How-To Geek

Picking a cordless tool brand feels like it should be simple until you realize the battery you buy first decides everything that comes after it. I learned that the hard way when I priced out a basic kit and saw the gap between Milwaukee and Ryobi up close. Both brands come from the same parent company, but they're built for completely different users and budgets.

AI doesn't always have to rely on the cloud. You can use local LLMs for a lot and give them access to information from the internet without having to expose them outside your home network. I built an AI-generated morning news briefing using a local LLM that never touches the cloud.

Whether you buy expensive SSDs or choose more affordable models (which are also quite expensive right now, let's be real), you probably think that nothing is safer than a new SSD. As in, at no point during the SSD's lifespan will your files be safer than right now, when you just bought it.

Technically, an operating system is only the software you need to run your computer and install software that you can use, but Microsoft has been bundling apps with Windows from the start.

The online video world is always chasing new trends, and now it’s all about short-form content. These short, scrollable feed-based videos are the most effective way to grow an audience, but producing them is surprisingly costly and time-consuming.

Claude users often fall into two camps: those who use it as a chatbot, and those who use it for coding. Claude Cowork can easily end up getting overlooked by both camps. There are plenty of ways you can use Claude Cowork that aren't for coding or typical chatbot conversations.

While some Linux distros have stood the test of time, others have fallen by the wayside, remembered only by their users.

Home Assistant is powerful smart home software that's packed with a huge number of features. There's so much it can do, and so much that you can do with it, that sometimes you might need a little guidance, help, or inspiration. There are some great Home Assistant resources available that you can turn to.

I'm happy to see that people are apparently getting back on the physical media wagon. By some miracle, DVDs and Blu-ray discs have remained in production and are still readily available, but for a while it seemed like the fervor for streaming might kill off physical media for good.

The traditional Linux tools like nano, man, cat, cd, ls etc. are almost four decades old now. They come from a time when computers had black-and-white screens and less computing power than your phone.

It's been almost two years since House of the Dragon season 2 ended on a cliffhanger. Tonight, we get answers in theHouse of the Dragon season 3 premiere, which airs at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and streams on HBO Max.

Vibe coding—despite huge improvements over the last two years—has always been hit-and-miss, with emphasis on "miss" if you're not very careful about how you use it. Fable 5—for the brief time it was available—felt like it finally changed that.

A smart home doesn’t need to cost a lot of money, and it certainly doesn’t mean paying a monthly fee. Here are some things I do to ensure that the only money I spend on my smart home is for devices that I can use without a pricey premium plan.

As web developers, we deal with text all the time. Whether it's JSON, HTML, URLs, Markdown, or something else. Nobody talks about the utilities that boost your productivity when managing these, so I will. I have three tools that'll help you make faster remote API calls, build and learn jq more quickly, and transform strings from one format to many others.

Excel is packed with productivity features, but some of its most useful tools are hidden or disabled by default. Whether you want faster data entry, better dashboards, or more powerful analysis tools, enabling a few overlooked settings can transform the way you work.

One of the biggest selling points of Google Pixel phones has always been the software. Google's approach has always been refreshingly simple: clean visuals, a handful of genuinely useful features, and very little unnecessary clutter.

The Toyota RAV4 has been one of America's best-selling SUVs since the late 1990s, and for 2026, it made one of the boldest moves in its nearly 30-year history. Toyota dropped gas-only engines entirely and made every RAV4 a hybrid.

I've had a knack for repurposing Android phones for most of my life. But I never considered doing the same for old, junk computer hardware, at least until I started self-hosting and building a tiny homelab last year. Ever since I fell down this rabbit hole, my perspective on old tech in general has shifted completely. Where the old me saw "e-waste," I now see gold.

Netflix's recommendation algorithm has evolved and can be good at predicting what you'll want to watch next. The problem is that it often ends up showing the same titles, making it harder to actually discover what aligns with your unique tastes.

For a long time, I treated my smartphone like, well, a phone with just a few extra features. Sure, I could browse the internet and work on documents, but I largely relegated my mobile device to being nothing more than a phone.