How-To Geek

As a PC builder of over 20 years, if I had to pick the best thing about desktops, it's their upgradability. Your desktop is a sea of possibilities, and it's not uncommon for the same PC to live on for years with upgrades here and there.

On Sunday night, Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor at the 2026 Oscars for playing twins Smoke and Stack in Sinners. Jordan defeated a star-studded category that included Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothée Chalamet, Ethan Hawke, and Wagner Moura. At 39, Jordan was the second-youngest actor in the category behind Chalamet (30).

System76 builds desktops and laptops designed for desktop Linux, and now the company has revealed its latest high-performance desktop. The new Thelio Mira has a redesigned case, AMD Ryzen 9 processors, and the usual best-in-class Linux support.

Sometimes, the product you want doesn’t exist. I liked my Google Nest Hub, but I felt it could be better. Naturally, as someone with a 3D printer and DIY skills, I took it upon myself to build the solution. I’m very happy with how it came out.

Google today announced that it is expanding Personal Intelligence to more people in the United States. First introduced earlier this year, it was limited to paid Google AI subscriptions, but now most free accounts will have access to the feature.

Smartphones have amazing cameras, but I'm not happy with any of them out of the box. I have to tweak a few things. If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone, these settings won't magically transform your main camera into an entirely new piece of hardware, but it can put you in a position to capture the best photos your phone can muster.

Performance SUVs are a thing now because people got tired of choosing between fun and practicality. You no longer need a low, two-door sports car to enjoy a great drive—today’s compact luxury SUVs can haul your stuff and still feel quick and composed on a back road.

In the midst of the ongoing storage shortage, who can afford to just throw away an old HDD? Even if you can, don't do it. There are better things you can use those old hard drives for.

When it comes to modern movie franchises, there are plenty we could point to, like Marvel and Star Wars. Today, everyone is talking about Dune, the latest and greatest in the world of book-to-movie adaptations. It also happens to be one of the best sci-fi movie franchises of the last decade.

Home Assistant provides native to-do list integrations such as Local To-Do and Shopping List, as well as third-party integrations for Todoist, Google Tasks, and more. You can use them as traditional to-do lists, but there are some clever ways to get a lot more out of them.

I wanted to use my Ugreen NAS as a central hub for my homelab—but that required mounting external storage servers to it. For some reason, Ugreen doesn’t let you do this within the operating system, but I found a way around it with just one command.

Spotify has quietly had a very impressive start to the new year. Over the last three months, the streaming service has released a handful of genuinely great features. The most recent update is headed to Wear OS devices, and it makes the app nicer to look at and easier to control.

Even if you’ve never used FFmpeg, you’ve almost certainly used a video editor or media conversion tool based on it. FFmpeg is one of the most popular tools for recording, converting, and streaming audio and video, and version 8.1 has arrived with some Vulkan-powered enhancements.

If you're using Windows, there's a good chance Microsoft is collecting all kinds of telemetry data from your PC to help improve your user experience, fix bugs, and troubleshoot errors.

Buying a hybrid is a major step toward saving money at the pump, but simply owning the vehicle is only half the battle. While the hybrid system and its corresponding technology do most of the work, you can put a few more fuel economy points on the board by having a thorough understanding of how to strategically use that technology to your advantage while driving.

If your bookmarks folder is stacked with saved sites, you’ll know the struggle of finding anything on Chrome for Android isn’t exactly quick. Unlike on desktop platforms, where everything sits neatly in a bookmarks bar, phones have a multi-step process just to open any bookmark. Google is finally fixing that friction with a desktop-style bookmarks bar that’s rolling out now.

Android Auto is easily the coolest feature your car can have if you're an Android user. It turns your car's head unit into an extension of your smartphone, and when it works correctly, it's perfect for displaying your maps, music, and messages all on a large screen that doesn't distract you during driving.

Most of the time when I hear that a movie I like is getting remade, my first reaction isn't excitement. It's confusion. I find myself asking the same question: why? If the original worked, why revisit it at all? Hollywood doesn't exactly have a great track record here. More often than not, the remake ends up feeling like a thinner, louder, or more unnecessary version of something that was already good the first time around.

Nothing kills your Excel workflow like manually zooming in to tiny text or zooming out to see the bigger picture. Instead of playing "too big, too small" with the slider or fighting your mouse wheel, you can use a two-second trick to snap any range into a perfect fit. It's better for your eyes, and much better for your productivity.

When we think of exciting graphics cards, we usually think of the most expensive GPUs. Think the RTX 5090s or the RTX 5080s, not the RTX 3050s. But cheap or pricey, most people are no longer thrilled by the idea of an old Nvidia GTX GPU, and rightfully so. Nvidia has moved on to the RTX 20-series in 2018, after all.