How-To Geek

For a very long time, if you wanted to try Linux on a semi-permanent basis, you needed to shrink your Windows partition, install a Linux distro of some variety, and just suffer through any of the numerous problems that can occur with dual booting.

Are you looking for a private, alternative search engine? Google is king, but its rivals are quickly catching up. With the recent general shift toward privacy awareness, perhaps one of them is right for you.

Google just gave you a new account login option to help escape the maze of password resets and recovery contacts. The company has introduced a selfie video sign-in feature that can get you in even when you're locked out or using a different device.

Are you ready for another batch of fun (and useful) homelab projects to try out this weekend? From building your own speed test server to some media server maintenance, here are three projects for you to finish before Monday rolls around.

When it comes to single-board computers, you have other flavors of Pi to choose from than just Raspberry these days. The Orange PI series of competing products might lack the vast community support and software library of the Raspberry Pi, but when it comes to one specific use case, the choice is much less clear.

For a few years, Intel Optane felt like it was cheating. Random reads that beat any SSD on the market. Latency low enough to make a spinning hard drive feel like a relic. And the most interesting side? A whole new memory tier that nobody else could touch. Then it just quietly stopped existing.

For over a decade, Plex was the undisputed choice for anyone looking to self-host a media server. Unlike its alternatives, Plex was polished, feature-rich, and years ahead of the competition.

Buying a used car can save you thousands of dollars compared to purchasing a new one, but it also comes with risks. A vehicle may look spotless on the outside and drive perfectly during a short test drive while hiding expensive mechanical or electrical problems beneath the surface.

Windows is the OS I use every day, even though it does plenty of things I don't like. I've tried switching to Linux more than once, and I keep finding reasons to give it another shot, but I always end up back on Windows. For all its faults, it still works best with the apps, hardware, and workflow that I rely on every day.

I've been tinkering with my smart home for well over a decade, so it's rare that I come across anything that feels truly new. Sometimes, however, I find ideas that I've not seen before, and it's always a breath of fresh air. Quite literally, in the case of one of these projects.

Playing music via the command line is a joy for many Linux users. Besides, who wants to pay for a Spotify membership or any other streaming service, when you can stream files to your computer directly from your phone's local storage? Or just listen from the phone itself? I decided to test it out.

Five router firmware builds have just been deemed majorly unsafe, and it isn't the usual patch-it-and-move-on situation. The web interface on these routers has a hidden backdoor password that hands over full admin access, and the username you type doesn't even matter.

What I want from AI is for it to take the boring and mundane jobs off my hands and free me up to do more fun stuff. Reading my emails before starting work each day is time-consuming and dull, so I decided to hand the task off to Claude.

Do you have Raspberry Pis sitting around not being used for anything? By the end of this weekend, you shouldn't! Here are three fun projects to do with your Raspberry Pis to keep them from rotting away in a drawer.

I love building things in the physical world, but when it comes to software, I have a hard time getting ideas out of my head. Coding is the big barrier—it’s just not something I’ve ever been good at. Recently, however, I’ve been using Gemini in Android Studio, and I’ve made my very first app.

One of the strongest arguments for buying physical media in a digital world is the unwritten rule that "the disc is always the true version." It's long been the case that buying DVDs or Blu-rays allows access to original edits or missing episodes that aren't available on any streaming service. However, for one of my favorite shows, streaming has now become the version that's more faithful to the original.

If you haven't used Excel in a while, you may be surprised by how much it has changed. Whether you switched to Google Sheets, moved to open-source software, stayed with an older version, or simply stopped following updates, Microsoft has added features that could dramatically change how you work with spreadsheets.

My phone is constantly bombarded with notifications. I try to limit them as much as possible, but even so, they quickly become easy to ignore. Sometimes, Home Assistant needs to alert me about something important, such as a water leak being detected, and these are notifications I really don't want to miss. There are several methods I use to make notifications almost impossible to miss.

If you have ever worked with two or three monitors, you have probably run into the same problem. You arrange your workspace exactly the way you like it. Your editor sits on the main display, documentation is open on another monitor, and Slack, Discord, or a terminal stays visible on a third. Everything feels organized until you switch to another virtual desktop.

When XPENG invited me to Munich for the global debut of the L03, I expected to see another electric SUV launch. Instead, I found myself looking at a company trying to redefine what a car can be, with AI-powered vehicles, robots, robotaxis, and flying machines all part of the same plan.