are losing a war with streaming services.

You’d think that the well-documented death of TV would lead cable companies to try something new and radical. You’d think that they’d send their best and brightest to work things out in a top-secret hotel lobby. Maybe they would even agree to lower their prices or to push for a new era of digital television that can compete with streaming services. But that’s not what cable companies are doing.

No, cable companies are doing something even more radical. They’re publicly arguing over free channels. The Spectrum cable company and the Tribune broadcasting company have begun a war over TV channels that anyone can access with an old-fashioned antenna.

Tribune owns most major over-the-air networks, like CBS, NBC, FOX, and ABC. These are locally broadcasted channels that you can pick up with an antenna. They’re not exclusive to cable networks. But Tribune holds licensing contracts with most major cable companies, and these contracts allow the cable companies to include Tribune channels in their lineup.

One of these cable companies, the Charter-owned service called Spectrum, was set to renew their contract with Tribune on New Year’s Eve. But the contract hasn’t been signed, and all Tribune networks have been removed from Spectrum’s cable service.

Why wasn’t the contract signed? Well, Spectrum built an oddly aggressive webpage to tell their cable subscribers that they can’t afford to renew Tribune’s contract. They claim that Tribune is “driven by greed,” and that they’re demanding “over 50% more” cash than what they used to.

But Tribune has posted a press release on their website, detailing how “extremely disappointed” they are that Spectrum won’t agree to renew the contract. Using the NFL playoffs as leverage, Tribune details how the “NFL playoffs are in jeopardy,” and how they “don’t want Spectrum subscribers to miss these games.” Of course, they could just watch the games for free online or over the air.

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Space Sickness Is Measured In What Units?

1. Drops
2. Garns
3. Upchucks
4. Fuges

Think you know the answer?