The terminal looks like an unassuming (sometimes intimidating) black box and feels like it’s only meant for pros or experts. It’s not as inscrutable as it seems though. Anybody can learn to use it and get stuff done. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll often find yourself launching a terminal instead of opening a new browser tab. That’s because the terminal is faster, reliable, and never shows ads.

There's an overwhelming number of file managers on the Google Play Store, but a good chunk of those are riddled with ads, proprietary, or both. File managers have access to the entire user file system, so you want to be sure you can trust them with all your data. Here are four open-source, privacy-friendly file managers you can try.

Regardless of the online platform you use to track time for your personal or team projects, you can’t deny that you’re not in control of that platform. If Clockify or Toggl go down tomorrow because of a glitch or scheduled maintenance, you can’t access them or your data until they come back online. That’s why the most reliable and private platform is always the one you can host yourself and have total control over. Let me show you how you can do exactly that.

An AWS outage recently took out Trello and for an entire day, people weren’t able to access their projects and tasks. The good news is you don’t need a Trello account just to have a Kanban board for you or your team. Instead, you can self-host a Trello alternative on your computer or homelab and protect your work from cloud outages.

On macOS, you can instantly look up files and launch apps with Spotlight search. Even many popular Linux distros offer snappy search bars like Spotlight. But on Windows, there is no central interface to search for every file, setting, and app. File Explorer takes forever to load searches, the Start search doesn’t always give relevant suggestions, if at all. Most of the time, it just plugs into Bing web results or displays ads for Microsoft products. We can’t fix Windows search, but we can replace it with a better option.

The more programs set to auto-launch on startup, the longer your computer takes to boot. That's doubly true for machines with older hardware. Allow me to show you different ways to identify and disable startup apps and speed up your PC's boot time.

Progress bars are everywhere, but we hardly ever give them a second thought. They have a little bit of mystery to them though. You might have noticed that downloads or file transfers sometimes get stuck at 99%. At times, they jump or stall. Sometimes they even fail at 99%. It happens because progress bars always lie, a little bit.

Instead of relying on your laptop’s tinny internal mic, you can connect your phone’s microphone to your computer. It also comes in handy if your PC doesn’t have an in-built mic, and you need to make a recording or take a meeting. The setup shouldn’t take more than two minutes. Let’s begin.

Until I started using Keep Notes to take notes on a daily basis, this note-taking app from Google felt pretty basic. Notion and Obsidian, in my estimation at least, were way more powerful. For some people, their Notion or Obsidian spaces are so sophisticated that they call them their “second brains.” Google Keep isn’t as complex as Obsidian, but it’s not as simple as a sticky notes app either. It sits comfortably in the middle ground between the two. Let me show you what I mean.

The one perk of having an e-reader is that you never have to read anything on a regular display, if you choose to. You can read manga, graphic novels, or comics on an e-reader. You can set up your e-reader to automatically update with RSS feeds. You can even read websites as ebooks on your e-reader. Let me show you how.

You don’t need to email files to yourself or text yourself notes just to sync them between devices. There’s a better way to wirelessly share data between your phone and computer. I’ll show you two ways to do exactly that. In addition to sharing text and files, you will also get quality of life features. For instance, you can have your phone’s notifications sent directly to your PC, answer texts without picking up the phone, and even control the phone’s media playback using a Windows PC.

Over time, hidden junk files and old drivers clog up Windows systems, slowing them down, and even introducing security vulnerabilities. That’s why it’s a good idea to ‘spring-clean' your computer every once in a while. Clearing away old junk files will speed up your computer and free up disk space at the same time. I’ll show you two ways you can do this.