How-To Geek

I'm no stranger to using different keyboard layouts. I'm a big mechanical keyboard fan, and I still use typewriters, even in 2026. The IBM Selectric I grew up with had a QWERTY layout, and the vintage (well, more like dilapidated and in bad need of some oil) Smith Corona I'm using now also uses the layout. In the late 1800s, QWERTY became the standard for typewriter keyboard layouts. But in the 1930s, another layout emerged: Dvorak. It looked like it could beat QWERTY on paper, but it never quite got there. I wanted to find out why (and give it a go myself).

I've used Excel for long enough to know that it isn't the first tool I'd reach for when I want to draw a picture, plan a room, or design a craft project. But a blank worksheet has helped me get creative, have a bit of fun, and sometimes even solve a problem faster than I could with a piece of paper or a dedicated app. Once you stop thinking of Excel as just somewhere to enter data, its grid becomes a surprisingly useful playground.

Earlier this year, Sharge released its original Disk Pro portable SSD and docking station. Now, we have the Disk Pro 2, which is upgraded in every way. Sharge really listened to its users and fixed some of the biggest complaints of the Disk Pro, and that makes this the portable SSD and docking station to beat, I think.

I’m surprised it took me so long to realize that I could use my 3D printer to rectify one of my biggest problems with Nintendo’s last two generations of consoles: Joy-Con ergonomics.

Television took center stage on Monday night at the 2026 Primetime Emmys. Widow's Bay, The Pitt, and DTF St. Louis walked home with the night's biggest awards, while Beef disappointed.

Your laptop had a full charge at the start of the day, but by noon, you're reaching for the outlet to refill the battery. The battery percentage kept dropping even though you didn’t stream anything or run a demanding task. That’s because Windows 11 isn’t sitting idle while you work. In the background, a quiet parade of apps, services, and sync routines run constantly in the background — none of which you ever asked for. The good news is that you can stop most of them.

Knowing where you actually are can sometimes be a problem when you're traveling. But that drawer phone gathering dust can outperform a purpose-built GPS unit, for the price of an app and a little setup time.

With so much music on streaming services, and more and more being added daily, it's not always easy to find music I really love among the millions of tracks. I use a cheap ESP32 board to make the process much easier.

A quick look at the Paramount+ top 10 rankings tells you everything you need to know about what movie lovers hold as a priority when it comes to choosing something to watch. The supernatural horror Passenger is still sitting at the top of the list, and Joe Dirt (which we covered last week) is in the top 5—two movies that have nothing in common other than the fact that they both have appalling Rotten Tomatoes scores. People like what they like.

Switching to Ethernet was simultaneously the best and the cheapest network upgrade I've ever gotten. Simply ditching Wi-Fi for a cable is fantastic, and in most cases, it improves your connection tremendously.

Linux has changed dramatically since the early days of the kernel. Desktops have gone from X11 environments with primitive window managers to polished graphical shells. Containers, cloud computing, virtualization, and immutable operating systems have transformed how people deploy Linux. Even the hardware running Linux today would have seemed extraordinary to many of its earliest users.

The unstoppable rise of foldables has slowed the homogenization of smartphones with new form factors and designs, but early in the foldable era, dual-screen smartphones (two separate displays connected by a hinge) seemed like an alternative to traditional slabs.

Linux on desktop systems is in a great place right now. Whatever desktop system you have, you can probably slap a Linux distro of your choice on it right now, and have few if any issues.

It's no secret that Milwaukee makes some of the best power tools, but buying into Team Red isn't as straightforward as it appears. The initial sticker price is only part of the story, and everything that comes after will inevitably cost a lot more.

No matter where you park or how many precautions you take, cars get incredibly hot, especially when left in direct sunlight. Sometimes, you have no choice but to leave your phone baking in the car, but what happens to its battery while you're gone might make you think twice.

Are you sick of having Wi-Fi problems? Yeah, so was I. And the internet is full of hacks that supposedly help so much, but most of the time, you'll be changing some settings and then scratching your head, trying to determine what exactly is now so much better.

Everyone is always so focused on new, new, new. But Netflix's back catalog of movies has legs, too. A week after I pointed you toward Straight Outta Compton and Alien, both are still holding strong on the U.S. charts. This week, Angelina Jolie joins them with her thriller Those Who Want Me Dead, which I get into below.

There's a saying that "the internet never forgets, "which is a nice soundbite, but in truth some things are lost forever on the net. Once a server goes down and the last copy of that data is disconnected, that's it.

My current phone, a Pixel 10 Pro, is the first phone I've ever owned that packs 256GB of storage space. Almost six months into owning it, I've still got plenty of storage left, and I'm in no hurry to free up space. But when I recently looked up how much storage I could free up on it for a piece I was writing, I discovered that Spotify took up almost 15GB of space. This wasn't new, but I completely forgot about it after upgrading to the Pixel.

When you set up a brand-new Windows PC, you probably want to get through the setup screens as quickly as possible so you can start using your shiny new computer. That makes it easy to click through Microsoft's privacy options without paying much attention to what you've actually enabled. One of those settings allows Microsoft to collect samples of what you type or write.