How-To Geek

Your smart home sometimes requires your attention in the same way that your brick-and-mortar home does. Remembering these tasks can help you avoid problems later on.

Obsidian has hundreds of community plugins—so many that simply browsing the list can feel overwhelming. Most plugins are built for specific workflows, and not every plugin will be useful to everyone.

There's a reason Paramount+'s fast-paced new movie Wardriver sits at the top of the streamer's Top 10 rankings—it's a thriller, and people love them. In fact, according to FlixPatrol, most of the biggest streaming services currently have thrillers among their top five because they offer mystery, crank up the tension, and dare you to look away lest you miss something.

I have broken Linux desktops in all the usual ways. I have installed a random PPA because some forum comments from 2018 sounded confident. I have removed a package that looked useless, only to discover it was holding the login screen together with tape and ancestral prayers. Not only that, but I upgraded at midnight, watched the system return with a black screen, and then pretended this was “learning” (copeeee!).

HBO Max has a reputation to uphold. It's one of the O.G. premium cable networks and has been the home of prestige TV for decades—it's the home of the dragons, the mushroom-zombies, the goombahs, and the rich people misbehaving at luxury resorts. But it's also got a whole lot of weird and funny stuff to make a marathon out of.

Google Photos caps your free storage at 15GB, and that isn't just your email—it is pooled between Drive, Gmail, Photos, and every other Google service. Given how many things it gets used for, that storage space disappears pretty quickly. If you need more storage, or if you use iCloud, you're basically forced to opt into a monthly subscription.

When it comes to in-flight entertainment, there are two kinds of flyers—the ones who gamble on the random crud on the seat-back screen or the airplane Wi-Fi and those who download their entertainment the night before. Be the second kind. TV shows offer the ultimate flexibility when flying. You can watch a single episode between the drink cart and your nap, or binge a whole season on a long-haul flight—it's your call.

If you've ever held the power button to shut your PC down, you've done an "unsafe shutdown," and chances are that your SSD wasn't too happy about it. The event was probably logged, adding up to your error count.

The last year has been a roller-coaster for those competing in the world of electric vehicles. From tariffs to the removal of the federal tax incentive for EVs, demand for electric vehicles has slowed down drastically. For those that invested the most, like Honda, this turbulence has been quite costly. Now it has officially claimed another victim.

Google Maps has quietly evolved far beyond turn-by-turn directions. Buried in its settings and menus are tools that can change how you explore, navigate, and trust the places you visit. Here are three worth turning on.

You might not have heard of Xteink, but it's shaking up the eReader world through the miniscule size of its devices: you can fit them in your pocket so that you're more likely to read your favorite book than your Instagram feed. The Chinese brand is capitalizing on this by releasing the X4 Pro, a similarly tiny reader that adds some heavily-requested features.

The modern gaming landscape has changed drastically over the past decade. In the early-to-mid 2010s, games like Grand Theft Auto V, Far Cry 4, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt heavily favored strong single-core performance. This played directly into Intel's strengths. With its focus on strong single-core performance and fewer but faster cores, Intel's CPUs dominated gaming for years.

If you've ever used Win+Shift+S for quick screenshots, you'll know how handy it can be and how much time it can save. But there's another shortcut that's even more useful. On recent versions of Windows 11, Win+Shift+T extracts editable text directly from your screen, turning information trapped in images, PDFs, and presentation slides into text you can immediately reuse.

Tom Hiddleston is fascinated by Pompeii. As he tells me below, "Pompeii isn't just a place; it's the people." Outside of acting, one of Hiddleston's true passions in life is the ancient world. Stealing a page out of his character Loki's playbook on the Marvel show on Disney+, Hiddleston attempts to travel back to 79 AD to investigate the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston.

Blu-ray may very well be the last physical media we get when it comes to video content, but if history had gone just a little differently, it would be HD-DVDs being frantically collected by media nerds today, and not Sony's gift to image quality purists.

The luxury SUV market is full of expensive options, but not every buyer wants to pay a premium price for a premium badge. More shoppers are looking for vehicles that deliver comfort, technology, and refinement without the long-term costs associated with traditional luxury brands.

Muscle memory is hard to shake. If you've spent years in Photoshop, you're not going to have a good time switching to GIMP. It took me three tries to switch over, and even then, tools like PhotoGIMP were incredibly helpful. You're unlearning years of shortcuts and what feels ingrained, which is hard to commit to for a tool you've never used before. If you're on the fence about switching to an alternative, then this tool is exactly what you need.

Mesh Wi-Fi is supposed to fix dead zones without filling your home with Ethernet cables. After all, Ethernet is fantastic, but only if you can easily run the cable from place A to place B, and preferably without it becoming an eyesore.

For me, being a fan of physical media never went out of style. I've never much cared for streaming, and when I douse it, I'm selective or self-host whenever possible. With some companies ditching physical media altogether, there's never been a better time to start collecting again. Of course, prior to now, streaming services have always been missing episodes of our favorite show despite its convenience. So I grabbed three of my favorite shows on DVD so I could have a complete collection.

Samsung is following Apple into the credit card space. The company has announced a Galaxy Card that not only rewards you for buying its own devices (such as the imminent Galaxy Z Fold 8), but also for some of the services you'd use regardless of platform.