How-To Geek

For most people, a 25-year-old video patent expiring sounds like a piece of legal housekeeping that has nothing to do with their computers. But for Linux users, it removes one more obstacle that has historically made something as basic as playing a video more complicated than it should be. Here’s everything you need to know and what this means about your media usage.

I love the simplicity and automation of my Google Account storage and how I can save valuable photos, videos, screenshots, PC/device files, and my Android phone data with little effort, but I don't like how easily and quickly it fills up, especially with default settings. I was frustrated, so I decided to take control of what Google syncs to regain valuable space. Google Account storage has definitely changed over the last decade, like Google Photos' Image Saver media becoming part of your storage space (June 1, 2021) and Drive separating from Photos (July 2019) because it was "supposedly" confusing to consumers.

When I first saw the crazy thing iPhone Air and Galaxy Edge, I wasn't interested. I had never cared when companies boasted about how many millimeters they had shaved off a device. Now I feel differently, and it wasn't Apple or Samsung who changed my mind— it was Boox.

Windows 11 has a robust virtual desktop feature, but it is rather basic. It probably doesn't help that Microsoft only built its own virtual desktop solution long after Linux and macOS had shown us what they could do.

We’ve all come across those “must-have apps for Android” lists somewhere. But this article is a little different. Instead of telling you which apps you need to download, I’m telling you which ones you can finally delete. Android has matured a lot over time, and features that once required a separate app are now built right into your phone.

Memory price hikes have pushed new Raspberry Pi prices up across the board and the secondhand market has started looking more appealing than it has in years.

I love Jellyfin; it allows me to stream my entire movie and TV show collection across multiple devices. There's really only one thing that Jellyfin can't do, and that's deciding what I'm going to watch. I wanted to find a more entertaining way to choose a show or movie, and what I found was even better than I expected.

I’ll admit, I’m not sure what I was expecting when I first opened up the box for the latest Dell XPS 13 laptop. However, I know for sure I wasn’t expecting to love this tiny laptop as much as I do. At $699, this could be the mid-range Windows laptop to beat in 2026.

How often do you play local media files on your PC? These days, most of what we watch comes from a cloud server viewed through a web browser. Even if you have your own media, you're probably watching it using a self-hosting solution like Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby.

I converted to a foldable Android phone a couple of years ago, and I've used them for nearly everything ever since. In that time, I've owned three different foldables during that time, borrowed a few, and have placed my hands on demo units of several others. Based on my experience, here are the five best or most impactful foldables to hit the U.S. market to date.

Open-source software is wonderful: it's free, diverse, and surprisingly accessible. You might feel that software development is a secret world of privilege and insider knowledge, but OSS has made great strides to overturn this misunderstanding.

Tech prices are going through the roof, with the high cost of RAM affecting everything from Raspberry Pis to high-end gaming PCs. The good news is that with Home Assistant, it’s often possible to repurpose old tech so that you don’t need to buy anything new.

I’ve been running a Plex server for a long time, which means I’ve made my fair share of amateur mistakes. Storage is probably one of the biggest things plaguing my Plex server, and I have definitely made all three of these mistakes at least once (if not multiple times).

These days, when you're buying an x86 CPU, you're buying Intel or AMD. (Probably AMD, actually, as even used Ryzen 5000 chips are a good deal right now.) That just wasn't the case in the mid-1990s, though. There used to be more players in the CPU market, and we had all the freedom of choice we could've ever asked for.

With Labor Day landing on the 7th this year, this weekend comes with a bonus Monday with absolutely no obligation to do a dang thing with, other than watch movies. If you're like me, more often than not I lean towards a good thriller. And if you're a Paramount+ customer in the U.S., the streamer is no stranger to the dark and intense.

Every time you upload a file to a cloud AI service, you trust that they'll be responsible stewards of that information. When you're talking about medical data, financial records, personal details about your life, or any other sensitive information, that is a big ask.

Most people know texting while driving is dangerous, but they do it anyway. There is so much peer pressure to be considerate of those waiting for you, but the law is pretty clear. Distracted driving is one of those crimes that makes a lot of sense when you see the numbers, but you want to be considerate. Luckily, Google has already thought this through.

If you've been in the Linux space for a while, you know just how customizable KDE Plasma can be. However, a lot of us only limit that customization to picking the theme or moving the panel. What surprises me is how many plug-in surfaces Plasma exposes that I barely even touched. On top of that, they sit right next to the Plasma features you probably use daily.

Home Assistant is incredibly powerful, but all that complexity means things can and do go wrong. I was tired of one of my most useful automations failing, so I decided to rewrite the automation with the expectation that it would fail. The result is that my smart home is now far more reliable.

Another year, another IFA conference. How-To Geek is scouring the halls of Messe Berlin to uncover all the new innovative tech at IFA 2026. Through our search, we've managed to go hands-on with the slimmest portable SSD of all time, super-long-lasting hybrid batteries, the first batch of RTX Spark laptops, and more.