How-To Geek

Intel has reportedly reached a deal to manufacture Apple chips just days after rumors emerged of ongoing talks, and the consequences could be profound even if you're an avid Windows PC user.

Own an old Moto Android phone but don’t plan to give it away or sell it? Instead of keeping it in some dim, dusty drawer and pulling it out every few months to check whether its battery has turned into a spicy pillow, you can repurpose it into something useful and keep using it on a daily basis.

That extra Ethernet port on the back of your motherboard is one of the most underrated bits of hardware on a modern PC. Most people glance at it once during the build, plug a cable into the other one, and forget it exists for the rest of the system's life. I did just the same thing, never caring for it much.

By the end of the week, I totally get the appeal of just turning your brain off and watching a mindless episode of Too Hot to Handle. But sometimes the most restorative weekends come by adding a bit of real-life perspective to your gray matter, with a good documentary. Luckily, HBO Max has some of the best quality ones around, and I've got a few suggestions below.

The luxury compact SUV segment looks different today than it did in 2003. When the BMW X3 first arrived, it essentially defined the category by proving an SUV (or crossover) could handle like a sporty sedan. The X3 has been a benchmark for over two decades, but the market is shifting. Buyers are moving away from luxury for luxury's sake and are, instead, looking for a vehicle that prioritizes everyday functionality and long-term value.

The weekend is the best time to actually sit down and mess with your Linux setup. This time, I have for you a selection of three apps that are aimed at improving your quality of life and using Linux that much more convenient. Each app solves a different kind of friction you've probably just accepted as part of your workflow.

One of the biggest advantages of turning a laptop into a NAS is that you get to fully reuse its internals, including the built-in battery. In the event of a power outage, that battery can keep the system running until electricity returns, effectively serving as a mini-UPS. This allows zero downtime and no need to reset or reconfigure anything, which is especially useful if your NAS is in a hard-to-reach spot like mine.

Satisfaction means different things to different people. For some, it’s completing a complex set of instructions in order to build something truly impressive, for others, it’s something altogether more tactile. Sometimes it’s finding another way to keep your hands busy while you focus on other tasks.

I don't like it when old games are as limited as they were twenty years ago. I think that when we emulate games, the advances in technology should translate to better gameplay. Unfortunately, that's not how it's worked with my emulator for a long time. Luckily, lossless scaling solved this problem for me, but it did come with some hiccups.

Cloud storage feels like the obvious choice for backing up important data. It’s cheap (and even free up to a point), convenient, and simple to set up.

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is the undoubted king of coding editors, with 75% of respondents to the 2025 Stack Overflow Survey citing it as a tool they use regularly. It towers above not only strong competitors like Vim, Cursor, and Notepad++, but also over its fuller-featured parent project, Visual Studio.

Netflix is on fire right now with some new prestige scripted series and movies, from Lord of the Flies and Man on Fire, to Apex and Bugonia, burning up the platform. But sometimes you need a little grounding from all that fiction with a solid dose of documentary—which can be even wilder than fiction.

Staying on top of conversations, whether in meetings, lectures, or even casual calls, can be harder than it sounds. You’re either fully engaged and missing key details, or busy taking notes and losing track of the discussion. And even when you record conversations, you’re often left with long audio files that are time-consuming to sort through.

When I first started using Claude, I treated it like a search bar with brains. I'd type a question into a fresh chat and get annoyed when Claude didn't understand what I wanted. It took me some time to realize that the problem wasn't Claude, it was me. A few changes in how I used Claude made it so much more useful.

If you've noticed your Ryobi lawn mower dying before the backyard is finished, the culprit isn't necessarily a bad or aging battery; it's probably how you're using your favorite feature. And if you've had the mower for a few years, how and when you use this feature becomes even more important.

FFmpeg is one of my favorite tools. It is a multimedia Swiss army knife that powers more media applications than I can count. However, it doesn't include a GUI by default, which can sometimes make it a bit difficult to use.

Router buttons are notoriously bad at making sense. It's not even that many people simply don't know what they're there for; it's that routers don't have one unified form factor the way laptops and desktop PCs do, so you may not even know what you're looking at.

It took a while, but automation tools are now baked into most smartphones. They're actually pretty good, too—with one exception. While Samsung Modes & Routines (even iPhone Shortcuts) are excellent, Google’s Pixel “Rules” are embarrassingly lackluster.

Almost every ESP32 device has Wi-Fi; it’s one of the things that makes the microcontroller so versatile. You can use this functionality to power a variety of wireless projects, from penetration testing to expanding the range of your home network.

Do you find that devices keep dropping off your Zigbee network or are slow to respond? The problem may not be your Zigbee network at all; it may be your Wi-Fi network. Both Zigbee and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi share the same frequency band, and they can get in each other’s way.