I'd do these 5 things differently if I were setting up my home network from scratch
…Those cables had to go, so I bought a spool of Cat 6 cable (although it weirdly says Cat 6e+) to support the 200 Mbps connection we had just subscribed to. The…
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5 misconceptions about home networking you still believe
…Manufacturers of these products have a very mixed record when it comes to timely firmware updates, and many of these devices are running software that never gets patched. By placing IoT devices…
Your smart TV is screenshotting everything you watch, but here's how to block it
Jeff Butts Mar 29, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT Jeff's been involved in the IT industry since before the Internet and spent more than 20 years working in technical support, system…
My gaming connection was dying until I checked what was under my rug
…a quick router reboot, a firmware update check, and then the same on the other end. I updated my NIC driver, reinstalled the game in question, and confirmed it was a networking…
Please, for the love of all things holy, update your BIOS
…There are plenty of new BIOS releases that are irrelevant to most users, especially in an era with multi-year chipset and socket support, so updating to every new BIOS release just…
Your router's MAC address filter is security theater, and here's what actually protects your Wi-Fi
…Use WPA2 at minimum, or WPA3 if all your devices support it. Pick a long, unique Wi-Fi password, update your router firmware, disable outdated standards if you can, and use a…
High availability doesn't require matching servers — my three different mini PCs proved it works anyway
Jeff Butts May 12, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Jeff's been involved in the IT industry since before the Internet and spent more than 20 years working in technical support, system…
You need these 6 self-hosted tools if you value your privacy
…It supports pretty much every audio, image, and document extension you could ever need, though some of the obscure ones can only be accepted as input files. For folks who’ve got…
I replaced the expensive Claude Pro subscription with these local models, and my productivity didn’t drop a bit
…Claude's advanced versions support context windows of 100,000 tokens or more. This was a significant leap beyond many contemporaries and allows Claude to reason over very large amounts of text…
I change these 5 GPU settings on every new PC for maximum performance, and you should too
…When it works, it can offer small but meaningful performance gains in supported titles. You can enable it through your PC's BIOS settings , but that isn't enough. You must always…