How-To Geek

How much are you paying your ISP every month? If you ask me, it's always too much, but I've had some bad luck with mine (one tried to get me to pay them $1,000 to let me leave).

Genesis loaned me a 2026 GV60 Performance AWD for a week here in Detroit recently, a sharp-looking SUV finished in Uyuni White over a Sky Blue and Prussian interior. It's an eye-catching vehicle on the road, with just about every luxury feature you'd expect from an all-electric SUV in this class.

You aren't immune from the wave of streaming service price hikes just because you have a bundle. Disney is raising prices for bundles that include ESPN and Hulu, as well as stand-alone ESPN access.

It's now clearer just when you can expect GrapheneOS' privacy-oriented Android ROM to be available beyond Pixel devices. The GrapheneOS team has finally shared more details on when its software will come to Motorola phones.

In the olden days, everyone taking their hardware seriously also had scratch disks. But they're currently considered to be from a bygone era.

Photoshop is still the photo editor most people know, and there's a reason it has stuck around for so long. But paying for another monthly subscription is harder to justify when GIMP is free and already handles most of the editing work many people actually need. Adobe currently charges $22.99 per month for Photoshop on an annual plan billed monthly, which works out to about $276 a year before you've even added any other Adobe apps.

The 2026 Toyota Grand Highlander Hybrid is a big three-row SUV, but its size doesn't stop it from going a surprisingly long way between fuel stops. The front-wheel-drive version has an estimated 619-mile range, giving it the kind of road-trip range you'd normally expect from something much smaller.

Foldable phones are having a big moment. Samsung’s two Galaxy Z Fold 8 phones are thinner, lighter, and pushing into brand new form factors. The iPhone Fold is also rumored to be coming this year. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual for the Pixel 11 Pro Fold—but I’m not reviewing it from a typical perspective.

If you shell out some of your hard-earned cash on a PCIe 5 SSD, you certainly expect it to hit five-digit speeds. It's meant to be the fastest it can possibly be in this current generation, after all. But what if testing the drive reveals much slower speeds?

I got tired of doing the same little tasks in Windows over and over: opening the same websites, creating folders, and copying text just to search for it. So I started using AutoHotkey to make those jobs happen with a keystroke or a few characters. Over the course of a week, those tiny shortcuts save me hundreds of clicks and keystrokes.

Over the years, more web browsing has been done on mobile devices than on desktops or laptops. While those devices are still in use, you probably reach for your phone to visit a website before your laptop nowadays.

The Android operating system comes with a Special App Access menu that includes a number of powerful permissions, most of which can grant apps installed on your phone a high level of access to the device.

Smart plugs are often dismissed as little more than a cheap way to remotely control lamps or switch on your coffee maker before you even get out of bed. But they're capable of much more than that, and one of their most useful applications is right there—in your homelab.

A Pi-hole is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s also a window into every single digital interaction on your network. It sees every domain every device in your house asks for, timestamped and tied to a specific client IP.

While there is still only one Windows, Linux distros come and go. While some early distros have stood the test of time, others have fallen into computer history. I'll look back on some pioneering Linux distros you can't get anymore, at least in current versions.

The second-generation Echo Dot was the first smart speaker I ever owned, but it was ultimately a disappointment. There was nothing inherently wrong with the hardware; it was Amazon's proprietary software that was always the problem. It's possible to hack an old Echo Dot and escape Amazon's ecosystem altogether.

DeWALT makes excellent power tools, and most people have all the basics that are pretty large. Sometimes, all you need is a small and versatile tool to get the job done. Whether you're low on space or don't want to buy huge tools, here are some tiny DeWALT tools that'll deliver big results.

Linux users like to argue about which distros are best, especially on Reddit. This can be either generally or for a particular use case, such as on laptops. I wanted to look at some of the "worst" distros and see if they were really as bad as some Reddit users claimed.

Switching to Linux is easier than it used to be, but one of the issues that hasn't changed is software compatibility. Genuinely good open-source apps that should run anywhere don't run on Linux at all or just aren't good at it. Unfortunately, open source doesn't mean cross-platform. Some of these tools are so deeply tied to Windows internals that even their own developers haven't figured out how to move them.

Do you know how many requests your smart devices make on your network? I didn't until I tracked it for 24 hours. Out of over 30 devices, just six smart plugs and switches used nearly 1.5GB of data and made nearly half a million DNS requests—in one single day.