ASUS TUF-BE6500 Review: A Good Dual-Band Wi-Fi 7 Router

The TUF Gaming BE6500 Wi-Fi 7 router (model TUF-BE6500) is the fourth dual-band Wi-Fi 7 router from ASUS, and the first officially designated as a gaming router. In a way, it’s the Wi-Fi 7 version of the Wi-Fi 6 TUF-AX5400 I reviewed a few years ago. Short for “The Ultimate Force,” ASUS’s TUF brand is…

Network Switches 101: The Variety and Quick Shopping Tips

When you look to expand your home network, especially for wired clients, you will likely need a couple of network switches. This post will explain in simple terms what they are, when you’d need one, and if so, which one to get. Before continuing, it’s a good idea to understand what a router is, though…

Instagram rolls out custom icons…but only for teens

Some Instagram users are feeling cheated out of a new feature, as the photo and video sharing app on Wednesday announced the launch of custom icons — but only for its teen users. Teens can now choose from a set of custom icons that turn the traditional Instagram logo into new variations that can be…

Rivian spinoff Also reveals a high-end modular e-bike for $4,500

Several years ago, as a skunkworks team of engineers inside Rivian set out to develop an electric micromobility vehicle, one question loomed. “What do we build in-house?” Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said in an interview recounting the early days of Also, which spun out of Rivian earlier this year. “We realized the only…

The first e-bike from Rivian spinoff Also has a virtual drivetrain

Ever since Rivian spun off its “micromobility business” into a standalone startup called Also earlier this year, there’s been much speculation about what kind of vehicles the company is working on. Now, Also is showing off its first products: a lineup of e-bikes and two pedal-assisted electric quads. The TM-B e-bike is Also’s attempt at…

The Long Tail of the AWS Outage

A sprawling Amazon Web Services cloud outage that began early Monday morning illustrated the fragile interdependencies of the internet as major communication, financial, health care, education, and government platforms around the world suffered disruptions. As the day wore on, AWS diagnosed and began working to correct the issue, which stemmed from the company’s critical US-EAST-1…