Home and Everyday Tech

This is the catch all for the stuff that isn't a PC but lives in the same house. TVs, chargers, drives, the things you buy once and then quietly resent for five years if you picked wrong.

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TVs for Gaming and Movies

Panel tech is the main decision. OLED gives you true blacks because each pixel turns itself off, and nothing else matches it for movies in a dim room or for contrast in games. Mini-LED gets much brighter and holds up better in a sunny living room, but it can bloom, meaning a halo of light around bright objects on a dark background. If your room has a lot of windows, lean Mini-LED. If you watch at night and care about picture quality above all, OLED.

For gaming specifically, ignore the marketing numbers on the box and check the actual port spec. You want HDMI 2.1 on the ports you'll use, 120 Hz support, VRR and a low latency game mode. A lot of budget sets advertise 120 Hz and only support it on one or two ports, or claim a refresh rate that's software interpolation rather than a real panel spec. Also, size is the upgrade people underestimate. Going up an inch tier does more for the experience than most picture quality specs at normal viewing distances.

Streaming Devices

Your TV's built in apps will slow down and get worse before the panel does, because the hardware inside is minimal and the software gets abandoned. A separate streaming box or stick is a cheap way to keep a good TV feeling new, and it's much faster to navigate. It also gives you back some control over what the TV is reporting about your viewing habits.

Pick based on the ecosystem you're already in, since that's what determines how well your phone, voice assistant and existing purchases play together. The specs worth checking are whether it does the HDR format your TV supports, whether it's got ethernet or Wi-Fi only, and how much storage it has if you plan to sideload anything. The cheapest sticks tend to get sluggish after a couple of years of app updates, so the mid tier box is usually the better long term buy.

Charging and Power

GaN chargers are the easy win here. They're a newer type of internal component that runs cooler and lets a charger be dramatically smaller for the same output, so a single brick the size of the old phone charger can now run a laptop. One multi port GaN charger replaces the pile of wall warts in your bag, and it splits power intelligently between devices.

Cables are where people get burned. USB-C is a shape, not a capability, so two identical looking cables can be wildly different. One might do 240W charging and 40 Gbps data, another might do 60W and USB 2.0 speeds, which is why your external drive is crawling. Buy cables that state their wattage and data speed, and be wary of anything unbranded. For power banks, capacity is only half the story, so check the output wattage too, since a huge battery that only puts out 18W won't charge a laptop meaningfully.

External and Portable Storage

For backups and archives, a plain external hard drive is still the cheapest cost per terabyte and it's fine for something that sits on a desk. For anything you carry, get a portable SSD instead. No moving parts means a drop doesn't kill it, and the speed difference is night and day when you're moving big files or working directly off the drive.

Two things to check. First, the enclosure and cable have to support the drive's speed, since a fast SSD in a USB 3.0 enclosure runs at a fraction of its rating. Second, be skeptical of no name high capacity drives from marketplace sellers, because fake capacity drives are a real and common scam. They report 4TB, accept the files and quietly discard them, and you find out when you go to restore. Stick with known brands and test a new drive with real data before you trust it with anything.