Manan reviews tech and gadgets

Which is better: Verizon Fios vs Spectrum

March 19th, 2021

Verizon Fios vs Spectrum tl;dr:

In Verizon Fios vs Spectrum Internet connectivity, Verizon Fios is significantly better for the same price with more bandwidth, more free stuff, and less outages.

For TV: Spectrum (because of their Apple TV app for live TV, Verizon doesn’t have anything like this and forces you to get their STBs)
For Internet: Verizon (Spectrum had multiple outages in my area and Verizon’s 1:1 for upload and download is fantastic)
For cost: Depends on the customer agent you get
Free stuff: Verizon (Amazon Echo Show and Ring)

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Amplifi Alien: A major upgrade to a slow mesh network

February 2nd, 2021

BLUF: Amplifi Alien is a beast, in looks and performance.

I’ve been in love with my Amplifi HD Gamer’s Edition mesh. The Wi-Fi coverage, gorgeous LED screen showing network metrics, and simple web and iOS interfaces to manage the devices–everything was great. However, as I wrote in my review, the Internet speeds were often less than 1/4th my ISP bandwidth. At the same time, my ISP — Spectrum — had been very unreliable with consistent outages every few weeks and slow speeds on every device, this where comes Amplifi Alien.

Here’s the tl;dr:

Gorgeous screen with fun content being displayed
Very easy to setup
If you’re comfortable spending the money, get x2 individual Alient routers ($758 vs $699 for the kit) — more LAN ports but also, what’s better than 1 Alien router? 2 Alien routers!
Very expensive to begin with and very expensive to scale since you will have to buy another $400 (incl. taxes) Amplifi Alien main router to extend this
The mesh satellite comes with ONLY 1 ethernet port, like why just 1 port in a such huge tower?
The Amplifi HD cannot be connected in a wireless mesh to extend this
Performance is significantly better than the Amplifi HD mesh kit

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Entry-level Gaming Desktop: 12 Things I Learned Buying the HP Pavilion

January 24th, 2021

2020 was a year of adapting new circumstances and making time for activities that aren’t work. Building an entry-level gaming desktop was not part of the plan till my group of friends who are into all forms of video games (from making them to playing them and analyzing every aspect of gameplay) started discussing strategies for AoE II. While I’m not a big gamer because it’s a singular activity (and I’m not that great at it either), our interests overlapped on Age of Empires II¹. I’ve had a Surface Pro 2016 as my personal laptop since, well, 2016 and I tried to run AOE II on it. I instantly started having fun but the game play was just bad with the trackpad, so I bought the wireless Razer Basilisk.

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Roborock S6 MaxV: Fun obstacle avoidance, good navigation and powerful app

October 22nd, 2020

The Roborock S6 MaxV is fantastic product. I hated my previous robo-vacuum. The Ecovacs Deebot M80 was a dumb and terrible device that was infuriating — it would never be able to find its way back to the base station, would keep going in circles and end up at the same spot where it got stuck; it was a bad device. As I started evaluating my next robo-vacuum I had the following requirements:

Must be able to find its way back home
Must be really really good at navigation
Must let me define custom mapping features like no-go zones
Must be good at not having hair stuck in it, and make it easy to remove the hair

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Amplifi HD: Chic WiFi Routers with Ubiquity’s Popular Features

October 8th, 2020

Update 2/2/2021: The Amplifi HD mesh continued to throttle my Internet and the performance was so bad that I had to work with Ubiquity to replace this with the Amplifi Alien.

Setting Amplifi HD was extremely easy, the iOS app made it seamless. The router is also a centerpiece of my living room. The LED base and the live speedometer on the LCD screen always makes me happy. The popular Ubiquity features for building a topology and having a coverage heat map are available.

Early last year I got myself a new Netgear R6700 router to replace the Linksys router that kept dropping my Internet every couple of hours. Unfortunately, as decent as the Netgear reviews were, it is a terrible router — either it couldn’t handle the number of devices I have or it is just a bad router. (I think it’s just a bad router.)

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Work from home laptop productivity accessories

July 30th, 2020

Work from home started like a fantastic change of pace. I didn’t have to take early morning flights, I could be in comfort clothes, slide into bed when I wanted to, binge TV whenever I wanted to, work from my bed or couch — all these amazing comforts… And then suddenly within two weeks, every week felt like one looooong Monday. There is no difference between work hours and off-work hours. All of this coupled with laptops that overheat and video Teams call, having the laptop on the lap was becoming very uncomfortable, the laptop on bed would get very hot because the vents were would get blocked.

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Simple accessories to organize gadget wires at home

July 19th, 2020

This article has been a few years coming, it was meant to be a follow-up to my article on the 5 smart gadgets but I just never got to it back then. So after a pause, here’s my list of some simple Amazon-bought dumb accessories to organize gadget wires in a smart / connected home:

Hide yo’ wires
Hold your charger cables
Stack those remotes
Apple TV remote covers

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5 Smart Home Devices on a Budget

August 5th, 2017

Internet of Things and smart home is exciting. It’s the culmination of years of hardware and software advances enabling you to interact and control your surroundings through touch/phone/voice. It is truly fascinating and magical. My first, and for the longest time only, smart device has been a WeMo plug. I was using the phone app to turn the room lights ON/OFF, I no longer had to get out of bed to control the lights of my room. It was great!

Then came Alexa. While I wasn’t an early adopter, the affordable Echo Dot was intriguing. During 2016’s Black Friday sales, I got myself the Philips Hue Starter Pack + Echo Dot combo; my rooms have never been the same. My Alexa-powered room setup was:

WeMo plug to control the AC
Hue bulbs for the room

I could control my lights and AC through voice commands via Alexa. Since I had to move, I had a few enhancements in mind. My current smart home setup includes:

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Sync Windows 10 Edge Bookmarks with iPhone

July 31st, 2017

I’ve had the new Microsoft Surface Pro 2017 for about a month and I’ve been enjoying it as a laptop more than a tablet. One of the new additions in Windows 10 is the next iteration of Internet Explorer – Edge. As I elaborated in my lengthy Surface Pro 2017 review, I’ve stuck to Edge on the Surface. It took some initial humps to get my Chrome bookmarks synced and setup as I’d like them but I got it working. One of the key things for me is having my bookmarks on my iPhone. I no longer have a Linux or a Mac PC so Chrome wasn’t necessary.

In order to get my bookmarks on iPhone and Edge synced, it was 1 unnecessary step more than what it should be (you can blame Apple or Microsoft for this, you can choose). Read the full story »

Surface Pro 2017: Work in Progress Validation of Microsoft’s Vision

July 30th, 2017

The last laptop I bought was in 2011. It was a mid-2011 13″ MacBook Air, something I bought after years of being a vocal non-believer in OS X (my first true use of OS X was Tiger on a Hackintosh). The Air was an upgrade from a back breaking, heavy, overheating, but spectacularly gorgeous screened Dell XPS 16. The decision to switch to Mac came after walking around Manhattan attending TechCrunch Disrupt with a 10 ton bag on my back. During the 6 years since my last laptop, life happened. I was spending most of my time with a work laptop; my need for a personal laptop started to fall drastically, coupled with my iPhone, I hardly used my personal laptop. But I still needed one, and that led to me getting a Surface. My use case for a personal laptop switched from a machine that I used for gaming, reading, writing, movies, Photoshop, video editing, podcast editing etc., to browsing, reading, and writing a book on my dating life; primarily, having a device more versatile and more like a laptop than my iPhone, not necessarily as powerful as my work laptop.
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