Today NETGEAR announced the latest addition to their high-end consumer 802.11AC Wi-Fi routers; the $400 Nighthawk X8 R8500. Like other “AC5300” routers the X8 is based on a 1.4GHz SoC with tri-band Wave2 sporting one “1000Mbps” 2.4GHz and two “2166Mbps” 5GHz radios. Unlike previous generations of 802.11AC routers the X8 has two features which make it very unique compared to […]
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Last January I had a chance to check out D-Link’s upcoming lineup of big-red routers (a welcome departure from the bland canister of previous years :)), with the $290/£215 DIR-890L being the first to ship and the first to make it into “the lab”. Offering a dual-core 1GHz CPU, four Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports, and USB2.0/3.0 expansion it ticks all […]
Read moreI was quite a shocked the other day to discover that the FCC wants to ban custom/3rd party firmware for Wi-Fi routers like dd-wrt. The goal, which is understandable from their perspective, is to remove the ability of radio wireless devices to work outside of their allowable parameters. The problem is that this is one of those “use a sledgehammer […]
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Infrared (IR) line-of-sight (LoS) is a cruel requirement, too often ignored by A/V cabinet designers and dismissed by the main furniture decision makers who “don’t want to see” the kit that makes the picture box work. Of course, solving the control problem afterwards is usually someone else’s responsibility; and chances are that since you’re reading this – it’s you. There […]
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If you’re a Plex user with a Roku, you should check out the channel that is now freely available for everyone. That’s right, the new Plex channel for Roku players is out of Plex Pass preview mode and FREE to all of our lovely users. With a sleek new look and improved support for lots of new features, the streaming […]
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If you’ve ever had a pipe burst or your basement flooded, you know that finding out ASAP is critical. The sooner you know, the greater the ability to pull things out, or turn the water off and start dealing with the problem. Once you’ve made the jump to home automation (HA), adding water detection sensors is a no brainer, but […]
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Discrete IR On/Off are a critical part of my home theater setup. Without them, I can’t include an “On” command in my startup macro for the HTPC which leads to all sorts of “training issues” with the other users in the house. So I was pretty upset when Intel killed the feature in a recent BIOS release. Fortunately they were […]
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We’ve been waiting for the SiliconDust HDHR4-2DT network attached DVB-T2 tuner for a couple years now. In the meantime, anyone leveraging the UK’s digital terrestrial television networks have had to make an unwelcome choice between pretending HD content doesn’t exist, or living without the inherent flexibility of an Ethernet enabled TV tuner. With the £100 device finally hitting shelves, it […]
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Staying on Wi-Fi’s cutting edge has been expensive over the last couple years, with the major improvements in software and features only coming to the top end of the market. Today NETGEAR took steps to reach more budget-minded users with the launch of the $150 R6400 AC1750 802.11AC Wi-Fi router. The R6400 is intended to slot into the R6300’s current […]
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CES 2015 introduced us to NETGEAR’s ReadyNAS 202/204, this network attached storage (NAS) was particularly interesting because by basing it around a 1.4GHz dual-core Cortex-A15, the underlying SoC should help alleviate once of the major concerns with ARM based devices – performance. With 2GB of RAM, two Gigabit Ethernet ports supporting various adapter bonding methods, easy “X-RAID2” setup, and a […]
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