How-To Geek

From 1978 to 1987, Subaru sold a fun little pickup truck that was quirky right down to its name, BRAT. And while the name may conjure up images of Bart Simpson or Dennis the Menace, it was just an acronym for Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter. Subaru marketed it as a “Fun in the Sun” vehicle with “On-Demand” 4WD and a pair of rear-facing jump seats in the bed.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) has really changed how we handle storage. It's moved from being just a specialized tool for big businesses to a key part of a home that you can build from a laptop. However, a lot of people treat these advanced machines like any other appliance you just set up and then forget about. They tuck them away in closets or under desks without really thinking about the physics that make them operate. Since mechanical hard drives are high-precision instruments that work with tiny tolerances, how long they last completely depends on how stable their environment is and how specific their hardware setup is.

This weekend on Prime Video, we’re diving into three shows that are flat-out alluring. Their deeply developed, relatable characters combine with engaging emotional storylines built around a unique premise, with unpredictable twists and strong, morally challenging worlds to foster something truly special and completely enticing.

Android Auto is essential if you want to access your phone from your car's infotainment system without ever having to glance at the screen. But as convenient as it is, all those notifications that keep popping up while you're driving are more than a little annoying—they can also be a dangerous distraction.

Seeing your real-time location on a map isn’t very useful if the map doesn’t show you where to go. This is especially true when it comes to walking and hiking trails, which aren’t usually visible in Google Maps. Matchy Maps fixes this by bringing physical maps into the digital world.

What's better than a fresh watch list for your upcoming long weekend? How about a watch list filled with Oscar-winning films across the years? I love finding new and old award-winning films, which has led me to niche winners that fly under the Big Five radar.

Subaru expanded its rugged lineup at the 2026 New York International Auto Show with the debut of the 2027 Forester Wilderness Hybrid. This marks the first time Subaru’s rugged Wilderness treatment has been paired with a hybrid powertrain, offering a 25% boost in fuel economy without sacrificing the brand’s signature off-pavement performance.

The weekend is a good time to poke around your Linux setup without any real agenda—and that's exactly how I end up finding apps worth keeping. This week I have three picks that cover very different ground: there's a task manager with a surprisingly deep feature set, a network monitor that shows you exactly which servers your apps are talking to, and a system resource tool that looks like it was ripped straight out of Windows. None of these are brand new, but they're all genuinely impressive and criminally underrated.

Ethernet cables are about as simple as they get. They're the easiest, most reliable way to connect a desktop PC to the internet. In the vast majority of cases, you just have to plug the cable into your PC, and just like that, your computer is connected, no configuration necessary.

A lot of new graphics cards and monitors benefit from DP connections, leaving a vacant HDMI slot on many a motherboard. But it doesn't have to remain unused. There are tons of neat things you can connect to that HDMI slot, including projectors, VR headsets, and second displays.

By no means am I a betting man, but I’d wager most readers haven’t heard of Changan. The brand hails from China and has been making vehicles for 40 years.

What makes a great documentary? Is it just an amalgam of facts and images? Or should they have to use those to pull you into worlds you didn't know existed or cared about? My favorite docs are the ones that make their topics an experience, bring in catharsis, pressure, sometimes anxiety, and joy. And it's all true.

While Linux has long been associated with lightweight performance and breathing life into aging machines, Canonical’s release notes for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS signal a clear evolution towards modern computing workloads. The company is quietly bumping its minimum memory requirements for the Linux distro—a widely-used open-source operating system and a beginner-friendly gateway into the Linux world.

Of all the streaming services, Netflix has built an impressive catalog of documentaries—especially if true crime is your thing. Harking back to the iconic Making a Murderer, the streaming giant knows a compelling crime story when they see one.

Normally, when you see a tool marked as being "for developers," your first instinct is to keep away because it's either too complicated, too niche, or it doesn't really apply to you. It turns out, however, that some of them can genuinely be useful, even if you're not a developer.

I self-host a lot of apps in my homelab. Some are just for fun and I spin up and down as needed, and others are crucial parts of my homelab’s infrastructure that I can’t live without. Here are the seven services I make sure are always running.

We've all had that moment when we're standing in the middle of the Home Depot aisle, looking at a glowing neon-green Ryobi tool at a great price and thinking, "I might as well buy one." I have a growing selection of Ryobi tools and battery packs throughout my garage, and I'm a huge fan because they handle everything I need. However, among them is one that's just sitting there collecting dust—literally.

There are lots of steps to complete when setting up a new phone. You add your accounts, install apps, change the sounds and colors, and so on. For me, there's one more step that I always do. I change the DNS settings. And it's one of the most important steps of all.

I used to avoid the command line as much as possible. PowerShell, especially, felt like one of those things you only touched if something had gone very wrong. It looks outdated, it’s not exactly welcoming, and at first glance it feels like you need to memorize a bunch of cryptic commands just to get anything done. But after spending some time with it, I realized it's not nearly as complicated as it seems. Once you get past the interface, PowerShell is just a faster, more direct way to interact with Windows, and in some cases, it gives you access to things the normal interface simply doesn't.

Google has long offered ChromeOS Flex to turn your ancient PC or Intel Mac into an up-to-date computer, but the process hasn't been intuitive for newcomers. Thankfully, it just got easier: Google has teamed up with refurbished electronics store Back Market to sell a $3 ChromeOS Flex USB Kit.