How to Make the Most of Your Christmas Gadget Gifts

— -- If your Christmas gifts this year included some of the season's hottest high-tech items, then there are steps you need to take to get the most out of your gear. Read below for must-dos for new owners of everything from drones to a kindle.

Hardwire Your Gear and Upgrade Your Router:

If you got a new gift that connects to the Internet, especially smart TVs, streaming video players, Sonos streaming music devices or gaming consoles, they should be hardwired to your router. Investing in a more modern router may be the best $100 you spend to get a high-speed experience out of all your new connected devices.

Fine Tune That TV (Or Not):

Televisions, especially 4K models were a huge gift in the holiday season of 2015. I loved this TechRadar article that highlights the best ways to set up the TV, including source cables, placement in your room and my personal pet peeve - picture settings.

They corroborate my own belief that all those fancy settings like vivid, cinema and dynamic are useless and that the best setting is standard. I have also disabled localized dimming because it darkens and lightens the screen, to try and match the bright areas and dark area that occur simultaneously in on-screen images. To me, it’s annoying and distracts from the experience. It’s a matter of personal preference, but you paid a ton for the thing, it’s worth getting it the way you like it.

The one time that experts, think you should switch to picture mode, is while gaming, because too much screen rendering can slow the action of game play.

Supercharge Your Kindle:

If you come across long articles online that you’d like to read later on your Kindle, there’s a super easy way to do it. Just install a free browser extension that automatically transfers the text. Instructions HERE.

Drone 101:

Drones were one of the most popular gifts this year, over a million have been expected to sell. A few things, the FAA has a site all drone pilots should check out.

Drone master Eric Cheng, author of "Aerial Photography and Videography Using Drones," offered me a demonstration with a reat pointers. Almost all consumer drones like bumpered quadcopters and finger drones that fit in the palm of your hand should be flown inside first. Cheng says operators need to learn the stick controls and windy, populated outdoor environments are not the place to learn.

Obviously bigger prosumer drones like DJI and Parrot models need more room and have the power to stay close to the operator as they learn, but a lot of caution is needed in the early days of any new pilot.

Parental Kill Switches for Kids' Gadgets:

Start the way you plan to proceed. This is a tenet of my controlling parenting style. Applied at Christmas, put parental controls on kids' new phones and tablets now so that you don’t have to wrestle control back from them and the gadgets later. Below are the two apps that do this- OurPact for IOS and Dinnertime for Android.

Dinnertime App: To avoid the technology tug-of-war (getting devices out of kids’ hands), this app gives parents a remote kill switch for their children’s phones. Install the app on the child’s device and install the control app on the parent’s phone. DinnerTime offers three options: schedule a “dinner time” break (duration 30 minutes to 1.5 hours); "take a break,” which indefinitely freezes the child’s device until the parent device unfreezes it; or “schedule bedtime,” from say 9 p.m. to 7:30 a.m., to make the device in inaccessible to the child. When the DinnerTime app is freezing the child’s device, it is in complete lockdown: no phone, no texting and no alarms. A full-screen image saying “Take a Break” or “Dinner Time” appears on the child’s phone with no access to settings or app icons. If the child reboots the phone, the DinnerTime blocking screen resumes immediately. The app is only available for Android devices. Click here to learn more about how it works.

OurPact App: Like DinnerTime, this free app offers similar parental control functionality for iOS users. Parents can sync their family's iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touch to OurPact and manage everyone's device use under one platform. This means kids' apps and Internet can be blocked during homework time or dinner time or hourly time limits can be set.