Random Tech Questions you want answered.

Apollo is by far the best Reddit app.

It’s fast and has tons of features that I’m still discovering. For instance, I just realized the other day that if you’re scanning the front page feed and continually see subs you’re not interested in you can simply “filter” them out and never see them again.

Has anyone here tried both Philips Hue and LIFX light bulbs?

I’d like to add smart lighting to my home office and have narrowed it down to those two brands. From what I’ve read, LIFX has better color and brighter bulbs, while Hue is compatible with more things.

I’d be looking at a couple of lamps and maybe the overhead light. Not sure how far past that I’m likely to go.

I have a friend that outfitted her whole apartment in Philips Hue, and the control she has over it is certainly neat. She has it synced up with Alexa, as well as through her Twitch account so users can change colors and such.

I started years ago with cheaper stuff and have slowly migrated over to Hue. I’m very pleased overall.

WellAdjusted wrote:

Does anyone have a recommendation for a Reddit iOS app, specifically for an iPad?

I just picked up an iPad Pro, and recently switched to an iPhone.

None of the iOS Reddit apps are as good as Relay Pro on Android IMO.

I am currently experimenting with Comet. I hate how the account switcher is buried under about 3 levels of menu, but the app has a decent iPad layout.

Apollo is not good on iPad. It’s just the iPhone layout blown up on a larger screen. The creator himself knows it and directs people to use something else until a (long MIA) update he’s working on comes out. Also, Apollo’s account switcher is not as convenient as it should be (though better than Comet’s), and the “Favorites” function not being account-specific drives me up the g-d m-f wall.

I’ve also been using BaconReader, which I used waaaaay back in the day when I last was an iPad and iPhone owner (back with the iPhone 4 and the iPad 3). It’s outdated and not particularly pretty, but it does have a proper iPad split layout plus a user switcher that’s only one tap away. It pisses me off less than the others, but I’m still looking for a prettier option that doesn’t bungle some commonly-used function.

I gave Apollo a shot, but I don’t think it’s for me. For video it looks like it opens an in-app browser window to the YouTube page, which would be ok except that I can’t full screen the video for some reason. Tapping the full screen button just brings up a message that full screen isn’t supported on my browser.

I’ll give Comet a shot.

Having a weird problem on my Fire Cube.

My major streaming apps stop playing videos completely. (Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, Disney+, Crave)

All apps have the exact same issue. They load just fine, but when I select any video, I get an error message stating the video can't be played or is unavailable.

The only solution I've found involves deleting the data of the app, deactivating the Fire Cube as a device on my account for all these services, then rebooting the Fire Cube and signing back in for each service.

The problem is that the issue always returns several days later. This is the third time I've had to do it so I'm at wits end. Anyone ever experience this issue and find a way to correct it? I can't think of anything in my setup that has changed that could explain this new phenomenon.

On the brink of just buying an Nvidia Shield or Apple TV but I'm happy with the Cube otherwise so if I spend $200+ on one of those and find out the problem still happens that would be a huge bummer.

"Content availability varies by country". Also, if you change your country ID in Amazon, the Fire Cube will pick that up and switch to the rules of that country, meaning anything you bought in another country will potentially be blocked.

Yeah, that's not it. I'm on the Canadian service for everything and not using a VPN. It's an issue where every single video on all services refuses to play, but only on the Cube, not via the website using the same wifi, and then it works fine for a few days when I deactivate and reactivate the device from each streaming service.

There's something about the device registration that stops working properly is my guess, but I'm not certain if the culprit is the Fire Cube or my router/internet connection or something else I'm not considering.

So it turns out that Philips has a Father's Day sale, just as I was trying to decide between LIFX and Hue. So I went to Best Buy and got a starter kit that was marked down from $190 to $120. I'm having a lot of fun playing with it.

*Legion* wrote:
WellAdjusted wrote:

Does anyone have a recommendation for a Reddit iOS app, specifically for an iPad?

I just picked up an iPad Pro, and recently switched to an iPhone.

None of the iOS Reddit apps are as good as Relay Pro on Android IMO.

