How-To Geek

This was a quieter week in the Linux ecosystem, but there's still some exciting news, especially if you're a fan of Pop!_OS and the COSMIC desktop. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.

Bluetooth on Windows can be surprisingly temperamental. Your headphones might start crackling, file transfers can freeze or fail, and sometimes devices just won’t pair at all. Each issue can stem from a different cause, but most have easy fixes. So, let’s look at the most common Bluetooth bugs.

Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are some of the best features in newer cars, but if you've ever wanted to upgrade from a wired system to a wireless one, the options were somewhat limited—until now. Don't waste your money on a no-name adapter from Amazon, and buy this one instead.

Let’s be honest, sending Christmas cards is not a fun holiday task. It’s time-consuming and can even be pretty expensive. Using AI to generate a Christmas card “from scratch” is tempting, but it’s a sure-fire way to end up in my trash bin.

Google is rolling out a major update to its Gemini audio models, bringing powerful live speech-to-speech translation capabilities to the Google Translate app. This upgrade uses the improved Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model, which is designed to handle complex voice interactions.

There was once a time when you could avoid buying a smart TV, but that’s no longer true. While convenient and packed with streaming apps, smart TVs are also filled with ads and tracking technology that monitors how you use your device, what you watch, and more.

Spend a few minutes with the Genesis G80, and you start thinking about it differently. Suddenly, you’re not comparing it to other midsize sedans—you’re sizing it up against the luxury heavyweights with crazy MSRPs and dealer markups that make your eyes water.

Surge protectors can help protect your electronics from large spikes in voltage caused by weather events, other appliances, and problems with the power grid. While it’s never a bad idea to use a surge protector with your PC, you can ensure better protection by spending a bit more.

Kali Linux, a popular Linux distribution for cybersecurity research and penetration testing, just revealed the Kali Linux 2025.4 release. This new build has updates to GNOME, KDE, and Xfce desktop environments, improvements for virtual machines, and much more.

If you use Safari on your iPhone like a lot of people do, you may be missing out on some super useful features. Safari is highly customizable, from navigation to display, and with a few tweaks, you can have an even better browsing experience.

Watching TV doesn't have to be mindless escapism or low-brow entertainment—you could actually learn something cool and interesting about cool and interesting people! Prime Video might not have the same grip on the streaming documentary genre that Netflix does, but never count it out.

Does your PC run smoothly one moment and suddenly become unresponsive the next? It’s incredibly frustrating—and even worse, there's rarely a single clear cause. The slowdown could stem from software glitches, faulty drivers, overheating, or a mix of several factors. Here are the fixes you can try.

Anime can feel a little intimidating if you're not a diehard fan or if you don't immerse yourself in it every day. Netflix makes it pretty easy to get your feet wet (or dive right in) with the stunning genre, though, and buried among its seemingly endless rows of titles are some incredible stories.

When real life goes off the rails, the stories beat any scripted show or movie on Netflix. And a good documentary or series doesn't just talk at you, it drags you into the room (interrogation or otherwise) with the people at the center of the story, whether it's a true crime caper or behind the scenes with the stars and creators of our favorite movies.

Amazon is finally making a huge, consumer-friendly shift for e-book owners, announcing that you will be able to download your DRM-free Kindle books directly in EPUB and PDF formats. This comes after Amazon has tried for so long to prevent everyone from downloading its books.

The Raspberry Pi’s main claim to fame is being a whole computer on a single circuit board, complete with a capable ARM chip. But its biggest party trick is how expandable it is, with a handy 40-pin general-purpose input/output interface (or GPIO for short).

There was once a time when you could avoid buying a smart TV, but that’s no longer true. While convenient and packed with streaming apps, smart TVs are also filled with ads and tracking technology that monitors how you use your device, what you watch, and more.

Most people assume that deleting files and emptying the Recycle Bin permanently removes them—but that’s not true. Those “deleted” files still sit on your drive and can be restored with recovery tools. So how do you securely erase sensitive data? You can use sDelete, Microsoft’s tool to wipe data.

Android has matured into a pretty great operating system over the years. However, it’s far from perfect. I’ve used every modern mobile operating system as a daily driver, from webOS to Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone. Here are the things that I think Android needs to copy from mobile operating systems of yesteryear.

Are you ready for more homelab projects to do? Because I know I am! This weekend, set your sights on saving money by canceling subscriptions, supercharging your coding experience, and overhauling your automation workflows.