How-To Geek

Apple fans are infamous for defending the company's every decision. The notch, sticking with the Lightning cable for too long, the price of extra storage, etc. But bring up the iPhone keyboard in a room full of iPhone owners, and the mood quickly turns.

Whether you're a DIY homeowner or a professional, you know that buying a cordless power tool means getting trapped in a single brand's battery ecosystem. If you buy any other brand, you'll need a new set of batteries and chargers. However, the complete opposite is true with the Bosch Power for All system, which lets you use a single battery with 10 brands across more than 150 tools.

The release of any brand-new operating system means the inevitable discovery of bugs and even device-breaking issues, and Googlebooks are no exception. It's simple to factory reset a Googlebook if you simply need a fresh start or are encountering minor problems, but in the event your Googlebook is effectively unusable, a more complete and in-depth recovery may be necessary. If you're in that boat, follow this guide to completely reinstall Googlebook OS and hopefully save your laptop.

One of the most commonly repeated SSD tips is not to fill your drive all the way up to full. It makes perfect sense, and even manufacturers will tell you to leave 10-20% empty, so you should probably listen to them.

ArtCraft, a free alternative to Adobe's creative suite built with AI-assisted coding, is making people question whether they should pay for creative apps anymore.

My smart home has a lot of complicated automations, many of which have their own quirks. When guests visit, they just want to be able to do simple things like turning on the lights, watching TV, or turning up the heating. I decided to turn an old Android phone into a dedicated guest remote that's simple enough for anyone to use.

Smart bulbs are a great addition to your smart home, especially if you’re just starting out. They are easy to install, set up, and control.

While PowerToys is a fantastic open-source tool made by Microsoft, its Windows modding capabilities are fairly limited. When it comes to built-in Windows modding options, you can do stuff like bring back the Windows 10-style right-click menu (via Registry Editor), toggle transparency effects, use a limited selection of custom themes, finally move the taskbar again, and a few other things, which isn’t that bad considering they’re all available right from the get-go.

Many newer Kindle models allow you to link your Kindle and Goodreads accounts so that the reading progress on your Kindle shows up in Goodreads. This was never the case for my old Kindle 4, and if you jailbreak a newer Kindle and read using KOReader, you lose the benefits of this native integration. Thankfully, I was able to use a KOReader plugin to get my reading stats to sync with Goodreads.

Netflix’s release slate ensures you never run out of something new to explore each week, and October's schedule is no exception. From foreign titles and originals to classic throwbacks, the streaming platform offers plenty, with some exciting movies landing this week.

When dealing with data corruption, you're much more likely to blame your SSD than anything else. And even if it's not your SSD, it'll be your OS or maybe even the CPU.

A website usually lives in a browser, where I navigate between pages, open images, and download files individually. On Linux, HTTPDirFS offers another way to access web content by mounting an HTTP server as a filesystem through FUSE. You can then browse the exposed resources through a file manager, much as you would browse files stored on your computer.

New TVs cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, but you'll often struggle to hear dialogue because of the tiny speakers. That's why it's worth spending a bit more on a 5.1 home theater soundbar system, like the LG S6FTR, which will bring a cinematic experience to your living room.

Google Keep is where I dump everything I need to remember. Grocery items, article ideas, errands, and random thoughts all end up in different notes. Finding anything later is a whole other problem.

Paramount has been one of the biggest names in the movie industry for a long time, and they have utilized that legacy to give us a strong streaming service with a pretty vast library. What I find so appealing about their platform is their catalog of movies, with hits from just about every era and genre ready to satisfy whatever craving I happen to have each week.

After using Bash for years on Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint, when I first came across Zsh on Kali Linux, it was like a new world just opened in front of me. Syntax highlighting, command suggestions, and all the gorgeous colors made me rethink my decision to ignore the command line. I had plenty of reasons to replace Bash with Zsh.

3D printers are a fantastic tool for making basically anything you could want. This weekend, I wanted to make my house a little less annoying. So, I set out to find three things I could fix that would make my everyday life a little better, and it took me under an hour to complete.

There's nothing worse than a fluctuating network signal when you're trying to work or stream a movie. The solution is a powerful router like TP-Link's BE9700, which delivers wide coverage and fast speeds, so you won't deal with timeouts or buffering.

Driving is my stress-relief activity. I’m the kind of nerd who actually enjoys checking stats and reports, so naturally, I wanted to see what my driving looks like on paper.

NVIDIA wants the RTX Spark to be the laptop chip for running AI agents on your own machine, so I expected my $3,200 HP OmniBook Ultra 16 to run circles around a Snapdragon laptop. Instead, Hermes took one look at the 32GB RTX Spark and said every model I wanted was too big. The Zenbook A16, with 48GB of memory and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, loaded three of them in one click. It was slow, but for local AI agents, the cheaper laptop ended up actually getting the job done.