I am currently experimenting with Comet. I hate how the account switcher is buried under about 3 levels of menu, but the app has a decent iPad layout.

Apollo is not good on iPad. It’s just the iPhone layout blown up on a larger screen. The creator himself knows it and directs people to use something else until a (long MIA) update he’s working on comes out. Also, Apollo’s account switcher is not as convenient as it should be (though better than Comet’s), and the “Favorites” function not being account-specific drives me up the g-d m-f wall.

I’ve also been using BaconReader, which I used waaaaay back in the day when I last was an iPad and iPhone owner (back with the iPhone 4 and the iPad 3). It’s outdated and not particularly pretty, but it does have a proper iPad split layout plus a user switcher that’s only one tap away. It pisses me off less than the others, but I’m still looking for a prettier option that doesn’t bungle some commonly-used function.

Thanks for the recommendation. Comet is basically doing what I want.

It is a little wonky in that there’s a setting to either play videos in-app or using the YouTube app, but regardless of what it’s set to it always opens in the YouTube app, but I can work with that.

kuddles wrote:

Having a weird problem on my Fire Cube.

My major streaming apps stop playing videos completely. (Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, Disney+, Crave)

All apps have the exact same issue. They load just fine, but when I select any video, I get an error message stating the video can't be played or is unavailable.

The only solution I've found involves deleting the data of the app, deactivating the Fire Cube as a device on my account for all these services, then rebooting the Fire Cube and signing back in for each service.

The problem is that the issue always returns several days later. This is the third time I've had to do it so I'm at wits end. Anyone ever experience this issue and find a way to correct it? I can't think of anything in my setup that has changed that could explain this new phenomenon.

On the brink of just buying an Nvidia Shield or Apple TV but I'm happy with the Cube otherwise so if I spend $200+ on one of those and find out the problem still happens that would be a huge bummer.

Welp, I can't believe this, but I discovered the problem and was also able to recreate it. Playing a video in the Paramount Plus app on the Fire Cube causes every other app to be unable to play video afterwards for whatever reason. Instead of deleting the streaming app that doesn't work, rebooting and then re-installing and re-registering that app, a solution that works just as well is just going into the settings and force stopping the Paramount Plus app. What a hunk of junk.

If you have a WD My Book Live, even without the Cloud connection active, disconnect it and watch WD’s statements for updates. A “threat actor” has succeeded in mass deletions of data across the population of My Book devices. No one has been able to recover their data, which is often encrypted.

kuddles wrote:

Welp, I can't believe this, but I discovered the problem and was also able to recreate it. Playing a video in the Paramount Plus app on the Fire Cube causes every other app to be unable to play video afterwards for whatever reason. Instead of deleting the streaming app that doesn't work, rebooting and then re-installing and re-registering that app, a solution that works just as well is just going into the settings and force stopping the Paramount Plus app. What a hunk of junk.

Their app was junk when it launched as CBS All Access, bad enough that I cancelled my subscription and subscribed through Amazon's Channels so I could use their player instead.

Strange question. We went to Colorado a few times this past year. A few weeks ago and back in March. Both times, my son's phone screen bulged out like the battery was going. The screen had a gap in the center of a few mm. Nothing on the top/bottom and only one one side. Both times after we returned home it went back to normal. We were staying at about 9,000 feet. It was worse the second time. I've seen lots of things do that (shampoo, potato chip bags, etc) but never a phone. Is that a sign of a bad battery or something else?

I'm guessing that phone is a few years old. My guess is that there's some trapped gas buildup inside the battery that expands at altitude.

I wonder though - is it one of the newer phones that advertised as waterproof? If it's properly hermetically sealed that it's expected to do that?

It's a Moto Z2 Play so it's about 4 years old. I don't think there's any water resistance but even it there was the gap was big enough to see inside the phone. Gas is probably the deal. At least it seems logical.

Gas expansion was my first thought too. If a battery is going bad it can put off gas that will be more noticeable at higher elevation. Probably time to replace it.

Yeah, and it's not the safe inert kind of gas, either. It's the "burns with a spark" kind of gas, I believe.

Robear wrote:

Yeah, and it's not the safe inert kind of gas, either. It's the "burns with a spark" kind of gas, I believe.

