How-To Geek

Are you ready to spend some time soldering and setting up projects on your Pi this weekend? Then today's post is for you! Below, I talk about building a custom turntable with a Pi Pico, designing a custom OBD-II dashboard for your car, and building a tabletop game soundboard.

Like most people, the way I mainly share a photo with friends and family is by texting it to them. This works fine if you just quickly want to share a moment. However, it's a very fragmented situation, and there is a better way—more than one, in fact—built into Google Photos.

More than perhaps any room in your home, the kitchen begs for 3D printed solutions. It’s an area that’s ripe with opportunities for custom optimizations—especially if you’re restricted by space. My kitchen can always use more functionality, and these five prints help.

If you have kids, managing their screen time can be a constant battle. It can be difficult to enforce the rules because it's easy for them to pick up a phone or tablet without you realizing. If you have Pi-hole set up, you can use it to shut down their internet access when it's time for bed.

I've been using VLC for years, so when I recently started reading about mpv as a compelling alternative, I decided to give it a try. My first impression wasn't great. mpv opened my videos just fine, but compared with VLC, it felt almost unfinished. The interface is sparse, there aren't traditional menus full of settings, and a lot of the conveniences I was used to simply weren't there.

The Claude plans have two different usage limit windows. One is a five-hour session limit and the other is a weekly limit that gets reset once a week. Anything you use below your weekly quota doesn't carry over, so any excess capacity is effectively wasted.

Your closest friends are generally the ones you have most in common with, and that often means sharing hobbies. Some of these things you do alone, while others are wholly social affairs. Many of them are even better when combined with a self-hosted project in your homelab.

The ls and cd commands are as old as Linux itself—older if you consider their actual Unix-based origins back in the 1970s. Now, while both of them are just as reliable as they used to be, a few modern alternatives have cropped up promising faster performance and more intuitive workflows. I decided to give them a try, and as it turns out, they’re good enough that I’ve retired both cd and ls from active duty.

You can't accuse Samsung of playing it safe with the Galaxy Z Fold 8. The passport-like design is an even bolder step than last year's slimmed-down Z Fold 7, and fundamentally changes how you use a foldable phone. It's an excellent device that I'm drawn to every day, and might just expand the audience for the Z Fold series. I'm just worried that its intended audience isn't ready to pay the high price for what they get.

Stop me if you've heard this before: "I don't have enough time in the day." I don't have the stats, but I'll go out on a limb to say that 99% of us, including myself, have muttered that common phrase before. In my case, I talk about not having enough time when it comes to streaming. I watch a lot of shows for work, but I struggle to find things to stream when pressed for time. That could mean having some time during a lunch break or needing to wind down before bed, for example.

CachyOS has earned a reputation for being fast, but because speed is easiest to benchmark in frame rates, it’s often discussed in the context of gaming too.

You no longer need a subscription just to make use of advanced AI on your Amazon streaming stick or TV set. Amazon is making Alexa+ available on Fire TV devices for free, saving you the expense of either a Prime or Alexa+ subscription.

With AI chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini becoming our go-to thinking partner/co-worker, more often than not, we use them extensively. Like many, I love using Claude (web or app), especially for high-value tasks such as brainstorming ideas, solution architecture for apps, document generation, or data analysis. However, as a free-tier user, I frequently hit the rolling 5-hour session limits.

20 years ago, the computers in your car mostly handled fuel injection and ignition timing, shifted the transmission, and triggered the anti-lock brakes when something went wrong. Each one ran on a dedicated chip, wired to do exactly one job, and nothing changed unless a mechanic swapped the part.

You might not have to buy a Google Pixel to get an Android smartphone with Qi2 magnetic wireless charging built-in. Well-known leaker Evan Blass has revealed that Motorola is working on a Moto Snap charger that hints at Qi2 coming to its broader phone lineup.

In some ways, your GPU is just an expensive and fancy way to turn electricity into heat and noise. These high-performance components try to squeeze every possible frame out for you, but the cost of the last few frames is much higher than the first few.

Google Maps is great for finding the quickest way from point A to point B. However, when I choose a specific route and share it with someone else, it sometimes sends them on a different path. I found a simple workaround that keeps shared journeys much closer to the route I originally chose.

Used EVs are becoming some of the best bargains on the market, with steep early depreciation putting vehicles that once cost close to $60,000 within reach for around the price of a new Toyota RAV4. This particular luxury SUV is a perfect example. At just three years old, well-cared-for models can be found for roughly $35,000, giving buyers access to a genuinely upscale interior, more than 300 miles of driving range, and the kind of technology usually associated with far more expensive vehicles.

Most of us have had an app freeze at exactly the wrong moment. I used to open Task Manager, hunt through the list, and force it to close. Windows 11 has a much quicker option, though, and it takes seconds to enable.

BMW's X5 has the badge, the reputation, and the luxury-car credentials, but you don't necessarily have to spend BMW money to get a family SUV that feels genuinely upscale. The Mazda CX-90 takes a different approach, pairing a premium-looking cabin with strong driving dynamics and the practicality of three rows.