How-To Geek

I miss when Android felt like my playground. My ground, my rules.

Apple is introducing its first-ever smart display, the Apple HomeView. Announced at the October 13th Welcome Home event alongside an upgraded Apple TV 4K and the next-generation HomePod mini 2, HomeView aims to unify the smart home around a large, super-intelligent screen that looks suspiciously like an Apple Watch.

If Netflix has a reputation for being a king of thrillers, Paramount+ can claim to be a king of sci-fi. The Paramount streaming service is loaded with entertaining sci-fi shows and movies to watch with the click of a button.

Have you ever emailed yourself an attachment, uploaded a file to cloud storage, or connected your phone with a cable just to move something between devices? If so, you know how unnecessarily complicated and frustrating file sharing can be. Things become even more awkward when your devices run different operating systems.

The ocean is calling in the official trailer for Expedition: Saving Our Seas. Narrated by ocean conversationalist and Moana voice actress Auliʻi Cravalho, the one-hour National Geographic special studies environmental change in all five ocean basins.

I've been playing guitar for more than two decades. I wish I could say that it made me an elite guitar player, but sadly it has not. But between guitar playing and running live sound for different bands, I've developed a pretty good understanding of the kind of gear it takes to get the job done in different situations. Over the years, I’ve bought, sold, and experimented with more amps than I can count.

You just spend a few hundred dollars on a fancy 2TB NVMe SSD, but when you plug it in to your Windows PC, you notice that only about 1.8TB show up. Given the cost of storage, it is painful to "lose" 9% of the storage you intended to buy before you transferred a single file.

Apple is expanding its smart home portfolio beyond speakers and Apple TV 4K. And the company is enlisting two established hardware makers to help. The Apple Home Collection is a lineup of cameras, a video doorbell, a smart lock, and thermostats built in collaboration with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. The gadgets aren’t slapped with Apple branding, though—the goal is to make them easier to set up, manage, and work natively with the Home app.

That spare Kindle you retired after upgrading doesn’t have to sit in a drawer. Jailbreak it, and the same e-ink screen can power five different projects, ranging from helping with appliance repair to telling you whether the weather is good enough for painting outside or not.

After decades of using Excel, you'd think I'd have run out of things to grumble about. Nope. There are still plenty of little frustrations I've learned to work around, which is why I'm always happy to see Microsoft smooth out the rough edges. Three recent updates have caught my eye, and refreshingly, Copilot has nothing to do with them.

Product recalls are surprisingly easy to miss despite their relative importance. If you’ve added any Ryobi tools to your garage in the last few decades, it’s worth checking that none of them have any outstanding recalls. If they have, you can easily use Ryobi’s website to rectify the problem with a replacement, refund, or repair.

A solid multi-tool is one of those everyday carry items I think everyone should have. Personally, my multi-tool is indispensable, and I didn't need to drop $100+ to get Leatherman reliability. Whether you like always being prepared, tackling little repairs around the house, or tightening up a loose bolt, a multi-tool is the perfect EDC. Here are a few affordable options with premium utility.

Every homeowner or trade worker has their preferred power tool brand, and whether you're team Ryobi, love everything Milwaukee, or something else, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the nearly identical options at big-box retail stores. Each brand makes a few unique items catering to certain professions or tasks, and here are five useful Ryobi tools that Milwaukee doesn't make.

People use all kinds of unconventional workarounds to share files between Android phones and Windows PCs, such as emailing themselves or shuffling files through cloud storage.

Linux has a reputation as a difficult operating system for enthusiasts only or as the operating system running in a data center. However, it is more widespread than that. It runs countless devices you see and use regularly—and a few you don't—even though it isn't immediately obvious.

It's a very common issue to try to unplug an Ethernet cable and it won’t move. You squeeze the tiny clip, yank back, and the plastic refuses to budge. I've broken one before, so my first instinct is to assume that I broke another one. Don't let your anger get the best of you and try to pull more. Your method is likely the problem.

Earlier this year, I bought a 6TB hard drive and hooked it up to an old laptop for one simple task: to back up my photos and manage them through Immich so that I could finally stop paying for Google Photos. Between my wife and me, we had around 50,000 photos to move over, but even after loading them all onto the server, I’d barely scratched the surface of the drive’s capacity.

Now that smartphones are firmly ingrained in our lives, we've seen "minimalist phones" rise in popularity. The problem is, these phones are often too simple, and a regular smartphone is still required. LTE smartwatches are a nearly perfect middle ground, but what if you don't like wearing a watch? I've got a solution.

Changing layer height is the easiest way to balance print quality and print time. It’s a simple, one-size-fits-all approach you can make with a few clicks in your slicer before you send a job to the printer. For a smarter approach, try varying the layer heights throughout the print so that you get the best of both worlds: detail where you need it, raw speed where you don’t.

I've always dreaded turning on my car and getting nothing but that dry click from the battery. When nobody is around to give you a jump, scrolling through quick internet hacks sounds tempting, but don't be fooled. People post clips making power tools look fast and harmless, but rigging them together can damage what's actually under the plastic casing.