How-To Geek

While the highly anticipated Prime Big Deal Days are nearly upon us, you don't have to wait around until Oct. 6–7 to start saving huge, as Amazon has already started posting some of its early-access deals, and there are numerous, noteworthy opportunities. Among the countless products, one that truly stands out as a worthy purchase with your hard-earned cash is this Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet—and it's over $80 off.

Amazon has revamped its entire Kindle lineup, and there are reasons to take notice even if you're happy with your old model. All of them are easier to carry and more colorful, but the highlight is the company's first color Kindle Scribe.

Once you start to dabble with Linux, you’ll encounter the phrase “terminal emulator” over and over again. You might be familiar with games emulators, but don’t be misled. This is very different.

Pick up any Android device or iPhone, and the home screens all essentially look the same: a grid of static icons and some widgets. Most devices in general work like this, but it wasn't always like that. Microsoft experimented with dynamic Live Tiles that combined icons and widgets into one, which hit their peak during the Windows 8 era — and you can still enjoy some of that magic on your phone today.

If you have ever opened a video template hoping to save time, only to find it works only if your footage fits its exact shape, you know the frustration. Most templates in editing software are rigid. You swap a photo here, a caption there, and then hope the rest of the sequence lines up with what you actually filmed. Movavi is trying a different approach with its 2027 release of Movavi Video Editor, built around a feature it calls Blocks.

I used a TV stand. That's the third option. You can see it in the picture above. It's not a mystery. But wait! There really is more to it than that. Because until I started using a dedicated TV stand, I really didn't think there was a third option other than using the TV's built-in feet or wall-mounting.

Years ago, I built an arcade cabinet from scratch and powered it with a Dell laptop from 2010 running Windows 7. It played games like Halo, Dragon's Lair, and plenty of other classic games. I also used it as a jukebox in my man cave. It got a lot of use over the years, and it lasted a long time, but several months ago it started to feel underpowered for what I was using it for. After looking around on Facebook Marketplace, I found a great replacement. It was a Dell desktop unit that already had Windows 11 installed. Once the switch was made, my old laptop didn’t have much to do.

You've probably heard that CDs, DVDs, and physical media in general are experiencing a resurgence. Makes sense. I have so many different subscriptions to various streaming services, I'm seriously considering ditching it all and just collecting DVDs again. At least they're mine for life, then.

Obsidian kind of makes getting data in feel like a project in itself. Manually typing metadata and deciding what folder it belongs to can get annoying. Obsidian is really good once your vault has stuff in it, but filling that vault tends to come with weird ideas. I went looking for a good solution and found a few that I think work well for different situations, where you don’t need to do much.

I've taken a lot of photos with Samsung Galaxy phones over the years, and I've learned that getting better results isn't necessarily about having the latest camera hardware. Some of the biggest improvements I've made have come from changing the way I use the camera and taking advantage of features that are already built into the phone.

Like most people running Windows, I rely on the built-in security to keep my device safe. I know my way around Windows Security, but I kept my settings mostly at default until recently, when I read a Microsoft report about a recent threat. In short, malware disguised as legitimate, popular apps tried to weaken Windows' own security settings by silently disabling them.

Android may have begun as a mobile operating system, but it has blossomed into much more. Unfortunately, system administrator tools are still playing catch-up, and certain information about apps is harder to access than it is on desktop PCs. Fortunately, there’s an app you can install that will tell you everything you want to know, and it happens to be open source.

The merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery is one step closer to becoming a reality.

While movies with an R rating can often signal something grim, gross, or too serious, it can also simply mean that it's just a license to be silly, stupid, and flat-out misbehave. If you're like me and admire all the colors of the English language, that letter tag allows filmmakers to let the profanity fly and chase jokes that might otherwise end up on the cutting-room floor (or on a director's cut DVD).

With GPUs and memory chips in incredibly high demand, 2027 is shaping up to be one of the more unusual graphics card release cycles. NVIDIA has been dominating the segment for years, but if recent rumors suggesting that the RTX 60 series is delayed until 2028 turn out to be true, AMD could find itself in a unique position to lure users toward its upcoming cards.

I've been self-hosting for more than 15 years now, and despite my best efforts, my friends and family just don't care about all the cool things on the network. As it turns out, Grafana dashboards are only interesting to me.

Smartphones have more storage than ever these days, but running out of space still happens all the time, especially with the powerful cameras on newer Galaxy phones. My Galaxy S26 doesn't have a microSD slot, like most flagship Samsung phones, and whenever I record a long video or want to shoot in 4K or 8K, I worry. But after finding one little setting, it's no longer a concern.

If you wanted to learn how to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux but didn't want to buy a license from Red Hat, CentOS was your distro. How did this affect the Linux ecosystem?

While so many people wait around until Black Friday or Cyber Monday to buy a TV, the trick is that you don't have to wait until after Thanksgiving to find a great deal on a high-quality TV, especially if you just know where to look. Hint: Best Buy is the place to shop right now, especially if you're looking for a massive 75-inch TV from Samsung.

When I first purchased an ESP32, I started with the hardest tools and only discovered the easier tools later. That led to a lot of unnecessary frustration, since most problems you'll encounter while working on ESP32 boards already have solutions. They're just not in one tidy place.