How-To Geek

Where I live, the weather is the default subject for small talk. Weather apps can give you a lot of information about your local weather conditions, but I wanted a better option. A cheap ESP32 project turned out to be far more useful than relying on my phone.

The relationship between the U.S. and China has been interesting to say the least. Politically, the two countries could not be more different, but economically there has been little choice but to engage in trade and business.

Everyone occasionally has problems with unusual file formats. Maybe you're a Windows and Android user who encounters an HEIC file on the internet, downloads an image expecting a JPG only to get a WebP, or simply needs a PNG converted into a JPG.

Is your Samsung Galaxy Watch struggling to make it through the day? There are plenty of tips and tricks out there for squeezing more battery life out of it, but if you've tried them all and still feel like you could use a little more juice, it's worth digging into the Galaxy Watch's developer mode. There are a few settings in there you can toggle that can give you a slight but real improvement in overall battery life.

I share my Amazon account with my wife, as it doesn't make sense for us to both pay for a Prime subscription. Mostly it's fine, but around birthdays and Christmas, things get tricky. Orders for my wife often arrive with my name on them, so she regularly opens packages addressed to me assuming that they're hers. I was about to order her birthday presents, so I wanted a way to track the Amazon package so I could grab it and hide it as soon as it was delivered.

Electric vehicles have become the default recommendation for anyone looking to save money on fuel, but they aren't always the smartest choice. For college students balancing tuition, housing, and everyday expenses, the upfront cost of a vehicle is only part of the equation. Charging access, reliability, and long-distance usability can end up being just as important as running costs.

Subscription fees have a way of blending into the background until you actually add them up. Dropbox, Notion, and Google Photos feel reasonable on their own, but together they're quietly pulling a good deal of money out of your account for services that also happen to hold your files, your notes, and your family photos on someone else's servers. Nextcloud is a self-hosted platform that replaces all three, and after moving everything over, I've kept the same work going without the monthly bills or the privacy trade-offs that come with handing your data to a third party.

Linux runs most of the world's servers, powers the majority of AI training infrastructure, and sits underneath more of the internet than most people realize. It got there because of a development model that's genuinely open, where anyone can submit a patch and the best code wins. That model worked well for decades. Then AI code generation got here and started exploiting exactly what made that openness possible. Now we've got a big problem that doesn't seem to have a good solution.

We all love catching up on award-winning shows and movies from time to time. Netflix’s large catalog has several Emmy-winning shows that don’t require you to invest significant time. These shows and limited series tell complete stories in one go that can be comfortably finished in a long day on the couch. You could even save it for Sunday and finish before Monday rolls around.

Dabbling with different Linux distributions is a fun hobby and something I've been doing for a while. Unfortunately, Linux enthusiasts like me have sort of a bad reputation when it comes to being welcoming to the hobby. Whenever someone asks me about trying Linux, I always have one distro in mind I can definitely recommend to beginners and enthusiasts alike.

Cleaning up a messy Excel spreadsheet can easily take longer than building it in the first place. I wondered whether Copilot could take care of the tedious work for me, so I gave it a deliberately chaotic workbook and a simple prompt. But instead of simply fixing problems, much of its effort went into deciding which ones it shouldn't touch.

With the price of new cars constantly rising, it is becoming harder and harder to find spacious family crossovers without overspending. If you're willing to get something with a few miles on the clock, your options open up quite a lot. On top of this, with depreciation on EVs being very steep in the first couple of years, your budget can go even further if you're willing to make the swap over to an electric crossover.

Thanks to the ability to easily add debit and credit cards for tap-to-pay, Google Wallet has become an irreplaceable part of daily life for many Android users. However, what many people don't realize is that while Google Wallet is great for payments, that's merely scratching the surface of all the things it can actually do.

The command-line terminal is still one of the most popular features of Linux, even though graphical interfaces have been common in desktop computers for decades. There are a few reasons for the terminal to stick around, but if you’re new to the platform, you don’t need to worry about it.

While I have some pretty powerful servers in my homelab, my most important and useful server does just one thing: manages my network. Without it, my whole network goes down, my external services no longer work, and I can't VPN home. So, if my network manager goes down, nothing else matters—that's why it has to be the most robust server, and, therefore, the most simple.

For many years, I had a long commute to work. At one point, I was driving as far as 86 miles each way, which seems insane to me now, but I drove to where the work was. Spending that much time on the road also meant more chances for something to go wrong, whether it was a dead battery, a flat tire, or a minor problem that could leave me stranded.

Most people treat AI model comparisons like a horse race where one comes out ahead and the other becomes unusable or slow. That thinking falls apart quickly once you spend real time with models that were never competing for the same job. Gemma 4’s quantized models and Qwen 3.6 are good examples of this. One is built to run quietly on your own hardware without sending a single keystroke to an outside server. The other is built to sit inside a cloud environment and work through problems at a scale that would make a local machine sweat. Knowing which one you actually need changes everything about how useful each ends up being.

Not every 3D print will go to plan, regardless of what you do. Understanding the underlying cause of a bad print is crucial to correcting it and will help you avoid problems in the future.

Microsoft's (or rather, Mark Russinovich's) Sysinternals suite packs more than 70 utilities, each designed for a specific purpose and useful in different situations. While I used a number of them back in the day when I regularly fixed issues on other people's PCs, I rarely have a use for most of the tools on my own machine these days. That said, there are a few Sysinternals utilities that I consider indispensable for every Windows user, myself included.

The NVIDIA Shield TV has had an amazing run. 11 years later, it's still more capable than some Amazon and Roku devices. It's easy to understand why, between the powerful hardware and the Android software that still receives updates. You could watch advanced 4K video, use it as a media server, and stream games from the cloud.