if you're anything like me at some point you've probably made the mistake of
buying your non- techsavvy parents or siblings or friends some kind of
technology related item as a gift not because you wanted to punish both
yourself and them but because you wanted to share your love of cool devices with
the others in your life and then after spending hours setting it up only to
have them break it in 10 minutes you probably vowed never to do it again well
I have to but this year I found a tech
gift a Sonos connect amp that solves a problem and genuinely makes life more
convenient for my parents and is easy
for me to maintain so I'd like to share that story with you and if you stick
around till the end there might be a fun way for you to Tech up your loved ones
this year as
well the blast 4hx headphones from ozone
gaming are compatible with the Xbox 360 PlayStation 3 PlayStation 4 and PC they
also feature a foldable design inline control and 44mm drivers check out the
link in the video description to learn more so my parents used to be techsavvy
I mean at least my mom was I'm fairly sure my dad still teaches his classes
with an overhead projector but but seriously we were actually kind of a
tech family in the early days we had a Commodore 64 I played the crap out of
Marble Madness we even had the joystick accessory that looked a little something
like this we upgraded to a 386 custom machine
built by Gino at bits and bites computer
store uh we were the first on the block with a 486 with CD ROM o and CA mixed up
Mother Goose anyone and I still remember the feeling of utter boredom that I felt
when my mom excitedly showed me the box for our state of the freaking art 144
kilobit pers second modem and loaded up a web page to show me how amazing it was
for some research paper she was doing for her master's degree we even joined
the Pentium era right early on 200 megaherz with MMX
friends but however it happened my parents went from The Cutting Edge to
where they're at today we're like we wanted to do a video shoot in their
house last year and Brandon asked for some photos of the set that we'd be
using so he could plan and it took me literally half an hour to get a picture
off of an Android smartphone and have them send it to me it would have been faster for me to drive there so I'm you
guys can imagine then and I take at least 40% of the blame for this the
disastrous experience a couple years ago that was setting up a home theater
system with a projector Media Center PC complete with TV capture card a game
console and at one point a karaoke machine there were so many remotes that
even with the mat that I created that had like outlines for where they went
and then labels for the buttons they couldn't figure out how to use it at the
best of times and diagnosing stuff like that over the phone is impossible the
service calls every time someone wanted to watch TV were a burden that no one
was happy with so when my parents moved to a condo and no longer had room for
the projector I think everyone was a little relieved but the AV receiver and
amplifier and the speakers lived on as kind of a badass stereo unit until
finally the receiver gave up The Ghost and with their teeth gritted my parents
came to me asking how they can keep using those speakers they spent all that
freaking money on it recommendation so that is where this
came in I reviewed the all-in-one speaker products in Sonos ecosystem a
while back and even with daily use I've been really really pleased with their
ease of use when accompanied by an all you can eat music service like Google
play music but the one thing I criticized about them at the time
something that really hasn't been addressed is that the speakers are super
unspecial sounding like especially for what you're paying for them so the
solution then was the connect amp it's a compact little white and silver box that
should be easy enough to hide somewhere discreet that allows you to use your own
stereo or 2.1 speaker setup with the Sonos ecosystem just plug in the power
cord plug in your speakers the same way you would to any receiver or any other
amplifier and follow the exact same setup guide as the rest of their product
sort of I was actually pleased to discover that you no longer need the
bridge accessory and everything can stream through your noral Wi-Fi hotspot
so basically you download the app go through the Wi-Fi setup set up which
room it's in and boom you're able to listen to any existing uh music library
songs you have you can listen to Internet radio through the Sonos app and
you can bind additional accounts so that's what I did I gifted my parents a
Google Play music account for 6 months and then with that done it took me a
matter of 5 to 10 minutes to show my mom how to use it my sister even already
knew how and it's times like this that my love of Technology become something
that I can legitimately share with others because while you can make the
argument that VLC or Plex or some commandline tool somewhere can do
everything that a consumer product like this can do and is significantly cheaper
the reality of it is that as Tech Geeks we get kind of wrapped up in the OMG
this is so cool it could do all this stuff and we forget about the you know
companies arriving for a cocktail party in 3 minutes and I need some ambient
music why isn't this working I don't want to reboot a
so then that's my challenge to you guys today whatever your story of how you got
into Tech is and however disconnected your loved ones are from the
technological World head over to the lonus tech tips Forum thread Linked In
the video description with the rules and full giveaway details and post what
technology gift you would buy for a non-
teie up to $300 and three lucky winners
yes we are giving away $900 worth of stuff three lucky winners will have
their gift sent to them to the person of their choice in time for Christmas by me
so Merry Christmas everyone on the subject of things being easy to use
tunnel bear the easy to use VPN app for mobile and desktop if you don't know
what a VPN is basically well the way tunnel bear describes this is it lets
you tunnel to 16 different countries
allowing you to browse the internet and use online services as though you are in
that other country so it's kind of like a like a man in the middle so that the
traffic coming to a website or service be it Netflix say for example appears as
though it's coming from a given country which allows you to get around firewall
rules it allows you to well use services like Netflix and have access to the
library of you know your friends down in the states who have way cooler shows
than you and all that kind of stuff it's available on Android iOS Chrome uh Mac
PC and uh yeah I think that's pretty much it and the apps are super easy to
use you just pick the country that you want to be in and then watch as your
bear tunnels your internet connection to the new location so when you do that a
couple things happen your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit
encryption and your public IP address gets switched so you show up as if
you're in that other place and they fixed all the annoying parts of using a
VPN for personal use there's no need to mess around with Port configurations DNS
or any router settings tunnel bear handles all that in the background and
they give you 500 Megs of data for for free so you can try it out no credit
card required then if you want to upgrade to unlimited data you can
actually save 10% by going to Tunnel bear.com LT Linked In the video description so
start ring start ding privately start browsing privately today all right so
thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like
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shop at Amazon instructions for which are up here it is the holiday season
instructions are up there buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct
monthly contribution through our for you get a little contributor badge and all that now that you're done doing all that
stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so check out that little button in the top right corner to see
our Channel Super Fun video where we play a pretty neat little game that
might actually be another pretty cool gift idea for the holidays it's called
Odus lists