How-To Geek

Walking into Home Depot usually gives you the feeling that you've seen every cordless tool Ryobi makes. Ryobi has a deal to only sell its tools at Home Depot in the United States, so it's hard to find them anywhere else. The thing is that other regions get heavy yard equipment that never touches domestic shelves, and some of it is amazing and worth the money.

Major cable providers often broadcast a second network from an ISP-provided router, and you might not even realize it's happening. These secondary networks might not detract from a home's primary network, but they can definitely give your phone a bad connection. Here's what's going on and how you can fix it.

If you like original direct-to-streaming movies, then this week's list is for you. Four of the five movies on this list are streaming releases. Prime Video occupies two spots on the list: a crime caper starring Stanley Tucci and a romantic drama starring Margaret Qualley.

Google is giving you a reason to pay attention to fitness trackers again. Today, the company has announced the Fitbit Edge, a new wearable that sits between the screen-free Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch lineup. The timing is interesting as Google has spent recent months expanding its health-focused features and wearables. The Fitbit Edge also arrives after a lengthy gap in the brand’s conventional fitness tracker lineup as the successor to the Fitbit Charge 6 that debuted in 2023.

Are you finally getting around to building your personal portfolio website? Wondering which AI coding tool you should trust with the job? I was in the same boat a few days ago, so I tested Claude Code and Codex CLI to see which one did a better job. As it turns out, neither was perfect, but one built a noticeably better portfolio landing page than the other.

Whether you’re a homeowner, home improvement specialist, or a commercial contractor, drills help get jobs done, no matter the task or project. Anyone can grab a drill and start using it, but understanding its capabilities and how it works is essential if you want it to last.

Backups are one of those jobs everyone knows they should do, but almost nobody does consistently. You mean to copy your files somewhere safe regularly, and for a while you do, until a busy week gets in the way and the habit quietly lapses. Then a laptop dies, a drive fails, or a file gets overwritten by mistake, and the backup you meant to have is three weeks out of date or doesn't exist at all.

You probably already know that you can use a VPN to circumvent regional blocks on content by making it look like you're in a different country or region, but have you thought about whystreaming services work so hard to prevent this practice? Is it actually illegal?

Getting a new Samsung phone is exciting, but I never use it straight out of the box. Before installing my usual apps or showing it off to my friends, I head into Settings and make a few changes. Some are small tweaks that make everyday tasks faster, while others fix things that have annoyed me on previous Galaxy phones.

You should really understand that buying a streaming device means trading some privacy for convenience. There's a lot of data being collected, and it happens pretty quietly. You are never asked for your permission either; it is just implied since the settings are on by default. Unfortunately, that means a company is profiting off everything you do, but you can always put a stop to it.

Ubuntu remains the most recognizable name in desktop Linux, yet a distro built on top of it often does a better job for everyday users. Linux Mint takes Ubuntu’s foundation and turns it into something friendlier, which says a lot about where Canonical’s priorities lie.

Earlier this year, I found an old 2-in-1 convertible laptop in my closet that I hadn't touched in a couple of years after I cracked its screen. I'd since replaced it with a business laptop and figured the old machine wasn't good for much until I realized one day that I could just turn it into a headless home server.

If you’ve got a desktop PC with a built-in Wi-Fi solution and you’ve been facing network issues, there’s a good chance the culprit is the Wi-Fi chip on your motherboard, especially if you’re using a budget board. The truth is that many motherboards come with subpar Wi-Fi, often because vendors want to keep prices down. That can result in random disconnects, poor performance when the signal is less than ideal, and driver issues.

AMD has been making CPUs that are popular among desktop gamers for years, with numerous chips earning legendary status for their performance and excellent value.

Wi-Fi 7 is ridiculously fast. So much so that most households have no use for it, not to mention actually having the gear to support it. Just having a router with Wi-Fi 7 doesn't mean that your entire home and your ISP can support those wild speeds.

Once a manufacturer stops supporting a device, you might assume it's headed for the e-waste bin. When online services and updates disappear, many devices become effectively useless. But thanks to enthusiast communities, that isn't always the case; many products become even more useful after official support ends.

Last weekend marked the arrival of one of Netflix's newest movies, Animals, starring Ben Affleck and Kerry Washington. It's a political thriller about a mayoral candidate who fights to save his kidnapped son. With an enticing premise and an A-list cast, I'd expect Animals to become a popular movie with subscribers this week.

I've been a fan of Dygma's keyboards since their very first Raise keyboard. I have used a Dygma Raise or Raise 2 for the better part of five years now, so when the opportunity came about to try out the Sonsei, I jumped at it. This uniquely portable columnar keyboard surprised me in quite a few ways. But, at the end of the day, I really love this little keyboard, even though there's a big learning curve.

Once, it was relatively inexpensive to buy another hard drive and throw it in your server when you ran out of space. These days, "just add another drive" is an expensive proposition.