How-To Geek

Tap-to-pay with phones didn’t take off in the U.S. as quickly as in other countries, but it’s now available at most retailers. There’s been one massive hold-out the entire time, though: Walmart. Finally, that’s about to change, and it’s happening very soon.

Did you know that Milwaukee's M12 tool lineup has a lot more than just drills, drivers, and saws in it? I didn't either. Here are five fun tools that you'd never have expected to be part of Milwaukee's lineup.

Most people think building your own apps takes months of learning or a computer science degree. It really just takes a free weekend and a few conversations with Claude to get tools that work exactly the way you want, without ads, without subscriptions, and without features you never asked for. I've built versions of all of these myself, and the gap between what you can make for free and what you'd download from an app store isn't as big as people think.

And so begins the closing out of summer on Netflix. As the world's biggest streaming service basks in the month's standouts like Don't Say Good Luck and The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, there's still a bit more to squeeze out of it, including Adam Scott's horror film The Whisper Man and one topping this weekend's bingeable list: the fifth season of Outer Banks.

With development boards like the ESP32-CAM and ESP32-S3 Sense, you can easily integrate a camera into your microcontroller projects. These can be useful in the home or at work, or just plain fun when integrated into more adventurous projects.

The writing has been on the wall from the moment Nvidia introduced DLSS, and then followed up with DLSS Frame Generation. The company is all-in on AI, and ever since we got frame gen, hardware upgrades have stopped being the sole focus of every new release. Instead, DLSS and Multi-Frame Generation drive the hype.

Google has been my favorite Android manufacturer for a long time. I've used Pixel phones for nearly a decade, and before that, I used Nexus phones and tablets. But that run is coming to an end. Next time I upgrade, I'll be switching over to the Samsung Galaxy side.

Being born in the '80s and growing up with computers from the mid-80s and onward, some of the earliest computer lessons that were drilled into me involved a warning about magnets: keep them far away from any computer!

Some smart home projects put your devices in the most obvious places. If you're building your own video doorbell with an ESP32-CAM module, there's really only one place you're going to put it. There are other projects that can put smart home devices in places that you might not expect.

Do you have a Bluetooth speaker that sounds great on everything except your Android phone? Why would this happen? Is it the speaker? Is it your phone? The answer is probably the Bluetooth codec they've decided to use.

Ten years of fixing other people's computers teaches you patterns fast. The same handful of problems show up again and again, and most of them aren't hardware failures or anything dramatic. Those small decisions seem fine at the time, but they snowball. By the time someone calls me for help, I usually assume it was a user error, not some unfixable Windows issue. There are plenty of common culprits I've traced back to those habits people tend to have, but there's usually an easy fix.

Have you ever installed a new drive or bought a new phone, only to find that you're missing a few gigabytes from your storage. Granted, it's only a few gigabytes—you'll get 476GB out of the 512GB you're supposed to have. But it's an important enough difference to just ignore it.

If you’re lucky enough to have a garage, you’ve not only got a place to park your car but a place to keep things you don’t want in your house, like tools, bikes, and other outdoorsy items.

It's no secret that Ryobi gets a lot of hate on forums and social media, but for the average homeowner or DIYer, they're more than enough. There's a reason it's one of the most popular power tool brands in the US. That said, there are instances where your Ryobi tools could be holding you back.

Most people who switch away from Microsoft 365 end up trading one subscription for a pile of disconnected free tools. Nextcloud is actually so much better than that. Nextcloud replaces many services and apps, like file storage, document editing, video calls, shared calendars, project boards, and a lot more under your control.

The topic of RAM doesn't bring any smiles these days. The RAM-pocalypse made sure of that. But recently, I started thinking about DDR5 RAM in particular, and how it might just be the one generation of DDR (not to be confused with Dance Dance Revolution) that'll never really take off.

A little while ago, my Linux machine was running excruciatingly slow. I attempted a few fixes: data management, optimization, adjusting Timeshift backups. That sort of thing. During that adventure, I found a few processes that were still causing performance issues. So I turned to Linux Namespaces to improve the visibility of my system processes and run applications safely.

USB devices are often fairly small, and old devices can end up being thrown into your junk drawer and forgotten about. If you replace a USB device with something else, or no longer need it for its original purpose, your USB device can end up gathering dust, but you may be able to repurpose it for Home Assistant.

I've recently spent a lot of time testing ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools with Excel, and one thing stands out: the more relevant detail you give them, the less time you spend correcting their answers. But creating a good AI prompt can take longer than doing the Excel task yourself, and that kind of defeats the point. So, to save you the bother, I've broken down the key parts of a useful Excel prompt so you can build one without starting from scratch.

Original programming has been dominating Prime Video's top 10 in August, with Reacher season 4 and Sterling Point season 1 sitting at Nos. 1 and No. 2, respectively. Beyond the list of new and returning shows this month, Prime Video has a stacked library of licensed shows that appeal to mass audiences.