How-To Geek

For many years, I built smart home automations that my family tolerated at best. It took a change of approach to finally create an automation that my family genuinely appreciated. That single automation ended up being a real turning point in how my family sees my smart home hobby.

The most-watched movie on Paramount+ right now is the new Scary Movie, which critics have taken a baseball bat to. It may have a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but folks keep pressing play on the Scream spoof, and honestly, I'm here for it because movie lovers can't go by critics alone.

Most of you reading this probably use just one Google Chrome profile to do everything. So that means your banking, work, leisure, and all other activities happen using the same online identity.

VS Code is a big deal. In Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, a whopping 76% of respondents said they use it regularly. That towers over the 29% who report using its nearest competitor, Visual Studio.

Google Keep is convenient, but convenience came with a cost many people would want to stop paying: my notes living in Google's cloud, tied to my account, scanned by whatever systems Google runs behind the scenes. Switching to Obsidian changed how I think about my own notes entirely.

I like to test out different music/media players on Linux every so often. I don't know how I missed out on Clementine. I've been using the Spotify desktop app on one of my machines for a little while as a media player. So, just for fun, I decided to pit them against one another in a bit of a "friendly competition." I was surprised to see which one I ended up liking better.

NFC tags can be incredibly useful smart home tools. They're cheap to buy, and you can use them to trigger automations just by scanning them with a phone. Not all NFC tags are created equal, and it's all too easy to buy the wrong NFC tags for the job.

I have a lot of family and friends, which means I’ve somehow ended up in hundreds of group chats. There’s one for discussing common life problems, another for vacation planning, one for the family, and a few that I’m honestly not even sure why they were created. After a while, all these conversations become my digital junk drawer.

Most people shouldn't worry about the majority of BIOS settings, since leaving them at their default values makes the most sense. This applies to most SSD-related BIOS settings as well. That said, there's a chance the previous owner messed with them if you bought a used PC, or that one friend who likes to tinker with PCs tweaked your motherboard's BIOS settings without your knowledge.

Even though the weather's getting cooler, the movies on Netflix are starting to heat up for U.S. subscribers, with The Whisper Man still holding court at the top of the streamer's charts. If you're into documentaries, maybe you've already checked out the wild-ride story of Australian Olympic breakdancer Rachael Gunn in Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly.

I have an annoying habit in Excel. Whenever I want to switch to another worksheet, I instinctively press Alt+Tab. I know that's not what the shortcut does, but years of using it to jump between apps have made the habit almost impossible to break. So I found a way to make it work.

Android Auto does a great job of putting the things you actually need behind your car’s screen, so you can leave your phone alone and focus on driving. But there are still plenty of moments when your phone is simply the easiest way to get something done. That becomes especially awkward when you’re driving with a passenger who wants to take over for a moment.

The cd command, short for “change directory,” is one of the most fundamental commands on Linux. It’s how you navigate the Linux terminal — moving between different working directories. That said, cd is an old-school way to navigate the Linux file system, and several modern alternatives have emerged that make the process faster and easier. Here’s a modern cd replacement that can help you navigate your file system with less typing and less guesswork.

I use a lot of ESP32 boards around my home, but they don't always have to be stuck indoors. By putting an ESP32 in my car, I'm able to access live engine data from my car that tells me much more than my dashboard does.

It's a new week, which means many of the major streaming services will be adding movies to their respective services. At HBO Max, one of the most divisive superhero movies in recent memory finally makes its streaming debut. Netflix has a pair of new releases: one comes from Tyler Perry, and the other is based on a beloved comedy series.

Every so often, I learn about a new Linux app that seems like it would be interesting and help streamline my work. It's never a bad idea to expand your software horizons. So I checked out an app called Albert to see if it could improve my workflow.

I've owned a lot of houseplants in my time and killed many of them. The biggest issue has always been knowing when to water them. Wi-Fi moisture sensors can help, but if you have a lot of plants, the cost can soon add up, and if your Wi-Fi goes down, they become useless. Using an ESP32, you can make a moisture sensor that works offline and is a fraction of the price.

Plex is best known as the streaming platform that lets you host your own video content and then stream it to devices on your local network. However, Plex has so much more to it, and chances are there's at least one of these five features you weren't aware of.

Third-party apps get most of the scrutiny when it comes to permission creep, but Google's own apps are often the bigger offenders. Here's a look at three permissions Google's ecosystem quietly holds onto well past the point they're needed.

I recently hooked up an old PC to my TV, expecting it to be the perfect way to turn my living room into a makeshift gaming setup. The hardware was more than capable, and both the PC and TV supported the refresh rates I wanted, so I assumed everything would work without a hitch. Instead, I was greeted by constant stuttering, flickering, and occasional black screens that made the whole setup feel broken.