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The upgrade life of electronic gadgets

The small electronic gadgets are everywhere in your life, and I will enumerate just a few of them, most of us for sure have them around the house:
  • smart remote controllers (like Logitech TV remotes)
  • digital cameras
  • wireless routers
  • smart TVs
  • SAN/NAS - array of hard drives to back-up your data
  • smart watches
  • mobile phones
  • tablets, mobile devices
  • GPS devices
  • audio/video recorders or players
  • media players or recorders
  • smart toys for your kids (game consoles, game pads, etc...)
                 One of the aspects of almost all of them is that at their "heart" there is a system running, like a small engine. The engine is built on two parts - hardware and software. The hardware part is most of the time fixed, you cannot change it, in best of cases you can upgrade it (that will make a subject for another post). The software part is the subject of this post, for companies building the product is called THE FIRMWARE.

             Make yourself a service and try to upgrade the firmware on the most devices used in your household because it can plug security holes, improve performance and most of the time make smarter use of the same device on the long run.

             For phones and tablets and smart devices with internet connections the manufacturers are taking care of it automatically (it is called over-the-air upgrades) but there are devices that you have to upgrade them manually by following the steps described in their manuals. In my case I did it for:
  • wireless routers, cable modems
  • digital cameras - in my case Olympus
  • old mobile phones - using custom firmware (google xda-developers)
  • media players (like Western Digital media players)
            The most frightening thought is that somehow, your old and reliable phone/wifi router is in fact a security trap waiting for a disaster to unfold.  Don't wait, make an inventory of your mostly used gadgets and see if there are any updates to be applied!

           To understand the gravity and the importance of the upgrade process just follow the media in the last revealing of design flow in CPUs for Intel/AMD and ARM, about Spectre and Meltdown  (in January 2018).

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