Tech Gifts for "Non-Techies" & A SURPRISE! [Giveaway closed]
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,644 words · ~8 min read
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if you're anything like me at some point you've probably made the mistake of
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buying your non- techsavvy parents or siblings or friends some kind of
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technology related item as a gift not because you wanted to punish both
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yourself and them but because you wanted to share your love of cool devices with
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the others in your life and then after spending hours setting it up only to
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have them break it in 10 minutes you probably vowed never to do it again well
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I have to but this year I found a tech
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gift a Sonos connect amp that solves a problem and genuinely makes life more
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convenient for my parents and is easy
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for me to maintain so I'd like to share that story with you and if you stick
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around till the end there might be a fun way for you to Tech up your loved ones
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this year as
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well the blast 4hx headphones from ozone
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gaming are compatible with the Xbox 360 PlayStation 3 PlayStation 4 and PC they
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also feature a foldable design inline control and 44mm drivers check out the
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link in the video description to learn more so my parents used to be techsavvy
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I mean at least my mom was I'm fairly sure my dad still teaches his classes
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with an overhead projector but but seriously we were actually kind of a
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tech family in the early days we had a Commodore 64 I played the crap out of
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Marble Madness we even had the joystick accessory that looked a little something
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like this we upgraded to a 386 custom machine
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built by Gino at bits and bites computer
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store uh we were the first on the block with a 486 with CD ROM o and CA mixed up
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Mother Goose anyone and I still remember the feeling of utter boredom that I felt
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when my mom excitedly showed me the box for our state of the freaking art 144
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kilobit pers second modem and loaded up a web page to show me how amazing it was
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for some research paper she was doing for her master's degree we even joined
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the Pentium era right early on 200 megaherz with MMX
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friends but however it happened my parents went from The Cutting Edge to
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where they're at today we're like we wanted to do a video shoot in their
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house last year and Brandon asked for some photos of the set that we'd be
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using so he could plan and it took me literally half an hour to get a picture
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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
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guys can imagine then and I take at least 40% of the blame for this the
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disastrous experience a couple years ago that was setting up a home theater
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system with a projector Media Center PC complete with TV capture card a game
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console and at one point a karaoke machine there were so many remotes that
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even with the mat that I created that had like outlines for where they went
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and then labels for the buttons they couldn't figure out how to use it at the
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best of times and diagnosing stuff like that over the phone is impossible the
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service calls every time someone wanted to watch TV were a burden that no one
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was happy with so when my parents moved to a condo and no longer had room for
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the projector I think everyone was a little relieved but the AV receiver and
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amplifier and the speakers lived on as kind of a badass stereo unit until
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finally the receiver gave up The Ghost and with their teeth gritted my parents
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came to me asking how they can keep using those speakers they spent all that
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freaking money on it recommendation so that is where this
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came in I reviewed the all-in-one speaker products in Sonos ecosystem a
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while back and even with daily use I've been really really pleased with their
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ease of use when accompanied by an all you can eat music service like Google
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play music but the one thing I criticized about them at the time
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something that really hasn't been addressed is that the speakers are super
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unspecial sounding like especially for what you're paying for them so the
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solution then was the connect amp it's a compact little white and silver box that
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should be easy enough to hide somewhere discreet that allows you to use your own
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stereo or 2.1 speaker setup with the Sonos ecosystem just plug in the power
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cord plug in your speakers the same way you would to any receiver or any other
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amplifier and follow the exact same setup guide as the rest of their product
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sort of I was actually pleased to discover that you no longer need the
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bridge accessory and everything can stream through your noral Wi-Fi hotspot
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so basically you download the app go through the Wi-Fi setup set up which
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room it's in and boom you're able to listen to any existing uh music library
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songs you have you can listen to Internet radio through the Sonos app and
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you can bind additional accounts so that's what I did I gifted my parents a
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Google Play music account for 6 months and then with that done it took me a
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matter of 5 to 10 minutes to show my mom how to use it my sister even already
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knew how and it's times like this that my love of Technology become something
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that I can legitimately share with others because while you can make the
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argument that VLC or Plex or some commandline tool somewhere can do
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everything that a consumer product like this can do and is significantly cheaper
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the reality of it is that as Tech Geeks we get kind of wrapped up in the OMG
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this is so cool it could do all this stuff and we forget about the you know
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companies arriving for a cocktail party in 3 minutes and I need some ambient
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music why isn't this working I don't want to reboot a
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so then that's my challenge to you guys today whatever your story of how you got
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into Tech is and however disconnected your loved ones are from the
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technological World head over to the lonus tech tips Forum thread Linked In
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the video description with the rules and full giveaway details and post what
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technology gift you would buy for a non-
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teie up to $300 and three lucky winners
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yes we are giving away $900 worth of stuff three lucky winners will have
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their gift sent to them to the person of their choice in time for Christmas by me
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so Merry Christmas everyone on the subject of things being easy to use
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tunnel bear the easy to use VPN app for mobile and desktop if you don't know
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what a VPN is basically well the way tunnel bear describes this is it lets
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you tunnel to 16 different countries
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allowing you to browse the internet and use online services as though you are in
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that other country so it's kind of like a like a man in the middle so that the
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traffic coming to a website or service be it Netflix say for example appears as
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though it's coming from a given country which allows you to get around firewall
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rules it allows you to well use services like Netflix and have access to the
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library of you know your friends down in the states who have way cooler shows
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than you and all that kind of stuff it's available on Android iOS Chrome uh Mac
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PC and uh yeah I think that's pretty much it and the apps are super easy to
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use you just pick the country that you want to be in and then watch as your
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bear tunnels your internet connection to the new location so when you do that a
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couple things happen your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit
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encryption and your public IP address gets switched so you show up as if
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you're in that other place and they fixed all the annoying parts of using a
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VPN for personal use there's no need to mess around with Port configurations DNS
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or any router settings tunnel bear handles all that in the background and
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they give you 500 Megs of data for for free so you can try it out no credit
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card required then if you want to upgrade to unlimited data you can
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actually save 10% by going to Tunnel bear.com LT Linked In the video description so
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start ring start ding privately start browsing privately today all right so
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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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button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to
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shop at Amazon instructions for which are up here it is the holiday season
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instructions are up there buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct
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monthly contribution through our for you get a little contributor badge and all that now that you're done doing all that
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stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so check out that little button in the top right corner to see
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our Channel Super Fun video where we play a pretty neat little game that
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might actually be another pretty cool gift idea for the holidays it's called
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