How-To Geek

October is on the horizon, which means new movies will be hitting streaming this week. Tyler Perry's latest directorial effort and one of Christopher Nolan's underrated movies hit Netflix. Meanwhile, Ari Aster's folk-horror movie heads to Hulu.

Many self-hosted services require a powerful CPU, lots of storage, or a dedicated GPU, but many of my favorite apps don't. In fact, most of the services I run daily would run acceptably on any PC made in the last 10 to 15 years. If you want to try self-hosting but don't feel like spending a month's rent on a new PC, break out your old laptop that has been collecting dust in your closet instead—it'll do just fine.

You won't have to wait much longer to try Boox's take on a pocket eReader. The company has started taking pre-orders for the Picco ahead of an October release date, and promises to give its rival Xteink some stiff competition.

If you own some Ryobi power tools and battery packs, there's a good chance you have one of its fans. Ryobi makes all sorts of extremely useful tools to keep you cool, but the internet's favorite model is the clamp fan. Here's why, and several creative ways to use this affordable little gadget.

If you have an older iPhone lying around your house collecting dust, you may be sitting on a (digital) gold mine. Even if you moved on to the latest iPhone model, a spare phone can come in handy in unexpected ways.Any old, functioning device can be used in many different ways, so before you give up on your spare iPhone, here are a few ways in which you can repurpose it that don't involve passing it along to somebody else.

I bought my Galaxy Watch thinking it’d make me more productive. I could keep up with my messages, get reminders to move if I’d been sitting for too long, and stay accountable with all my to-dos just a wrist raise away — basically, I could stay on top of all the crucial information without having to reach for my phone and get distracted by everything happening on that big screen.

Google TV is popular, but it hasn't had an easy fight against Amazon's Fire TV and Roku devices. It's not hard to see why. Not only are there many Fire TV and Roku sets, but there's also a wider variety of devices: there's just one Google TV Streamer, but multiple Amazon and Roku media players.

A low-powered CPU can make some tasks slower, while a small disk drive means you’ll have space for fewer files. But a machine with low memory can be catastrophic: applications hanging or getting closed by the memory manager, or even the whole system coming to a halt.

There is an interesting part of the used server market that I think more homelab builders should pay attention to. Most of you probably already know that companies regularly get rid of perfectly usable enterprise hardware once it reaches the end of its supported life. The problem is that when people talk about buying retired enterprise equipment, they usually think about rack servers, workstations, CPUs, or workstation laptops. Disk shelves rarely get the same attention.

Winamp is one of the most iconic programs of the late 90s and early 2000s. Despite its long history, it has fallen by the wayside as newer, more capable programs have taken its place.

If you still have a printer, it's likely something you only use occasionally, so you haven't really been pressured to buy a new one for years now.

I wanted to see whether I could do something more interesting with my NAS than simply use it for storage. I decided to run games on it and stream them across my local network to another computer, with the NAS handling the rendering while the client handled the display and controls. I used a TerraMaster F4–425 Pro NAS and focused on games that matched the hardware rather than trying to turn it into a replacement for a dedicated gaming PC.

If you've ever tried to get a remote desktop working on a Windows Home machine, you've discovered that it isn't especially easy. You have two unappealing options: you can pay for a Windows Pro license just for RDP or you can accept the privacy and security risks of third-party remote access accounts.

File Explorer handles most copy jobs, but it stumbles when transfers get large, long, or interrupted. Microsoft has shipped a command-line alternative for roughly three decades, though, and believe it or not, it's already on your PC. Here's what Robocopy is, where it beats the graphical approach, and who should bother learning it.

Linux Mint has a reputation for being the friendly face of Linux and the perfect first step. The one people point to when they say switching from Windows is easier than you'd think. I believed that for a while. I installed it on my Lenovo IdeaPad Y70, got comfortable, and figured I'd finally made the jump for good. What followed was about a year of regretting that choice entirely, and I would take it back if I could. I wish more people told you what to expect when you switch from Windows to Linux.

I didn’t expect to get this attached to Android Auto, but here we are.

I love reading. My home is stuffed full of books, and so are my eReaders. The problem is that with so many great books to read, I find it hard to finish the book I'm on before I start the next one. I ended up adding a small script to my jailbroken Kindle that stops me from opening any other books until I've finished the one I'm reading.

It's business as usual for Netflix, as the streamer continues to put out new movies this month. Unabomber, a new thriller about the life of Ted Kaczynski, shot straight to No. 1 on Netflix. I expect that movie to stay at No. 1 for at least the next week.

Remember when the most expensive consumer GPUs in the world actually melted? Or, most of the time, when their connectors melted? I do too. But it's not a thing of the past.

A PC desk setup is like an iceberg: on the surface, it looks good, but beneath it lies much more. The hidden portion usually consists of messy cables and wires leading to various ports and outlets.