How-To Geek

If you're like me, you might have a bunch of retired storage devices sitting around the house. HDDs, SATA SSDs, NVMes ... Putting them to work for actual storage and backup purposes is great, but the reality is that some older SSDs are better suited to other tasks.

After Amazon announced that older Kindle models, such as my ancient Kindle 4, would lose access to new Kindle Store downloads, I decided to jailbreak it. I added the KOReader reading app and set it up so that it could display my Home Assistant dashboard, but I wondered how else I could use it. It sounded crazy, but could it work as a portable monitor?

Who would've thought that a day would come when an AI could hear your voice and speak just like you. I've used speech AI tools before, such as ElevenLabs. While those are great for voice cloning, they come with a price.

Sometimes, life is too short to sit down and watch a three-hour movie or a show with episodes that push an hour. If you've only got time for a quick Netflix fix, here are some great shows that have episodes of around half an hour or less.

As I write this, there are basically two types of CPU that matter: x86 and ARM. The former belongs to Intel and AMD, which each hold critical patents necessary to make modern PC chips. ARM belongs to, well, ARM, and you'll find that in MacBooks, phones, tablets, and more.

For most of the time I've been using Windows, voice dictation has been pretty fairly clunky. It worked as an accessibility feature or an interesting experiment, but it made for a difficult replacement compared to a mouse and keyboard. However, with the rise of AI, that has changed significantly.

When you install the Home Assistant companion app on your phone, you can allow Home Assistant to track your location. By default, you get a device tracker entity that will toggle between home and not_home based on the Home location that you set up. There are plenty of useful automations you can trigger using the location of your phone.

Most people use about 10% of Excel's actual capabilities, yet beginners often feel pressured to learn the other 90% immediately. That's a recipe for burnout. If you want to actually get work done, skip the noise, ignore the shiny distractions, and focus on the basics that make spreadsheets useful.

When you switch to streaming, you expect instant, perfect 4K video. You're paying for a top-tier, multi-gigabit fiber connection, so it's frustrating when your Amazon Fire TV Stick still freezes during a key movie scene. Buffering like this is one of the most annoying parts of home entertainment, but you can stop it. The problem is rarely the speed of the internet coming into your house. Instead, it's the data's physical struggle to reach your device, so it is great that it has a hidden port for you.

Are you staring at a sea of empty cells and don't know where to begin? Excel feels far less intimidating when you treat it as a toolbox instead of a test. These beginner-friendly projects help you create practical trackers and planners in under an hour while learning core skills.

The newest version of Mazda’s compact SUV may be more modern and more practical than ever before, but not every change has been for the better. As automakers continue moving toward bigger screens, softer driving dynamics, and broader mainstream appeal, some of the sharpness and character that once made certain crossovers stand out is starting to disappear. That is exactly why some buyers may be better off shopping slightly used instead of buying brand new.

You probably already use Claude for the occasional question or writing your emails, but that’s barely scratching the surface of what it can do. There’s a big difference between using Claude as a chatbot and using it as an automation tool that quietly handles the parts of your digital life you’ve been avoiding for years. If you’ve been curious about what agentic AI actually looks like in everyday life, here are five boring tasks I automated with Claude.

Now Playing wasn’t one of the reasons I wanted to switch to Pixel. I knew about it and, aside from thinking, "Okay, so it's an offline Shazam, whatever," I didn’t give it much thought. Worse still, the feature was completely broken during the first few days of owning my Pixel 10 Pro, so I couldn’t even test it.

Pixar is the champion of animation, but not all of their movies have had the chance to shine. For 40 years, the studio has brought families together across 30 movies. Certain movies never enter the discussion of being among the studios' best — they were overshadowed by other films, or they went direct-to-streaming on Disney+.

We all have one sitting in a drawer somewhere. That phone you replaced two or three years ago, still working fine but gathering dust because the battery isn't quite what it used to be, or because the camera on the new one is just better. You keep telling yourself you'll do something with it eventually.

Far too often, I think of something to add to my to-do list, but then by the time I've gotten around to opening the list and adding the tasks, I've forgotten what it was. I decided to see if I could quickly add tasks to a to-do list with my voice by using Home Assistant.

While I’ve got a pretty solid gaming desktop, my partner is still rocking an ancient Windows desktop that I used for gaming for a few years before I built a new gaming PC in 2020. It’s powered by what was once an excellent budget gaming CPU, the dual-core Intel Pentium G4560, along with an AMD Radeon R9 270 GPU, and only 4GB of RAM. The machine originally had 8GB of DDR4 RAM running in dual-channel mode, but one of the sticks died a few years ago.

I miss the days of binging one show over the course of several months. It’s how I completed shows like The Wire and Friday Night Lights. I must admit that I streamed the shows in college when I had significantly more free time on my hands. Since I write about entertainment for a living, I have less spare time to watch long-running shows that take weeks. Occasionally, I just need a show that I can finish on a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon.

Before I made the jump to a unified mesh Wi-Fi network, I was confronted with the conundrum of moving into a bigger house, and suddenly having no Wi-Fi signal in my office or in our bedroom.

Google Play Store might be the default app store on Android, but the good thing about Android is that it gives you a choice. That includes the choice of the software store. Here are some alternatives to the Google Play Store worth checking out.