The Great Tech IQ Adventure: Can You Win the $50 Treasure?

Put your networking knowledge, troubleshooting skills, and technical know-how to the test with our latest The Technology Firm / Lovemytool Quiz! Whether you're a seasoned network engineer or just someone who knows their way around an Ethernet cable, there's a challenge waiting for you.

We've put together a collection of technical questions covering networking, Wireshark, protocols, and general technology trivia. Some questions might be easy, others might make you scratch your head, and a few could have you wondering whether you should have paid more attention during that last networking course!

But there's more than bragging rights at stake. One lucky participant could walk away with a $50 Amazon Gift Card! That's right, a little technical knowledge could turn into some new gadgets, accessories, or whatever else catches your eye on Amazon.

Capturing Network Traffic on a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Using tcpdump

When troubleshooting network problems, sometimes the biggest challenge isn't finding the problem itself; it's capturing the right traffic in the first place. Fortunately, if you're working with a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, you already have a very useful troubleshooting tool built into the operating system. EdgeOS is Linux-based and includes utilities such as `tcpdump`, allowing you to capture packets directly from the router without installing additional software. In this article, we'll look at capturing traffic on a specific Ethernet interface, such as `eth2`, and explore how this can help diagnose connectivity problems, routing issues, and unexpected network behaviour.  

Kilobat CLI Network diagnostics for macOS, in your terminal and your AI agent. (By Philip Seifi)

An API request that times out does not tell you where the trouble started. The Mac may be offline, DNS may return an unexpected address, a configured proxy may be unavailable, or TCP and TLS may fail on the way to the destination. 

Start with the evidence for each layer before changing settings. I built Kilobat CLI to make that first pass easier. It is a free, GPL-3.0-only macOS command-line tool; the Kilobat desktop app is a separate proprietary product. The CLI needs macOS 14 or later. Its Homebrew installation builds from source and requires Xcode 16 or newer: 

Teen Inventor Explores Using Sound Waves to Fight Fires: A Creative Approach to Fire Safety

A great idea doesn't always come from a million-dollar research laboratory. Sometimes it comes from a student who looks at an everyday problem and asks a simple question: Is there a better way to do this? That's exactly what makes the story of Ángela Karime Venegas Hernández so interesting. The young Mexican inventor developed an experimental fire-extinguishing device called Vortex Tech, which uses sound waves instead of traditional water or chemical-based extinguishing agents. Her project attracted international attention and earned a gold medal at the 2026 International Science and Invention Fair in Indonesia. Not bad for an idea that started with a little curiosity and some engineering experimentation!

Lab Work: What a Slow USB Drive Looks Like in Wireshark (And Why Testing Matters)

If you spend enough time troubleshooting networks, you eventually discover that not every performance problem is actually a network problem. Sometimes the culprit is a server, an application, a disk, or a little portable USB drive that seems to have all the time in the world. That is one of the reasons I enjoy doing hands-on lab work. You can read documentation, watch videos, and memorize protocol details, but there is something special about deliberately creating a problem, observing it, and learning what it looks like when it happens in the real world. For this experiment, I connected a slow USB portable drive to a server, copied files to it, and used Wireshark to observe the network traffic associated with the transfer.