How-To Geek

When it comes to power tools, few names carry the recognition of Milwaukee. That's especially true when it comes to professional trade work. So, whether you're a DIYer, a new homeowner, or an electrician apprentice, here are a few tools some of the pros swear by.

Whether you're buying a MacBook or a Windows laptop, most modern laptops suffer from one serious problem: They don't have enough ports. Thankfully, you can solve that problem for less than $30.

Canonical announced today it's collaborating with SpacemiT (Hangzhou) Technology Co., Ltd. in an effort to make Ubuntu run on SpacemiT's RISC-V systems-on-chip (SoCs) that use the RVA23 profile. The SoCs include its upcoming K3 series, and there's now support for its existing K1 SoC as well.

Many Plex performance problems don't come from your server or network; they're caused by the files themselves. If you choose the wrong HandBrake preset when preparing your videos for Plex, it can cause buffering, quality loss, and excessive CPU load. Fortunately, it's easy to fix.

Stop wasting hours manually sorting, deduplicating, and filtering your data in Excel. Instead, combine FILTER, UNIQUE, and SORTBY to create a self-cleaning data engine that does all the work from a single cell and never needs updating.

This month, HBO Max is bringing us access to some eye-opening new content. In addition to an exclusive movie debut, you can expect the return of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the final season of a sexy drama series, two new series debuts—one of which is based on astounding true events—and a true-crime documentary set in the hometown of the mirrored glitterball. Now it’s a party.

Android has evolved a lot since the first phone arrived back in 2008. Even in the last 4–5 years, there are dozens of new features you've likely forgotten about or never remember to use.

Do you use Linux Mint but feel like you’re not getting the most out of it? Or maybe you think Mint is too basic for serious work. Whether you’re a student or a working professional, these three Cinnamon applets can help you become more productive on Linux Mint.

Car culture and PC culture share more vocabulary than you’d think—often entire concepts lifted straight from automotive engineering. Here are nine common PC terms that came directly from car culture, and how their meanings shifted (or stayed the same) when they drifted over.

There's a reason why Outlook is one of the most widely used email providers. But it's even better when you know how to get around it better.

You may think that Android's USB debugging feature, hidden within the developer options, is only for developers. But it can be very useful for just about anyone and could very well save your data someday. To do that, you'll need to have enabled the feature beforehand.

Last year, wireless charging for Android devices received a boost thanks to Qi2. The Galaxy S25 was one of the first to support this new standard, but Samsung infamously left out one of its biggest features: magnetic wireless charging—a.k.a. “MagSafe.” The Galaxy S26 series is making the same mistake.

Got an old Android phone sitting unused in a drawer? By installing an open-source ROM, you can bring it bang up to date and give it a whole new lease of life. That's what I did with my old Motorola phone. Here's how it went.

A non-working NVMe drive can be alarming. Not only are NVMe SSDs expensive, but if it was previously working and your system now won’t recognize it, it could also put your data at risk.

Working as a developer doesn't mean you always code. Often, you're assigned boring, mundane tasks. Be it converting data formats, encoding and decoding data, or validating their structure, jumping from tool to tool is cumbersome. That's where Dev Toolbox comes into play.

If you’ve been shopping for a Prius because of its affordable starting price, but dream of something more refined and luxurious, the used market has an intriguing alternative. For roughly the same price you’d pay for a new Prius, you can step into a German sedan with premium appointments, thoughtful design, and the kind of build quality usually reserved for higher price brackets. It’s a rare opportunity to get true luxury without stretching your budget.

You're probably familiar with the most common ways to trigger automations in Home Assistant. You can trigger an automation when the state of an entity changes, when you press a button, when presence is detected, or at a specific time of day. Today we're going to take at some lesser-known triggers that can be just as useful.

BYROW is the gold standard for row-based math in Excel. By housing your formulas in one spilled range, you eliminate the risk of manual overrides, keep your files lean, and make your data more scalable. It's the easiest way to turn a fragile, messy workbook into a robust tool that actually works.

The one thing that slows me down (or at least used to slow me down) was having to look up documentation or commands while working with Termux. So I found a way to bring an AI assistant (not a coding agent) into Termux. Now I can look up commands and search for stuff on the fly without leaving the terminal. It's helping me learn Termux faster and saves me the trouble of switching between apps.

Most people getting into Linux just use Ubuntu, but there are a lot of other distros out there. One of them is Fedora, which is actually pretty cool.