How-To Geek

If you’re building a homelab, the price can quickly add up. Though there are bargains to be had in the form of second-hand mini PCs and salvaged drives, if you have a 3D printer you can save even more money by making your own components where possible.

My home server runs more than a dozen services I use regularly for work and for my personal life. Wake-on-LAN is great when it works, but it isn't foolproof. Sometimes a BIOS update breaks your settings, the network card gets put to sleep, or the PC is completely offline. When WOL fails, someone has to physically push the power button on the PC. If I'm away from home, that can be a problem.

Windows 11 is rife with features enabled by default that you'd be better off disabling. While some degrade the experience of using the most popular desktop operating system in the world, and others take up precious resources and can have a negative effect on performance, there are a few that simply have no place in Windows anymore and that no one should have enabled in this day and age.

I've watched Excel go from a program where I had to know exactly what to type to one where I can describe what I want and have AI build it for me. After some resistance at first, I've embraced it. But there are still times when I look at what AI has produced and think, "I'd rather just let Excel handle this."

Can any show stop Reacher? The action show continues to sit atop Prime Video's top 10 in the U.S. None of the three shows below will be in the top 10 right now, but they are all popular in their own right. The first show on this list is a Prime Video original with two seasons out and a third one on the way.

Have you ever wanted the watch face on your smartwatch to change automatically depending on what you’re doing? A minimal watch face when you go to sleep, and then one with lots of health data when you start exercising. If that sounds useful, then you’re in the right place. I’ve configured my Galaxy Watch to automatically change its watch face based on what I’m doing—here’s a detailed overview of how you can do the same.

Vinyl enthusiasm seems to go on unabated, and I certainly could never have predicted when we threw out our last record player that anyone but a few hardcore adherents would ever care about these PVC discs again. Yet here we are.

Despite new-car prices continuing to climb, you don't have to spend more than $40,000 to find something genuinely fun to drive in 2026. The choices are certainly getting thinner, with affordable sports cars, hot hatches, and manual-transmission models disappearing at an alarming rate, but enthusiasts still have a surprisingly diverse selection. From lightweight rear-wheel-drive roadsters to practical sport sedans and powerful turbocharged hatchbacks, there are still cars built to do more than simply get you from A to B.

As we head into the final weekend of August and say farewell to summer, there's still a little left of the month before all the new streaming content arrives, which is just fine because we're still mining HBO Max's catalog movies for the month.

Nearly every Microsoft Excel workbook I own—especially those I share with others—contains a hidden backend worksheet. It's essentially the engine room of my workbook and helps me keep my spreadsheets organized and functional. Here's why you should have one too.

A Pi-hole is a great way to block trackers, a few ads, and even some types of malware, like well-known phishing sites. However, the most surprising thing about running a Pi-hole is the amount of information you get almost instantly. You become privy to nearly every connection every device on your network makes.

If you're like me, you have a slew of power tools and not enough battery packs. To make matters worse, the battery cells are usually more expensive than the tools themselves. Thankfully, Home Depot is running another of its popular buy-one-get-one deals ahead of Labor Day, and it's handing out free Milwaukee 5.0Ah extended-capacity batteries.

Over the years, I’ve tried many note-taking apps on my Android devices. Each one served a purpose, but most didn't have the features I really needed. When I tried ColorNote ten years ago, it wasn't ready to be my workhorse, but a lot has changed since then.

Working with note-taking apps and Markdown has worked out well for me over the years. I've been doing it for a while now, and I can't say I miss using GUI word processors. Obsidian is the app I use the most, so I created a general knowledge vault in the app. And I did it without typing a single word in the Obsidian editor.

Hugging Face is best known as a community for open AI collaboration, but now it's venturing further into hardware. The company has released the Microduck, an open-source duck robot that you can buy and train yourself.

The Kia Telluride has always sat in an interesting spot. It’s a mainstream three-row SUV, but the newer model pushes much harder into the kind of design, comfort, and technology you'd normally expect from something wearing a more expensive badge.

Have you ever wanted to point your finger at a screen and have the cursor follow your hand? If you own a Galaxy Watch—or any Wear OS watch, for that matter—you can actually do that right now. I just turned my Galaxy Watch 8 Classic into a gesture-controlled mouse for my Windows PC, and it took about two minutes to set up.

While Linux teams can fail to handle drivers for some devices effectively (or wisely), it's not always their fault. Whether the discussion involves distributions like Ubuntu with GNOME on Wayland, openSUSE with KDE Plasma on X11, or even Manjaro with Xfce on X11, each OS can experience potential device or driver problems. Over time, Linux driver incompatibilities have improved, but they still carry some hiccups.

It's that time of the week again. Now that we're a few weeks into the new school year, it's time to rethink how your family is organizing their tasks and calendars, as well as how everyone games at the same time with your homelab taking a central role in your routines.

I've been a VLC user for years, and I still like it. It plays just about anything, works across platforms, and includes far more features than I usually need. The thing is, most of the time I'm not streaming over a network or digging into advanced playback settings. I'm just double-clicking a video file and watching it.