How-To Geek

I love a good movie that strikes an inherent chord and leaves a long-lasting impact. The unforgettable ones tend to linger for quite a while, and when a movie does that, you know it’s done its job of inspiring insight, deeper understanding, and different perspectives.

Mesh Wi-Fi systems get recommended like a cure-all, and to be fair, they absolutely have their place. I use one myself because I need to cover both my house and a separate studio, and it's the only setup that makes that seamless. But that's a pretty specific scenario, and it's not how most people actually live or use their network.

Most of Excel's functions and tools ignore the difference between capital and lowercase letters, which is fine until a case-sensitive ID breaks your workflow. The FIND function is a strict gatekeeper for your data, treating casing as a critical data point rather than a suggestion.

The list of new movies from last week was much smaller in scale compared to what's arriving in the coming days. Netflix's sweet comedy, Roommates, and the raunchy Prime Video movie, Balls Up, would not make our top 3. That's a testament to this week's quality of streaming movies.

There was once a time when Nova Launcher was the best Android launcher in the world. If you bought the premium version, you might very well feel compelled to continue using it. Sadly, now is the time to let go.

Mechanical keyboards are a massive upgrade over standard membrane ones. They offer a level of customization that goes far beyond typing feel alone. One of the biggest advantages of hot-swappable mechanical keyboards is that you can easily mix and match switches and keycaps to build something unique.

The Google Pixel 10a is fresh out of the oven, taking the fight to the iPhone 17e, which launched alongside Google’s latest budget Pixel offering. The phone is widely praised for its fantastic camera (at least in the ~$500 price segment), but the Pixel 10a is much more than just a great camera in an affordable package. It has plenty going for it, with one of its standout features being its bright, vibrant display.

If you're wondering just how long different storage media can store your data, either because you’re looking for a long-term storage solution or are just curious, you've come to the right place since this piece talks just about that. Let’s see which storage media can keep your data around the longest.

If you're clicking and dragging in Excel to create long lists of data, you're still in old-school mode. The SEQUENCE function is a modern dynamic array tool that generates entire series of values from a single formula, making it a powerful tool for automated headers and complex grids.

Performance and refinement are usually expected to come with a premium price tag, especially in the midsize sedan world where European badges often dominate the conversation. But every so often, a car arrives that quietly delivers far more than its price suggests—offering the kind of speed, comfort, and road presence that makes far more expensive rivals feel difficult to justify.

Since Google replaced the popular Google Play Music with YouTube Music, I’ve been on the hunt for the perfect offline music player—and the market is full of options. While I love listening to music (and it’s something I do for many hours every day), my criteria for picking the right app are surprisingly simple.

If you work with data, the biggest thing slowing you down isn't the analysis itself. It's the constant, boring administrative work needed to get the data ready. You've probably been there, looking at a raw export and knowing you'll spend hours manually formatting, setting up conditional rules, and organizing the structure before you can get any real insight. It's a huge, daily hit on productivity. I found the best answer to this issue, and I use Gemini in Google Sheets to make things easier.

In the past year or so, I've gone all-out on optimizing my storage habits. I'm not the most regular with my backups, but that's one thing I've been trying to fix. Another is how I approach my backups to begin with.

I recently switched back to the Linux desktop, and just in time, because GNOME 50 is now making its way to the latest crop of Linux distributions—and it comes with many of the features I have waited years to see.

When I tell you I lived in a world of just physical books for so long, I mean it. I grew up reading the physical editions of the Harry Potter novels, went through years of required reading in high school with physical books, and, of course, was introduced to special editions because of BookTok. Why would I need anything like an e-reader?

Streaming media is so easy these days, but it can get pretty expensive. Albums, films, and shows can also sometimes disappear with very little notice, which just kind of sucks when you're trying to listen to or watch your favorite things. There’s a reason dedicated media servers exist. And I'm a media hoarder, so I take this sort of thing seriously.

ShellCheck is a code verifier that spots bugs, incompatibilities, and other problems in shell scripts. It’s valuable because few similar tools exist, and shell programming can be particularly flaky, with portability concerns and different syntax changes introduced over time.

The cars and trucks Americans drive are aging, and they’re doing so at a record-breaking pace. According to the most recent S&P Global Mobility data, the average age of vehicles on U.S. roads has climbed to 12.8 years, the oldest ever recorded.

As a writer, I love to read, and I think everyone should read a real book from time to time. But watching TV is definitely easier and more popular, and there are plenty of books that have been turned into amazing TV shows: the following may be even better than the books they originated from.

The conventional wisdom when it comes to motherboard BIOS updates has always been that unless there's something wrong with your PC, it's best to just leave it alone. Yet, you can expect a new BIOS update becoming available every year or two following a motherboard's launch.