How-To Geek

There are hundreds of open-source apps out there, especially now in the era of vibe coding—it is actually becoming a bit of a problem.

Alexa is the voice assistant that changed the game. Amazon made controlling your smart home with your voice accessible to everyone, but that convenience comes with a cost. Things you say to Alexa get sent to Amazon's servers and may be listened to by Amazon contractors, but Home Assistant lets you set up truly local voice control.

Before cloud storage became a thing, before anyone ever thought of keeping a NAS at home (much less an all-SSD NAS), and before many of us turned into bona fide data hoarders, plenty of businesses kept their data on cassettes small enough to disappear in a desk drawer.

Most people who buy 3D printers, myself included, mainly print models that other people make. Talented sculptors and designers who make things that are beautiful, useful, or both.

Even after years of clicking through the same menus, Photoshop still has tricks hiding in plain sight. These three features changed how I work, and I had no idea they existed.

Ryobi makes all sorts of power tools in various sizes, but did you know the brand has an entire line of small USB-C rechargeable tools for around the house? Whether you're short on space or don't want to buy huge tools, here are some tiny Ryobi tools that are still good enough for big jobs.

Passengers who refuse to wear headphones on a flight normally just get a scolding or mean glare from fellow flyers, and that's their only punishment. But now, those traveling with United Airlines may face harsher punishments than just peer judgment if you try and play audio without headphones.

Did you know that your router can function as a presence-detection sensor for your Home Assistant smart home? It’s easy enough to set up, perfect for some things, and terrible for others.Your router can detect when you leave home, but there's a catch

Most families end up scattered across three or four different cloud services without ever deciding where to be. Photos go to iCloud, documents pile up in Google Drive, the shared calendar lives somewhere else entirely, and at some point, everyone stops trusting that anything is actually backed up. I spent longer than I'd like to admit in that situation before I moved everything to a self-hosted Nextcloud server.

Tinkercad is an easy-to-use computer-aided design (CAD) app that runs in a browser, but it’s not without its limitations. That’s why I was excited to hear about SketchForge, a completely open-source alternative with a few nice extra features and a lot of promise for the future.

Google owns Android, with Pixel phones that are pretty great and are getting better every year, but Samsung continues to own the experience, with sales numbers to prove it. And while I love both, Samsung is beating Google at its own game, and has been for a while now.

Are you still using Rufus to create bootable USB drives? Are you frustrated that you need a separate USB drive for every operating system you want to boot? Well, let me introduce you to Ventoy—a free, open-source alternative to Rufus that lets you store as many operating systems as your USB drive has room for and boot into any of them with ease.

Fire TV is one of the easiest streaming setups to get running and one of the easiest to leave half-configured. Most people plug it in, get through the initial setup, and never touch the audio settings again. The defaults aren't doing you any favors. Four settings buried in the menus have a bigger effect on how everything sounds than any hardware upgrade would, and none of them are very difficult to do or require going into super secret developer menus.

Raspberry Pi computers used to be cheap. Sadly, that's not the case anymore as I write this, but you may still have more than a few older models lying around from the good old days when they were practically giving them away.

It's no secret that Ryobi gets a lot of hate online. You've probably seen videos on social media poking fun at the bright lime-green tools, and asking for advice in a Reddit tool forum will quickly get responses about just how "bad" they are. If that's the case, why are they so popular, and why do DIYers keep buying them?

I was excited when Microsoft added the PIVOTBY function to Excel. After years of building PivotTables, having a formula-driven alternative felt like a major upgrade. But after replacing several PivotTables with PIVOTBY, one frustrating formatting issue convinced me I wasn't quite ready to leave PivotTables behind.

Google's suite of cloud applications, including Google Keep, are extremely convenient. However, if you value privacy and the ability to customize your experience, there is a better option out there.

Self-hosting may require an up-front investment, but over time you can save money and avoid costly ongoing subscription fees. These services can also make your hobbies more accessible and satisfying, which helps justify the modest effort and cost involved.

For years, Microsoft tried to fight off Linux. Linux users were all too happy to take potshots at Microsoft and Windows in turn. But over the years, something changed. It seems that Microsoft has become an advocate for one of its biggest competitors: Linux and open-source software more generally. How did that happen?

Are you looking for a way to secure your smart home against potential bad actors or intruders? A VLAN is the perfect tool for the job. Here’s how I have my VLAN set up, and how I plan to use it to secure my smart home’s network.