How-To Geek

Milwaukee tools have a solid reputation, and it's one of the best brands in the business, but there are occasional misfires. With hundreds of tools readily available across its growing M12 and M18 platforms, there's bound to be a few duds. Here are a few Milwaukee tools that users most often regret buying.

I like traveling, but I have never been particularly fond of carrying too much stuff. A laptop, its charger, a few essentials, and a bag that does not feel like I am moving house are enough for me. Unfortunately, working remotely can complicate that plan. Hotel Wi-Fi is unpredictable, public networks are a privacy concern, and accessing my home lab while I am away requires a little preparation.

It's easy to design objects that are fully 3D printed, but I've found that my most useful creations work with existing devices. Often, old gadgets just need to be reconfigured a bit to be repurposed. I've used my 3D printer numerous times to breathe new life into phones, smartwatches, and smart home products.

There are plenty of settings that you can scroll through on a Roku TV or streaming device, but there are some hidden menus that offer even more options. You can access these secret settings by pressing a sequence of buttons on your Roku remote, although none of them will give you 30 lives.

Building a homelab can get expensive quickly. A spare PC turns into a virtualization host, which leads to a dedicated NAS, a managed switch, and eventually a rack full of equipment that consumes electricity around the clock. For many homelabbers, the challenge is finding ways to keep experimenting without spending money on new hardware every few months.

The state of the open-source software community has never been better, with Windows being arguably the biggest platform for open-source apps. The most popular desktop operating system in the world has hundreds of fantastic open-source tools and utilities, with the best of them being able to compete with, and sometimes beat, their premium closed-source peers.

When most people think of 3D printing, they imagine spare parts, clever home solutions, or, most likely, piles of articulated dragons. But you can create visual art in quite a few ways with a 3D printer.

Linux has thousands of commands, and most of us lean on the same few dozen. Many of you might not even use more than 10 unless it's absolutely needed. But it turns out, tucked away in the rest, are small utilities that quietly do the heavy lifting. Here are four that even seasoned users forget exist, along with the situations where they shine.

I put off trying ESP32 projects for a long time because I assumed they would be complicated and time-consuming, and I didn't have hours to spare. Building ESP32 projects from scratch can take time (though not nearly as much as I'd imagined), but you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Some commercial products contain ESP32 chips, and you may be able to flash them with custom firmware.

Your phone comes with Google Chrome, but you may want to swap it for Mozilla Firefox for privacy concerns and Google’s near-monopoly over the web. Yet there are many versions of Firefox floating around, and while the main version is fine for most, it may not be the best option for you.

That USB port on the back of your router looks like an easy way to share storage at home, maybe even set up a full-blown NAS. It does work, for what it's worth. But the router has a different main job, and using it as a file server comes with costs most people don’t expect until their network slows down. Here's why that's a bad idea.

Documentaries are a great weekend watch, giving you a glimpse into some of the biggest events in history. You get to sit back on your couch and watch something for an hour and a half, and you don't even have to feel guilty about it because you're learning something, or at least that's what I tell myself.

In the good old days, you could buy software outright and then use it forever without needing to pay anything more. These days, you're far more likely to have to pay a monthly subscription to keep using your software. However, the era of software subscriptions may be coming to an end, as AI-assisted developers are releasing free replacements for entire software suites.

While Ryobi tools at Home Depot are exclusive to the retailer, Ryobi is owned by TTI, which also owns Milwaukee and Ridgid tools. Home Depot is the only retail company authorized to sell Ryobi-branded products. You won’t find them at Lowe’s, Harbor Freight, Menards, or other big retail chains.

In a vacuum, the Nvidia Shield TV Pro is still one of the beefiest and most capable streaming boxes around. Its Tegra X1+ chip coupled with 3GB of RAM is powerful enough for any video file, you get support for most major HDR and audio formats, and the streamer also offers extra goodies such as excellent AI upscaling, gigabit LAN, and two USB 3.0 ports.

It's amazing what you can find when it comes to used computers. The current strange pricing of computer hardware notwithstanding, for the most part computers devalue rapidly. So a machine from ten years ago will have lost nearly all of its value.

One of the best things about Home Assistant is how customizable it is. Instead of installing a huge piece of software that supports every smart home device known to man, you can install specific integrations for the devices you own. There are also powerful plugins, including what were previously called add-ons but are now known as apps, that make Home Assistant even more powerful.

My keyboard doesn’t have a Delete key. It doesn’t have F1 through F12, Home, End, or even a tilde, and I type thousands of words on it every day without missing any of them. That’s because my keyboard has layers: hold one thumb key and the entire keyboard turns into something else entirely. Once I started building my workflow around layers, a normal keyboard started to feel like it was missing something.

In case you didn't know, the popular Plex self-hosting media service also supports music. You can take your CD collection, rip them as high-quality lossless files, and then play that music back through the Plex client.

Some of Excel's most useful functions are also its simplest. SORT is a good example: with a single argument, you can alphabetize a list, and with a couple more, you can sort an entire dataset. Better still, the results update automatically when the data in your source range changes, so you don't have to repeat the process every time a number or name changes.