How-To Geek

AI can do a lot of impressive things, and connecting an LLM to your smart home can make it much smarter. It can also make it pretty dumb, too, if you decide that you're going to use it to give a smart bulb a personality.

If you’ve tried using Claude to learn to code and walked away feeling like you just witnessed a magic trick rather than actually learned something, you’re not alone. Without structure, AI coding tools default to doing the work for you—you end up with hundreds of lines of code without understanding the algorithm or the logic behind it.

For the longest time, I used to ssh into my home servers and then use top or htop to check their resource usage. To keep an eye on my Docker containers, I would run Docker stats, I would run docker stats or docker ps. I'd use basic shell commands to check disk and network usage too. Or systemctl to view systemd services. It gets pretty annoying when you have all your services spread across multiple little servers. One of my co-workers told me about Beszel, and it has saved me from all that monitoring headache.

The first 1GB hard drive was released by IBM in 1980. The IBM 3380 Direct Access Storage Device (DASD) was enormous by today’s standards, weighing about 64lbs and costing ~$50,000. We then waited 27 years for the first 1TB hard drive, the Deskstar 7K1000 from Hitachi, which came out in 2007.

The likes of Audi and BMW still dominate the sports sedan conversation, offering polished performance and premium appeal. But as the segment has evolved, many of those cars have drifted toward refinement over raw driver engagement, leaving a gap for something more focused and a little less conventional.

There's a near-endless sea of free and paid photo editing tools at your disposal. While many of them offer powerful features that can completely transform an image, most of the time you only need the app to tweak a few small details. For that kind of quick-and-dirty editing, I've found myself using the built-in Windows Photos app almost exclusively. If you've been ignoring it, allow me to convince you that it might be worth another look.

It's no secret that Google is cracking down against "sideloading" Android apps—which is to say, installing apps from outside the Play Store. Google Play Protect has thrown up the "harmful app blocked" warning for a long time now, but it was simple enough to ignore the warning and install the app anyway. However, in the past few months, Play Protect has blocked app installations completely. This is what you can do to get past Play Protect blocks.

Are you on the fence between using your phone as a 3D scanner or buying a professional 3D scanner? I’ve always wanted a 3D scanner, but I also thought my phone would be just as good. I scanned the same object with both a professional 3D scanner and my iPhone 17 Pro and printed the results—and they were not what I expected.

It's Monday morning, and an "updated" copy of an Excel workbook is sitting in your inbox. But when you open it, it's often impossible to tell what's changed. Instead of playing a game of spot the difference, use these built-in Excel tools to highlight differences in seconds.

A good homelab setup doesn't need to consist of all flashy, exciting applications. The longer I've used my homelab, the more I've come to view the apps that sit idle in the background as the most important services I host.

Narwal’s latest Flow 2 robot vacuum packs a lot of new features compared to its predecessor. With better suction performance, a higher-temperature mopping system with real-time self cleaning, and better navigation, the Flow 2 is a great upgrade to an already fantastic robot vacuum/mop.

There was a time when a luxury car was defined by the logo. Those lines have blurred today, as many mainstream manufacturers offer vehicles in their lineups with advanced powertrains, upscale interior layouts, and connectivity technologies that hold their own against luxury namesakes at a lower price.

When Android phones first took off over a decade ago, custom launchers were all the rage. The idea of completely transforming your phone’s look and feel was a huge draw for enthusiasts—and even non-techies. Today, however, launchers are almost unheard of. They’ve largely fallen out of favor in favor of whatever your phone came with, and frankly, I think that’s for the better.

When you buy a new smart TV, you expect a quality viewing experience as soon as you turn it on. Still, you may be accidentally accepting lower picture quality, unreliable connections, and privacy issues by keeping the default settings. The best performance gains are already inside the device you own. By following these steps, you can fix these distortions, stabilize streaming, stop the data tracking, and speed up your TV to what is now standard in the industry.

Your smart home hub won't last forever. It might be due to the hardware dying or becoming outdated, or because your smart home provider pulls the plug. Whatever the reason, you need to be prepared.

I consider myself part of many fandoms. Some are from my childhood, others from college, and now, as a young adult, but they all mean something to me on some level. One of those just happens to be Star Wars.

Just because your Android phone is starting to get old, it doesn't mean you have to replace it. There are things you can do to keep it running for longer. I recently decided to factory reset my old Pixel to try to freshen it up. Then, after I set it up again, I changed a few key settings. The result is that it feels almost as good as new.

When I was growing up in the '90s I always read about this mythical connection called FireWire. It was a connection mainly found on Macs, and I had never even seen a Mac in person until I was an adult, but long before then it had lost to USB decisively even on its home Macintosh turf. Or did it?

When Android phones first arrived, there wasn’t a built-in flashlight feature. So, flashlight apps were extremely popular—and profitable. One particular flashlight app got caught doing something not so bright, and the US government had to get involved.

True-crime documentaries are always a sure-fire hit on any streaming platform. 2025 saw the release of some doozies—beyond the usual SEO suspects, such as Chaos: The Manson Murders, American Murder: Gabby Petito, and The Fall of Diddy—that proved to us the true crime genre is moving in a direction that values education over exploitation.