If you've seen this page pop up when installing your new cable modem, you can get stuck in an endless loop of frustration.

The Comcast/Xfinity walled garden, gstatic 204, captive portal, endless loop, signup redirect, certificate error—or whatever else you want to call this mess—is a real pain. This scenario applies especially to anyone who owns their own equipment, typically a cable modem and separate router. For example, you may have a Motorola cable modem and a TP-Link wireless router. Basically, any combination of new or upgraded gear can trigger the problem.

We recently added a Seagate Exos X18 18TB hard drive to our production storage setup. The Exos line is Seagate's enterprise-class family of drives, designed for high-capacity storage and demanding workloads.

Performance has been excellent. In our testing, the X18 delivered sustained transfer speeds of around 260 MB/s, making it a very fast mechanical hard drive and a good fit for large media files, backups and production storage.

The HDSPe AIO Pro from RME Audio is the successor to the HDSPe AIO. The “Pro” adds an improved clock, additional headroom and switchable I/O levels of +24 dBu, +19 dBu, +13 dBu and +4 dBu at 0 dBFS.

We've been running the original AIO in one of our systems for several years with great results. When the AIO Pro was announced, we wanted to see if the improvement in specs would be worth the upgrade. We also had to consider if we'd be willing to give up our AO4S-AIO-192 expansion card and its four additional analog outputs, as RME no longer offers this option with the new AIO Pro.

Comet is a beautiful sounding reverb with a powerful yet intuitive design. The GUI has an organic nature to it that responds with both sonic and visual feedback, allowing you to dial in both lush spaces and straight-ahead reverbs.

The opsix is a powerful little FM-based synth from Korg that sounds really good. Korg has made FM programming accessible with the opsix. They've included many of the iconic key and bell sounds you'll recognize from the DX-7 days, but that's just a fraction of what the opsix is capable of. The presets are so good. Come for the built-in sounds, stay for the addition to discovery.