like me many of you probably carry around a USB stick that's filled to the
brim with your favorite utilities you know just in case
but technology changes newer better
tools come along and sometimes the older ones aren't as effective or even stop
working altogether and realistically who's got the time to
keep up with all the latest cool side projects from development with kids who
haven't discovered girls yet have no fear because we've got you covered with
some improvements to tools you might already know about some awesome
utilities that you might not know about and a sneaky solution to a problem that
pops up at the worst of times we've also got this completely unexpected segue to
our sponsor Samsung Samsung's Galaxy unpacked event is not very far far away
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50 credit you probably spend a ton of time at your PC wearing headphones so
what if there was something you could do to improve your audio quality regardless
of how much you spent on them equalizer APO does exactly that adding powerful
graphic and parametric Equalization to your Windows PC you can tweak the EQ
curve system wide for for more personalized listening experience or per
device to boost key frequencies so you catch those footsteps sneaking up behind
you before it's too late it's even customizable with add-ons that can
enhance it with power functionality like audio device routing surround
virtualization and even recommended EQ curves for some of the most popular
headphones by the way if yours were overlooked you can check out Auto EQ dot
app a database of even more downloadable EQ curves we're going to have links to
every tool we talk about today in the description below the only downside you
might have to come back to this video and click that link again if a Windows
update messes with the sound subsystem and borks your custom setup now if
tweaking frequencies isn't your thing and you just want a way to route your
audio so that your stream viewers don't hear your Discord buddies inventing new
cuss words then voice meter is the tool for you I can't believe we've never
talked about this thing because voicemeeter is amazing it's a virtual
audio mixer that comes in threes sizes each giving you more virtual channels
and control over more Hardware than the last we installed the middle of the road
banana version for our demo of what voicemeeter might look like configured
for a two-player streaming session we've got audio coming in from our capture
card and our two headset mics then using these various A and B buttons on each
input Channel we can control where that input audio goes the a outputs are
hardware and we've set those up to be each of our headphones and the system
speakers and the B outputs are virtual
so we've got those routing to Discord and to OBS for streaming once it's all
set up both players can hear themselves the game and the Discord audio and the
stream viewers hear only the player mics and the game audio oh side note by the
way voicemeeter also happens to be just about the best and fastest way to clone
your audio output to multiple devices I had a bug a while back where my VR audio
mirroring wasn't working which made it impossible to play one of my kids
favorite party games and voice meter took care of this for me in about three
minutes let's get away from audio for a bit though I'd wager that most of you
are familiar with 98 which lets you install and update popular software
without all the next next Finish Well if
you've ever been disappointed with the selection of applications that are available in ninite then chocolaty might
be for you chocolaty is a command line package manager for Windows that has
more than 10 000 unique packages available if you've
ever used apt or yum to manage software on Linux you're going to know exactly
what I'm talking about and if you haven't let me demonstrate why you do
care about this on our system here we've already got
chocolatey installed so we just go to a prompt and type in choco install
paint.net and hit enter chocolaty downloads and installs paint.net for us
and all we have to do is say yes when it asks if we're sure and we don't even
have to do that if we just add a dash y to the end of our Command we can even
string together dozens of packages and have our new machine just set itself up
while we go out and wash the car and like nine night chocolatey can also be
used to keep your installed programs up to date or specifically to not if
there's something you don't want to upgrade you can lock in a particular
version there are paid plans available that
offer some extra features for business use but even in its free community
supported form this is a must have tool
and the command line is a little too daunting for you you don't need it just
make sure the first thing you install is chocolatey gooey and you can manage
everything graphically after that here how about I use chocolaty to show you
guys another cool tool winterstat has been a staple of technicians USB keys
since its first release back in 2003 allowing us to easily identify what is
eating up all of that precious hard drive space but these days you might prefer whiztree
from antibody software the interface is immediately familiar but unlike Windows
stat it's fast like I'm talking seconds
instead of minutes and it even handles gotchas like hard link files
significantly more accurately furthermore unlike Windows stat wiztree
is still in active development and gets bug fixes updates and new features
periodically which by the way you can get automatically by creating a
scheduled task to run the update command in chocolatey changing gears our next
tool is only in the Microsoft store sorry chocolatey users but it might be
worth checking out anyway you've probably heard of Windows power toys but
have you heard of win toys this utility gathers program and service management
tools along with frequently used Windows settings tweaks and fixes and puts them
all in one place so you don't have to go digging through the various settings
apps and control panels trying to figure figure out where the devil Microsoft has
moved things this week speaking of losing track of things I'm
sure we've all been there looking for that bootable thumb drive that you know
you have you know the one with that ISO on it well no more while it's long been
possible to have multiple bootable utilities on a single thumbstick our
favorite method these days is ventoy
cool after a quick installation to your drive all you've got to do is just copy
any ISO or any disk image file you want
and ventoy will automatically detect it and add it to a menu at boot no more
manually updating menus or requiring the installer software to add or update your
tools this has already been a Time Saver for me on multiple occasions oh and
while you're adding images to your new ventway Drive be sure to include one of
the tiny images from netboot.xyz which uses pxe booting to
let you launch your choice of more than 80 operating system installers live
operating systems and utility images all
downloaded on demand over the Internet it can even boot Windows installers
though you will need to do a bit of fancy work to host the installer files
on a Windows PE environment somewhere on your network
if you'd rather someone else do all the heavy lifting and gather your utilities
for you kind of like hiron's boot CD back in the day you can check out
medicat USB this massive 20 plus
Gigabyte collection of tools is wrapped up in a customized ventoy menu system
and includes a wide selection of bootable tools along with a Windows PE
environment with an enormous collection of portable apps now obviously
collections like these exist in the uh legally dubious excuse me Zone but the
reality is that if you've ever worked at a tech shop you've probably touched one
at some point so we would be naive to imagine that everyone is just going to
pretend they don't exist so we installed
metacat to a 32 Gigabyte thumb drive and actually ended up with only a couple
gigs free so if you're going to want to add any additional isos or tools you're
going to probably want to start with a bigger device we should also note by the
way that our antivirus lost its flipped in mind when we first tried to install
this collection and classified many of the utilities as hacking tools which
feels a little unfair because it is chock full of legitimately useful repair
and diagnostic tools and I think we need
to look at them through the lens of the good that they can do rather than the
harm like a screwdriver from LTT Store it could be used as a shiv
but it's a lot more useful for brewing and unscrewing things oh yeah while I'm
annoyed by the way why is it so hard sometimes to move files between devices
we run into this all the time when we're
away from the studio and trying to copy scripts from our Windows laptops to the
iPhones that we use as teleprompters it wastes a lot of time and never needs to
happen again thanks to simple HTTP server from GitHub user the Wawa
running this program in a folder will launch as advertised a simple HTTP
server that offers up the contents of that folder to the network that means
any machine on the network that has a web browser can then navigate to that IP
address and download the file they need easy peasy only one thing just remember
to turn off the server when you're done because otherwise pretty obvious
security issues oh and on that note don't try to run this utility on your
company's corporate Network because I'm sure it's going to send it running
hopefully we've introduced you to at least a couple of cool new tools that
you're already downloading to your thumb drives and if you've got a suggestion
for a must-have that we haven't brought up before let us know in the comments
down below ideally you could maybe give us one that generates marginally Wittier
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like this video why not check out the return of handytech under 100 where we
discovered some must-have physical gadgets rather than software tools