How-To Geek

What if you could have a massive portable monitor for your PC, phone, tablet, or gaming handheld anywhere? XREAL did that with its augmented reality glasses, and now the company has announced an updated model and optional external hub at CES 2026.

Baseus just revealed a super-thin magnetic power bank, in the same style as the Apple MagSafe Battery. It can attach to the back of a phone with magnets, and you can still use it as a regular USB-C charger for other devices.

There are many USB Type-C laptop docks, but the new Baseus Spacemate RD1 Pro is a bit different. It's a vertical tower with 15 ports, a screen for checking the charging status, and a Qi wireless charger on top.

Jokes about "the Year of the Linux Desktop" seem to have been around almost as long as Linux has. The last few years have seen more developers and desktop users taking Linux seriously. Linux powers many servers, including those that bring you sites like this one, but could it finally break through on the desktop in 2026? Here's what would need to happen for Linux to reach a tipping point.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas just kicked off, and Jackery has all sorts of exciting new tech to share, including a solar-powered gazebo that combines outdoor lounging with energy storage. This isn't your average canopy, and I can't wait to put one in my backyard.

Every so often, a product gets released that's truly excellent, but it doesn't receive a lot of attention. It's easy to forget about streaming boxes when we all have smart TVs, spare streaming dongles everywhere, or an old Google Chromecast in a junk drawer. However, this particular streaming box is over 10 years old, and I still use mine daily.

Are you using an AI browser like ChatGPT Atlas, or Perplexity Comet while logged into all your accounts? Letting an LLM automate your browsing can quietly put everything at risk. Here's how AI browsers are being hacked and why no antivirus can save you.

If you have ever tried crunching large datasets on your laptop, maybe a big CSV converted to NumPy or some scientific data from work, you have probably heard your laptop fan roar like it is about to take off. That is a sure sign it is doing some heavy lifting. Push it a little further, hit run on your Python script, wait, and then everything freezes as out-of-memory errors start flashing.

PC gamers want the smoothest experience possible, which usually means investing in top-tier hardware. While graphics cards and CPUs actually make a big difference, there's one component that gets way more attention than it deserves: SSDs.

Microsoft's switch from Windows 10 to Windows 11 left many PCs supposedly obsolete. This is sad news for many PC owners, but good news for you if you're in the market for a NAS or a homelab.

A decade ago, I didn’t want anything to do with Samsung phones. Now they’ve become the only ones I want to own—and while this may be surprising, there’s a single Samsung app that’s a big part of the reason why.

Apple’s AirPods are so ubiquitous, they’ve become the Kleenex of Bluetooth earbuds. But whether you own an iPhone or an Android, AirPods are hardly the only compelling option. As long as you stay clear of the cheapest budget options you see in checkout lines, Bluetooth earbuds, in general, are all pretty awesome.

Got an old smartwatch collecting dust in a drawer? Wondering if there's anything practical you can do with it besides gathering dust? Well, here are five genuinely useful ways to repurpose it into something that still earns its place in your daily routine.

My iPhone 15 Pro has 256GB of internal storage. The last time I'd checked, I was using about half of that capacity. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that my storage was suddenly almost completely full. The culprit was not what I was expecting.

When you buy a tech product, it usually comes in its own box. Many normal people will throw these boxes away, realizing that they're highly unlikely to ever need them again. Some of us, however, find it harder to say goodbye.

I’ve used just about every “read-it-later” app out there, and none of them stuck. To my surprise, what finally worked wasn’t a read-it-later app at all. It was Obsidian.

If you're a music fan who's never tried a high-quality pair of headphones, you just don't know what you're missing. Audiophile headphones built for Hi-Fi playback can completely transform the way you listen to and appreciate music. Here's what I learned when I first delved into the world of audiophile headphones.

Spotify is the most popular music streaming service of all time, so it's a surprise to no one that it changed the music industry forever, mostly not for the better. It's altered how artists release music and how we listen to it. Yet despite everything wrong with Spotify, I still can’t seem to quit.

For weeks, my Wi-Fi felt unreliable in ways I couldn’t reconcile. My house uses an eero mesh network, coverage is strong everywhere inside my home and even out at the fringes of the property, and speed tests at the router consistently looked fine. Yet my Windows work laptop would randomly crawl. Meetings had video issues, and large downloads would slow to a halt. Walking closer to a node didn’t help. Rebooting the router didn’t fix it. Toggling Wi-Fi off and on barely made a difference. Everything seemed to be pointing to "bad Wi-Fi," but there was no clear smoking gun.

This was a quieter week in the technology space, with CES 2026 just around the corner and everyone celebrating the holidays, but there were still new developments for Pebble smartwatches, Plex servers, Linux, and PC hardware. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.