Ask HTG: What's the Point of the Chromecast HDMI Extender? Do I Need It?

Did You Know? Two U.S. pennies (2.5 g each) are equal in weight to one U.S. nickel (5.0 g each). Geek Trivia The First State to Adopt an Official State Dinosaur Was? Wyoming → Maryland → New Jersey → Colorado → Advertisement Download Cloud-Based Video Conferencing for Dummies Today, your physical presence is no longer mandatory. With the ability to meet virtually, long commutes and whirlwind cross-country meetings can be bypassed. Welcome to the world of cloud-based video conferencing. Click here to download Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Unprintable Characters Unprintable Characters (a.k.a. Control Characters) are single-byte control codes that do not represent written symbols. Instead, they are used for controlling printers and serial communications. What We're Reading from Around the Web The Man Who Brought Stop-Motion Animation Into the 21st Century [Wired] ComiXology Announces Second Wave of DRM-Free Publishers, Brings Free Comic Stash Up to 50,000 Comics [ComiXology] BitTorrent\'s P2P Encrypted Messaging App Is Now Available [Motherboard] Hubble Helps Find Smallest Known Galaxy Containing a Supermassive Black Hole [NASA] The Plan to Nuke the Moon and Other Cold War Plots Revealed in Secret Documents [Newsweek] The Idea Builder: Dremel Releases a Mass-Market 3D Printer [Make] Meet The One Place On Earth CD Sales Are Still Brisk [NYT] Amazon reveals sleek new e-reader, beefed-up HDX tablet, keyboard [ArsTechnica] Ask HTG: What’s the Point of the Chromecast HDMI Extender? Do I Need It? Media center “sticks” like the Chromecast are more popular than ever and many of them come with little 3-4″ HDMI extension cables. What are the cables for and do you actually need to use them? Read on as explain why, even if your Chromecast is working fine without it you may want to plug it in anyway. Read This Article → GRUB2 101: How to Access and Use Your Linux Distribution’s Boot Loader Ubuntu and practically every other Linux distribution use the GRUB2 boot loader. Unless you have multiple operating systems installed, this bootloader is normally hidden — but it provides options you may sometimes need. Read This Article → What’s the Difference Between Single and Double Quotes in the Bash Shell? Enclosing text in quotation marks is fairly standard practice on the command line, especially when dealing with files that have spaces in the names, but how do you know whether to use single or double quotes? Let's take a look at the difference, and when you should use one vs the other. Read This Article → Why You Don’t Need an Expensive Smartphone Anymore Until recently, you needed to spend hundreds of dollars — often $649 or “$199 with a two year contract” — to get a smartphone with good performance that could run the latest apps. Solid smartphones are now much cheaper. Read This Article → Advertisement Download A Cybercriminal's Guide to Exploiting DNS for Fun and Profit Your customer data—and your business reputation—are undoubtedly secure, but is it? Take a look at yourself through the eyes of the cybercriminals who are making today's headlines. Click here to download