How-To Geek

Fans of documentaries know that Netflix has a knack for delivering weekend viewing that sparks conversation come Monday. And the fact that the chilling series Death of a Pastor's Wife is still perched at No. 1 on the streamer's U.S. Top 10 also says a lot about viewers' appetite for true crime.

Your Galaxy phone now shares photos with the cloud service you're most likely to use. Samsung has confirmed that Gallery is starting to sync with Google Photos instead of Microsoft's OneDrive,

You want an iPhone case that protects your phone and has a functional, sophisticated style. But so many ultra-protective cases on the market are too bulky, overshadowing your iPhone’s design, so all that’s noticeable is that brick of a case.

Many people buy a NAS with a single goal in mind: building a private Plex media server for all their movies and TV shows. But Plex itself requires surprisingly few resources to run, meaning the processor and RAM in your NAS can spend most of their time sitting around, doing basically nothing.

It might be an unpopular opinion, but I think almost all power tool combo kits are a waste of money, especially if you already own a few tools or battery packs. We've all walked into a hardware store and found a 5-tool or 7-tool combo from Ryobi, DeWALT, Milwaukee, or others at what looks like a good price, but it's rarely the smart move. Here's why.

I've spent a lot of time listening to music from a single smart speaker in my home office. While the sound quality is okay, there's only so much a single speaker can do. I recently acquired a ten-year-old hi-fi system, and the difference is night and day.

We keep saying our smartphones are more powerful than the computers we grew up with, but almost nobody actually uses their phone like a computer. That always bugged me, so I’ve tried to make my phone double as my PC for some time now. Granted, the experiments have always been hit or miss — until I finally tried it on my Google Pixel. While it can’t replace a proper workstation, I found it to be pretty good as a portable Linux PC. In fact, it’s so good that it has practically replaced my Raspberry Pi.

When it came time to replace my soundbar, I was ready for something better. The soundbar-and-subwoofer systems I was looking at were running between $300 and $600, and I wasn't excited about spending that much on another soundbar. I've never been completely happy with the soundbar experience, especially when I knew the same money could buy a traditional stereo setup with better speakers that would fill the room.

I've never used Arch before. Not even an Arch-based distro. When I came across CachyOS, it didn't scream "Arch-based" to me, though under the hood, it was. After spending some time with CachyOS, I realized there was another way into the Arch world.

Pi-hole is usually the go-to solution when someone asks about network-wide ad blocking or a basic network monitor, and for good reasons: it is simple, well-documented, and works well for most situations.

Excel, like many apps, is a program of habits. You find an annoying quirk, come up with a way to work around it, and it becomes etched into your muscle memory. Over the years, I've learned that some of these quirks have surprisingly simple solutions: tweak the way you work, press a different key, or change a setting and leave it alone. If any of these five Excel annoyances sound familiar, you can learn the fixes in a few minutes this weekend.

OsmAnd Maps is one of the most popular open-source alternatives to Google Maps. It has a lot going for it, but I can’t deny it’s not the prettiest app to look at. Thankfully, we can fix that — it’s very customizable.

My home is full of smart devices. My office desk alone is covered in different gadgets and sensors. With a little planning, you can reduce the number of devices around your home by combining several of them into a single device.

Are you ready for this weekend's roundup of Raspberry Pi projects? Today, I have some fun things for you to try out, from building your own knowledge base to creating your own custom feed reader, all before Monday rolls around.

Have you seen the slew of new customizable 3D models that are on sites like MakerWorld lately? It's all thanks to a word you might never have heard of before — parametric. Parametric modeling has done more to improve the 3D printing world than almost anything else, and here's everything you need to know.

Netflix isn't always the first streaming service you think of scrolling through when you're in the mood for a world-hopping, alien-hunting, or even Earth-based sci-fi movie. But while a Tyler Perry dramedy and Puss in Boots currently dominate the top three, we're here to launch you out of your brain and into something good.

Most home NAS units are designed to stay powered on and available 24/7. After all, if you want to ensure a backup is made, the best way to do that is keep your backup solution available all the time.

On my personal computer, I do a lot of the things I care most about protecting. I use it for banking and shopping, and I keep personal documents on it that I wouldn't want exposed. Firefox is usually the browser I reach for when privacy matters, but for this machine I wanted something that went a little further.

Public Wi-Fi is convenient, but it can expose more of your browsing than you'd expect. Android has a built-in feature called Private DNS that quietly encrypts one of the most revealing parts of your connection. Here's what it does, how to turn it on, and what else helps.

Windows doesn't need third-party utilities to take care of itself. With the right built-in tools and a bit of setup, a PC can check its own health, repair corrupted files, and even recover from a failed boot without much help from you.