How-To Geek

In 1995, Microsoft tucked a first-person, Doom-like game inside Excel 95 to credit its developers. Three decades later, the hidden Hall of Tortured Souls still runs, if you know how to get it running. Here's how to set up a virtual machine and unlock it yourself.

I’ve accumulated an embarrassing amount of old tech over the years. Cables whose purpose I’ve long forgotten, gadgets I haven’t touched in years, and assorted bits of hardware have a habit of ending up in boxes rather than the trash. When it finally comes time to clear things out, though, I’ve learned not to throw anything away before checking it with Google Lens.

Linux is an operating system that encourages you to explore and tinker. You can go from zero to power user quickly, but what makes it great for power users often puts off newbies.

Bigger doesn't always mean better, and that's especially true in the world of power tools. Most Ryobi tools come with a 2Ah or 4Ah battery in the box, and when that's not enough for the job, many will end up looking for something bigger. Sure, that massive 12Ah battery sounds nice, but there's a good chance that's the wrong upgrade for you.

Triple monitor docks usually either require DisplayLink drivers or you're paying a premium for a Thunderbolt dock, all just to use an extra screen.

If you like high-profile movies heading to streaming, then you're going to like the list this week. On Apple TV, a popular Mattel toy brand has been turned into a movie. Hulu has two releases this week: one is a documentary about an iconic band, and the other is an intriguing horror movie.

Fighting wrongful traffic tickets, reducing collisions, catching vandalism, and eliminating he-said, she-said accident disputes are all good reasons to have a dashcam. But there’s another, more pressing reason to outfit your vehicle with a watchful eye. According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, staged accidents are on the rise and have become a $20 billion annual problem in the US. If there were ever a good reason to install a dashcam, it’s to avoid fake incident claims.

If you're looking to speed up your Excel workflow, keyboard shortcuts are crucial. And I'm not just talking about the ones you learned the first time you sat in front of a Windows machine, like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Some shortcuts are more powerful than those but easier to overlook, and F4 is one of them.

Thrift stores and garage sales can be great places to find old tech devices that still have plenty of life left. Not every gadget you find in a thrift store is worth buying, but there are some devices that could be worth snagging at the right price.

Free phone numbers sound like a better deal than they usually are. Google Voice has been handing out U.S. numbers at no cost for years, and for a while it was one of the more useful things Google made that plenty of people used. The catch is that the rest of Android's phone experience has moved on without it, and the gap between what Google Voice offers and what Google Messages now does has grown so wide that I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's main number.

Amazon built Fire TV into the streaming stick that tinkerers happily recommended. Its shift from Android-based Fire OS to the in-house Vega OS ends that deal, swapping app choice and freedom for Amazon's control. And unless stuff changes significantly, future Fire TV sticks are going to be a pass for me.

It used to be that picking a Linux distro mostly came down to which desktop you liked and which package manager you preferred. That is less true today. The distros getting attention now are built to do a specific job, whether that's ensuring ta thousand PCs are identical, surviving a bad update, or playing Windows games on your TV.

There are plenty of free, self-hosted services that can replace popular paid subscriptions. All you need is the hardware to run them on. I paid $200 for my mini PC, and by self-hosting just five services, I save more than $670 every year, based on the monthly subscription prices.

It's increasingly hard to use 4GB of RAM these days. But RAM is expensive now, in case you haven't heard. In the case of Linux, mainstream desktops have grown hungrier, and Ubuntu now recommends 6GB. Two lightweight options still run comfortably on 4GB laptops, though, and each suits a different kind of user.

Your Fire TV has some great diagnostic tools that you probably didn't know about. They answer pretty much every question you have about why your Fire TV isn't working well. Being able to see developer settings and tools is one of the features you really should already be using.

The Linux diff3 command detects differences between three text files. This helps you identify versions, understand their differences, and merge the changes. diff3's great for source code, scripts, or any plain text file.

Today marks the start of the first full week of October. In case you missed it, many new movies have been added to Netflix, including Tyler Perry's tear-jerker Doing Life. The three movies listed below won't make you cry because of their sincerity. In fact, you might look away due to the thrills and scares!

The best and worst thing about tech is just how fast it moves on. You buy a CPU today, then a year later, the socket's changed and your upgrade path is over. Nothing is permanent in tech, and with yearly release cycles for many components, it's easy for things to get left behind.

Building a home media setup used to be a no-brainer because you owned the hardware and files, and you didn't have to pay just to listen to music you already bought. Plex used to be that easy, but now it feels like you have to pay a third party to reach files on drives you bought, on a network you maintain. It's time to stop giving away money to a middleman and pick an alternative.

Old Wi-Fi routers get thrown out long before they stop being useful. Before you toss yours, three projects can give it a second life, and they cost little more than time and a spare Ethernet cable.