How-To Geek

Pocket eReaders are hot right now thanks to Xteink and a handful of rivals, but they frequently come with compromises or are simply hard to get. Boox aims to change that with the upcoming Picco, a tiny eReader I tried at IFA 2026 — and it's promising so far.

If you’ve tried to build a second brain — one place to store all your ideas and retrieve them when necessary — you probably already know that it’s easier said than done. I’ve made multiple attempts at building a second brain myself, but ultimately failed because of all the effort required to maintain it. What finally made it stick was Obsidian, its Daily Notes feature, and a handful of free community plugins.

Whether your homelab consists of an ISP-provided router and a mini PC or a whole rack that takes up the corner of your spare room, it could always benefit from a few considered upgrades.

People always say they don't have time to watch all the movies and TV shows they want to see. Ironically, in situations when we lose power at home, we have the time, but not the ability. That's why you need an emergency USB stick.

I’m becoming the guy who builds weird phone accessories. This time, the idea was simple: bring back the headphone jack while retaining the ability to use the phone’s charging port. That’s exactly what I did, and it all fits in a custom case.

One of the worst feelings is realizing you're unprepared for a situation, whether that's stuck on the side of the road or during a big weekend project. That's why I always have a selection of dependable tools ready to go for flat tires, stubborn bolts, and other situations. With that in mind, here are five affordable DeWALT tools you'll want in your trunk or in the back of your truck.

Owning an Android or Google TV gives you a lot of freedom, but navigating its interface with a standard remote can sometimes be frustrating. You likely already use your smartphone as a remote to control your TV wirelessly — for tasks like typing long search queries or as a backup remote. While there are plenty of Android and iOS options to control your Google TV, controlling it through Windows 11 is often a less explored territory.

Is there a battle between HDMI and DisplayPort these days? Not really, not anymore. DisplayPort has traditionally been the easy recommendation for PC monitors, and modern DP 2.1 has beaten HDMI when it comes to bandwidth.

Excel has more than 500 built-in functions, but if you asked me which ones I use most often, I wouldn't need very long to answer. After nearly two decades of using Excel professionally, there's a small group I keep reaching for whenever I'm building or fixing a spreadsheet. Some have been around for years, while others are relatively new to modern Excel.

The Pebble Time 2 is the most fun I’ve ever had with a smartwatch. It’s not the prettiest. It’s not the most durable. It’s not even packed with the most features. But this smartwatch sparks so much joy and is so genuinely useful that I haven’t wanted to part with it from the moment I put it on.

It’s no secret that a good percentage of thefts are opportunistic in nature. Thieves target items that are easy to grab, so a good defense often boils down to making items less inviting.

Every morning, I open the same apps and then spend the next few minutes dragging, resizing, and rearranging them across my two monitors. By the afternoon, everything has shifted again. I was getting tired of rebuilding the same desktop layouts, so I went looking for a better way. Then I found an easy-to-use PowerToys tool: Workspaces.

For the past couple of years, I've done most of my published writing from my phone. I know how weird most people find this, so I thought I'd try a traditional desktop PC.

Most of us have an old bookshelf speaker, soundbar, or Bluetooth speaker lying around somewhere. They still sound good, the problem is that they're not very "smart."

I miss the good old days when you had to queue for a movie, lining up outside the theater and passing the Now Showing posters which would get you excited about what you were about to see. I wanted to build something similar for Jellyfin using a cheap ESP32 display.

Nvidia is slowly lifting the veil from the first PCs with its RTX Spark chip, and it's now clearer what they can do. I had the opportunity to demo several computers from Asus, Dell, Microsoft, and other brands at IFA 2026, and they promise to transform computing — although some big questions remain.

Four of the best series to watch on Netflix this weekend came to the service in a 50/50 split—two from the back end of August, and two newbies just dying to make an impact on the Netflix Top 10.

When someone new comes over, one of the first questions I get is why in the world I have a random laptop plugged into my router. Depending on how tech-savvy they are, my answer usually ranges from "Oh, it’s just for movies" to "This is my home server, and here's what it does." So, here’s why I actually keep a decade-old laptop running next to my router.

I'm forever creating dashboards in Excel, and while I get a lot of satisfaction from it, that's part of the problem. I end up going down a rabbit hole, adding more charts, and then wondering whether I left anything out. There's no handbook for creating a dashboard in Excel, as every dataset is different. So I decided to let Gemini do the decision-making for me.

Cassettes, CDs, even vinyls (despite their recent resurgence in popularity) — physical media that you can hold and confidently pronounce as yours has unfortunately become a rarity in the modern world. The digital landscape is one of temporary consumption and conditional ownership, and convenience alone can't make up for the downsides.