How-To Geek

The first weekend in May marks the start of the summer movie season in Hollywood. Over the next few months, studios will be releasing a slew of movies that could be financial juggernauts. In other words, the blockbusters are hitting theaters—The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Toy Story 5, and more.

That HDMI port on the back of your NAS has probably been sitting unused since the day you set it up. Most NAS owners ignore it—not because it’s useless, but because it’s rarely explained. Here are three things you can do with your NAS’s HDMI port, ranging from simple convenience to genuinely useful.

I was recently invited to Hyundai’s inaugural Metaplant Experience media program in Savannah, Georgia. The cuisine was outstanding, the accommodations were luxurious, and the weather couldn’t have been better. Yet, all of that was eclipsed by Hyundai’s breathtaking, nearly 3,000-acre state-of-the-art U.S. smart factory, part of a $12.6 billion investment in Georgia.

A lot of people, at least in the pre-"vibe coding era," lament that they can't program because they're "not math people." I wasn't either. Here's how I got started building machine learning models in Python anyway.

For years, Samsung and Apple have borrowed features from each other, often with each new generation of devices or software. However, not every feature makes the jump. One feature Samsung was first to offer has yet to arrive on the iPhone. With phone screens getting larger, it’s surprising Apple hasn’t adopted it sooner.

When you're connected to the same Wi-Fi network, it's pretty simple to SSH into any device connected to the same network. But outside that same network, you cannot do that because your ISP doesn't assign a unique public IP to your home network. You might have heard that you need to set up "port forwarding" to get into your home servers when you're out. But it doesn't have to be so complicated. Here's an easy and safe way to SSH into your home network when you're away.

A strong value in local AI computing just left the market. Apple has quietly discontinued the base Mac mini with an M4 chip, effectively raising the price of its entry-level desktop from $599 to $799.

Most of the documentation I deal with now is digital, which means it can be copied and searched at will. Unfortunately, plenty of important things do require paper documentation—a major inconvenience compared to digital.

AI can do a lot of impressive things, and connecting an LLM to your smart home can make it much smarter. It can also make it pretty dumb, too, if you decide that you're going to use it to give a smart bulb a personality.

If you’ve tried using Claude to learn to code and walked away feeling like you just witnessed a magic trick rather than actually learned something, you’re not alone. Without structure, AI coding tools default to doing the work for you—you end up with hundreds of lines of code without understanding the algorithm or the logic behind it.

For the longest time, I used to ssh into my home servers and then use top or htop to check their resource usage. To keep an eye on my Docker containers, I would run Docker stats, I would run docker stats or docker ps. I'd use basic shell commands to check disk and network usage too. Or systemctl to view systemd services. It gets pretty annoying when you have all your services spread across multiple little servers. One of my co-workers told me about Beszel, and it has saved me from all that monitoring headache.

The first 1GB hard drive was released by IBM in 1980. The IBM 3380 Direct Access Storage Device (DASD) was enormous by today’s standards, weighing about 64lbs and costing ~$50,000. We then waited 27 years for the first 1TB hard drive, the Deskstar 7K1000 from Hitachi, which came out in 2007.

The likes of Audi and BMW still dominate the sports sedan conversation, offering polished performance and premium appeal. But as the segment has evolved, many of those cars have drifted toward refinement over raw driver engagement, leaving a gap for something more focused and a little less conventional.

There's a near-endless sea of free and paid photo editing tools at your disposal. While many of them offer powerful features that can completely transform an image, most of the time you only need the app to tweak a few small details. For that kind of quick-and-dirty editing, I've found myself using the built-in Windows Photos app almost exclusively. If you've been ignoring it, allow me to convince you that it might be worth another look.

It's no secret that Google is cracking down against "sideloading" Android apps—which is to say, installing apps from outside the Play Store. Google Play Protect has thrown up the "harmful app blocked" warning for a long time now, but it was simple enough to ignore the warning and install the app anyway. However, in the past few months, Play Protect has blocked app installations completely. This is what you can do to get past Play Protect blocks.

Are you on the fence between using your phone as a 3D scanner or buying a professional 3D scanner? I’ve always wanted a 3D scanner, but I also thought my phone would be just as good. I scanned the same object with both a professional 3D scanner and my iPhone 17 Pro and printed the results—and they were not what I expected.

It's Monday morning, and an "updated" copy of an Excel workbook is sitting in your inbox. But when you open it, it's often impossible to tell what's changed. Instead of playing a game of spot the difference, use these built-in Excel tools to highlight differences in seconds.

A good homelab setup doesn't need to consist of all flashy, exciting applications. The longer I've used my homelab, the more I've come to view the apps that sit idle in the background as the most important services I host.

Narwal’s latest Flow 2 robot vacuum packs a lot of new features compared to its predecessor. With better suction performance, a higher-temperature mopping system with real-time self cleaning, and better navigation, the Flow 2 is a great upgrade to an already fantastic robot vacuum/mop.

There was a time when a luxury car was defined by the logo. Those lines have blurred today, as many mainstream manufacturers offer vehicles in their lineups with advanced powertrains, upscale interior layouts, and connectivity technologies that hold their own against luxury namesakes at a lower price.