How-To Geek

I have been loyal to iOS since 2018. I liked the polished iOS experience and reliable day-to-day performance. But one Samsung feature kept tempting me to buy their phone. Samsung offered me something Apple still doesn’t: DeX, a full desktop-style interface that runs from my phone. It became a game-changer for my productivity.

For the past couple of years, Spotify Wrapped has left me underwhelmed. The insights it serves up never feel all that “insightful” — which is strange, because Spotify clearly has a mountain of data on my listening habits. So I decided to get my hands on all that data and build my own Spotify Wrapped. I requested my full listening data from Spotify and processed it myself in Excel to dig up the kind of insights Wrapped never gives me.

Home Assistant 2026.9 update is out today. And it aims to solve the everyday guesswork that comes with running a smart home. The latest release answers questions like why an automation fired, which entities need your attention, or seeing how Matter devices are connected. The September update also has several other changes that make the open-source home automation platform more polished.

I tend to hold on to my vehicles for a long time, which means things eventually wear out or stop working the way they should. I also try to handle repairs myself whenever it makes sense. Sometimes that's as simple as replacing a sensor or tracking down a bad connection, but the hardest part is usually figuring out what's actually wrong.

Android phones, especially the most expensive models, are pretty capable devices. They have as much RAM as some laptops, and their processors are often as fast as laptop CPUs from a few generations ago.

Nvidia's GTX cards may be too old to support any modern, demanding uses, but they're still among the best GPUs of all time.

Netflix is bringing a particularly varied lineup of documentaries this September, covering everything from a viral Olympic controversy to the long shadow of 9/11. Some stories revisit major moments in history, while others uncover events most people may have never heard of.

You’re probably using VLC as your default media player. It plays basically anything you throw at it, and it’s been doing that reliably for over two decades. That said, playing media is only a fraction of what the app is capable of. The developers have spent years turning it into a genuine Swiss Army knife for all things audio and video.

I first jumped into the fold with Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold4 back in 2022, and a foldable has been my primary smartphone since then. Four years later, the category has grown by leaps and bounds, and foldable technology has evolved drastically alongside that growth. That doesn't mean there's still a lot of room for foldables — and Samsung in particular — to further improve.

Obsidian is one of the most powerful apps out there, but it’s more of a DIY project than a ready-made solution. The default Obsidian experience is fairly basic and bare-bones, centered around a simple note-taking experience. However, once you start tweaking it with the many community-made plugins available, you can slowly transform Obsidian into a powerhouse. Here’s how I set up my Obsidian vault to function like a project management system—and the results were so good that it has replaced Notion for me.

I have both an Android phone and a relatively modern car with a touchscreen, yet I still don't use Android Auto — and it's not because I don't know what I'm missing. I just like my Kia's built-in software more.

After years of jumping between Google Pay and Google Wallet, the company finally settled on Google Wallet as its one-stop destination for everything from contactless payments to digital IDs. Here are some of its helpful features to make your life easier.

A lot of gamers are understandably concerned when they first boot up their new gaming PC and discover that their expensive graphics card is hitting temperatures north of 80°C.

Most of us sit on our couches to watch movies or shows, just to get out of our routine lives bound by work, household chores, tasks, and duties. And what better way to do it than watching a thriller that keeps us hooked until the end? I love the genre, especially the thrillers that play with my mind.

Running out of storage usually means one thing—hovering over the downloads folder with increasingly desperate intent and looking for anything you can move to an external drive. But unless you’ve genuinely run out of files to delete, the problem likely isn’t what you have; it’s how much space Windows is quietly using behind the scenes. It turns out that a surprising amount of storage is tied to temporary files, recovery data, old updates, and system clutter. The good thing is that you don’t need another PC cleaner because Windows already has a capable cleanup kit built-in.

LED strip lighting is all the rage, and for good reason. It’s cheap, versatile, easily integrates with smart home platforms, and it’s easier than ever to make your own.

Me? I'm a hardcore anime fan. You've probably never even heard of the anime I like. You? I guess you're not really into this anime stuff. It's all spiky hair, big swords, and too much fan service. Right?

As a tech journalist, it's easy for me to go ahead and criticize RAM and SSD makers for price hikes, and ignore the reasons as to why that might be happening.

I realized I didn't have a single place where I could see all my subscriptions, so I built a simple Excel tracker to bring them together. Since I set mine up, it's helped me cut more than $1,000 from my recurring expenses by showing me what I was paying, highlighting overlaps, and giving me time to act before renewals.

Android Auto can be frustrating if you don't want it to do anything more than the basics. It quickly fills up with apps, it bombards you with notifications, and generally feels bloated and cluttered. All I need is for it to tell me where to go and play some music until I get there. And by changing a few key settings, that's exactly what it does.