How-To Geek

Spending around $30,000 on a sporty sedan usually leads buyers straight to the Honda Civic Si. It's quick, efficient, well-equipped, and backed by Honda's hard-earned reputation for reliability.

Since I've jailbroken my ancient Kindle 4, I've been amazed by what I've been able to do with it. I've turned it into an E-Ink smart home dashboard, used it as a Pocket replacement, and even made it into a slow-refresh secondary monitor. I'd seen that you could add an LLM to KOReader, but I wondered if this was taking things too far.

Any serious Linux user will have their list of favorite command-line apps that they immediately install on any new machine. I am no exception. It seems I'm finding more apps that I want to install. Here are some more of my go-to terminal apps.

As new car prices continue to rise, more owners are choosing to hold onto their current vehicles longer, as the average car in the U.S. is now nearly 13 years old. To keep your car running smoothly well into its teen years, routine maintenance is essential. Two of the simplest and most affordable maintenance items, the engine air filter and the cabin air filter, are often overlooked.

Make sure your passwords are secure with Proton Pass—and save up to 50% on the Pass Plus plan while you're at it.

For years, Pixel phone owners had to put up with a unified "Internet" Quick Settings tile that combined the Wi-Fi and mobile data toggles. If you wanted to toggle your Wi-Fi or mobile data radio, you couldn't simply tap the appropriate tile like you could for more than a decade. Nope, you had to tap it once to open the Internet panel and then tap again to disable or enable Wi-Fi or mobile data.

If you've ever wondered why one of the ports on the back of your TV appears to glow, that's the optical digital audio output via a TOSLINK port. It uses light to transmit data through a fiber-optic cable, which is why the port can appear to glow. While HDMI ARC and eARC have become the standard way to connect a TV to speakers, there are still a surprising number of things you can use your optical audio port for.

"You've got to watch the classics" is a phrase I'll always hear from a parent or relative when I say I haven't seen movies that came out before I was born in the 1990s. While everyone has a different definition, I think classic movies are timeless, innovative, and significant. Some of these films impacted pop culture, reshaped a certain genre, or launched actors into stardom.

People sometimes joke that the Lexus ES is just a Toyota Camry in a nicer suit. That joke has always been an oversimplification, but the 2026 redesign makes it harder to dismiss. For example, both cars dropped their gas-only engines in the same redesign cycle. Every 2026 Camry is now a hybrid. The 2026 Lexus ES is hybrid-only as well, though this year Lexus also introduced a fully electric ES version.

I got into self-hosting earlier this year after building my first NAS, and what started as a fun little hobby quickly turned into an addiction. The more apps I added to my Docker stack, the more value I got from the relatively small amount of money I spent putting everything together.

The internet is a wonderful thing, but we don't always appreciate it. It's only when we lose access that we remember how amazing it really is to have access to pretty much all the information that exists. My internet went down recently, and it took me far too long to notice, so I built myself a tiny internet status light to keep track.

Motorola is the oldest phone brand that's managed to stick around to this day, so it's impossible to write off its success as mere luck. As our telecommunications needs have evolved over the years, so has the brand that's built these phones.

3D printing fixes for broken items is one of the simple pleasures of owning a printer. Why pay over the odds or wait for replacement bits of plastic to arrive when you can just make your own?

When you're trying to get perfect audio at home, it's really easy to spend a ton of money upgrading your main speakers. You might think that a bigger unit or a higher price tag automatically equals better sound quality. That common assumption is honestly the biggest mistake people make in modern home audio setups.

When the format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray raged in the mid-2000s, plenty of early adopters and digital archivists bet on the format that ultimately lost. Their reasoning wasn't nostalgia or brand loyalty, but it came down to three practical advantages.

Thermal paste seems to be awfully simple on the surface, and yet, it somehow generates endless arguments. Dot sizes, application patterns, curing times, replacement schedules, and whether one wrong drop can destroy your entire PC ... I've seen it all.

Most people toss old remotes into a junk drawer the moment they upgrade their streaming device, and there they sit. However, the Amazon Fire TV remote is worth pulling back out because it pairs over Bluetooth instead of infrared, which means your phone, tablet, and PC can all recognize it as a standard input device. That one detail opens up more uses than you'd expect from something that used to just control your television.

Google offers a lot of very useful free office apps, including Google Docs, Google Sheets, Gmail, Google Slides, and more. Many beginners fail to take advantage of the integration between these apps, however. Using the power of Google Drive, you can save yourself a lot of busywork and get things done far more quickly.

I don't drive much these days, but it's nice to have Android Auto whenever I have a long drive ahead of me. However, every time I use it, I keep landing on the same conclusion: a cheap USB cable still beats the wireless experience where it counts.

The rise of AI has been both a blessing and a curse for software development. On the one hand, experienced programmers can turbo-charge their productivity. On the other, vibe-coding means anyone can have a go—even if they have little experience.