How-To Geek

Netflix is rolling out a slew of new movies. Last weekend, the animated stop-motion movie I Am Frankelda premiered to positive reviews. This weekend, Netflix gets back into the rom-com department with Voicemails for Isabelle, starring Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson.

Most home networks start off easy. A modem, a cable, a router, Wi-Fi, and that's it. Most home networks stay that way, too.

Android has terrible defaults for settings that directly concern your digital privacy. They're all built on an "opt-out" design, so you're expected to turn them off yourself if you don't want to give away all your personal information.

I spent a month living inside LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, and every well-regarded open-source Office alternative I could find. Here's what I learned — and why I quietly opened my wallet at the end of it.

Another week means it's time to spotlight some of the new movies heading to some of the major streaming services. Our top selection is an A24 movie released in theaters earlier this year. It features a rising star who is knocking at the door of the A-list. Many viewers will get a chance to watch this thriller on HBO Max.

Most people build their home network with the goal of making it fast. Get the biggest plan, the flashiest router, the most bars, and call it a day. I get the appeal. Speed is the thing you feel every day, and it's the thing the box on the shelf is screaming about.

When I was doing my Master’s degree, I needed a cheap, small laptop that could fit in my motorcycle backpack and have enough battery power to get through about four or five hours of daily lectures. I ended up getting a used netbook for $50, but it came with a horrible custom distro of Linux that really didn't let you do anything.

Are you ready to buy your first NAS? Before you click purchase, there’s one major thing you need to think of first—do you have the right hard drives for a NAS? Not all hard drives are created equal, and you need to make sure your NAS has storage that’s up to the task.

Excel has plenty of flashy features, but few are as useful day after day as data validation. Drop-down lists were one of the first Excel features I learned that felt genuinely advanced, and I still rely on them to keep data clean and consistent. Here's how to create drop-down lists in Excel using data validation.

I recently found myself in a frustrating position: I was paying for gigabit internet, yet my PC’s speed tests kept dropping to a suspiciously precise number: 100 megabits per second.

Robot vacuums are one of the few things from the sci-fi movies I watched as a kid that actually came true. I might not have a flying car, but I've already owned a few robots that did a half-decent job of keeping my floors clean.

Ubuntu has long been the standard recommendation for people new to Linux, though in recent years that advice has come into question. While more people are touting Fedora as "the everything distro", I think that the title really belongs to Debian. Its tagline, "the universal operating system," is no hyperbole.

If you are just starting your journey into self-hosting, you'll have to make a choice before installing your first instance of Jellyfin, Immich, or Home Assistant: which operating system do you use?

The Awesome Home Assistant list is a collection of highly useful resources for Home Assistant, including a large selection of integrations. The list includes the number of GitHub stars that each integration has received; these are some of the most popular according to the community.

Hulu appreciates comedy. Across movies, TV shows, and stand-up specials, Hulu has a wide selection of programs to make you laugh. One of Hulu's newest shows that premiered this month is Not Suitable for Work, an amusing comedy from Mindy Kaling about young professionals trying to make it in New York City.

Microsoft designs Windows with the assumption that it's going to be the only operating system on the computer drive. Because of that, it does not play nicely when it has to share that drive with another operating system. Anyone who has ever tried dual-booting Windows and Linux will tell you that it rarely ever goes smoothly.

Your Jellyfin library can look just as good as any streaming platform's library, complete with proper titles, metadata tags, and beautiful album covers. It doesn't matter how messy your offline music files may be (they don't even need to have track names), this tool automates all that work with just one click.

Naturally aspirated engines are rapidly disappearing from the modern performance car landscape. With tightening emissions standards and a strong industry shift toward turbocharging and electrification, most sports sedans have abandoned larger, high-revving engines in favor of smaller, forced-induction setups. As a result, the driving character that once defined this segment is becoming increasingly rare.

If like me, you've been looking for an alternative to Google's cloud-first and AI-first Photos app, this list should end your search. These are free and open-source apps without any ads or intrusive AI or cloud features.

Troubleshooting router issues almost always starts with simple advice along the lines of 'have you tried turning it off and then on again,' but when you have to dig deeper, it's the wild, wild west out there. One of the more important pieces of advice that I don't see cropping up often is that you should actually set up router alerts to know what's happening to your network at all times.