How-To Geek

We’ve all been there: you come home from work, take a shower, and settle in to stream a show on the kitchen TV while cooking, only for it to keep buffering despite a strong Wi-Fi signal.

Samsung’s long and slow transition to Google Messages is finally coming to an end. On July 6—exactly one week from today—the Samsung Messages app on Galaxy phones will officially be discontinued. It’s time to make the switch.

Every time you search Google, Bing, or Amazon, you see a clean list of results. But under the surface, those pages contain a large amount of structured information, including rankings, product listings, reviews, featured snippets, and related questions. For developers, getting reliable access to that information in real time has traditionally meant building and maintaining complicated scraping systems.

You might soon have a major alternative to SpaceX's Starlink and Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) for satellite broadband. Launch company Rocket Lab is buying satellite giant Iridium Communications for about $8 billion in a move that could keep you connected when you're far away from cellular networks.

I didn't realize Android Auto replaced Google Assistant with Gemini until I tried to make a phone call. What should have been a simple experience made me switch back to Google Assistant. It wasn't exactly horrible, but something hilarious and kind of weird happened the first time I tried calling a contact.

As summer gets underway with its suffocating heat patterns, there’s no better time to sit in the air conditioning and indulge in movies with a casual, crowd-pleasing atmosphere full of adventurous escapist vibes, summer romance, and decade-specific nostalgia.

2021 doesn't seem like that long ago, but in the world of computer technology it might as well have been a century. If you bought your storage back then, the prevailing advice was to get something between 500GB and 1TB, and that SATA was still perfectly fine, with most apps and games seeing no real benefit from the faster (but much more expensive) NVMe drives.

Python has a huge, active ecosystem of third-party libraries for developers to use and build upon. The Python Package Index (PyPI) lists hundreds of thousands, so where on earth to begin?

StumbleUpon is back. Sort of. Although the original site shut down and became Mix back in 2018, other people have developed various randomizer-style websites to provide a similar experience.

I've used the same Kindle for over a decade, and since it worked fine for my needs, I never got around to jailbreaking it. When Amazon ended software support for my Kindle model, I finally took the leap. Now that it's jailbroken, I'm able to use my Kindle for so much more than just reading books.

Over the last few years, you might have come across a common Developer Options hack that promises to free up RAM on your Android phone by limiting background processes. Or perhaps you're still using an app to clear cache and memory.

With companies continuing to release new generations of their smartwatches, one area consistently receives the most attention: fitness. Health and fitness features have become a primary focus of smartwatches in recent years, and that trend shows no signs of slowing down.

I have several Echo smart speakers in my home. Amazon has continued to make the prices of these devices relatively cheap in order to try to lock people into its smart home ecosystem. I no longer really trust my Echo speakers, so I wanted to see if I could put them to use in another way.

You don't really own much of your digital life. Your files live on someone else's servers, your phone reports back to its manufacturer, and the software you rely on every day can change its terms, raise its price, or disappear whenever the company behind it decides. That's the trade most of us made without thinking about it: convenience in exchange for control.

A little over a decade ago, SSDs began to drop in price, making them a viable storage option for consumer PCs and offering significantly faster performance than traditional HDDs.

Shared universe franchises have become so commonplace in Hollywood that the format has made its way to television, yet there is one underrated horror franchise that I feel doesn't receive the recognition it deserves. Not only have properties like Marvel and Star Wars successfully bridged the worlds of movie and television like never before, but franchises like The Boys and Star Trek prove that even television properties can become expansive multi-narrative hits. For better or worse, the concept of a shared universe has endured into the 2020s.

Hybrid models have become the default recommendation for anyone looking to save money at the pump. Automakers continue to expand their electrified lineups, and many buyers assume that impressive fuel economy now requires some form of battery assistance.

Documentaries have quietly become one of the most reliable genres to watch on streaming. And whether they're delivering everything from tabloid-worthy court cases and gorgeous concert epics to soaring music biographies and a fish-out-of-water series that shouldn't be good but is, a good doc mixes the best parts of journalism, entertainment, and storytelling.

Storage is one of those parts of Linux that most people only think about when something breaks. You pick a file system during install, trust it with your files, and then forget it exists. It sits under everything: your OS, your home folder, your logs, your downloads, your work, and all the small mistakes you make while changing things. For years, that mostly means one thing: when a file changes, the old data is overwritten by the new data, and you move on.

Not all Android smartwatches are created equal. The Pixel Watch has a few exclusive features that you won’t find on a Galaxy Watch or any other Wear OS device. If you have one on your wrist, you should be sure to know the benefits.