How-To Geek

Are you thinking of switching to Linux? Have you struggled to pick a suitable distro? Perhaps you're a veteran, and you've got strong opinions about which distros a beginner should use. Whatever your situation is, I have three reasons why Ubuntu is still king for beginners.

Are you ready for another lineup of fun Raspberry Pi projects to tackle this weekend? I'm taking the ride with you and building my own E-Ink calendar display, as well as showing you Open Voice OS and how to build your own Raspberry Pi-powered dash camera!

Homelabs might not be as intricate as actual server racks, but for your personal projects or setups, it's probably good enough. Yet, with a homelab doing all the stuff it does, you're probably missing an important detail—a UPS holding everything together.

It’s reasonable to expect your smart home to work even without an internet connection. This is especially true if you’re using a truly local platform like Home Assistant, but it’s not always possible since not all smart home devices support local control.

For some strange reason, the internet seems to be obsessed with running the 1993 classic shooter DOOM on everything with a display or chip inside. This begs the question: is there anything that can't run DOOM?

A lot of people assume that if their files are synced, they're safe. It feels like a backup. Your documents are in the cloud, they show up on every device you use, and everything just kind of works. So if something goes wrong on one machine, you figure you can just grab a clean copy from somewhere else.

I’ve had my Unraid server for the past several years, and it’s had an SSD cache drive for almost that entire time. However, at the beginning, my cache drive was definitely an unexpected bottleneck in my system. Here’s what happened and how I fixed it.

Wi-Fi is all around us, but it’s obviously not something we can see with our eyes. That makes it easy to miss Wi-Fi dead zones in your home, which is exactly what happened to me. Thankfully, Samsung Galaxy phones have a super handy Wi-Fi mapping tool built in.

It might not be apparent if you browse through my article history over the past half-decade, but I actually don't like writing bad news about Microsoft Windows. I'm tired of having to complain about the world's most popular desktop operating system, developed by one of the largest and most valuable tech companies in existence.

When Tesla first unveiled the Cybertruck, the conversation centered around its apocalypse-proof demeanor and a design meant to survive the end of the world. But as the popular truck has integrated into the daily lives of its owners, the narrative has shifted from surviving a zombie onslaught or alien invasion to powering everyday life, be it for work or pleasure.

At this year's Galaxy Unpacked, I was more excited about the Galaxy Buds 4 than any of Samsung's new phones. But as cool as these new buds are, there's one thing about them that I wish Samsung would do differently—something that harkens back to the originals.

Using an API can be a tricky challenge, with issues like authentication, rate limiting, different data formats, and various HTTP verbs to master. But some APIs can be simple, requiring little more than a browser or the curl command-line tool.

Ring is a name that’s become synonymous with doorbell cameras, swallowing up a huge chunk of the market. On the surface, these cameras are easy to use and offer reasonable protection against would-be intruders and porch pirates.

Streaming video service recommendations still tend to be simplistic unless you're using platform-specific tools like Google's Gemini for TV, but that's finally changing. Tubi has launched ChatGPT's first-ever native streaming service app, making it easier to find movies and shows on Fox's free-to-watch service using more natural-sounding requests.

MINI has always leaned into the idea that no two of its cars should be exactly alike. From the factory, you can usually pick your roof color, mirror caps, and hood stripes. But for one longtime MINI enthusiast here in the United States, the standard online configuration tool wasn't going to cut it.

Vinyl enthusiasm seems to go on unabated, and I certainly could never have predicted when we threw out our last record player that anyone but a few hardcore adherents would ever care about these PVC discs again. Yet here we are.

As a voracious fan of Jason Bateman, I’m always captivated by his work. Whether it’s absurdly funny, seriously creepy, or intensely harrowing, he always knocks performances out of the park while bringing a rare distinctiveness to every role he embodies. Starting out as a teen star in the 1980s, Bateman went on to headline some of the best and most influential shows of the 21st century as an adult, delivering exceptional performances.

Vibe coding has taken the development world by storm—and it truly is a modern marvel to behold. The problem is, the vibe coding rush is going to leave a lot of apps broken in its wake once people move on to the next craze. At the end of the day, many of us are going to be left with apps that are broken with no fixes in sight.

We’re now in an era where fancy rendering techniques like ray tracing and even full path tracing tend to steal the show. I get it—they look incredible in screenshots, tech demos, and gameplay videos on high-end machines, but in practice, they bring even the most powerful systems to their knees.