How-To Geek

You just spend a few hundred dollars on a fancy 2TB NVMe SSD, but when you plug it in to your Windows PC, you notice that only about 1.8TB show up. Given the cost of storage, it is painful to "lose" 9% of the storage you intended to buy before you transferred a single file.

Apple is expanding its smart home portfolio beyond speakers and Apple TV 4K. And the company is enlisting two established hardware makers to help. The Apple Home Collection is a lineup of cameras, a video doorbell, a smart lock, and thermostats built in collaboration with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. The gadgets aren’t slapped with Apple branding, though—the goal is to make them easier to set up, manage, and work natively with the Home app.

That spare Kindle you retired after upgrading doesn’t have to sit in a drawer. Jailbreak it, and the same e-ink screen can power five different projects, ranging from helping with appliance repair to telling you whether the weather is good enough for painting outside or not.

After decades of using Excel, you'd think I'd have run out of things to grumble about. Nope. There are still plenty of little frustrations I've learned to work around, which is why I'm always happy to see Microsoft smooth out the rough edges. Three recent updates have caught my eye, and refreshingly, Copilot has nothing to do with them.

Product recalls are surprisingly easy to miss despite their relative importance. If you’ve added any Ryobi tools to your garage in the last few decades, it’s worth checking that none of them have any outstanding recalls. If they have, you can easily use Ryobi’s website to rectify the problem with a replacement, refund, or repair.

A solid multi-tool is one of those everyday carry items I think everyone should have. Personally, my multi-tool is indispensable, and I didn't need to drop $100+ to get Leatherman reliability. Whether you like always being prepared, tackling little repairs around the house, or tightening up a loose bolt, a multi-tool is the perfect EDC. Here are a few affordable options with premium utility.

Every homeowner or trade worker has their preferred power tool brand, and whether you're team Ryobi, love everything Milwaukee, or something else, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the nearly identical options at big-box retail stores. Each brand makes a few unique items catering to certain professions or tasks, and here are five useful Ryobi tools that Milwaukee doesn't make.

People use all kinds of unconventional workarounds to share files between Android phones and Windows PCs, such as emailing themselves or shuffling files through cloud storage.

Linux has a reputation as a difficult operating system for enthusiasts only or as the operating system running in a data center. However, it is more widespread than that. It runs countless devices you see and use regularly—and a few you don't—even though it isn't immediately obvious.

It's a very common issue to try to unplug an Ethernet cable and it won’t move. You squeeze the tiny clip, yank back, and the plastic refuses to budge. I've broken one before, so my first instinct is to assume that I broke another one. Don't let your anger get the best of you and try to pull more. Your method is likely the problem.

Earlier this year, I bought a 6TB hard drive and hooked it up to an old laptop for one simple task: to back up my photos and manage them through Immich so that I could finally stop paying for Google Photos. Between my wife and me, we had around 50,000 photos to move over, but even after loading them all onto the server, I’d barely scratched the surface of the drive’s capacity.

Now that smartphones are firmly ingrained in our lives, we've seen "minimalist phones" rise in popularity. The problem is, these phones are often too simple, and a regular smartphone is still required. LTE smartwatches are a nearly perfect middle ground, but what if you don't like wearing a watch? I've got a solution.

Changing layer height is the easiest way to balance print quality and print time. It’s a simple, one-size-fits-all approach you can make with a few clicks in your slicer before you send a job to the printer. For a smarter approach, try varying the layer heights throughout the print so that you get the best of both worlds: detail where you need it, raw speed where you don’t.

I've always dreaded turning on my car and getting nothing but that dry click from the battery. When nobody is around to give you a jump, scrolling through quick internet hacks sounds tempting, but don't be fooled. People post clips making power tools look fast and harmless, but rigging them together can damage what's actually under the plastic casing.

So you've found an old CRT PC monitor, or maybe you inherited it from your grandpa. Either way, it's just a heavy old piece of junk, right? Best to just send it off for recycling, because there's no good use for these anymore. Wrong!

Does it really matter what brand or model of GPU you buy? Regardless of who the board partner is, the GPU on the card still comes from AMD, NVIDIA, or Intel, right? So why are you paying more for a "premium" card?

I do a lot of writing on my laptop, but it's far from ideal. The problem is that my laptop is full of distractions that can steal my focus, including access to the entirety of the internet as well as highly addictive games such as Slay the Spire. I decided to turn my old Kindle into a distraction-free writing terminal, and it worked better than I was expecting.

We're getting to the point in October where it's perfectly reasonable to put the tombstones, skeletons, and giant spiders on the lawn in anticipation of Halloween. But if you're like me, you'll still want a couple of comedies on your pre-spooky season movie night list to keep things light before all the horror arrives.

When Valve released the Steam Deck in 2022, it wasn't a cutting-edge device by any means, and that was a deliberate choice. Valve carefully balanced performance, power consumption, and cost to create a machine that was almost perfectly suited for its intended purpose.

I'm a big fan of Docker, especially with apps like Papermerge and Actual Budget. Over time, I've ditched some containers like Wallabag for alternatives that work better for me. While I use it for many different tasks, I often spin down containers for apps I'm not actively using at any given time. However, I run some apps 24/7 on one of my homelab laptops. These apps help me monitor, control, and manage my work every day.