How-To Geek

Android may have begun as a mobile operating system, but it has blossomed into much more. Unfortunately, system administrator tools are still playing catch-up, and certain information about apps is harder to access than it is on desktop PCs. Fortunately, there’s an app you can install that will tell you everything you want to know, and it happens to be open source.

The merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery is one step closer to becoming a reality.

While movies with an R rating can often signal something grim, gross, or too serious, it can also simply mean that it's just a license to be silly, stupid, and flat-out misbehave. If you're like me and admire all the colors of the English language, that letter tag allows filmmakers to let the profanity fly and chase jokes that might otherwise end up on the cutting-room floor (or on a director's cut DVD).

With GPUs and memory chips in incredibly high demand, 2027 is shaping up to be one of the more unusual graphics card release cycles. NVIDIA has been dominating the segment for years, but if recent rumors suggesting that the RTX 60 series is delayed until 2028 turn out to be true, AMD could find itself in a unique position to lure users toward its upcoming cards.

I've been self-hosting for more than 15 years now, and despite my best efforts, my friends and family just don't care about all the cool things on the network. As it turns out, Grafana dashboards are only interesting to me.

Smartphones have more storage than ever these days, but running out of space still happens all the time, especially with the powerful cameras on newer Galaxy phones. My Galaxy S26 doesn't have a microSD slot, like most flagship Samsung phones, and whenever I record a long video or want to shoot in 4K or 8K, I worry. But after finding one little setting, it's no longer a concern.

If you wanted to learn how to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux but didn't want to buy a license from Red Hat, CentOS was your distro. How did this affect the Linux ecosystem?

While so many people wait around until Black Friday or Cyber Monday to buy a TV, the trick is that you don't have to wait until after Thanksgiving to find a great deal on a high-quality TV, especially if you just know where to look. Hint: Best Buy is the place to shop right now, especially if you're looking for a massive 75-inch TV from Samsung.

When I first purchased an ESP32, I started with the hardest tools and only discovered the easier tools later. That led to a lot of unnecessary frustration, since most problems you'll encounter while working on ESP32 boards already have solutions. They're just not in one tidy place.

The binge-watch model is still alive and well. Even though I prefer the weekly release, I'll still find myself crushing an entire season or miniseries in one sitting. It's all about finding a show that ends each episode with an enticing hook. If the final moments of an episode feature a shocking reveal or twist, I'm watching the next episode immediately.

I increasingly find myself drawn to digital books, though how enjoyable they are depends entirely on the device that I read them on. With the rise of phone-sized eReaders, I decided to pit one up against another reading-focused option, a book-centered phone.

We've spent the better part of the last couple of decades phasing out legacy computer ports in favor of newer standards. While VGA and DVI are largely a thing of the past now, why is it that some rather expensive motherboards still carry that ancient six-pin PS/2 port for connecting keyboards and mice when most peripherals have switched to USB?

Most smart TVs do more than display images and videos—they collect information. Sometimes, that information is just about your viewing habits using automated content recognition (ACR). Other times, your TV records snippets of conversations or information about other devices on the network or in Wi-Fi range.

You don't have to give up the conveniences of digital music when you prefer the sound of vinyl, provided you're willing to put in some work. Reddit user Simon Trost has built a Raspberry Pi-based "Now Playing" screen, the VinylPi64, that automatically detects songs playing on your turntable.

Technology has a habit of quietly removing things we thought would be around forever. Floppy disks gave way to USB drives, film cameras were lost to digital photography, and vinyl was barged out of the way by CDs and streaming before making an unexpected comeback. Sometimes the replacement is better, but other times you spend years wondering why someone decided the old way needed fixing. Excel has had plenty of those moments.

In the Android world, performance is king. Leaked benchmarks bring praise or ridicule to phones that have never been touched. Everyone wants the latest and greatest Snapdragon chip. As a long-time Pixel user, I've never been concerned with any of this.

Power tools need to meet the highest standards and be tough enough for years of on-site work. You get what you pay for, and it's not worth cutting corners because cheap products will let you down when you need them the most.

I went into my TrueNAS Scale versus Unraid test with a pretty strong assumption about how it would end. TrueNAS Scale had almost everything I normally look for in a homelab server. Unraid looked more convenient, but I expected that convenience to come with compromises I would eventually find annoying.

Linux is an important part of modern development, and Windows users often rely on a separate app like Docker Desktop to get started. Now, Microsoft is making it easier to run Linux containers on its operating system through Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The feature was first showcased at Build 2026 and entered public preview in June. Now, it’s available for everyone with the latest WSL update.

There are a few things you should double-check before turning a laptop into a NAS. While you definitely can just do it, these three BIOS options are definitely worth double-checking before diving down the rabbit hole.