How-To Geek

When you buy a new car today, you're not just buying a vehicle. You're signing up for something closer to a subscription surveillance service, except you don't get a discount for participating, and nobody asks for your permission.

The state of the web these days is abysmally noisy and divisive. Every day, it bombards our fragile minds with absurd and horrific things, yet an abundance of constructive content is widely available. The algorithms that power social media emotionally bait us to ignore the positive stuff and consume the garbage instead. To clear our minds and calm our lives, we need to cut them out.

I've been building PCs for almost two decades, and I've yet to use an AIO liquid CPU cooler in any of my builds. The thing is, I won't, ever. Here's why.

Your computer probably isn't as fast as it should be, and the reason usually isn't the hardware. Windows ships with defaults that make sense for someone, somewhere, but not necessarily for the way you actually use your machine. None of these are hard problems to fix, and there are three changes that you could make that take maybe ten minutes total and cost nothing. However, you'll see the difference immediately.

Now that the dust (and tears) have settled from the conclusions of Euphoria and Hacks, and we now turn our attention to House of the Dragon in a couple of weeks, now might be a good time for some documentaries! Luckily, HBO Max has some excellent new and new-ish options at the moment.

My smart home knows a lot about me, and not all of it is good. It knows how long I’ve spent sitting in my office chair, how few steps I’ve taken, how little exercise I’ve done, and more. In an effort to shame myself into doing better, I decided to use a local AI model to generate a snarky report card every day.

Netflix hosts a large library of award-winning movies, but finding the right one for your weekend streaming can sometimes feel harder than it should. While the latest trending titles may be all over your Netflix home, there are plenty of acclaimed films that are worth searching for.

When it comes to reliability, Toyota and Lexus tend to dominate the conversation. However, another Japanese automaker has quietly built an equally impressive reputation for dependability. Subaru consistently ranks among the most reliable brands in the industry, and one of its most popular SUVs combines that long-term durability with a level of capability that many rivals simply can't match.

When building a robust home Wi-Fi network, there are universal rules we all should follow. They make logical sense, help you create a seamless network, and can instantly remedy the issues plaguing your current setup.

Microsoft Excel handles temporal data effectively if you know which formulas to use. The problem is that Excel includes over 20 date and time functions, but most people only ever need a small core set to build powerful, self-updating workflows. These essential date functions turn messy timelines into automated systems you can actually rely on.

Even though I prefer GNOME over KDE, I have made a habit of installing KDE Connect on all of my Linux PCs. Yet for the primary task of sending files between my PC and my phone, KDE Connect is no longer necessary. There's an app in Flathub that takes advantage of Android's built-in Quick Share feature, making KDE Connect redundant for those who are only using the app for sending files.

The concept of needing to set a secure password has been hammered into our heads for so long, it barely warrants a mention. And while some of us definitely go out of our way to make some passwords super secure, other passwords lie there forgotten for ages. Wi-Fi passwords fall under that umbrella: they're often never changed, and if they are, they're made to be easy to remember.

When it comes to your personal or sensitive data, the best way to keep it private is to keep it offline. AI apps usually work online, which means you have to give up your files and data to the cloud in order to use them. But these four open-source AI tools are completely offline and only use your computer's processing power to run.

Paramount+ subscribers in the U.S. have lots to watch on the streaming service this weekend, including all the usual Taylor Sheridan shenanigans, The Ultimate Fighter Season 34, and that reminds me—um, a major UFC event happening live on the White House lawn on Sunday.

BMW has unveiled the M Concept Neue Klasse at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and it's a not-so-subtle preview of what to expect from the M3 EV when it finally arrives.

When you look at what NAS stands for (Network-Attached Storage), the name doesn't exactly do these devices justice. It makes them sound like little more than glorified hard drives that happen to be available to every device on your network. If you're only using your NAS to store files, you're barely scratching the surface of what it can actually do.

The World Cup kicked off this week, instantly sorting Netflix subscribers into two camps—those ignoring everything else on the planet for soccer and those dodging the sport entirely—no judgment either way, but we've got a list of soccer shows and movies for people who don't like soccer for anyone on the fence.

With the vacation season in full swing, it's worth taking a few minutes to get your phone ready before you travel. While modern Android devices already come packed with helpful features for traveling, there are still numerous useful travel settings that need to be enabled or configured manually. If you want your phone to be properly prepared for the trip ahead and avoid running into avoidable issues along the way, here are some things you can do to make your phone travel-ready.

Did you know that NASA has a stacked repository of 3D printing files that you can download and print for free? This includes some of the agency’s most iconic equipment, plus terrain maps and asteroids.

Look on any Home Assistant forum, and you're likely to find a ton of posts from people showing off their intricately detailed dashboards. While many of these dashboards look incredible, packed with controls and graphs, they're not something that I really want. There's only one dashboard that I enjoy using.