How-To Geek

Finding answers to simple smart home questions like "does this light bulb require a cloud service" or "is this smart switch reliable with Home Assistant" can be surprisingly difficult, even after trudging through forum posts and Reddit threads. The Open Home Foundation Device Database aims to fix these problems, using data collected and anonymized from Home Assistant installations.

Linux is increasingly user-friendly, and as more and more apps become compatible, it is more tempting than ever to jump ship from Windows to Linux. However, there is one major drawback to Linux for anyone that wants to try it.

Your NAS is, at its core, kind of another PC. It has PC specs, and it runs a full operating system, but the way it's put together means it's optimized to do certain things betther than your PC.

Affordable family sedans often trade premium features for low prices, but one Korean-built example proves that doesn’t have to be the case in 2025. It delivers a level of comfort, refinement, and technology that rivals far more expensive rivals, all while staying within reach of mainstream budgets. For buyers who want a sedan that feels genuinely upscale without the luxury-car price tag, this model hits a rare sweet spot.

With optical media production winding down, and many people seemingly happy to get rid of their disc collections, there's never been a better time to pick up used media for your collection, but I'm still somewhat particular about used discs no matter how low their price!

Some SSDs are already quite compact, but a new SSD format takes things to the next level. The Mini SSD tech from Biwin looks more or less like a microSD card, but boasts PCIe 3.0-like read and write speeds and is available in capacities up to 2TB.

Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distros, but as with a lot of popular things, some people hate it. If you're fed up with Ubuntu's direction in the past few years, you might want to check out the distro it's based on, Debian. Here are some reasons why.

February is exciting for a mash-up of reasons, and in honor of that, I’ve selected a mash-up of movies on Amazon Prime Video for you to watch this week. From a cloak-and-dagger adventure and a gritty crime thriller to a feel-good mental health drama and one of my favorite Philip Seymour Hoffman comedies, we’re taking a ride.

One of Apple's major selling points is the seamless sync and continuity it provides between devices, and this is a major reason I've been immersed in its ecosystem for years. The iPhone often steals the show, but there's another killer productivity combination that is not talked about as much.

I love Windows, don't get me wrong. However, I would be wrong to not recognize that Linux, for all its faults, is better than Windows at some things.

Wiping a drive before selling it is very important. Not just because whoever's going to use it next needs the space, but also because you don't want them snooping through your files after you sold it.

Software makes the world go round, and more often than not you have to pay a pretty penny for the biggest and most popular software packages. Which is more than a little ironic when you consider that just about any software you pay for today is built at least partly on the work of free and open source developers.

Not every device in your home is smart, but that doesn't mean that they can't still be part of your smart home. There are plenty of dumb devices that you can make smarter with a little help.

Ubuntu is great (it's many people's first Linux distro), and like your typical Linux distro, you can customize and change a lot of stuff. That includes, of course, some stuff that's turned on by default that, whether for comfort or for actually serious reasons, you might want to disable.

A new GPU is the most thrilling thing when you're a PC gamer. After all, it's often the single most impactful component in a PC, and upgrading your graphics card can give you a major performance boost in all your games.

I recently lost my gaming laptop's secondary SSD, and the most likely cause was sustained overheating and throttling. Which means that I was now in the market for a new drive, and unlike before, I was now keenly aware of the thermal situation when it came to my SSDs.

Smart security cameras can be a great way to monitor what's going on in and around your home. Used well, they can play an important role in keeping your home safe, but you may not be using them to their full potential.

Cold storage is all about keeping your files and making them last for years, just in case you ever need to retrieve them to look at old memories. Improper methods of storage can cause those memories to be lost forever, which is why some formats are better than others for storing stuff over the long term.

I cover many tech companies, with Samsung phones and accessories currently serving as my center of gravity, but there’s one brand primarily associated with furniture and home decor that has come out of nowhere to become the tech company I’m most interested in.

Windows may be the most popular desktop OS, but it's not the most capable one. Linux outshines Windows in a number of areas—from full control over how your desktop looks to reviving decade-old hardware abandoned by Microsoft’s OS. To prove my point, here are five things Linux can do, but Windows can't!