How-To Geek

Reading in your twenties as a young woman is familiar: you loved it as a kid, burned out after high school, and now books are big again. Most of us were former readers trying to rekindle our love of reading.

Back in the early days of Android, it was common to root your phone so you could "hibernate" or "freeze" battery-killing apps. They wouldn't be able to wake up the device's CPU or consume any system resources. These days, Android has built-in features to stop battery-leeching apps, but you can still freeze apps, and you don't even need root access to do it anymore.

Netflix's documentary catalog is something I can never get enough of, and when I begin my streaming session for the weekend, I am never out of fresh documentaries to binge-watch. Be it true crime, sports, biographies, or science, Netflix's documentary collection is never-ending.

I happen to have a lot of old gaming PC parts scattered around the drawers and bins of my office. This comes from years of building PCs professionally, but it also meant that I could simply repurpose my old gaming desktop into a home server instead of buying a dedicated NAS.

Some Ring doorbells can use AI features to interact with visitors when you're not home. I ditched my Ring doorbell for a Reolink doorbell that runs fully locally, but I wondered if I could recreate a similar feature using a local LLM. I was partially successful.

The camera experience has always been a big part of what sets Pixel phones apart from other Android devices. While some features are genuinely exclusive, others aren’t as stuck in the walled garden as you might think. For example: Magic Eraser.

If you were an early NVMe adopter or just like pulling apart old laptops for parts, you’ve probably got one or two tiny 64GB or 128GB NVMe SSDs lying around. They’re too small to realistically use as primary storage in a modern desktop or laptop, but it’s also hard to justify leaving them unused in a drawer—and they don’t exactly make for good "cold" storage anyway.

I've started purchasing physical media and digitizing it to build my own media library. I could put this all on a Plex or Jellyfin server, but I decided to purchase an Open Source Media Center box instead—and this has been the single best TV upgrade I've ever made.

I'm a self-hosting machine, running over half a dozen servers with dozens of virtual machines and over 100TB of local storage. However, even with all that hardware and storage, I stopped self-hosting three services and pushed them back to the cloud—here's why.

As governments and companies around the world seem to be on a bit of an internet censorship binge, many people are turning to VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to get around these restrictions—only to be caught out!

When you're using Home Assistant, it's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that you need to create an automation for everything. Automations aren't the only option, however. Sometimes using a script or a scene can be a better choice.

What are the 10 greatest movies of all time? For a movie lover like myself, it's an impossible question. Could I name 10 movies that I believe to be great? Absolutely. The only problem is that I will regret my answers within five minutes of posting this article. I'll forget about an all-time movie that deserves to be on this list and get mad at myself for not putting it on. I feel the same anxiety when ordering at a restaurant — as soon as the waiter walks away, I want to change my selection.

For years, named ranges were the "pro" way to structure Excel data. But modern spreadsheets have moved on. Tables now handle what named ranges only simulate—without the manual upkeep or hidden breakpoints waiting to surface.

Microsoft Excel still rules on the desktop, but the mobile app (iOS and Android) has quietly developed a few advantages of its own. From scanning tables with your camera to touch-friendly data entry, some Excel tasks are genuinely faster and easier on your phone. Here are five workflows to start using today.

Self-hosting had always sounded appealing; the idea of running my own services and keeping control of my data was music to my ears. Despite running a Home Assistant server for several years, however, I'd never gotten beyond that point until I bought a relatively cheap mini PC.

Have you ever wondered just how much it costs to run your homelab? The answer might shock you—it did for me. Here's how I started measuring the power draw of my homelab, and why it's important to do so.

I never leave the house without a few essentials. Those include my phone, wallet, keys, and my daily carry pocket knife and flashlight. And if you're still using your phone as a flashlight, I have the perfect upgrade for you.

For months, I thought my favorite pair of earbuds, which I used a lot for podcasts and long workdays, was just wearing out as electronics do. The sound had become dull, the vocals seemed distant, the bass muddy, and the cymbals sounded indistinct. I blamed software updates, battery degradation, or just normal wear from daily use. I was already browsing for replacement models when I thought about cleaning them. This led to a serious look at how I take care of my earbuds. Basically, the jump in sound quality was immediate and embarrassing because it's so simple. If you, like me, believe your earbuds are worn out and ready to throw away, you might be surprised to learn that their best days are still ahead.

Google Gemini can be a genuinely useful assistant in your day-to-day life. It can also be a completely pointless, nonsense machine for your own enjoyment. I decided to combine those two very different approaches—practical and silly—and I wish I’d done it sooner.

Pipes are a very powerful core feature of Linux. By chaining programs together, you can carry out complex tasks with a small set of tools. But piping isn’t always the best solution; when it’s not needed, it can increase complexity and lead to less efficient options.