How-To Geek

For decades, one hybrid hatchback has stood above everything else when it comes to fuel economy. Even as the market has exploded with electrified SUVs, sedans, and crossovers, no rival has managed to dethrone the long-standing benchmark for efficiency. If your number one priority is spending as little money on gas as possible, there is still one clear answer.

I wanted to move my Adobe Lightroom library to a portable SSD so I could use it on both my desktop and laptop. Instead of purchasing a pre-built SSD, I built my own for a fraction of the cost (and I can upgrade it later if I need to).

Few computing-related things seem as straightforward as a simple USB hub. It's there, you grab it, plug it in, plug things into it, and voila: you suddenly tripled the number of your USB ports! Sounds great (and it is), but there's also a reason why USB hubs are often treated as disposable tech. Those extra ports often tend to malfunction and die off one by one.

Apex's reign at the top of Netflix might be coming to an end with the addition of two new movies in May. The first is Swapped, an animated adventure starring Michael B. Jordan and Juno Temple. The other movie is Remarkably Bright Creatures, an endearing drama starring Sally Field and Lewis Pullman. Both movies have the potential to be the No. 1 movie when Netflix updates its rankings.

After a four-year wait, Euphoria has returned to television, but season 3 is providing a major shake-up to its formula. Not only have four years passed in the real world, but the in-universe tale has moved forward, taking the cast of the Zendaya-led teen drama out of high school and into the trials of young adulthood. As such, the series faces a new challenge of whether it can keep up its momentum with this drastic new status quo.

I've owned many portable external battery banks. I typically look at how much power they hold, how fast they can charge other devices, and how big they are—but my latest battery came with a perk I didn't know to look for.

A NAS is a great addition to any homelab setup. It can back up your photos and other files, run a Jellyfin or Plex server, and replace a few of your subscription services.

Popular proprietary voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant make it simple to control your smart home with your voice, but they lack personality. They're more like Computer from Star Trek than J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man or GLaDOS from Portal. Using two tools in Home Assistant, I gave my voice assistant a personality and a voice to match.

If you’re like me, you’re subscribed to many streaming websites, and one of those happens to be Amazon Prime. There are plenty of great shows on Amazon Prime, but one I love dearly and have had for many years is Invincible.

Cloud AI is powerful but not private. Local AI is private but less powerful. That trade-off is real, and trying to pick one over the other is the wrong framework. A better use of your time is to find tasks that require privacy, but not as much model intelligence, and then have local AI models automate them for you. Here are three such tasks that I’ve automated using on-device LLMs.

Power tools are a very personal purchase for a lot of people, and maybe even a sensitive subject. Just like tools in general, there's a lot of personal preference, brand loyalty, and most importantly myths that influence what people use.

The Adobe Suite is a mainstay of creatives everywhere, and one of the most common apps is Adobe Premiere—the video-editing software. However, I've switched to an open-source alternative, and I don't regret it for a moment.

If you've shopped for storage in the last few years, you've probably noticed the 2.5-inch hard drive quietly fading from the shelves. NVMe SSDs are tiny, fast, and increasingly affordable. The 3.5-inch drives still rule the desktop and NAS world. And yet, somehow, the humble 2.5-inch HDD keeps showing up.

I love having an Amazon Fire TV Stick, but the lag used to be a real problem. Initially, it felt like a great purchase because of the convenience and value, but over time, every click of the remote felt slower. The home screen felt heavy, menus lagged behind input, and trying to jump between Netflix and Disney+ was a test of my patience.

Homelabs are a fun, worthwhile hobby for many of us, but you don't always need to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars into your setup. I try to think of it as more of a sandbox where I’m making things, learning, and experimenting with hardware and software.

You probably know that GitHub isn't your only option for code management, but you're probably not aware about the many alternatives we have out there. One alternative that's currently gaining momentum is Codeberg, but what is it about?

One of the things I use the terminal for on Windows, in both PowerShell and WSL, is for running basic network diagnostics. Here are the commands I use most frequently.

Used mini PCs are an excellent solution if you need a dedicated Plex server. CPUs have been more than powerful enough to do the job for years, so there's no need to splash out cash for something new.

One of Google Maps' most recent features has become one of my most used ones on the navigation app, and for good reason. Ask Maps, an AI conversational feature, is now personalizing and simplifying navigation to a great extent.

If you’ve been using Obsidian for a while, you’ve probably seen Canvas in the sidebar and dismissed it as a whiteboard gimmick. That reaction makes sense—an infinite blank space with no obvious starting point isn’t exactly inviting. But Canvas isn’t a whiteboard—it’s where you go when your notes can’t hold the thought you’re trying to work through. Once that clicks, you’ll wonder how you have been thinking without using Obsidian Canvas.