How-To Geek

When you use CarPlay, you probably just start some music, enter a destination, and drive off. However, there is a lesser-known feature that can make your CarPlay experience a lot more personal and fun: setting a custom greeting or sound when it connects to your car.

Owning a 3D printer comes with the promise that you can just make some stuff yourself now instead of buying it from the store. At least, that's what you tell yourself as you place your order for the magic factory box, but most of us don't actually end up doing that at all.

When you pick out a phone, you’re also picking out the operating system—that typically means Android or iOS. What if a phone didn’t follow those rules? What if it could run any OS you wanted? This is the story of the legendary HTC HD2.

Animation is my favorite visual medium, and I have watched an incredible amount of it in my life, but these five movies are without any doubt ones that each represent a major turning point in the art form. One could easily do a top 100 list too, given the near-century of animation to choose from, but for my money, these are the key titles.

I use Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude almost every day, both for work and for my own projects. Each service has its strengths and weaknesses, and you can access a lot of the features for free. The paid plans offer even more features, but if you only want to pay for one, there's a clear winner.

Plex streaming isn't just a matter of having a hard drive spacious enough to fit your collection of movies and shows. It turns out, though, that in order to have an optimal experience, you need a lot of things, including a computer capable enough to decode your media into something watchable on your specific form factor. Your old GPU can go a long way at helping you out with this.

We all have certain icks with our favorite apps—a bug, subpar display, long navigation, or even core features that we want to change to our liking. With streaming platforms like Spotify, you can get annoyed quickly when these issues manifest every day.

There are plenty of Home Assistant automations that look impressive but are really just showing off what the smart home software can do. Having an AI generate a snarky description of the person at the front door when the doorbell rings is fun but not really necessary. There are some automations that are genuinely useful, however.

I'm a recovering Windows user. From Windows 3.11 to earlier this year, I've always had a love-hate relationship with Microsoft's flagship OS.

When I updated my iPhone to the latest version of iOS, I was greeted with an unexpected demand: verify my age in order to continue to have access to some features. Currently, this only applies to people in the UK, but it's likely coming to your neighborhood, too.

GNOME aims to be simple to use, with a minimal interface, a small set of core apps, and basic customization available by default. But GNOME extensions can offer almost anything you might miss from a fuller-featured desktop environment.

In 1986, Jim Henson joined forces with talented fellow filmmakers and a musical icon to tell the story of Labyrinth, resulting in an everlasting cult classic that has endured for 40 years. While he may be best-known for the charming characters of The Muppets, Henson and his company have either been involved in projects with darker tones or crafted them themselves, such as The Dark Crystal. Features such as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth retain the careful, practical work behind Henson's creatures with more mature and riskier storytelling.

Notion is one of the most popular note-taking apps out there, and for good reason—it has a ton of well-developed features. However, I wanted something that was a bit simpler and more private. That's why I started using Joplin.

There’s plenty to say about how a smart home can make day-to-day tasks easier, but some devices can have positive health effects too. By automating these devices, you can reap the benefits without having to remember or manually trigger a thing.

When it comes to homelabbing, there are a lot of services and apps you might want to run. While installing them individually is an option, I chose to go the Docker route instead—and there's no going back.

When a vehicle is recalled, the owner never has to pay for repairs out of pocket; the manufacturer picks up the tab. But that doesn’t mean owners don’t pay a price.

After having printed in a single filament color for years, I found the idea of a multicolor 3D printer extremely appealing. There's no arguing with the results either. Multicolor prints are a big step up aesthetically, and there are big practical upshots too for functional prints.

Excel formulas are great until you need to stack 10 of them inside each other—one wrong bracket can ruin your entire afternoon. You can skip the headache by moving that logic into Power Query. Conditional columns let you build "if/then" rules visually, keeping your data clean and easier to manage.

RAID 6 is the best form of RAID to run in a homelab, right? I don’t think so. RAID 6 might offer slightly more protection than RAID 5, but I prefer RAID 5 for my NAS systems—here’s why

Android in 2014 was a playground for innovation. The ecosystem was much simpler, and everyone was kind of doing their own thing. This led to more frequent fresh ideas compared to what we have today. Here's some of the stuff we thought was groundbreaking back then—and I would really love it if a lot of these things were still around.