How-To Geek

Are you weighing buying a new car or more RAM for your NAS? Maybe not, but it feels like it these days. Your NAS likely needs less RAM than you think it does—here’s how to figure out just how much RAM your NAS actually needs.

Have you noticed that you're getting better at using Linux? Everyone learns at their own pace, but if you've been using Linux for a while, here are the five signs that prove you're starting to become an advanced user.

The holiday season brings a festive dose of gift-giving, party hosting, and much-needed vacations. If you are traveling at the end of the year or around New Year's, I recommend getting on board with my obsession: real-time flight tracking.

Are you staring at the Linux Mint download page wondering which edition to choose? Do terms like Cinnamon, Xfce, and MATE feel confusing? Here are the honest pros and cons of each desktop environment so you can choose confidently.

People buy Apple products for many reasons, but they stick around because of the ecosystem. Thing is, Android has an ecosystem that is just as complete and just as good. One could even say there is a vast galaxy of Android-powered Samsung devices that provide the same kind of integration we've come to expect from Apple products.

Paramount+ subscribers are almost spoiled for choice when it comes to its library of crowd-pleasing blockbusters. For this week, and since we're edging closer to the holidays, I've been in the mood for huge popcorn flicks that are easy to watch.

I’ve been using iTerm2 ever since I discovered there was a better alternative to macOS’s built-in Terminal.app. But I didn’t pay it much mind beyond that: after all, if it ain’t broke...

As we inch closer and closer to the big day of presents—I mean, family, love, togetherness, and all that good stuff—we also inch closer to more time off to do what we entertainment nerds love to do most, which is consume. This week, we’re taking in a mouthful, so be sure to work up an appetite.

You've probably written dozens of Bash scripts by now. You may have used grep in a conditional statement or sed to transform small blocks of text inline. What if I told you that's incredibly inefficient? Bash provides built-in utilities to handle these cases, but they're infrequently utilized, so let's fix that.

In the smart homes of the future, we were promised that everything would be automated. Today, there are robot vacuums to clean your floors and smart locks that secure your residence without a key—so why should you still be manually operating your blinds?

I don't even want to think about how much money I've spent on gaming headsets over the years. The answer is way too much, and all because it took me far too long to give up.

While I've tried the alternatives, I always seem to come back to good old Plex, but as the years have gone by, the pressure to pay has increased. I managed to resist, but recently, out of pure frustration, I put down for a month of premium Plex, and there's no going back.

I can't be too hard on Adobe Creative Cloud. It gave us an affordable and legal way to access tools like Premiere and Photoshop with ongoing support and updates. Before, the upfront cost for these apps was enormous, and you had to pay up all over again when a new version shipped anyway. If you use Creative Cloud to make money, it's also a legitimate business expense–and a fairly-priced one at that.

Do you find that you're getting false positives for your smart home automations? It can be frustrating when automations trigger when they shouldn't. If this is happening to you, setting up a Bayesian sensor may help.

A lot of smart devices are far superior to their dumb equivalents. Smart plugs, for example, can do so much more than traditional plugs can. Sometimes, however, there are occasions where only a dumb device will do.

The package manager is what primarily makes a Linux distribution special. You can always swap out the desktop environment, the window manager, and the shell, but you're stuck with the package manager built into the distro you're using. And unless you go out of your way to avoid the terminal, you will be interacting with the package manager fairly often. So it makes sense to give that choice some thought, especially if you're new to the Linux ecosystem. The Advanced Package Tool (or APT) and Pacman are the two most popular package managers out there, and I'll try to help you pick one.

Modern earbuds can block out the world with active noise cancellation, yet still let you hear someone when you need to, thanks to transparency mode. Still, there’s one small, often overlooked feature that makes it even easier: wear sensors.

If you're like me, you're probably properly sick of everything being a subscription. I recently started purging subscriptions from my life, Microsoft 365 being prime among them. But, if you get rid of apps that you need when you cancel your subscription, how can you keep doing what you were before? These apps are just the ticket to replace key paid services.

I used to waste hours in Microsoft Excel manually cleaning data, fixing formulas, and reformatting worksheets. That was until I realized I could use the Find and Replace dialog (Ctrl+H) to achieve the same results in seconds. As a result, I can now spend more time on the things that matter.

If you want to master Google Sheets on your phone, you need to make a significant change in how you think about it. Your smartphone isn't just for looking at data while you're out and about. It's actually a fully functional, highly optimized platform that handles complex data management and analysis perfectly well.