Inkjet printers periodically flush ink through their nozzles to stop them clogging — sending it straight into a hidden waste pad, whether or not you've printed a page.

A coffee stain or a peeling sticker shouldn't kill a QR code, and usually it doesn't. Here's the redundant-data trick, borrowed from deep-space communication, that keeps damaged codes readable.

SSDs need free blocks to write fast. The real reason a drive suddenly feels slow is almost always capacity, not calendar age.

Swapping the battery is supposed to end the chirping. When it doesn't, the real cause is almost always one of four things, and a dead battery usually isn't one of them.

Microwave ovens and Wi-Fi routers share almost the same frequency, and one of them is about 35,000 times more powerful than the other.

Six state laws took effect Jan. 1, pushing repair protections past a quarter of the country. But a software trick called parts pairing shows how much control manufacturers still keep.

A bulging phone case or a laptop trackpad that won't sit flat is usually the first visible sign of a chemical reaction inside a lithium-ion cell that started days or weeks earlier.