How-To Geek

If you're unhappy with the state of your internet connection, and you've done the usual troubleshooting to optimize your Wi-Fi, the logical next step might often be buying a new router. Or is it?

Crossovers may dominate driveways these days, but the sedan isn’t going anywhere. For plenty of drivers, a lower seating position, better road manners, and a more comfortable daily commute still matter more than maximum cargo space.

Movie night has always been a staple in my household, especially with all the streaming services we subscribe to. We pop the popcorn, everyone picks their favorite seat in the room, and then we start the film.

The Android ecosystem is lucky to have a wide selection of excellent, free, open-source apps. These apps are so good that they could easily charge a fee. I started by listing 7 of these apps, then 4 more—now here are another 3 I currently have installed on my phone. They're free of cost, don't show any ads, or sell subscriptions.

There's an easy solution if you want to watch Spider-Man: Brand New Day before your friends and avoid spoilers: sign up for Amazon Prime. Sony Pictures and Amazon are offering U.S. Prime members access to early screenings for the Marvel superhero movie on July 29, two days ahead of its official July 31 premiere.

If you ask Nvidia, its RTX Spark chip represents a fundamental shift in computing: we'll soon rely on AI agents to get most of our work done, and enjoy a powerhouse for creativity and gaming in the meantime. And the ingredients are certainly there between a wildly fast integrated GPU, a solid CPU, and talk of "all-day" battery life.

When Lincoln introduced the Navigator in 1997, it took the bones of a pickup truck and wrapped them in the kind of interior luxury that buyers had previously associated with European brands. Nearly three decades later, the Navigator has evolved into something no one saw coming from Ford, or perhaps any other automaker for that matter: a rolling wellness retreat.

Excel is built for working with data, but large tables of numbers can be difficult to scan quickly. Fortunately, you don't need advanced design skills to make your spreadsheets more informative. Whether you're building quick reports or more advanced dashboards, these simple visualization techniques can help you spot trends, summarize data, and present information more clearly in minutes.

I have a lot of Zigbee smart home devices in my home. The low-power mesh network offers several benefits over Wi-Fi, but it's not perfect. When one device kept dropping off the network, the fix was cheap and effective.

After 22 months of paying for Tesla Premium Connectivity on my 2021 Model 3 Performance, I'd had enough. The connection was unreliable, dropping at the worst times, and I couldn't justify the monthly fee for a service that consistently let me down.

For years, the Raspberry Pi was the name in DIY, tinker, and maker space. If you wanted to build anything with a network connection or that involved a ton of GPIO, the Pi was the default choice. However, as hobbyist smart home and IoT projects have become more popular, the amount of hardware to support them has grown significantly. While the Pi lineup is still valuable and versatile, the ESP32 has evolved from a niche curiosity into a serious contender for most DIY projects.

All the popular power tool brands make a ton of excellent tools and accessories, giving us more choices than ever. Big names like Ryobi and Milwaukee are often compared because of their offerings, not to mention they're owned by the same company, but make no mistake: they're very different. And what gives Ryobi an advantage isn't what you think.

Is your home network not running as fast as you'd like it to? Well, outside of the obvious things like making sure to use Ethernet everywhere you can, here are five mistakes that could be the reason your home network is running slow.

My phone has hundreds of screenshots of restaurants, museums, and other locations so I can "look them up later." Unfortunately, I almost never do. Thankfully, there is a feature available for Google Maps on iPhones that turns that mess of half-forgotten screenshots into locations saved on Google Maps automatically.

If you run an AI locally, you get complete privacy, no API or subscription costs, offline access, and you never have to worry about running into your usage limit right when you're in the middle of something. For a long time, AI coding assistants were janky, unreliable, and painfully slow, but newer local models can hold their own against the cloud-based models as long as you're careful about how you use them.

I was sick of using Alexa in my smart home, so I decided to replace her with Assist, the local voice assistant in Home Assistant. At first, the experience wasn't great and I'd often have to repeat myself, but by making a few simple changes the experience improved dramatically.

A new month means it's time to start preparing for the new movies and TV shows arriving on Netflix. One of the movies I have my eye on is Office Romance, a rom-com that pairs Jennifer Lopez with Brett Goldstein. The other movie I'm interested in is In the Hand of Dante, which boasts an A-list cast of Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Jason Momoa, Martin Scorsese, and many more.

Docker Desktop is undeniably elegant. The clean interface, one-click management, and abstraction of complexity make it great for beginners, but that abstraction comes at a price.

Having a capable 3D printer is important, but even the best printer in the world won't do a good job if you give it bad instructions.

Docker is one of my favorite things about Linux. I like Docker because it's based around open-source containers, efficient for my needs, and most containers are, in my experience, simple to work with.