How-To Geek

I have a lot of Zigbee smart home devices in my home. The low-power mesh network offers several benefits over Wi-Fi, but it's not perfect. When one device kept dropping off the network, the fix was cheap and effective.

After 22 months of paying for Tesla Premium Connectivity on my 2021 Model 3 Performance, I'd had enough. The connection was unreliable, dropping at the worst times, and I couldn't justify the monthly fee for a service that consistently let me down.

For years, the Raspberry Pi was the name in DIY, tinker, and maker space. If you wanted to build anything with a network connection or that involved a ton of GPIO, the Pi was the default choice. However, as hobbyist smart home and IoT projects have become more popular, the amount of hardware to support them has grown significantly. While the Pi lineup is still valuable and versatile, the ESP32 has evolved from a niche curiosity into a serious contender for most DIY projects.

All the popular power tool brands make a ton of excellent tools and accessories, giving us more choices than ever. Big names like Ryobi and Milwaukee are often compared because of their offerings, not to mention they're owned by the same company, but make no mistake: they're very different. And what gives Ryobi an advantage isn't what you think.

Is your home network not running as fast as you'd like it to? Well, outside of the obvious things like making sure to use Ethernet everywhere you can, here are five mistakes that could be the reason your home network is running slow.

My phone has hundreds of screenshots of restaurants, museums, and other locations so I can "look them up later." Unfortunately, I almost never do. Thankfully, there is a feature available for Google Maps on iPhones that turns that mess of half-forgotten screenshots into locations saved on Google Maps automatically.

If you run an AI locally, you get complete privacy, no API or subscription costs, offline access, and you never have to worry about running into your usage limit right when you're in the middle of something. For a long time, AI coding assistants were janky, unreliable, and painfully slow, but newer local models can hold their own against the cloud-based models as long as you're careful about how you use them.

I was sick of using Alexa in my smart home, so I decided to replace her with Assist, the local voice assistant in Home Assistant. At first, the experience wasn't great and I'd often have to repeat myself, but by making a few simple changes the experience improved dramatically.

A new month means it's time to start preparing for the new movies and TV shows arriving on Netflix. One of the movies I have my eye on is Office Romance, a rom-com that pairs Jennifer Lopez with Brett Goldstein. The other movie I'm interested in is In the Hand of Dante, which boasts an A-list cast of Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Jason Momoa, Martin Scorsese, and many more.

Docker Desktop is undeniably elegant. The clean interface, one-click management, and abstraction of complexity make it great for beginners, but that abstraction comes at a price.

Having a capable 3D printer is important, but even the best printer in the world won't do a good job if you give it bad instructions.

Docker is one of my favorite things about Linux. I like Docker because it's based around open-source containers, efficient for my needs, and most containers are, in my experience, simple to work with.

June is finally underway, and Paramount+ has outlined all it has in store for U.S. subscribers this month. The first month of the summer is slated to be a doozie, with UFC at the White House, a spectacle that's sure to be, er, interesting, some dark and mysterious documentaries, and a new season of the Michael Fassbender spy series The Agency on tap.

The midsize truck segment and its move away from the tried-and-true V6 didn't happen overnight, but it happened faster than most of us realized. Within the span of just a few model years, turbocharged four-cylinders replaced naturally aspirated V6 engines across nearly every nameplate in the segment.

Right now, everyone watching Netflix is likely still reeling over The Boroughs or letting The Crashdocuseries sink in, but if you're quite ready to move on from those buzzy hits, a new month has brought a fresh roster of newly-added movies to the service for U.S. subscribers. And I'm here to help you sift through them with a few highlights.

Most drivers have experienced this unfortunate scenario at least once. You’re driving down the highway, minding your own business, when suddenly you find yourself behind a dump truck. Normally, this wouldn’t be a cause for concern, but this truck has just left the quarry and is filled to the brim with gravel. As it rumbles down the road, bits of gravel begin to pelt your car at 70 mph. You can hear the tiny stones bouncing off your paintwork.

It's the first of the month, which means Netflix has added a substantial number of new movies and shows. Some of the highlights include the Creed movies, Friday Night Lights, The Karate Kid franchise, and the first five seasons of Hawaii Five-0. Keep an eye on the new movies coming later this month, including Office Romance and Little Brother.

Using Android Auto wirelessly is very convenient and cuts down on cable clutter, but it isn't perfect. The biggest issue is how heavy it can be on the battery. Obviously, it will never be able to match a wired connection that charges your phone as you go, but by tweaking a few settings, you can really reduce the battery drain.

You might think that hosting your own local photo server is a great way to save money instead of just paying for Google Photos. However, you'd be wrong. By the time you buy a NAS, storage, and pay for cloud backups, you'll be spending far more than Google charges you.

Welcome to June. It's a new month, which means the major streaming services will be adding a significant number of movies this week. In case you missed some of last week's top movies, be sure to check out two HBO Max movies: The Moment with Charli XCX and Miss You, Love You with Allison Janney and Andrew Rannells.