How-To Geek

I have spent a substantial part of my professional career working with RHEL, and it has given me a pretty good understanding of why organizations standardize on it, and I have seen the operational advantages that make companies willing to pay for it.

Tom Cruise swung for the fences with Digger. Unfortunately for Cruise and the rest of Hollywood, the risk hasn't paid off, with Digger suffering an epic opening-weekend failure at the box office.

The simple reason? It's trust. I simply, personally, don't trust Seagate as a hard drive brand anymore. Is it fair to avoid an entire brand? If you look under the hood at what a brand actually is, it might not make too much rational sense. Even my own personal philosophy has always been to judge products on their individual merits.

Two new details today from Google reveal some fine print about its Googlebook laptop platform. Several cross-device features require a phone running the latest Android 17, while app support can vary depending on the laptop’s processor. This means that the experience could vary significantly for users.

Cheap tablets are popular choices for Home Assistant dashboards. You can mount them on a wall and use them to display data and controls for your smart home. Before you buy a cheap tablet, it's worth considering if your old Android phone can do a better job.

Those little Wi-Fi bars in your taskbar might make you think you have the strongest signal in town, but they measure something far narrower than speed or reliability. Here is what the meter actually reads, why full bars can still mean a sluggish connection, and how to check what your network is doing.

It's October, and there's a chill in the air. This time of year, I can always hear Jodi and Betty from SNL's classic sketch Bronx Beat in my mind saying, in their Bronx accents, "It's sweata wetha." And for Netflix viewers, that means some new movies have arrived, with more than a few thrillers and horrors to start getting you prepped for spooky season.

In 1995, Microsoft tucked a first-person, Doom-like game inside Excel 95 to credit its developers. Three decades later, the hidden Hall of Tortured Souls still runs, if you know how to get it running. Here's how to set up a virtual machine and unlock it yourself.

I’ve accumulated an embarrassing amount of old tech over the years. Cables whose purpose I’ve long forgotten, gadgets I haven’t touched in years, and assorted bits of hardware have a habit of ending up in boxes rather than the trash. When it finally comes time to clear things out, though, I’ve learned not to throw anything away before checking it with Google Lens.

Linux is an operating system that encourages you to explore and tinker. You can go from zero to power user quickly, but what makes it great for power users often puts off newbies.

Bigger doesn't always mean better, and that's especially true in the world of power tools. Most Ryobi tools come with a 2Ah or 4Ah battery in the box, and when that's not enough for the job, many will end up looking for something bigger. Sure, that massive 12Ah battery sounds nice, but there's a good chance that's the wrong upgrade for you.

Triple monitor docks usually either require DisplayLink drivers or you're paying a premium for a Thunderbolt dock, all just to use an extra screen.

If you like high-profile movies heading to streaming, then you're going to like the list this week. On Apple TV, a popular Mattel toy brand has been turned into a movie. Hulu has two releases this week: one is a documentary about an iconic band, and the other is an intriguing horror movie.

Fighting wrongful traffic tickets, reducing collisions, catching vandalism, and eliminating he-said, she-said accident disputes are all good reasons to have a dashcam. But there’s another, more pressing reason to outfit your vehicle with a watchful eye. According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, staged accidents are on the rise and have become a $20 billion annual problem in the US. If there were ever a good reason to install a dashcam, it’s to avoid fake incident claims.

If you're looking to speed up your Excel workflow, keyboard shortcuts are crucial. And I'm not just talking about the ones you learned the first time you sat in front of a Windows machine, like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Some shortcuts are more powerful than those but easier to overlook, and F4 is one of them.

Thrift stores and garage sales can be great places to find old tech devices that still have plenty of life left. Not every gadget you find in a thrift store is worth buying, but there are some devices that could be worth snagging at the right price.

Free phone numbers sound like a better deal than they usually are. Google Voice has been handing out U.S. numbers at no cost for years, and for a while it was one of the more useful things Google made that plenty of people used. The catch is that the rest of Android's phone experience has moved on without it, and the gap between what Google Voice offers and what Google Messages now does has grown so wide that I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's main number.

Amazon built Fire TV into the streaming stick that tinkerers happily recommended. Its shift from Android-based Fire OS to the in-house Vega OS ends that deal, swapping app choice and freedom for Amazon's control. And unless stuff changes significantly, future Fire TV sticks are going to be a pass for me.

It used to be that picking a Linux distro mostly came down to which desktop you liked and which package manager you preferred. That is less true today. The distros getting attention now are built to do a specific job, whether that's ensuring ta thousand PCs are identical, surviving a bad update, or playing Windows games on your TV.

There are plenty of free, self-hosted services that can replace popular paid subscriptions. All you need is the hardware to run them on. I paid $200 for my mini PC, and by self-hosting just five services, I save more than $670 every year, based on the monthly subscription prices.