How-To Geek

Whenever you are talking about a car, everyone wants to know how much horsepower it makes. It is a question as old as the automobile itself. Even though most people don’t understand how it is calculated or what it really means, horsepower is usually the first statistic referenced when describing a car. It is the benchmark by which all cars are measured, especially performance cars.

You might have heard mixed things about the safety of breathing the same air as your 3D printer. While the smell of melted plastic isn’t exactly pleasant, I was curious about what effects the average 3D print had on the air around me, and how it compared to my usual daily routine.

Wi-Fi 7 is an exciting standard that promises faster, smarter wireless connections. Its hallmark feature, Multi-Link Operation (MLO), lets devices use more than one frequency band at a time to reduce latency and boost throughput.

Excel's LAMBDA helper functions are the future, but knowing which one to pick is the real challenge. This is your go-to whistle-stop guide for matching the function to the task and building spreadsheets that finally think for themselves.

When I say "most important," I don't mean the most popular on GitHub, the most beloved by power users, or the project with the loudest community. I mean software that measurably changed the direction of computing. Tools that altered user behavior at scale, forced billion-dollar companies to respond, shifted technical standards, or redefined what people expected from their devices. Importance, in this context, isn't about vibes or nostalgia. It's about influence you can see in the market.

If your current Kindle is getting long in the tooth and you’re thinking that buying a new one is the best course of action, hold that thought until you read this. Instead of shelling out cash for a new Kindle, you can invest a few bucks in your current one and make it feel new again.

Back in the day, Android phones were a lot more daring. Companies experimented with all kinds of wild designs, features, and even pricing. Among all the phones that tried to stand out over the past decade, one captured the enthusiast fanbase like no other: the coveted OnePlus One.

The promise of open-source software sure sounds good because it tends to be powerful, community-driven tools that are completely free. It feels like a great move from the costly, restrictive subscription model that giants like Adobe force on you. However, even after months of using these tools and getting totally comfortable with them, I still miss some things Adobe offers.

We all have an old smart TV somewhere that's been replaced by a newer model, or is simply starting to show its age. But the great thing about smart TVs, compared to older television sets or other devices like smartphones, is that they tend to have a much longer lifespan.

Whether you’ve got an Android TV or Google TV streaming device, the home screen is something you see a lot. That’s exactly why it’s stuffed with recommendations and ads. I got tired of all the junk and cleaned things up with a free launcher.

Whether you have a fancy all-SSD NAS or you've turned an old PC into a makeshift backup solution, you've probably set it up, in part, to keep your files safe. But many of us, in our effort to protect our backups, forget about a much more important aspect of it all: protecting the NAS itself.

If you’re thinking of spinning up a Plex library, let me save you a few headaches. I’ve been running my own media server for the better part of a decade, and, over the years, I’ve learned a lot of things that you shouldn’t do.

In terms of a private media server, Plex is one of the best options on the market. Many users enjoy using Plex to store their personal media, including movies and television shows, in one spot. In addition to its storage opportunities, Plex offers plenty of free content thanks to its ad-supported streaming television.

For many people, smart light bulbs are their first introduction to the world of smart home tech. They're simple to set up and use, but there's a lot more you can do with smart bulbs than just lighting your home.

This was another busy week in tech news, with Samsung finally revealing the Galaxy S26 series, Android 17's second beta release, big updates for Home Assistant and Excel, and much more. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.

Are you sick and tired of being used as a pawn in a never-ending data mining race? Instead of putting your data in the cloud where random companies can profit from it, you really need to take control of your own data. There’s only one way to enjoy privacy in the cloud era—own your own data.

If your NVMe SSD suddenly disappears, it doesn't mean that it vanishes out of existence. It just means that your OS has lost track of it. Sure, physically it's there, but it might as well not be if your PC can't connect to it.

The latest entry in the Jurassic World franchise has a new streaming home. Jurassic World Rebirth is now available to stream on Netflix. The dinosaur adventure starring Scarlett Johanssonfirst went to Peacock following its impressive theatrical run. Now, it will reach an even wider audience on Netflix.

3D printers allow you to create objects that solve problems, improve on products you own, and above all, make you smile. But they can also be used to create items that improve the printer itself, and these are often the best first prints to make.

So, you're getting into software development, and one elemental name keeps coming up: Rust. After experiencing that myself, I looked into the increasingly popular programming language. Here's what I learned about it, plus the steps it took to start writing Rust programs myself.