How-To Geek

How often do you replace your phone? For over a decade, I've been on a two-year cycle on a phone contract. With my last phone, and iPhone 14 Pro, I lengthened that to three years. Now my three years are up, but I don't feel any need to upgrade to a new phone.

When your smart home goes down, all those clever automations that make your life easier stop working. There are some handy tricks that homelab users often use that help keep Home Assistant running or minimize the impact if it does go down.

Want to do more with the Linux terminal? You might not instinctively put videos and the command line together, but with FFmpeg you can actually do a lot with a video file just by typing a simple command in your terminal.

Your physical Ethernet port has lasted the test of time despite slowly getting phased out. Lots of modern laptops and smaller PCs don't even have this familiar connector anymore, and some people may not know what Ethernet is. This can make people think a wired connection is just old news, something slow and clunky from the dial-up days. We will show you that your computer's often-ignored Ethernet port is actually a hidden Swiss Army knife. It can make dedicated high-speed links for moving files between devices, give power to remote equipment, and let you set up advanced networks way beyond just getting online.

Twin Peaks remains one of the most iconic television shows of all time, marking a major cultural shift and creative transition in TV between the 1980s and 1990s. The show took the familiar formula of the classic murder mystery that was popular at the time and flipped it on its head by purposefully obscuring the murderer and blending unexpected elements of surrealism and horror into it.

Android phones have a lot in common with computers. They have a file system, support for keyboards and mice, advanced multitasking, and even a full-fledged desktop mode. One thing Android doesn’t have, however, is a native clipboard. Thankfully, Gboard can fix that.

Linux is famously customizable, and when you hear its perks discussed, you'll usually see mentions of "flexibility" and "personalization" in the conversation. Despite those strengths, I've gotten tired of customizing my Linux PCs.

Arch Linux has a reputation for being brutally hard to install and maintain. That reputation isn’t wrong—but don’t let it fool you into thinking it’s the final boss of Linux distributions. Here are three distros that are a lot harder than Arch—reserved for truly advanced users who deeply understand how Linux works.

There are plenty of problems with using smart bulbs in your home. One of the most frustrating things is that if the light switch is off, your smart bulb won't work at all. Smart switches solve this problem, but there are some things smart bulbs can give you that smart switches can't.

Sci-fi and fantasy are my favorite genres (big surprise), but for most of my life the movies in these genres always felt like they had less substance than the SF&F books I devoured over the years.

These days, it takes a special trick to silence a noisy hard drive (HDD). And if not for this unfortunate patent war and lawsuit, we may have had a proper solution that could have kept our HDDs quiet, or at least quieter.

Memory card slots on flagship phones are a thing of the past and are unlikely to return. So if you want extra storage on your phone, your main option is to choose a higher capacity when you first buy it. But I go a different way. I still buy the base model, and then expand the storage by plugging in an external SSD. It might sound strange, but it actually works pretty well.

The best way to learn stats and data science is to actually do it. And to do it, you need datasets. One good place to find them is Kaggle. Here's how I find, download, and explore Kaggle datasets.

In my role as a content creator, I’ve tested more apps, platforms, and tools in the name of productivity than I care to count. For my daily work, I rely on open-source tools that help me move faster and get more done. They’re fast, flexible, and have no subscriptions or fees.

Do you own a powerful GPU but barely use it anymore? Are you feeling guilty of watching expensive hardware sit idle? Well, you don't need to play video games to get your money's worth from your GPU. Here are five ways I've repurposed my RTX GPU after quitting PC gaming—and they've genuinely improved how I work and live.

Microsoft Word may seem like it is still a basic writing app, but it has gathered plenty of easy-to-use shortcuts over the years. Tasks that you find tedious likely to have a tool designed to make your work easier. While some are simple, there are many that can save you a significant amount of time.

Microsoft Excel usually thinks in directions: "look one cell to the left." That's fine until you move the formula and the reference gets lost. By knowing how to use the dollar ($) sign, you can tell Excel when to look at a permanent address and when to look at a moving target, meaning you're building sturdier formulas.

Electric vehicles used to be limited to a small handful of choices, but that’s changed quickly over the past few years. Today, you’ll find everything from compact city EVs to electric pickups and high-performance supercars hitting the market.

Electric vehicles used to be limited to a small handful of choices, but that’s changed quickly over the past few years. Today, you’ll find everything from compact city EVs to electric pickups and high-performance supercars hitting the market.

PCIe adapters are the ultimate solution for adding anything from extra M.2 SSDs and SATA drives to 10-Gigabit networking adapters and Wi-Fi cards. While they are the fastest form of expansion on your motherboard, they are not as foolproof as they might look. If you don't match the right adapter to the right slot, you could be severely limiting your hardware's performance.