Gadgetory

if you're anything like me at some point you've probably made the mistake of buying your non tech savvy parents or siblings or friends some kind of technology or related item as a gift not because you wanted to punish both yourself and them but because you wanted to share your love of cool devices with the others in your life and then after spending hours setting it up only to have them break it in ten minutes you probably vowed never to do it again well I have to but this year I found a tech gift a Sonos connect amp that solves a problem and genuinely makes life more convenient for my parents and is easy for me to maintain so I'd like to share that story with you and if you stick around till the end there might be a fun way for you to check up your loved ones this year as well the blasts 4hx headphones from ozone gaming are compatible with the Xbox 360 Playstation 3 Playstation 4 and PC they also feature a foldable design inline control and 44 millimeter drivers check out the link in the video description to learn more so my parents used to be tech savvy I mean at least my mom was I'm fairly sure my dad still teaches his classes with an overhead projector but but seriously we were actually kind of a tech family in the early days we had a Commodore 64 I played the crap out of Marble Madness we even had the joystick accessory that looked a little something like this we upgraded to a 386 custom machine built by Gino at bits and bytes computer store we were the first on the block with a 486 with cd-rom whoo and Carta mixed up mother Goose anyone and I still remember the feeling of utter boredom that I felt when my mom excitedly showed me the box for our state of the freaking art 14 for kilobit per second modem and loaded up a web page to show me how amazing it was for some research paper she was doing for her master's degree we even joined the Pentium era right early on 200 megahertz with MMX friends but however it happened my parents went from the cutting edge to where they're at today we're like we wanted to do a video shoot in their house last year and Brandon asked for some photos of the set that we'd be using so he could plan and it took me literally half an hour to get a picture off of an Android smartphone and have them send it to me it would have been faster for me to drive there so I'm sure you guys can imagine then and I take at least 40% of the blame for this the disastrous experience a couple years ago that was setting up a home theater system with a projector media center PC complete with TV capture card a game console and at one point a karaoke machine there were so many remotes that even with the mat that I created that had like outlines for where they went and then labels for the buttons they couldn't figure out how to use it at the best of times and diagnosing stuff like that over the phone is impossible the service calls every time someone wanted to watch TV were a burden that no one was happy with so when my parents moved to a condo and no longer had room for the projector I think every was a little relieved but the a/v receiver and amplifier and the speakers lived on as kind of a badass stereo unit until finally the receiver gave up the ghost and with their teeth gritted my first came to me asking how they can keep using those speakers they spent all that freaking money on it my recommendation so that is where this came in I reviewed the all-in-one speaker products in so Knossos ecosystem a while back and even with daily use I've been really really pleased with their ease of use when accompanied by an all-you-can-eat music service like google play music but the one thing I criticized about them at the time something that really hasn't been addressed is that the speakers are super unspecial sounding like especially for what you're paying for them so the solution then was the connect amp it's a compact little white and silver box that should be easy enough to hide somewhere discreet that allows you to use your own stereo or 2.1 speaker setup with the Sonos ecosystem just plug in the power cord plug in your speaker's the same way you would to any receiver or any other amplifier and follow the exact same set up guide as the rest of their products sort of I was actually pleased to discover that you no longer need the bridge accessory and everything can stream to your normal Wi-Fi hotspot so basically you download the app go through the Wi-Fi setup setup which room it's in and boom you're able to listen to any existing music library songs you have you can listen to internet radio through the Sonos app and you can bind additional accounts so that's what I did I gifted my parents a Google Play Music account for six months and then with that done it took me a matter of five to ten minutes to show my mom how to use it my sister even already knew how and it's times like this that my love of technology becomes something that I can legitimately share with others because while you can make the argument that VLC or Plex or some command-line tools somewhere can do everything that a consumer product like this can do and is significantly cheaper the reality of it is that as tech geeks we kind of wrapped up in the OMG this is so cool it could do all this stuff and we forget about the you know companies arriving for a cocktail party in three minutes and I need some ambien music why isn't this working I don't want to reboot a server so then that's my challenge to you guys today whatever your story of how you got into tech is and how ever disconnected your loved ones are from the technological world head over to the Linus tech tips forum thread linked in the video description with the rules and full giveaway details and post what technology gift you would buy for a non techie up to three hundred dollars and three lucky winners yes we are giving away nine hundred dollars worth of stuff three lucky winners will have their gift sent to them to the person of their choice in time for Christmas by me so merry Christmas everyone on the subject of things being easy to use tunnel bear the easy to use VPN app for mobile and desktop if you don't know what a VPN is basically all the way tunnel bear describes this is it lets you tunnel to 16 different countries allowing you to browse the internet and use online services as though you are in that other country so it's kind of like a like a man-in-the-middle so that the traffic coming to a website or service be it Netflix say for example appears as though it's coming from a given country which allows you to get around firewall rules it allows you to well use services like Netflix and have access to the library of you know your friends down in the states who have way cooler shows than you and all that kind of stuff it's available on Android iOS Chrome Mac PC and I think that's pretty much it and the apps are super easy to use you just pick the country that you want to be in and then watch as your bear tunnels your internet connection to the new location so when you do that a couple things happen your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption and your public IP address gets switch so you show up as if you're in that other place and they fixed all the annoying parts of using a VPN for personal use there's no need to mess around with port configurations DNS or any router settings tunneled their handles all that in the background and they give you 500 Meg's of data for free so you can try it out no credit card required then if you want to upgrade to unlimited data you can actually save 10 by going to tunnel bear comm /l tt linked in the video description so start bribing start driving privately start browsing privately today alright so thanks for watching guys that this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop in Amazon instructions for which are up here it is the holiday season instructions right there buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution through our forum you get a little contributor badge and all that now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so check out that little button in the top right corner to see our channel super fun video where we play a pretty neat little game it might actually be another pretty cool gift idea for the holidays it's called odious list