How-To Geek

It's the first of the month, which means Netflix has added a substantial number of new movies and shows. Some of the highlights include the Creed movies, Friday Night Lights, The Karate Kid franchise, and the first five seasons of Hawaii Five-0. Keep an eye on the new movies coming later this month, including Office Romance and Little Brother.

Using Android Auto wirelessly is very convenient and cuts down on cable clutter, but it isn't perfect. The biggest issue is how heavy it can be on the battery. Obviously, it will never be able to match a wired connection that charges your phone as you go, but by tweaking a few settings, you can really reduce the battery drain.

You might think that hosting your own local photo server is a great way to save money instead of just paying for Google Photos. However, you'd be wrong. By the time you buy a NAS, storage, and pay for cloud backups, you'll be spending far more than Google charges you.

Welcome to June. It's a new month, which means the major streaming services will be adding a significant number of movies this week. In case you missed some of last week's top movies, be sure to check out two HBO Max movies: The Moment with Charli XCX and Miss You, Love You with Allison Janney and Andrew Rannells.

I always treated secondary DNS as a pretty inconsequential setting. You either leave it alone entirely or fill it once and then forget about it for the rest of time. You pick a primary server, pick a backup, and then move on.

When XPENG invited me to China for a four-day press trip spanning Guangzhou and Beijing, I'll admit my expectations were mixed. Bold claims about self-driving tech from a Chinese EV brand—that I'd heard before. A flying car was something else entirely.

VS Code is everywhere, but it comes at a cost: RAM, startup time, and creeping complexity. After spending serious time with three leaner alternatives, I'm not going back.

If the first thing you do after buying a new Android phone is head straight into Developer options and drop the animation scale to 0.5x, you're already ahead of most people. It’s one of Android’s worst-kept secrets that instantly makes any phone feel faster and more responsive.

Figuring out network issues is probably my least-favorite thing to do that's related to my PC (or my home network in general). It can take ages, simply because so many little factors can manifest themselves in various ways, ruining everything around them with little fanfare. Even something as simple as a mesh router can ruin internet speeds, for instance.

Nvidia has unveiled its first laptop CPU for the mainstream, the RTX Spark. It's built to power AI agents, content creation, and gaming, and it's already finding its way into Windows laptops from major brands — including in a MacBook Pro rival from Microsoft.

I always assumed my home network was mostly talking to a handful of servers nearby, making the occasional overseas travel. But I probably wasn't fully aware of where my network was pinging to. Running TapMap for a week proved just how wrong I was—and how far my data actually travels.

Heart-pounding movies have been my crème de la crème. Whether their stories encompass the rise and fall of a ruthless empire, the fractured reality of memory, the chaos of conflict, or the reckless thrill of real-life crime, there’s no shortage of lingering entertainment.

Windows 11’s latest update has finally introduced ‘Haptic Signals’, a feature that enhances the UI experience of the operating system. Haptic feedback in a laptop trackpad is not a pioneering feat, since Apple brought it to its MacBooks all the way back in 2015. Ever since, Apple has been tweaking and improving the feature.

Your router is essentially a tiny, underpowered computer optimized to handle a wide variety of tasks, such as Wi-Fi management, routing, DHCP, and, of course, DNS forwarding. Although routers are impressively efficient for their size and price, they're still working with extremely limited resources, so the more work you can offload to other devices, the more resources the router has for other tasks.

For years, streaming services were my go-to choice for music in the car, since they gave me the ability to listen to whatever music I want whenever I want. However, over time, I've also become disillusioned with the fact that I don't actually own any of the music I was listening to. I also realized that I've spent more than $1000 on streaming subscriptions over the years with nothing to show for it.

There’s a particular frustration that hits when you run out of Claude tokens mid-project—and Anthropic is more than happy to sell you a $100 or $200 plan to solve that. But chances are, the problem isn’t that you use Claude more—it’s that you use it inefficiently.

Netflix ended May on a high note with several hit movies that debuted in the streamer's top 10. The Crash, a stunning documentary about a tragic accident, remains the No. 1 movie on the service. For something lighter in tone, try Ladies First, a satirical comedy starring Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike.

Excel is packed with shortcuts and automation tools that handle formatting, analysis, and repetitive work in seconds. These beginner-friendly features eliminate tedious spreadsheet tasks so effectively that the results feel almost too good to be true.

AMD is dealing with soaring PC component prices through an unusual strategy: repackaging old CPUs and GPUs to reach gamers who can no longer afford the latest technology.

Dell is continuing its XPS revival by launching a redesigned XPS 13, and it's not just a major rethink of the company's smallest premium laptop — it's a direct bid to capture would-be MacBook Neo buyers.