How-To Geek

Using a TV to control your smart home makes sense, which is why Google Home and Samsung SmartThings come baked into many TVs. But what if you want something a little more private? In the absence of a Home Assistant Android TV app, Homey's new release is your next best bet.

Excel is well-known for being a versatile and powerful desktop app, but I always found the mobile app (iOS and Android) frustrating to use. As it turns out, I was looking at my spreadsheets the wrong way. A little-known feature called Cards View replaces cramped grids with a touch-friendly layout.

Presumably, the whole reason you went to the trouble of setting up a smart home in the first place was to make your life easier, not add more frustration to it. In particular, after putting up your feet in the evening following a long day's work, you want to benefit from all the automation you've carefully installed.

Spending a few hundred (or upward of a thousand) dollars on a 3D printer isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. But one thing that shouldn’t hold you back is the erroneous belief that 3D printing has a steep learning curve.

If you’re anything like me, you probably have hundreds (if not thousands) of bookmarks—articles you saved for later, resources from a phase you’ve moved on from, and links that may not even work anymore. At first, you probably thought that you’d clean them up later, but now it’s gotten so big that you’re probably paralyzed just by looking at it.

It's no secret that Samsung makes some of the best phones, but they're always full of redundant apps and bloatware that waste precious storage space. After reviewing Samsung phones for the last 14 years, I've fallen into a routine of purging all the apps I don't want. Here are several of the apps I uninstall from every Galaxy phone.

My smart home budget is limited, so I can't buy every sensor available. Water leak sensors always felt like a bit of a gimmick, so I held off from buying any for quite some time. Life taught me a lesson about how useful they can be, and now water leak sensors are a key part of my smart home.

There was a time when Spotify was the easy, obvious, and definitive choice for people who cared about music. It was well-designed, helped you discover music you'd fall in love with, felt fairly priced, and nothing else really made you want to switch.

Here are some plugins I install and settings I change whenever I'm setting up a new Obsidian vault. My goal is to create a sort of scaffolding to stay organized as the vault grows.

Alexa+ is Amazon’s new, premium voice assistant that costs $20 per month (but comes free with Amazon Prime). Amazon’s top-billed feature is a conversational assistant that’s a lot chattier than the previous version.

The just-released Lenovo Pro 9i (Gen 11) Aura Edition creator laptop is an incredible piece of modern tech. From the gorgeous tandem OLED display to enough power to be a portable gaming rig, there's really not much to dislike about this premium Windows laptop.

Rivian has started deliveries of the R2 electric SUV over two years after its announcement. The move marks a new chapter for the company: like Tesla did with the Model 3, it's moving from the luxury EV market to a considerably wider audience.

As someone who watches a ton of movies and TV shows, there are certain projects that I watch on a regular basis. Even though I can recite much of the dialogue and point out what will happen next, I never grow tired of it. In a way, I'm addicted to these miniseries and films. You could call them my healthy obsessions.

While we all sit staring at the calendar waiting for House of the Dragon's third season to premiere on June 21, if you feel like a binge stop-gap guaranteed to hold a candle to the dragon-filled series, there's no shortage of shows on HBO Max that have proven themselves worthy on the Emmy Awards battlefield.

While Microsoft used to denounce Linux in the 2000s, it can't seem to stop itself from finding ways to run Linux programs on Windows today. While WSL, or Windows Susbsystem for Linux, has been the main way to run Linux utilities on Windows, the company has ported some common Linux command-line tools to Command Prompt and PowerShell. I decided to take them for a spin.

The average new-vehicle transaction price is hovering at or near $50,000 today, the highest it’s ever been in the automotive industry. It seems the days of ultra-affordable cars have passed, and even a six-figure salary may not leave enough margin when factoring in the total cost of vehicle ownership.

Ubuntu isn’t your only option for reviving old PCs through Linux. Xubuntu is a lighter version of Ubuntu capable of running on moderately old hardware. Let’s see how well it delivers the Ubuntu experience on an older laptop.

When you hear that a router supports Wi-Fi 7, you naturally expect it to pack three bands—2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz—along with other Wi-Fi 7 features such as MLO (Multi-Link Operation), 320MHz channels, and 4096-QAM. In reality, however, MLO is the only one of those three Wi-Fi 7 features that routers are required to support, which has resulted in many Wi-Fi 7 routers shipping with only two bands: 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Why do they lack the 6GHz band, and are they still worth getting? I'll answer those two questions below.

You may already know that checking a project's status before you clone it with git is a good idea, but did you know there's a convenient and attractive way of showing those stats right in your terminal? Meet Onefetch.