HTG Explains: What is Beamforming on a Wireless Router?

Did You Know? Although it is widely believed that all calico colored cats are female, both male and female cats can have the coloration (but outside of rare mutations it doesn’t appear in males and typically renders them sterile in the process). Geek Trivia The Most Accurate Clock Built To-Date Relies On? Higgs Boson Particles → Lasers → Quartz Crystals → Quantum Entanglement → Advertisement Download 20 Travel Hacking Strategies to Help You Travel the World and Spend Less We can prove to you that traveling the world doesn't cost a lot of money. In fact, you'd be surprised by how cheap traveling can be. Download this quick guide to travel hacking and get ready to pack your bags. Click here to download Thoughts from the Geek A Friend of How-To Geek Needs Your Help Update: You guys are amazing! Thanks to our readers we were able to raise almost $10,000 for Ryan and Ashley in a day. That’s absolutely amazing and just blows my mind. Your generosity and kindness, and the wonderful notes you left with your donations, made me so proud to have readers like you. If you haven’t donated, you can read the story below. If you have donated, thank you so much, and we really appreciate your help. — Back in 2007 when I was starting How-To Geek, there was a great tech news site called CyberNet News run by a husband and wife team, Ryan and Ashley. They did a great job of putting together all the most important tech news for the day, especially focused on new downloads and tech information for geeks. Even though they were really busy with their own site, Ryan and I became friends, and he gave me tons of advice about how to run a web site that was really helpful in turning How-To Geek into what it is today. The world of tech news changed and they eventually had to switch gears and now they run a great cooking website called CenterCutCook (we recently linked to their amazing S’Mores cones recipe). These are really good people. And then disaster struck… In 2014, Ryan was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, which is hard enough for anybody, but they also learned around the same time that they had a kid on the way. After their son was born, they discovered that the baby was in kidney failure, and eventually was diagnosed with a rare disease called Primary Hyperoxaluria. Today, Ryan is fighting colon cancer, and baby Miles needs both a kidney and a liver. They are dealing with chemo for Ryan, dialysis for Miles, and all while trying to keep their web site running so they can pay the bills. But does that stop them? Nope. They are still awesome, giving people. Ryan spent a lot of time a few months ago helping me out with some advanced server configuration to make sure How-To Geek is running as optimally as possible, and he’s always taking time to give me tips. Their friends and family set up a donation page for their medical expenses, and I’d like to personally ask our great readers to donate to them. They are really good people, and they don’t deserve what is going on. If every one of our daily readers donates at least a few dollars, we can get them to their fundraising goal in a few hours. Donate to Ryan and Ashley (and baby Miles) Geek Comic Today's Tech Term EIS EIS (short for Electronic Image Stabilization) is an image enhancement technique that uses electronic processing to control image stability. EIS helps to minimize blurring and compensate for device shake on cameras (and on some binoculars, video cameras, and telescopes). EIS may also sometimes result in a decrease in picture resolution. What We're Reading from Around the Web This Online Anonymity Box Puts You a Mile Away From Your IP Address [Wired] How to Save and Close All Open Documents in Word Word allows you to open multiple documents at once as well as view multiple documents at once. What if you make changes to all the open documents and then want to quickly save and close all of them? Easy to do and we'll show you how. Read This Article → HTG Explains: What is Beamforming on a Wireless Router? Modern wireless routers often promise “beamforming” technology for improving your Wi-Fi reception and reducing interference. But what exactly is beamforming, how does it work, and is it really helpful? Read This Article → What is Apple Music and How Does It Work? If you woke up today to find a new icon planted on the home screen of your iPhone, you might be wondering; what's this new Apple Music app about, and what can I really do with it? Read This Article → How to Use AMPPS to Install Joomla Locally on Your PC It's not necessary that you have a local development environment in order to have a good web site. You could edit files directly on the server or have your editor set up to automatically transfer changes to the server once you change and save them. However, there are lots of benefits of running a local server. Read This Article → HTG Explains: What Geofencing Is (and Why You Should Be Using It) The term is popping up more frequently in news articles, appearing in product manuals, and highlighted as a feature in tons of mobile applications, but what exactly is geofencing? Read on as we explain what it is, why it’s appearing in more productions and applications, and how you can benefit from using it. Read This Article → What is Different About the Windows 10 Control Panel, So Far Much is changing in Windows 10. Chief among these is a driven move from the old Control Panel that we all know so well, to the new-look, touch-friendly Settings. Today, we want to discuss what is changing from Windows 8.1 to 10. Read This Article → How to Track Firewall Activity with the Windows Firewall Log In the process of filtering Internet traffic, all firewalls have some type of logging feature that documents how the firewall handled various types of traffic. These logs can provide valuable information like source and destination IP addresses, port numbers, and protocols. You can also use the Windows Firewall log file to monitor TCP and UDP connections and packets that are blocked by the firewall. Read This Article → How to Create a New Item in Outlook Directly from the Clipboard You're working on a document and discover that you need to send part of it in an email to a colleague. Rather than manually creating a new email in Outlook before you can paste the text, you can simply paste it while in Outlook. Read This Article → Why You Shouldn't Automatically Log Into Your Windows PC Automatically logging into your Windows PC opens a security hole. When you enable automatic logins, your Windows account password is stored on your PC where any program with administrator access can access it. Read This Article → Advertisement Download The Eleven Step Action Plan for Achieving Your Goals This quick action plan, brought to you by the American Management Association, is a step-by-step guide for achieving your goals. Use it as a tool to help you achieve more than you thought possible! Click here to download