How-To Geek

It's been almost two years since House of the Dragon season 2 ended on a cliffhanger. Tonight, we get answers in theHouse of the Dragon season 3 premiere, which airs at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and streams on HBO Max.

Vibe coding—despite huge improvements over the last two years—has always been hit-and-miss, with emphasis on "miss" if you're not very careful about how you use it. Fable 5—for the brief time it was available—felt like it finally changed that.

A smart home doesn’t need to cost a lot of money, and it certainly doesn’t mean paying a monthly fee. Here are some things I do to ensure that the only money I spend on my smart home is for devices that I can use without a pricey premium plan.

As web developers, we deal with text all the time. Whether it's JSON, HTML, URLs, Markdown, or something else. Nobody talks about the utilities that boost your productivity when managing these, so I will. I have three tools that'll help you make faster remote API calls, build and learn jq more quickly, and transform strings from one format to many others.

Excel is packed with productivity features, but some of its most useful tools are hidden or disabled by default. Whether you want faster data entry, better dashboards, or more powerful analysis tools, enabling a few overlooked settings can transform the way you work.

One of the biggest selling points of Google Pixel phones has always been the software. Google's approach has always been refreshingly simple: clean visuals, a handful of genuinely useful features, and very little unnecessary clutter.

The Toyota RAV4 has been one of America's best-selling SUVs since the late 1990s, and for 2026, it made one of the boldest moves in its nearly 30-year history. Toyota dropped gas-only engines entirely and made every RAV4 a hybrid.

I've had a knack for repurposing Android phones for most of my life. But I never considered doing the same for old, junk computer hardware, at least until I started self-hosting and building a tiny homelab last year. Ever since I fell down this rabbit hole, my perspective on old tech in general has shifted completely. Where the old me saw "e-waste," I now see gold.

Netflix's recommendation algorithm has evolved and can be good at predicting what you'll want to watch next. The problem is that it often ends up showing the same titles, making it harder to actually discover what aligns with your unique tastes.

For a long time, I treated my smartphone like, well, a phone with just a few extra features. Sure, I could browse the internet and work on documents, but I largely relegated my mobile device to being nothing more than a phone.

I bought my first ultrawide monitor back in February 2018. It was a game changer for me. I went from two 27-inch 16:9 monitors to one 34-inch 21:9 and absolutely loved it.

The latest generation of Wi-Fi 7 routers has finally dropped to prices that make them a realistic upgrade for anyone buying a new router. If you’ve bought one recently only to find that your internet doesn’t feel noticeably faster, it’s worth going over a few things to check whether the router is actually delivering the performance you’ve paid for.

There's nothing wrong with a comfort watch. It's the end of a long day, and instead of wasting hours scrolling for something to watch, you throw on a show you've seen hundreds of times. I know people who put on The Office to act as white noise while they sleep. The same goes for people who embark on rewatches of Game of Thronesor The Sopranos. Look, we've all rewatched our favorite shows. Now, it's time to find something new.

I've had solar panels for nearly ten years, after having them installed on both my current home and my previous one. There are a few reasons why I knew I wanted to invest tens of thousands of dollars into this technology, and why I've had no regrets.

I relied on full Excel charts for years, but they often felt like overkill for simple tracking. Then I discovered sparklines—and suddenly I could see trends directly inside the cells. My spreadsheets became tidier, I stopped wasting time inserting and formatting complex charts, and I didn't have to juggle floating objects.

More buyers in the U.S. want an SUV that can basically replace several vehicles at once. It has to be comfortable for commuting, practical for family life, and still feel a bit premium without going full luxury-price headache.

At this point, I have several NAS servers around my house. The best thing I ever did, though, wasn't setting up five NAS servers. It was separating the important data from replaceable data. That is when running a NAS finally clicked with me, and I wish I had done it a long time ago.

Nothing makes me feel more futuristic than tapping my smartwatch to a terminal to pay for a bag of chips. However, there’s one part of the process that has always been a bit annoying to me. Thankfully, Google Wallet on the Pixel Watch finally fixed it.

Now that I've finally jailbroken my Kindle, I can't stop thinking of things to do with it. I'd messed around with making it display various things, and I wondered if I could make it do something genuinely useful and display the feed from my video doorbell.

Just a decade ago, a home server sounded like something only serious tinkerers bothered with. Maybe it was an old desktop under a desk, a basic NAS in a cupboard, or one shared folder. For most people, it was fairly small scale, outside of those of us who were self-identified data hoarders and needed lots of space.