Iyaz's favorite gadget investments this year (2018 edition)

[MUSIC] These are my favorite tech and gadgets for 2018. Every year I end up making various tech purchases using my own personal money. And every year I let you know my favorite stuff. It's been a strange year when it comes to my tech life, but let's get to it. and number five is my iRobot Roomba 671. My good old neat old bot vac died this year. the motor was completely frozen. So the search began for a new robot vacuum. This year I wanted to get a connected model so I could set a schedule using an app and maybe get alerts. As I'm a smart home nerd I also wanted to work with an Echo, or Google Home, put all those requests together plus not wanting to spend too much money and the Roomba 671 got the nod. It works well and takes care of the copious amount of dog hair my dog sheds. Number four is my Arris Surfboard SB6183 modem. I was checking out my network and realized my old modem Was not capable of handling the max speeds of my internet service provider. Feeling like a fool I had to right this wrong. Enter the Arris Surfboard SB6183. It maxes out at around 686 Megabits per second, which is far beyond what I get at my home. Yes, having your own modem requires you to call your ISP, and reading off a few numbers. But, it's worth it. No more rental fees. [MUSIC] Coming in at number three, is my Amazon Cloud Cam. My old Dropcam died. Yes, it was a Dropcam, way back before they were called Nestcams. So it's time to replace it. I looked into some great reviews at Cnet and picked the cloud cam over the net cam. Here's why. One. It was much cheaper than the nest cam. Two. It came with free twenty four hour clip storage. The Amazon cloud cam also has great video quality. I would like to be able to share the camera feeds with others without giving away my Amazon credentials. And number two is Plex, the media server software. Yes, Plex has been around for awhile but 2018 was a year I ended up using it the most. Earlier in the year, guess what, my home media server died. I was using a combination of Pogo Plug and DNLA Well, this gave me an opportunity to rethink my entire setup. Plex is great at organizing your home media, finding metadata, and apps are available for both the Roku and Apple TV. One. And my favorite tech investement of 2018 It's this $9 multi-USB charging cable by Chafon. I wound up using this thing very frequently in combination with a battery pack. One part is a standard USBA, two micro-USB connectors. There's a mini-USB for all devices Lightning adapter and USB see you can even charge multiple devices at the same time with this cable. Please note that this cable does not do data just charging. This little thing is come in handy for myself and my family my phone uses USB C. My headphones use micro-USB, my fiance uses an iPhone, one cable, for all of us. Let me know what was your favorite tech for 2018. I'm Iyaz Akhtar and I'll see you online. [MUSIC]