How-To Geek

The streaming services are coming out strong to start the month with new and returning shows. Prime Video has a new teen drama, and no, it's not The Summer I Turned Pretty. Instead, it's a refreshing entry into a crowded teen drama field, and it happens to be my top show to watch this weekend.

For years, VLC has been my gold standard for media players. It'll happily open every weird file format I throw at it, and it doesn't cost a dime. It has only crashed two or three times in the decades I've been using it.

Google Drive’s free online storage is a popular, convenient way to share files across devices and keep copies in the cloud. As the backend store for Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Photos, it’s a service that many of us use, whether we like it or not—whether we even give it a moment’s consideration.

Most Allied fighter planes early in World War I used rotary engines, a design in which the whole engine spun with the propeller rather than being bolted to the airframe. The spinning mass created a powerful gyroscopic effect. The Sopwith Camel, one of the era's most feared fighters, turned so much faster to the right than to the left that novice pilots crashed when attempting sharp right turns. Veteran pilots learned to fly the Sopwith Camel despite the quirk.

If you can tear yourself from the Big Brother live feeds and are all caught up on Lioness's third season premiere, give yourself a break from the reality TV mayhem and the intensity of Zoe Saldana's covert ops with something from Paramount+'s solid library of documentaries and docuseries.

The days of giving your children cash allowances are over — at least, if your family lives in Google's universe. You can now send money to your kids through Google Wallet for use on their Android phone or Wear OS smartwatch.

Shopping for a used luxury SUV usually comes with a catch. You might get premium performance, upscale materials, and an impressive badge, but you're also likely inheriting higher maintenance costs, expensive repairs, and reliability concerns that can quickly erase the savings of buying used.

It's been over 20 years since Sony released a cassette player, and cassette sales are so minuscule they barely show up on market reports. So, naturally, I decided now would be a good time to buy a Walkman. I can explain.

So you have an internal SSD in your laptop, and you're running out of space. For some reason, upgrading the SSD inside the laptop isn't an option.

If you're like me, your life of streaming usually happens at home or somewhere with a strong Wi-Fi connection—but not always. Between flights, subways, cottage/camping weekends, waiting rooms, or the random dead zone, I've often found having a handful of comfort shows downloaded on the Netflix app on my devices really handy.

Owning a 3D printer is like having your own little factory. In theory, this can save you money, because instead of ordering some plastic stuff online, you can print it for mere cents on the dollar. Right?

If you need to convert or extract parts of a PDF, you might think you need to pay for Adobe Acrobat or use some shady web app. If you're willing to use the command line, either in Linux, macOS, or Windows Subsystem for Linux, you can manage your PDFs for free.

There’s no shortage of officially supported Android Auto apps available on the Play Store. You can find everything from navigation and music players to podcast apps and even a few games. But the simple truth is that Google still puts heavy restrictions on what apps can do inside Android Auto.

Back in the day, I used to loathe the custom skins and apps that Android phone makers added to their phones. Android's vendor-neutral default apps have since been replaced by Google apps, and the tech giant has used its dominance to fill our Android devices with far more pre-installed software than any other company.

Most people treat USB ports as background infrastructure. You plug things in, they work, and you don't think about them until something stops showing up in File Explorer. I assumed desktop PCs were basically immune to the problems I'd seen on laptops, where I'd already burned out ports by pulling too much power through them. However, the limits are real; they just fail in quieter and stranger ways than I expected.

We love the Raspberry Pi here at How-To Geek. For many of our writers, past and present, the Raspberry Pi was a revolution in small-format, affordable Linux computing. That’s why it pains me to recommend against buying one at the moment.

Ford is finally ready to share tangible details of its affordable electric pickup truck. The automaker has revealed that the EV will carry the Fathom name and a starting price of $28,350 when equipped with a "standard-range" battery.

We've all been there: you're in the middle of a winning streak in a game and your ping spikes, or you're on a video chat and suddenly your image freezes without warning. Maybe a download is inexplicably slow despite other devices on the network functioning fine.

Are you ready for another slew of homelab projects to try out this weekend? Well, you're in luck, because I have some nifty things to try out, including my favorite project of the weekend—creating a custom TV channel for your home based on your Plex media server.

Many Android apps need internet access. Lots don't, but connect anyway. By installing a firewall app on my Pixel, I was able to lock down more than a dozen apps. It brings a big privacy boost as well as data and battery savings. And it's surprisingly simple to set up.