How-To Geek

In my home, Roku is the main streaming platform. I have several Roku televisions and a couple of streaming sticks. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time in the Roku interface. One of the reasons I chose Roku was because it seemed easy to use. The remote is the same on every TV, and even the least tech-savvy people in my home have no problem using it. However, recent changes have started to make my Roku Home screen feel too busy.

Do you envy the Apple ecosystem and wish you had something similar between your Windows PC and Android phone? Or maybe you’ve wanted your phone to show up as a window on your desktop, so you can poke at it with your mouse and type on it with your keyboard instead of picking it up every two minutes? If so, boy, do I have the perfect app for you — and yes, it’s completely free and open source.

Many ESP32 boards come with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a microphone, and Thread or Zigbee support and are very affordable. That makes them great candidates for an experimental DIY smart home device—at worst, you have a board and a failed project that can be used later.

Linux might not be for everyone, but it could be exactly what you’re looking for. If your computing habits align with Linux’s unique strengths, it might be the perfect operating system for you—without you even realizing it. Here are the signs!

Smartphones obviously have tons of sensors underneath the shiny surface. Most of them are extremely common, but one particular sensor is very rare. It's super useful for people who do 3D printing, but it can't be found in modern Android phones anymore.

MacBooks are renowned for their slimline designs and unrivaled power and efficiency. They're among the best laptops you can get, but they have one flaw that can make them frustrating to use. Their slim and lightweight design comes at the cost of connectivity ports. For example, a MacBook Air has a pair of USB-C ports that might be fine for everyday tasks, but they aren't ideal for power users who want to connect memory cards or HDMI monitors.

Bambu Lab represents both ends of the 3D printing spectrum. On the one hand, it’s an incredibly successful company that took the world by storm by making 3D printing easy, accessible, and relatively cheap. On the other hand, it’s a brand that’s taken pages from the Apple and Nintendo corporate playbooks, locking down its ecosystem and throwing its legal weight around.

An average Ubuntu or Fedora installation can easily reach 15GB before you even start doing anything. Alpine Linux, which is famously tiny, usually weighs in at a few hundred megabytes.

Offers like 20TB of cloud storage for a few hundred dollars keep circulating on Reddit, paid once and kept for life. They aren't scams, strictly speaking, but "for life" means the company's life, not yours. Here's why the deals exist and what to do instead.

The browser wars ended a while ago. Most of us have picked a side and settled in, with the choice largely coming down to either Chrome or Firefox. However, just because we’ve settled in doesn’t mean innovation in the browser space has stopped. New browsers are still coming out with cool new features.

De-Googling an Android phone generally means removing annoying things from your device's overall experience. You accept that you'll lose certain functionality, but the main upside is a more private, secure experience. However, a handful of features become more useful once you remove Google from the equation. Stop treating Google like the default, and you'll find that certain things on your Android device have a little extra functionality.

Ryobi makes tons of excellent tools for inside and outside the home, for outdoor activities, and more. And if you're sick of yard work tools loud enough to double as a soundtrack, Ryobi has plenty of solutions. Surely you've wandered Home Depot aisles looking at mowers, blowers, or trimmers and seen the "Whisper Series," but is it any good?

If your desktop or laptop keeps lighting up in the middle of the night without you touching it, the cause is almost always traceable. It's a common complaint, and one that tends to get written off as a glitch or a haunted machine, when in reality Windows almost never wakes itself up without a specific trigger behind it.

I've spent a lot of time replacing Google apps and services with alternatives, and have moved on from Google Maps, Chrome, Photos, and even Search. But the one Google app that I keep coming back to is Waze. I keep it installed on my phone and use it in Android Auto, and there are four specific reasons why.

Back in 1996, Ryobi promised they would never change their 18V battery mount. Thirty years later, the batteries still fit, the power tools never die, and my garage looks like an explosion at a tennis ball factory. That awful neon lime green color is everywhere, but I love it.

Quite a weekend is in store for U.S. Netflix subscribers, but also for TV lovers in general, as not only does Saturday Night Live kick off its 52nd season on Saturday (here are some SNL-based movies to get you in the mood). But Netflix has got some seriously excellent and iconic television to binge the heck out of.

My favorite use for an old router? Turning it into a basic Ethernet switch. The thing is ... that's super boring. Pretty much everyone does that.

If you're not careful, self-hosting can change from an interesting hobby into a second job. You'll find forums and pages full of people recommending all sorts of services that are finicky or difficult to maintain.

Motorola makes great phones like the Razr Fold, but its U.S. presence is... bleak. Beyond foldables, you're limited to value-for-money budget Android phones and just one current mid-tier model, the Edge. There's not much variety in conventional phones, and no option at all if you want a flagship.

If you've used Windows for a long time, you probably remember the "My Computer" icon sitting on your desktop, ready to give you access to your drives and folders. These days, Windows calls it "This PC," but Windows 11 doesn't put the icon on your desktop by default. If you want that familiar icon back, you can add it in a few clicks.