How-To Geek

Smartphones and the apps we use on them are designed to maximize screen time. You might pick up your phone to swipe away a notification alert, only to realize half an hour has passed and you haven’t looked away from the screen. That’s why I set up a notification system to alert me whenever that happened.

For a lot of us, streaming was supposed to be the end of expensive cable bundles. A way to pay only for what we actually watched. But somewhere along the way, that promise started to unravel. Every show seemed to live on a different platform, subscription prices crept up, and the once simple joy of flipping through channels turned into a spreadsheet of monthly charges. According to Consumer Reports, more than half of American households now subscribe to four or more streaming services, and nearly one in ten pay for nine or more. It’s a quiet kind of subscription fatigue that’s easy to ignore until you finally add up the totals.

Major shifts could be ahead for Android—the Epic vs. Google settlement will change app distribution. Motorola's new Moto G series starts at just $170. Plus, Google Messages can now pin 20 conversations, and Gemini is coming to Google Maps navigation. Read on for more!

Android is now over fifteen years old, and in that time, some truly great apps have come and gone. Let's take a moment to honor a few of our fallen brethren who truly did serve us well.

For people desperate to have the smallest eReader possible, the Durobo Krono is a new option. It’s a 6.13-inch phone-like device with an E Ink screen that tries to differentiate itself with a scroll wheel. Unfortunately, the device feels cheap to use.

The weekend is here, and it’s time to continue on your self-hosting journey! This weekend, we're going to focus on getting some self-hosted cloud storage and media servers running in your homelab.

SECO has officially launched the Pi Vision 10.1 CM5, a rugged industrial human-machine interface platform built around the powerful Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. This device takes the flexible Raspberry Pi platform and transforms it into a professional-grade solution.

There are some graphics cards and graphics card families that just have so much staying power, that you can use them for years. I ran the same NVIDIA 8800GT for a decade without needing to upgrade it, thanks to the long life of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and multi-platform ports.

Are you ready to tackle some more advanced Raspberry Pi projects? This weekend is the perfect time to take your hobby projects to the next level.

If you were one of the, er, many who watched Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan's new sci-fi thriller series premiere on Apple TV last night, you might be feeling the same as me and the vast majority of critics out there: this could be the streamer's best show since Severance.

Movies Anywhere quietly announced that it will no longer sync purchases from Google Play and YouTube on October 31st. This is an unexpected consequence of the ongoing feud between Google and Disney, the latter of which owns the Movies Anywhere service.

Single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi are an incredibly popular way of running Home Assistant. Alongside official hardware like the plug-and-play Home Assistant Green, the Raspberry Pi is the easiest way to run Home Assistant.

You can spruce up the wallpaper on your Android to match the time of day. Instead of a boring static wallpaper, you can set the phone to change wallpapers dynamically. For example, you could have your phone display a light mode wallpaper during the day, which transitions to a dark mode wallpaper at night. I’m going to show you three ways you can do so.

YouTube may have significantly intensified its ad blocker war, which is leading to many users reporting that the platform is completely failing to load. Although the spike on DownDetector made it look exactly like a major partial outage, the problem isn’t with YouTube’s servers.

Infrared photography is a technique that involves capturing infrared light by blocking out all or some frequencies of visible light. The results are unique and otherworldly, and it’s fun to see what the world around you looks like when you capture it in this way.

Luxury car ownership doesn’t always have to come with a luxury price tag, and this sedan proves it. Known as one of Lexus’ most reliable models, it offers the refinement, comfort, and long-term dependability the brand is famous for, all at a price that rivals a brand-new Toyota Camry. For buyers looking to move upmarket without breaking the bank, it’s a rare opportunity.

Pebblebee just revealed the Clip 5 and Card 5—a cute set of Bluetooth trackers with enhanced safety functionality and rechargeable batteries. They're almost perfect, and I'd probably buy them if not for the lack of UWB precision finding.

Blockbuster popcorn movies with high-caliber Hollywood acting talent are great, but sometimes nothing beats the jaw-dropping weirdness and compelling real-life stories that only a good documentary or docuseries can deliver. And lucky for us, Netflix has them in spades.

LibreOffice and other office suites are built around the Open Document Format, or ODF for short, which has a few important advantages over Microsoft Office files and other formats. That includes the ability to open your files years or decades after they were created, as the LibreOffice folks just pointed out.

I love my old and beat-up Toyota Tacoma truck, but the upgraded stereo still doesn't support wireless Android Auto. Unless you have a newer vehicle, yours probably doesn't, either. After trying multiple different dongles to convert it into a wireless experience, I can confidently say the AAWireless TWO is the only one worth buying.