Like the day after Thanksgiving.

I'm trying to swap out my hard drive for an SSD. I cloned the drive using Crucial's Acronis tool, took out the old drive and put in the SSD and now I can't boot up because the system thinks the boot drive is missing. However my boot drive is a smaller SSD I've had in the computer since I built it, and it always been the system drive as far as I know. Is there anything in Disk management that raises a flag in terms of why my PC thinks the boot drive is missing when the HDD isn't connected?

IMAGE(https://i.postimg.cc/KYKTtjXn/image.png)

EDIT: and this happens without connecting the new SSD, so even when my boot SSD is the only drive connected it still happens (though I did check the UEFI to make sure the boot order is set up properly).

In the boot order in the firmware, is the removed HDD still listed? It could be whiffing on that.

Robear wrote:

In the boot order in the firmware, is the removed HDD still listed? It could be whiffing on that.

Actually I think I just found the solution: https://www.tenforums.com/installati...

Looks like Windows assigned the system partition to my HDD for some reason, even though the SSD is the boot drive. I'm going to try following the steps in this post.

Thanks, Microsoft! Sigh…

Yeah, when you install Windows 10, you should make sure you only have the system drive plugged in. If you have any other drives it will use the other drives as part of the install for Windows. I have no idea why! It's stupid.

Yea Windows does stupid stuff if you have more than one drive in your system when you install Windows. Always disconnect all drives except the one you want to install Windows to.

I ran the Windows 11 compatibility checker on my current PC and it has a number of issues that will make running Windows 11 require a fresh install at the very least. I might use it as an excuse to upgrade my SSD. 256 gigs is just too cramped for a boot drive these days.

Does anyone here own an Asus router?

I've mostly used TP-Links in the past, but my Archer C9 finally died.

I ended up getting an Asus AX1800 RT-AX56U. I like most things about it.

However, I'm having a lot of trouble with the 5ghz band. It constantly drops out/will disappear and nothing can connect to it.

All the stuff I've checked online, like:

Making sure firmware is up-to-date.
Checking different devices.
Manually setting a channel that's not congested (there's only 1 5GHZ signal in my area, actually. So this shouldn't really be a problem.)
Adjusting the channel bandwidth.
Basically everything here: https://www.asus.com/support/FAQ/103...

I even tried out Merlin, but the problem is the same on Merlin (custom Asus firmware) and the stock firmware.

Restarting the router fixes it for awhile, but then it eventually just drops/disconnects again.

This is across Android devices, Chromebook, desktops, laptops, my Switch. So I don't think in this case the clients can be blamed.

I'm kind of at a loss of what else to try. Has anyone run into something similar and can offer some new suggestions?

(FWIW I never had these issues on the Archer C9, so I don't think it's environmental, re: 5ghz interference. Plus like I said almost no one on my block uses 5ghz, there's the 1 signal and it's pretty weak.)

I have an RT-AC66U, and have seen that on both the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands. I can normally see the network, but my TVs in particular will not be able to connect to it, while the phones seem to be fine. It's rare enough that I just power cycle and that normally fixes it for a few months, so it hasn't been prevalent enough to push me to investigate. I really like my router, but I agree that particular bug is a bit annoying.

I got my file server back online and got it upgraded with WiFi 6 Gig+. I ended up having to buy a new SAS card and I returned the PCIe Wifi 6 card I couldn't get to work and got an m.2 one because while I was working on the other stuff I noticed I have an m.2 Wifi slot in addition to 2 NVMe m.2 slots (for some reason I thought I only had a single m.2 slot on this motherboard). I am now getting about 4x the speed on this PC on my new internet:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ntSgQLN.png)

That downstream is not bad, but that upstream is:

IMAGE(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ee/9f/3b/ee9f3b3ea305833a9bdf067aca9ef022.jpg)

My GF recently switched to a different sim card on her iphone and then back to the original one. In the process she lost about 100 contacts that she can't get back.

I went and tried to import contacts from her sim card to her phone and that didn't seem to work.

does anyone have any ideas how to get those contacts back?

thanks,