How-To Geek

In my search for a media center front-end, Home Assistant server, media server, and do-everything-else computer, I briefly considered buying a Raspberry Pi. Then I caught wind of the used Mac mini market, and it was clear which direction made more sense.

If you're not happy with your internet connection around the house, your ISP and Wi-Fi router are probably the first things you'll blame. But before you pay for a faster internet plan or a new router, there's a much cheaper solution you should try first: a simple unmanaged switch. Allow me to explain.

There's still some heat left in this summer, and while an icy glass of lemonade is a great way to cool down, for a more thorough, deep chill that sends shivers into your bones, there's nothing better than a spine-tingling thriller TV show. Luckily, Netflix has these in spades.

At its annual fall event today, Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo—its first-ever foldable phone. The Cupertino-based tech giant is eight years late to the party, since Samsung popularized the segment in 2019. Unlike many OEMs that first debuted a book-style folding phone, the iPhone Duo takes a different approach with a passport-style design.

Apple just unveiled one of its most important devices of the year, and it's something you can use even if you'd never touch an iPhone. The new AirPods 5 promise significant upgrades to Apple's "default" wireless earbuds, including for Android users — although there are still limitations worth considering on Google-powered handsets.

Firefox, GIMP, and LibreOffice are the obvious, popular apps that you'll see everyone recommend for your Linux system. But there are many more apps beyond those.

Apple is announcing a slew of devices today, but it's starting with its next-generation slab phones—iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. There’s something unusual about this year’s launch—Apple did not announce the standard iPhone alongside the Pro models, marking the first time in six years that the company split its iPhone launch this way.

Android Auto's launcher can get crowded fast, and a cluttered screen is the last thing you want staring back at you while driving. Trimming it down to the essentials makes the whole experience faster, safer, and far less distracting.

Proxmox is remarkably forgiving when you use it the way it was designed to be used. With it, you can have a functioning homelab in an afternoon, but that ease and simplicity can also encourage a lot of mistakes.

The fear of an AI apocalypse has persisted for decades in movies like WarGames and the Terminator series, but now that worry is becoming more than speculative fiction. Both current and recently-departed Anthropic researchers argue that there's a real possibility AI could kill humanity — although the issue is complex.

If you’re like me, you have a bunch of files, folders, and items in your office that make it unorganized and cluttered. Over time, these become increasingly overwhelming, and you forget what’s in each file or folder or which cable goes to which monitor or port.

JSON has become a near-ubiquitous data format, used in API responses, save game files, and configuration. But many people feel it can be better, and various attempts have been made to expand or improve it. JSONC is one of those attempts.

A NAS is one of the cheapest and most convenient ways to keep your data backed up. It’s also fairly reliable, but while HDDs and SSDs can last for years, they will fail eventually. When they do, you could lose everything stored on them, so here are some cheap ways to back up your NAS before that happens.

A dashcam can be one of the most useful gadgets you add to your car, but simply sticking one onto the windshield doesn't guarantee that you're getting the protection you expect. Where you put the camera can affect everything from how much of the road it captures to whether it interferes with your own visibility, and a poorly planned installation can create problems you probably didn't consider.

I know I can’t be the only one who hates how almost everything has become a subscription now. Fortunately, the issue is primarily isolated to popular mainstream software — there’s still a lot of niche software that’s just as good, if not better, that hasn’t moved to the subscription model. This is particularly true in the open-source space, which is filled with genuinely excellent apps that can help you ditch many of your paid subscriptions without losing most of the benefits. Here are three such FOSS apps that I personally used to replace some of my paid subscriptions.

Battery-powered tools are now powerful enough to tackle most jobs, with an ever-growing range of options from impact drivers to nail guns and everything in between. These live in your shed or garage when you’re not using them—but this could be a big mistake.

A Calc II volume of revolution problem is a decent stress test for any study app. It has several moving parts: setting up the integral, choosing the right method, sketching the region being rotated, and labeling each stage clearly enough that a student can follow the logic back to the original question. Type that problem into a general chatbot, and you tend to get a wall of text. Somewhere in the middle is the right answer, but the steps blur together, and there's nothing to look at.

For a long time, the navigation app debate has fallen into two main camps: Waze and Google Maps. Recent events have brought MapQuest back to public attention, so I decided to see if it could genuinely replace Google Maps.

I love my Bambu Lab printers, but I got tired of the software lock-in and decided to see how well I could recreate it with community tools. I was actually able to get remote monitoring and notifications working fairly well without a ton of work, and here's how I did it.

Have you ever wondered why Arch Linux users can’t stop mentioning that they use Arch, by the way? Did you want to try Arch Linux yourself, but then saw the technically demanding installation process and told yourself, “Oh, that’s why”? Well, I’m happy to tell you that Arch Linux is no longer as hard to install as it used to be — and hasn’t been for some time now. Even if you don’t come from a technical background, you can install and set up Arch in an afternoon.