How-To Geek

Last month, Frankie Muniz, Bryan Cranston, and Jane Kaczmarek reprised their beloved roles from Malcolm in the Middle for the revival series, Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair. For any revival, the biggest determining factor for their existence is viewership. Will audiences tune in for more episodes? In Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair, the answer was yes, as the revival scored Hulu and Disney+'s most-viewed season premiere of 2026.

For a long time, Synology was the NAS brand. If someone asked what NAS to buy, you’d say Synology and move on. Their hardware was always decent but DiskStation Manager was genuinely exceptional—nothing else in the consumer space came close to the software experience. You were paying a premium, but it made sense.

Setting aside some time to write nowadays, in a distraction-free environment, isn’t the easiest thing to do. With so many distractions out there, it’s a miracle anyone gets any writing done at all.

If your Excel workbook shows everything at once, it's harder to use than it needs to be. The fix is simple: only surface what the user actually needs to see and hide the rest. Let me introduce you to the 10% rule.

From the day I ditched my old LG phone, I've been a regular user of Samsung phones. This year, I made the switch to Linux Mint as a daily driver on my PC, and that gave me the idea to try running a few of my favorite Linux apps on my Galaxy Z Fold.

If you've upgraded to a new router, you don't have to get rid of the old one. Instead, you can turn it into an access point or Wi-Fi repeater, or even use it as a secondary network node if you've got two routers from the same brand that both support the same proprietary mesh software.

There are some smart home sensors that you only truly appreciate when the worst happens. I had a water leak sensor in my home and assumed that it was keeping me protected. I found out the hard way how wrong I was.

Most Linux users never think twice about the kernel running under their system. It just works. But for those who want stronger security guarantees, there's an alternative worth knowing about—and living with it taught me more than I expected.

AV receivers can be finicky or hard to understand at first, so it's easy to mess a thing up or two during setup. Here are some settings to check if you're having any audio problems in your home theater.

When it comes to reading, I’m kind of the queen of it, at least in my family. You really can’t find me without a book at my side, headphones in my ears blasting an audiobook, or, in this case, an eReader in my hands. My Kindle and I have come a long way since I started, and there have been some great times so far.

Whether you’re sick, playing hooky, or just taking a mental health break, nothing recharges the body’s batteries like a good day of rest. The best way to get that, at least as far as I'm concerned, is to settle in on your couch and binge-watch a good TV show.

When you're busy on a home repair, DIY project, or renovation, do you just reach for the biggest battery pack for your power tools? If so, you might not be doing yourself any favors. If anything, it only weighs you down and makes things more difficult than they need to be.

Ever tried building a second brain, only to abandon it three weeks in? I have—more times than I’d like to admit. Capturing ideas is the easy part; organizing, tagging, and maintaining everything is where it falls apart. But I’ve found a cheat code: using Obsidian to capture ideas while Claude handles the organization. Here’s how my system works—and the exact prompts I use.

It's easy to spend a lot of money on your home network in an attempt to make it faster, more stable, or more flexible. Faster Wi-Fi standards and upgrading to a mesh router system can all give your LAN a big kick in the pants.

Earlier this year, Pixel phones got several cool new features. Aside from finally giving the Now Playing feature its own app, there were also a number of Gemini upgrades, but buried under all those additions was one small feature that noticeably improved the experience of using my Pixel phone: Comfort View.

We've all been there. Your PC starts to feel sluggish, or you're staring at a "low storage" warning, and the first instinct is to reach for a third-party cleanup tool. I've done it more times than I'd like to admit. Install it, run a scan, watch a bunch of "issues" pop up, and hope it magically fixes everything.

Finding yourself with a bit of extra cash is a great feeling. Maybe you landed a raise or a promotion at work, put in a few extra hours on a side hustle, or spent a weekend helping a friend or family member move. When that unexpected money hits your account, it’s good to pay down debt when and where you can, and your vehicle is a good place to start.

After expanding into color with devices like the Paper Pro, reMarkable is back to black-and-white. The company has unveiled the reMarkable Paper Pure, a third-generation E-Ink tablet that catches up in performance without making you pay for the color display you might not need.

Do you remember LaserDisc? It was an optical format with twice the resolution of VHS, and it was clearly the superior medium for home movies, yet VHS absolutely dominated it. The most plausible explanation for this I've heard is that VHS allowed people to record TV programs to watch later and that buying home movies wasn't something they knew they wanted.

For any job you can do on Linux—or Windows—there are at least a dozen GUI apps that can do what you want. However, to keep distractions to a minimum, I use the terminal for most of my day-to-day jobs, and I don't miss out on any productivity.