Gadgetory

okay so you've gone to the local mediocre buy because you've got some stuff in your house but you need to connect to the internet the slackjaw dude at the entrance points you to aisle nine and three-quarters so you spend 10 minutes wandering around trying to figure out what that means until finally you find yourself staring at a wall of modems routers switches and access points but all look more or less the same plastic boxes with some Ethernet ports on them in maybe some antennas what is the difference between all these gadgets well let's start with the most fundamental piece of equipment you need to get online the modem this processes the signal from your internet service provider or ISP that's being carried over a phone cable fiber or satellite link and interfaces with your own home network if you're just connecting one wired device to the Internet a modem is all you need plug your computer into the Ethernet port on the modem and you are ready to rock with no configuration required in most cases but these days it's far more likely that you have multiple things you want to get online a whole host of computers phones tablets and game consoles not to mention that smart fridge that you're having second thoughts about this is where a router comes in our router will create your very own local network with each device you want to connect assigned its own local IP address kind of like unit numbers in an apartment building but all share the same street address so your router then makes sure that web traffic gets to the appropriate device within your home so your data packets don't end up going to your parents instead these days most of us tend to think of routers as wireless but there are plenty of routers that operate only to hook up wired devices to your local network so a router isn't actually Wireless by definition we only think this because modern wireless routers are a combination device consist thing of a router a switch sometimes a modem and a wireless access point or AP this is the piece that actually communicates with your mobile devices over-the-air all those standalone access points that plug into the router aren't all that common for home networks they are often found in public places where many people need to connect wirelessly to the same network such as in airports or hotels if you have a lot of wired devices and the few ports on your wireless router aren't enough the solution for you is an additional network switch these can turn one Ethernet port into many but usually need to be connected to a router to handle assigning IP remember those local addresses to all the devices on your local network something you can learn more about here and if you've ever wondered what a network bridges it's simply a device that links devices together by having inbound and outbound Ethernet ports so a switch is just a bridge with a lot of outputs bringing us finally to our old friend the network hub and yes I do mean old as you might have one collecting dust in your attic and it's kind of hard to find them in stores anymore you see hubs are sort of like switches but instead of analyzing incoming traffic and deciding which device it should go to hubs are essentially glorified splitters that just blast the same network traffic to all outbound ports usually resulting in lots of network congestion that seriously limit speeds because of this significant shortcoming hubs were phased out in favor of more intelligent switches as Network and internet speeds increased so if you do happen to see one on sale somewhere it's almost always better to opt for a switch instead unless you really like old tech and you store everything on zip drives just to be contrarian are you self-employed or running a small business I guess that's sort of the same thing do you find yourself running around like a chicken with your head cut off trying to sort out all that paperwork and accounting and expense reports and in voicing loud stop sucks and freshbooks is all about making it not suck any more fresh books actually recently launched an all-new version of their cloud accounting software that is designed to make your life more organized more efficient and therefore easier fresh books is designed for people who aren't necessarily numbers people it allows you to track expenses track your hours send professional-looking invoices in seconds and accept payment on your terms so you could take deposits upfront if you were a painter for example or you can take the whole thing at the end but eliminate that stupid guessing game where you send someone an invoice and they're like oh yeah I didn't get it or whatever because freshbooks lets you see when they've seen your invoice and they can even pay through the platform they've also got a card reader now as well so check them out at the link in the video description and put an end to spending your time accounting for the work you did instead of doing your work and enjoying yourself so 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