How-To Geek

When you switch to streaming, you expect instant, perfect 4K video. You're paying for a top-tier, multi-gigabit fiber connection, so it's frustrating when your Amazon Fire TV Stick still freezes during a key movie scene. Buffering like this is one of the most annoying parts of home entertainment, but you can stop it. The problem is rarely the speed of the internet coming into your house. Instead, it's the data's physical struggle to reach your device, so it is great that it has a hidden port for you.

Are you staring at a sea of empty cells and don't know where to begin? Excel feels far less intimidating when you treat it as a toolbox instead of a test. These beginner-friendly projects help you create practical trackers and planners in under an hour while learning core skills.

The newest version of Mazda’s compact SUV may be more modern and more practical than ever before, but not every change has been for the better. As automakers continue moving toward bigger screens, softer driving dynamics, and broader mainstream appeal, some of the sharpness and character that once made certain crossovers stand out is starting to disappear. That is exactly why some buyers may be better off shopping slightly used instead of buying brand new.

You probably already use Claude for the occasional question or writing your emails, but that’s barely scratching the surface of what it can do. There’s a big difference between using Claude as a chatbot and using it as an automation tool that quietly handles the parts of your digital life you’ve been avoiding for years. If you’ve been curious about what agentic AI actually looks like in everyday life, here are five boring tasks I automated with Claude.

Now Playing wasn’t one of the reasons I wanted to switch to Pixel. I knew about it and, aside from thinking, "Okay, so it's an offline Shazam, whatever," I didn’t give it much thought. Worse still, the feature was completely broken during the first few days of owning my Pixel 10 Pro, so I couldn’t even test it.

Pixar is the champion of animation, but not all of their movies have had the chance to shine. For 40 years, the studio has brought families together across 30 movies. Certain movies never enter the discussion of being among the studios' best — they were overshadowed by other films, or they went direct-to-streaming on Disney+.

We all have one sitting in a drawer somewhere. That phone you replaced two or three years ago, still working fine but gathering dust because the battery isn't quite what it used to be, or because the camera on the new one is just better. You keep telling yourself you'll do something with it eventually.

Far too often, I think of something to add to my to-do list, but then by the time I've gotten around to opening the list and adding the tasks, I've forgotten what it was. I decided to see if I could quickly add tasks to a to-do list with my voice by using Home Assistant.

While I’ve got a pretty solid gaming desktop, my partner is still rocking an ancient Windows desktop that I used for gaming for a few years before I built a new gaming PC in 2020. It’s powered by what was once an excellent budget gaming CPU, the dual-core Intel Pentium G4560, along with an AMD Radeon R9 270 GPU, and only 4GB of RAM. The machine originally had 8GB of DDR4 RAM running in dual-channel mode, but one of the sticks died a few years ago.

I miss the days of binging one show over the course of several months. It’s how I completed shows like The Wire and Friday Night Lights. I must admit that I streamed the shows in college when I had significantly more free time on my hands. Since I write about entertainment for a living, I have less spare time to watch long-running shows that take weeks. Occasionally, I just need a show that I can finish on a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon.

Before I made the jump to a unified mesh Wi-Fi network, I was confronted with the conundrum of moving into a bigger house, and suddenly having no Wi-Fi signal in my office or in our bedroom.

Google Play Store might be the default app store on Android, but the good thing about Android is that it gives you a choice. That includes the choice of the software store. Here are some alternatives to the Google Play Store worth checking out.

Sometimes you can spend hours creating a Home Assistant automation that saves you about 30 seconds. On rare occasions, however, it's the other way round. I set up an automation in just a few minutes that saves me far more time each day.

Switching on "private DNS" feels like flipping the privacy switch. The name alone makes it sound like a one-click solution to keep your browsing habits to yourself, hidden from your ISP, your network admin, and anyone else who might be peeking at your traffic.

Before smartphones, most people’s experience with operating systems was from computers. Naturally, many of those desktop habits carried over, and malicious Android developers were more than happy to take advantage.

Not so long ago, running a Windows PC without some kind of special antivirus would have all but ensured that your PC got infected with malware. Now, however, the situation is different. Microsoft has made huge improvements to the operating system, and you probably don't need to pay up for antivirus.

While it can be subtle, Windows 11 is filled with lots of little animations and details that give the OS an overall impression of being shiny and modern. Of course, this is only skin-deep, but setting aside whether Windows 11 actually is shiny and modern under the hood, these aesthetic effects aren't free.

Car theft in the United States hit a decades-long low in 2025, a 23% drop from 2024, according to the latest data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB).

When I first started setting up my smart home, I focused on Wi-Fi devices. They were easy to set up, and I didn't need any equipment other than the router I already owned. If I had my time over again, I'd do things very differently.

Most online Excel tutorials are obsessed with flashy new functions, complex formulas, or clever hacks that solve simple problems in overly complicated ways. But the real upgrade isn't new or exciting at all. Excel tables are old, unglamorous, and one of the most powerful features in the ribbon—and they'll transform how you work.