Switching to Ethernet was simultaneously the best and the cheapest network upgrade I've ever gotten. Simply ditching Wi-Fi for a cable is fantastic, and in most cases, it improves your connection tremendously.
Cloud-based automation services such as Zapier and Make let you connect different services together to automate tasks without having to build everything from scratch. If you'd rather not have all your personal automations running in the cloud, n8n gives you a different option.
When was the last time you thought about the devices that run your home network? You might have some devices that are officially too old to be using in 2025.
This one is for all the people who buy a router, set it up according to the default settings, and never look at it again. Unfortunately, default settings aren't really optimized to keep us safe and secure. Instead, they're designed to make the product work out-of-the-box for as many people as possible.
I'm approaching the limit of my free Google storage, and Gmail has started prompting me to pay for additional storage to keep using my account. While paying for more storage is a simple solution, it's not the only option.
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If you have a multi-gig NAS, one of the most obvious (and yet, somehow, still easy to miss) network bottlenecks is plugging it into a gigabit network. So, naturally, you look at your router, hunt down the 2.5Gbps or 10Gbps Ethernet port, and go for the fastest option available on your hardware. Makes sense.
How careful are you when it comes to your PC's Ethernet ports? Because I gotta say, I've abused my fair share of both ports and connectors. I've yanked cables sideways, left them plugged in for years (even though they would've benefited from an upgrade), moved hardware around without disconnecting them first, and generally just taken them for granted. Most of the time, I got away with it.
The web looks very different from when I first started using it. Browsers have changed, websites have become more complex, and I've picked up countless keyboard shortcuts along the way. Most have come and gone from my daily routine, but there's one I still turn to pretty much every day: Ctrl+Shift+D.
Android keeps a running list of every Wi-Fi network you've ever joined, and it never expires on its own. Most people are carrying dozens of entries they've long forgotten. That list is more revealing — and more useful to strangers — than it first appears.
If you want a fast, stable connection, and you want to do it properly, you go wired. We all know this, but just because wired is the right answer doesn't mean there's no wrong way to do it. If you traipse one long cable all around the house and out to the annex, you may hit a wall you didn't know existed. Ethernet has a hard distance ceiling, and once you pass it, things will start going wonky.
A Wi-Fi router can advertise hundreds of MBs, yet your Linux laptop may deliver a fraction of that speed. Before replacing the router, changing channels, or blaming the wireless adapter, there is one Linux setting worth checking.
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Firefox for iPhone now includes a built-in ad blocker using EasyList, though first-party ads, search promotions and sponsored Firefox content can remain.
The post Mozilla Finally Brings Built-in Ad Blocking to Firefox on iPhone appeared first on TechRepublic.
If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed in the tech world it’s that nothing is guaranteed. From AOL, Netscape, Yahoo, and MySpace, every tech empire seems to eventually fall to ruin. One method to reliably maintain information or online experiences that are lost to whims of computer users and markets is to backup, preserve, and host that information on one’s own computers, and the Kiwix project aims to help make offline backups of favorite websites.
The open-source tool started as a way for users to make their own offline backups of Wikipedia but eventually expanded into having the ability to backup many other sites as well. Wiki-type sites are generally the easiest, but it can also create backups of other sites like StackExchange so that when the Internet goes down or the site vanishes from the world, the information is preserved for use. There are plenty of guides online for setting up Kiwix as well, with it running easily on most Linux systems with or without the help of Docker, as well as versions available for Windows, Android, and Apple platforms.
Although the Kiwix software hosts the website backups, creating the backups needs to be done with another tool called Zimit to create the .zim files Kiwix uses. The Kiwix organization also hosts pre-downloaded .zim files of common websites so each user is not independently crawling Wikipedia on their own, a task that could take months on limited consumer hardware. As for what hardware to ultimately host it on, we might recommend an armageddon-proof machine like this one.
This week on the GeekWire podcast: SpaceX reports its first quarter as a public company, and Elon Musk says Starlink could deliver a majority of the world’s internet within a decade, leveraging production facilities in Redmond. Musk also explains the company’s data center ambitions, calling terrestrial infrastructure a trivial problem next to reusable rockets.
Plus: we bring two Washington tech universe posters into the studio, 17 years apart. The 2009 original turns up gems including Boeing’s unlikely connection to Classmates.com, the 1990s forerunner to Facebook. It also brings back memories of Teledesic, the Craig McCaw venture backed by Bill Gates that tried to beam internet from space decades before Starlink.
Finally, the GeekWire Trivia Challenge returns with a timely question about Google’s origins.
SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company
Mapping Washington’s tech universe
GeekWire Trivia
Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Audio edited and produced by Curt Milton.
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