How-To Geek

Nothing makes me happier than a free weekend. Between the grind of the 9-to-5 lifestyle and the pressure of fulfilling social obligations, a weekend of rest and relaxation feels like a luxury. If I find myself with an open weekend, I love to start a show that I know I can finish before work on Monday morning.

Hot on the heels of YouTube Premium’s recent price hike, Google is quietly dangling a discount that may or may not soften the sting depending on how deep you’re already in the company's ecosystem.

I don’t like the idea of storing my files on someone else’s PC, losing access whenever the internet goes down and having to trust strangers not to take a peak—and that was before companies started training AI models on whatever files they could get their hands on. I’ve long dreamed of going local only, but I’m starting to realize the many ways in which self-hosting my own cloud is worse.

There are some parts of your home that are full of smart home devices; I have a lot of smart devices in my living room, kitchen, and bedroom, for example. Other areas can often get neglected, including utility rooms or even your outdoor space. Here are some Home Assistant projects that can give those areas some love.

Whether your file manager is KDE’s Dolphin, GNOME’s Files, or an alternative, it’s probably an essential part of your workflow, used daily to navigate and organize your files. However, Linux users have been performing these tasks for decades, long before GUI desktops even existed.

Hybrid badges tend to dominate the fuel-economy conversation, but not every buyer needs electrification to keep running costs low. In 2026, several affordable gasoline-powered cars are proving that smart engineering, lighter weight, and efficient powertrains can still deliver outstanding mileage without the added cost or complexity of a hybrid system.

Samsung has given its SmartThings hub an AI injection that could make it more useful for tracking your smart home, and not just from your phone. The company's Now Brief feature, which provides timely AI-curated updates, now supports home security, Family Care (support for aging parents), and pets, and is coming to TVs and refrigerators "soon."

Picking a font can be a tough task because there are so many to choose from. So why not pick a winner using a tried-and-tested method: the elimination tournament.

Do you have a habit of "closing" apps running in the background on your phone, hoping it'll improve performance or save battery life? If so, you should probably stop, because it's doing more harm than good.

Niagara Launcher has quietly become one of the best Android launchers available today. It originally grabbed attention for completely reimagining the Android home screen, and it has continued to improve upon that concept. The latest update brings a brand new customization tool and a company rebrand.

If you have fond memories of being able to upgrade your laptop’s components, I’m here to tell you that I’m right there with you. Except, in 2026, my view on that has changed, and I totally understand why companies stopped building user-upgradable laptops—and that’s okay.

Some jobs seem to get put off forever, regardless of how important they are. Though I’m always tinkering with my smart home, rarely do I put my audit hat on and check the nuts and bolts.

At first glance, Excel's ISNUMBER seems almost too straightforward to be useful—it simply tells you if a cell contains a numerical value. However, its true power lies in its ability to act as a logical gatekeeper, turning messy errors and function outputs into clean TRUE or FALSE values.

If you want your SSD to stay in peak condition without leaving even a smidge of performance on the table, I'd like to acquaint you with the TRIM command. TRIM not only keeps your SSD running at its best, but also reduces unnecessary operations that can, over time, negatively impact its lifespan.

There are so many ways today for readers like me to consume content. You could check out an Audible subscription and, in turn, listen to some awesomely narrated audiobooks by celebrities, or check out some new releases. Or you could do it the old-fashioned way and head to your local bookstore to pick up the latest release. But for me, I’ve leaned more into e-reading.

If you've spent any amount of time configuring and customizing your Linux environment, shell, or CLI tools, you've likely done so by editing configuration files. These config or dot files (they're called dot files because the file names usually begin with a dot) can get pretty complex over time. If these files are lost or overwritten, you'll have to recreate all your configurations and customizations from scratch. That's why it's a good idea to back up these files. If you run Linux on multiple devices, it's also a good idea to sync the dot file changes between computers instead of making the same changes everywhere by hand. I use this tool to do both those things.

Bambu Lab is a company that has taken the 3D printing world by storm. Its latest printer, the Bambu Lab X2D, is a long-awaited follow-up to the company’s 2022 debut, and it’s causing quite a stir in the 3D printing community.

I'll be honest—I completely forgot that NVIDIA's RTX Video Super Resolution existed. I was looking around the NVIDIA app the other day trying to sort out a custom resolution issue and spotted the setting again.

Self-hosting is now more popular than ever, and it’s not hard to see why. Day by day, more of our digital lives is moving into subscription-based cloud services that often fail to deliver.

There is a quiet assumption that if you choose Xfce, you have made peace with a certain aesthetic. Functional, stable, slightly frozen in time. It works, it does not surprise you, and it does not try to look like anything else, and much like others, I also accepted it. Then I started making small, almost trivial changes, and something odd happened. The desktop stopped feeling like a compromise and started feeling intentional.