How-To Geek

Of all the Linux commands, rm is notorious. It's easy to completely wipe out your system with one mislaid rm command as root. I knew not to, but I ran that command on purpose anyway. Here's why.

First, you watched a series of great movies on Paramount+ with runtimes under two hours. Now, we're cutting that runtime to 90 minutes or less, meaning this list is for people who are strapped for time and need something quick.

Brave is doing what Mozilla won't. Mozilla hasn't innovated in years. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of waiting. I have limited options, yet Brave ticks the right boxes. Here are the reasons I left Firefox behind.

The Honda CR-V Hybrid has been one of the stronger players in the hybrid SUV market for years, and it's easy to see why. It looks good, has plenty of useful features, and does a lot of things well without making everyday driving complicated.

Charging a phone should be boring. You plug it in, it charges, you move on. When that stops working reliably on a Samsung, the usual instinct is to swap cables, restart the phone, and wait to see if it fixes itself. That works sometimes, but it misses real causes that add up over time. Luckily, Samsung actually built some diagnostic features right into an app on your phone.

Ring is at last addressing some of its longstanding privacy issues by limiting its access to your security camera videos. The Amazon brand has introduced a TAKE (Throw Away the Key Encryption) security strategy that it claims will improve privacy for your footage while still enabling a raft of smart home features.

Too many people treat Ethernet cables like an afterthought. You use whatever cable is included with your router, or you buy a random Ethernet cable off of Amazon without verifying whether it actually suits your needs. The thing is, what actually separates budget cables from premium ones isn't obvious from the outside. If you test a premium cable against one that is super cheap, you'll end up with a pretty different experience, but you woundn't know that from just looking at them.

In typical Milwaukee fashion, your favorite cordless power tool brand just unveiled several exciting new tools that are still coming later this year. If you need or want more tools, and who doesn't, new Milwaukee products are on the way and will absolutely be worth the wait.

It's been over 20 years since I had to compile a Linux kernel, and that's because the boxed copy of Red Hat Linux someone gifted me wasn't going to work with my PC back then without adding stuff that is standard today.

My movie collection has been through many iterations. It started life on VHS, then moved to DVD, before I ripped all those DVDs so that I could stream them using Jellyfin. I always planned to get a Blu-ray player one day so that I could keep a physical collection in higher quality. I hoped that eventually Blu-ray players would come down in price, but it looks like that's just never going to happen.

The most useful smart home sensors perform routine tasks like measuring temperature and humidity or detecting sudden movements. But there are a lot of weirder sensors that you might not have thought of that can make your home feel futuristic.

I grew up with cell phones that didn't really care if you dropped them several times a day, so I just never got the desire to put phones in cases. Early smartphones were very fragile, but times have changed, and getting a case for your flagship phone is now truly optional.

I've bought a lot of cordless power tools over the years that have come and gone, but one has remained: this trusty old blue Ryobi drill. It's a workhorse that I've owned for over 20 years, and here's why it outlasted everything else.

It's fair to say that streaming has completely revolutionized the way that many of us consume media. While streaming offers convenience, there are some key reasons why owning physical media is still superior.

If you have kids, you'll know how too much screen time can seem to affect your kids' mood and behavior. During the school year, limiting their screen time is fairly easy to do as they're not at home for most of the day. During the summer break, the kids are at home a lot more, so I built a chore tracker for my kids that rewards them with screen time.

Google Pixel phones are not exactly renowned for having a huge selection of features—the downside to minimalism. That’s why I was recently surprised to find a suite of diagnostic tools in the settings. These tools can be helpful for troubleshooting and determining the health of your device.

I stopped using portable applications for a long time. Between cloud storage, web apps, modern package managers, and the ever-growing number of regular apps you can download and install, they just didn't seem all that necessary. That changed when I ran into a situation with a friend's laptop where the operating system was so badly messed up that nothing would work correctly, including internet connectivity. All the cloud apps and installers in the world couldn't help. So, I went home and put together a toolkit to repair any PC I might encounter.

An over-the-air, or OTA, update is any software fix or feature update an automaker sends to a car wirelessly, through a cellular or Wi-Fi connection, the same way a phone downloads a new app or security patch. The car downloads the code, installs it while parked, and comes back online running something different than it did the night before, all without a trip to a dealership.

The PC market is a hot mess right now, with GPUs priced at up to $5,000 and 32GB of RAM going for, at minimum, $400 (DDR5). It's not a good time to buy ... well, basically anything, including SSDs and RAM (obviously). But this is when unexpected purchases start making more sense.

While I like messing around in Linux, it's not my daily-driver operating system. I tend to use it for specialized projects, or when I have no other choice, such as using a Linux Netbook in college, or with handheld gaming systems that work best with Linux for various reasons.