How-To Geek

Android phones have come a long way when it comes to privacy. Private Space on Pixels and Secure Folder on Samsung phones are really handy. Android's permission system has also become very granular in recent years, giving you a high level of control over what apps can access on your phone, and the Privacy Dashboard is a solid way to audit what your installed apps have been up to. But there's always room to grow, and some third-party apps offer privacy controls Google doesn't match yet, and in some cases probably never will. The only downside is that you have to sideload them.

Disney+ has rolled out its second price increase in as many months. Its standalone and Hulu bundle subscriptions now cost slightly more, with a notable exception.

If you use Spotify for streaming music, podcasts, and audiobooks, you may have noticed that your phone’s storage gets filled up too quickly. The streaming service quietly eats up gigabytes of storage space in the form of temporary cache. But now, the streaming service appears to be working on a new feature that would limit the cache, allowing better optimization of storage.

Thanks to Snapdragon for covering a trip to Snapdragon Summit. All experiences were hosted, but we received no extra compensation. The company did not influence editorial output.

One of the biggest benefits of Home Assistant is that it offers local control, so your smart home doesn't stop working when the internet is down. If you're away from home when the internet connection dies, however, then you may be unable to reach your Home Assistant server even if it's still working fine. These projects offer some alternative ways to communicate with your smart home without relying on the internet.

I’m a Pixel person through and through and have been daily driving one since I bought my Pixel 6a. And, for what it’s worth, I’ve had plenty of time with Samsung phones because I review them, so my preference is an informed choice. However, that’s only when it comes to smartphones. I don’t get many smartwatches sent my way, so I wasn’t very familiar with the hands-on differences until I bought a few with my own money — and boy, was I shocked.

There's nothing worse than a laptop that overheats. I've been there; the last two decades are lined with less-than-stellar laptops for me, actually. One was so bad that it'd turn off within 45 seconds if it didn't have a hair dryer on the cold setting constantly blowing into its vents. Yes, I've tried to fix it. But when you're a broke college student, you make do with what you have.

The legendary comedy institution that is Saturday Night Live returns this weekend, September 26, for its 52nd season with Knicks star Jalen Brunson hosting and Katseye as musical guest. I've never watched a lot of sports in my life, but SNL's storied history of golden eras, seasonal slumps, "The Weird Year," controversies, iconic cast members (many gone too soon), and ever-rotating roster have made it the team I've followed for almost my entire life.

YouTube has unveiled a flurry of updates to both its core video service and YouTube Music that will tangibly affect your day-to-day streaming habits.

For many people, Claude is the AI model of choice. It pioneered a lot of cool features with Claude Code, Cowork, MCPs, Skills, and more. The models also just sound more thoughtful when answering your questions. So naturally, one of the biggest frustrations folks have with Claude is that it doesn’t last as long as they want it to and burns through their token usage very quickly. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix — one that was sitting right under your nose. By changing this one setting, I was able to make my Claude usage last 8x longer.

When you’ve been around as long as Android has, many apps have gone the way of Harvey Dent. Some legendary, trusted names have become completely unnecessary or unsafe to use. Make sure you don’t have any of them on your phone.

Fedora is easily one of the best Linux distributions out there, but the default software manager it ships with isn’t doing it any favors. Whether you're on Fedora Workstation with GNOME Software or running Fedora KDE with Discover, both are painfully slow to load and offer an overall buggy experience. I can't tell you how many times I've searched for an app, gotten an empty screen, and assumed the app just wasn't available — when it was actually just stuck loading.

There's little argument that, among today's flat-panel display technologies, OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) screens are objectively the best.

A big upside to owning a 3D printer is being able to print things for next to nothing when you need them. While tools made from filament like PLA and PETG lack the durability of even their cheapest metal counterparts, they’re often good enough in a pinch.

Have you heard people talking about Docker but have no idea what it is or if you need it? Docker is a fantastic tool that I think belongs in every homelab—here’s what Docker is, and why it is the one tool that makes my homelab easy to manage.

I'm a huge fan of wired internet, even if the cables can be a bit of a mess (which can be fixed on the cheap). But Ethernet connections aren't the best for everything, not by a mile.

Buying smart home devices that rely on cloud-based services is always a risk. If the cloud service goes down, or worse, is discontinued completely, then your smart home devices can become nothing but expensive paperweights. Thankfully, there are plenty of open-source projects that can rescue smart home devices that have been abandoned by their manufacturers.

Lots of task-tracking software is costly and comes with more features than you need. I built a dynamic task tracker that does everything I need in three quick steps—and if you have Excel for Microsoft 365 or Excel for the web and a spare 10 minutes, you can too.

Raspberry Pi has always been associated with tinkering, modification, and making hardware do things it wasn’t designed to do. Now, the company has publicly confirmed that it has been quietly locking its boards to factory-configured RAM capacities through firmware. So, if you were planning a RAM swap—whether for a repair or an upgrade, the message is now on the record: it won’t work.