How-To Geek

Excel tutorials are everywhere, but many "pro tips" are actually bad habits in disguise. From broken formulas to messy data formatting, here are the popular tips that are secretly ruining your workbooks and what to do instead.

Luxury sedans don’t sell themselves anymore. In today’s market, SUVs and crossovers grab most of the attention, which means traditional four-doors have to work a lot harder to stand out.

There are people who fight over terminals the way audiophiles fight over headphones—deeply passionate and extremely opinionated. If this behavior confuses you, it's probably because no one explained what these tools are actually competing on. Spoiler alert: it's not the ability to run commands—every terminal can do that. Here's a breakdown of how terminals differ from one another, and which ones you should care about.

A smart speaker is supposed to connect everything easily and let you control your house without effort. We gave up some privacy for the convenience of setting timers, controlling lights, and getting quick answers just by speaking a command. As these speakers get smarter, it feels like they've become a little too human.

I finally got tired of using Gigabit networking with my NAS, so I upgraded to 2.5GbE. The upgrade was actually cheaper than I expected, and the results were better than I expected. Moving to 2.5GbE completely changed how my NAS works in my homelab, and I think it will for you, too.

More people are looking for alternatives to proprietary apps every day—even hugely popular apps like Google Maps. OpenStreetMap is the backbone of many open-source map apps, but it relies on volunteers to keep it updated. StreetComplete makes it easy and fun to participate.

The Adaptive Lighting custom component in Home Assistant can change the brightness and color temperature of the lights in your smart home throughout the day to mimic the natural light of the sun. This can help make lighting feel more comfortable throughout the day and may help support better sleep habits.

I've tried vibe coding for fun mostly. But I realized that when done right, it can make some quality software products, especially if you're a vibe coder with programming knowledge. That's why I've been testing different techniques and found some that work really well.

Electric vehicles often face the range wall, a common concern for car buyers when trying to decide whether to go full-electric or stick with a gasoline vehicle. If a person is taking frequent cross-country road trips, this range wall becomes a major factor in their buying decision.

Network issues can be frustratingly difficult to troubleshoot, especially if they're intermittent. Sometimes it is a hardware problem, sometimes it is the layout of your home, and yet other times, it comes down to a software issue.

There's a long-standing myth that the "best" Excel users write the longest formulas. Excel mastery used to be measured by how many functions you could cram into one cell, but that standard no longer holds up. Modern tools have changed the game—what once looked like a genius nested formula is often just technical debt in disguise.

Far too often, I see 3D printing guides skip one of the most important steps of all—prototyping. Making prototype prints is absolutely crucial to getting a quality end product. Just about every time I skip prototyping, I regret it. So, here’s why you should value and pay attention to prototyping way more than 3D printing guides normally let on.

Vaultwarden is a community-built, open-source server for Bitwarden that you can self-host. It can connect to all official Bitwarden apps and extensions, which means you don't need to replace any of the Bitwarden apps and extensions you've already installed. You can just sign into them with your self-hosted instance of Vaultwarden.

Luxury cars used to be all about showing you’d made it. Big chrome grilles, soft suspensions, and a badge everyone recognized were the whole point.

We live in a world where video game adaptations are having a renaissance. Sure, there are certainly some that are terribly made and have no substance whatsoever (looking at you, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie), but most modern-day adaptations have really taken the cake for how well-done they are.

Travel is almost always a bit stressful. I'm constantly double-checking that I haven't forgotten anything important, and I'm always juggling too many things in my hands when I reach the security checkpoint.

If you’ve just upgraded to a brand-new, lightning-fast boot drive, you don’t have to get rid of the old one. The same goes for those ancient HDDs we all have sitting in a dusty drawer, like the ones we used to boot our Windows XP PCs from.

Modern displays are amazing when it comes to detail, brightness, color, and all the ingredients that make for an impressive picture—except motion clarity.

The Mercedes-Benz GLB-Class was designed to bridge a gap in the automaker's product line and luxury SUV market as a whole. Although the subcompact GLA served as the entry point, its smaller cabin could feel cramped over time for growing families.

Lots of people will use an IDE like VS Code or a regular editor like Vim, but for my work in data science and statistics, I need something different. Here's why I use IPython and Jupyter notebooks for exploring datasets.