How-To Geek

The BMW X6 effectively created a new category when it arrived in 2008. By blending the higher seating position of an SUV with the sloping roofline of a sporty coupe, it challenged the idea that a utility vehicle had to look like a box.

Samsung has dominated the foldable phone space ever since the introduction of the first Galaxy Fold in 2019, followed by the vertical flip-style Galaxy Z Flip in 2020. While plenty of other brands have tried to challenge that early lead with their own foldables, none have really come close—except for one underdog, and believe it or not, it’s Motorola.

Home Assistant is one of the most powerful smart home platforms around, but even Home Assistant has its limitations. That’s exactly what the Home Assistant Community Store aims to solve, and it does a killer job at making your Home Assistant installation much more capable.

Paramount+ has a solid lineup of new movies and shows on the way for the month of May (and Battlestar Galactica has found a new home there, too). But as we transition into all that new stuff, there's plenty to watch on the documentary side of things, if you're into riveting real-life stories that are stranger than fiction could ever be.

What streaming platform do you think of when you hear the term "comfort shows?" There are plenty of great comfort shows over on Netflix, or maybe available with an HBO Max subscription. But for me, I always think of Peacock.

Vibe coding has made it possible for anyone to create their own custom components for Home Assistant. Many of these integrations are shared on forums for other people to use, but using them could put your smart home at risk.

Old Android phones and tablets make better security cameras than cheap IP cameras. You'll find a lot of apps designed for repurposing phones into live security cams. The apps generate a live stream that you can view inside a browser. However, you can also hook it up to a network video recorder to record or re-stream the feed from the Android device. That way it can seamlessly integrate into your existing security system.

I've had a computer in some shape or form for too long to mention now, and have been building my own PCs for 20 years. Those two decades span multiple desktops, including some that were technically the same PC that evolved multiple times over years of upgrades. I'm also the designated tech person for a number of my family members and friends, which means I'm often saddled with old PCs that they don't know what to do with anymore.

If your aging PC is struggling to keep up with the demands of a modern Windows version, you are not alone. It's pretty common for older hardware to be left behind as software evolves. However, that doesn't mean your system is ready for an e-waste dump.

Whenever I'm at the computer, I seem to have Spotify going in the background. With data on Spotify songs available, I wanted to see if any traits the hit songs had in common. I used Spotify to see if I could build a model of a hit song.

Before every weekend rolls around, I like to refresh my Netflix watch list with limited series and miniseries that I can typically wrap up within a day or two. And if you're like me, you know how exciting these shows can be for a perfect binge-watching session.

Unreliable Wi-Fi is the most frustrating and common issue we deal with. It's a real struggle when you have to deal with buffering screens, dropped video calls, issues with your smart home, and slow download speeds that usually make even new devices seem old. For years, the default advice for solving this problem has been to replace your old router. Performance does not depend on purchase price. If you master a few cheap software tweaks and small physical adjustments, you can get back significant speed and stability without spending money.

PowerShell is a Windows utility you can use to fix a surprisingly large number of common Windows 11 issues. It's often faster than digging through Windows 11 menus and in many cases, you can simply copy, paste, and execute commands without any further intervention on your side.

It's 2026, and Android still doesn't have some basic features like cutting off internet access for certain apps. Now there are third-party apps that make this sort of firewall possible on Android. However, they come with one big trade-off: they need to run constantly in the background as a VPN tunnel.

If you sideload books onto your Kindle, you'll know that things don't always go smoothly. Files sometimes don't even convert properly, the formatting can be completely unpredictable, and your library becomes messy very quickly. That's why I convert my eBooks in Calibre before putting them on my Kindle. It fixes almost all the problems.

So you've heard about Qubes OS, and you're scared to try it. Well, you should be. Qubes OS is not something you can fumble through; there's an upfront research cost, and just because you have a powerful computer, it doesn't mean it'll work. I explain the entire hardware landscape in simple terms.

If you have a few ESP32’s lying around and nothing to do with them, let me show you some fun projects you can finish in under an hour. From full-on air quality monitors to simple sensor projects, here are five things you can do with your ESP32s today.

Is your Netflix watch list looking a little dry? Netflix is set to release new titles in May as the heat picks up, which will ensure your summer watch list is packed with new, fresh films, shows, documentaries, and live events.

Running a Plex server starts out as a tidy experiment and then quietly turns into infrastructure. At first, it is a few movies in a folder, maybe a TV show or two that you swear you will organize later. Then one evening you open the library and realize half the metadata is wrong, some files refuse to match, and someone has just messaged you asking if you can “add that one show with the guy” (this description is somehow expected to be sufficient). That is the moment Plex stops being a media server and starts behaving like a system that needs tooling around it.

If you've already made the switch from VLOOKUP to XLOOKUP in Excel, you've taken the first step toward better formulas. But most people still only use it as a drop-in replacement—they're missing one of its most powerful capabilities.