How-To Geek

Energy costs are up, and the best way to lower your bill is to lower how much you use. There are multiple ways to go about that, and the right tech can help.

Even when you buy a product outright, you may still need to pay a subscription to access all of its features. These subscriptions can soon add up, but thankfully, there are alternatives. You can often avoid subscription fees with an inexpensive ESP32.

"Thriller" is the most overworked word in the movie business. It gets slapped on everything from courtroom dramas and shark movies to high-octane spy pictures to shark movies with tornadoes in them. All these thrills make it tricky when browsing streaming services, and Paramount+, with its cavernous pit of thrillers, is definitely not immune ... which I guess isn't a bad thing?

If you feel like your internet is playing up, what's the first thing you do? A lot of us reach for the same tool: a speed test. Those things catch more than just slow internet; they also note your latency, and if there's packet loss, you'll see it because the speed test will take ages to complete (or it won't complete at all). And as long as it shows a number within our expectations, we shrug and assume the Wi-Fi is just having a bad day.

I've been homelabbing for over five years at this point, and it's safe to say I've run hundreds of Docker containers over the years. However, there are five stand-out containers in my homelab that I've simply never had to repair.

My phone and Android Auto go together like two peas in a pod. I use my phone all day, and the moment I get in the car, Android Auto becomes an extension of it on my dashboard. Maps, music, messages, calls — I’m so used to the two working together that I rarely stop to think about where my phone ends and Android Auto begins.

Linux failed to keep me happy, even after I moved from Ubuntu to Arch, then to Gentoo. I now live comfortably on another little-known OS, one with forward-thinking ideas.

Amazon's Echo smart speakers have been incredibly popular, with sales in the tens of millions at their peak. If you have old Echo smart speakers lying around, don't throw them away just yet; there are plenty of ways to put them to good use.

When your PC's operating system gets corrupted, or if an update fails, or a drive gets damaged, you need to be ready—or be prepared to spend a lot of time trying to get it back up running. Thankfully, it's just as simple as grabbing a thumb drive and getting it up and running as a rescue drive.

As much as I enjoy digital books and comics, there is nothing quite like reading on paper—but I have neither the budget nor the space to amass physical copies of my digital library. This is why I've kept tabs on the state of paper-like Android tablets over the years. After comparing three devices that each take a different approach, here's what I would buy.

I built a capable gaming PC because I wanted a powerful machine that could run all the latest games in 1440p and 4K. The problem is that I spend most of my day writing, browsing, and doing other miscellaneous tasks rather than gaming.

I've been a cord-cutter for years, so over-the-air TV isn't new to me. I've used an antenna during hurricane outages and for the occasional football game when I wanted a local broadcast without worrying about which streaming service carried it. It was always useful, but it never became a big part of how I watched TV.

I’m perfectly happy doing plenty of things on my phone, but Google Maps isn’t always one of them. Ask me why, and I could probably give you 50 reasons. The biggest one? Maps feel far less cramped on my PC. I get a much bigger view of the map, more room to move around, and the freedom to use my mouse and keyboard instead of constantly pinching and dragging on my phone. After using Maps this way, I’ve realized that some tasks are simply more enjoyable — and much less fiddly on a bigger screen.

The iPhone Duo comes a whopping seven years after the original Galaxy Fold. With that much time to prepare, you’d hope Apple would have some fresh, new ideas — and it did. Samsung may have all the foldable experience, but it could still learn a thing or two.

A few months ago, Microsoft released a new Windows 11 feature that provides a modern alternative to the good old System Restore. The feature is called point-in-time restore, and it should have already landed on your PC with a recent Windows update. Point-in-time restore can be useful because it creates a snapshot of your system every 24 hours, allowing easy recovery to a recent restore point.

What is a laptop if not a mini PC stuck in a folding prison? There may be a bit more to it than that, but when a laptop fails at its primary task of being a portable computer, it’s good to know that you can still get some life out of it as a static one.

HBO Max has no shortage of shows that everyone is into, but some of its best series are not exactly the household names that dominate every streaming conversation. Dig a little deeper into the platform's catalog, and you will find plenty of shows that deserve more attention than they get.

Your NAS is, at its core, kind of another PC. It has PC specs, and it runs a full operating system, but the way it's put together means it's optimized to do certain things betther than your PC.

Everyone is a PC newbie at some point, and there are so many mistakes to be made. One of the most annoying I've come across is installing your NVMe SSD in the wrong M.2 slot. Any beginner could do it, and if you don't know what kind of performance to expect from your machine, you might not even notice something's wrong.

While watching the endless episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and The X-Files that I consumed on the old CRT of my youth, at the time I don’t recall ever thinking that it looked terrible. Compared to the pristine digital that the vast majority of today’s television is produced on, though, the difference is stark—it was softer, grainier, and there was way less detail. But that was never what the cameras actually saw.