How-To Geek

What did you think of that massive House of the Dragon season 3 finale? Betrayals, big character deaths, dragon action—what more could you want?! Oh, you already want something else to watch on HBO Max? I get it. Well, while Lanterns is days away and season 5 of Abbott Elementary even longer, the pickings are a bit slim, but there's still some good TV to watch that might surprise you.

In 1997, on a Shinkansen bullet train running between Tokyo and Nagoya, then-Volkswagen AG CEO Ferdinand Piëch grabbed an envelope and sketched an engine that had been on his mind for a while. He had just finished talking with Karl-Heinz Neumann, the automaker's head of powertrain development, about the VR6, Volkswagen's narrow-angle six-cylinder engine, compact enough to fit transversely even in a Golf.

There are countless project management apps out there, but many of them are packed with features I never use. So I asked Gemini, ChatGPT, and Copilot to build a Kanban board that worked offline, saved my data locally, and didn't require yet another subscription. I gave all three the same prompt and tested the results, and they all created working apps. But the one I liked most surprised me.

By now, if you’re a Prime Video subscriber in the U.S., you should have already had your way with Masters of the Universe and Project Hail Mary, both of which are still all over the Top 10 charts. The real question is, what to watch next.

I used Unraid as my only home server platform for nearly five years before I decided to jump ship to a traditional Linux distro. Unraid was still working well for me, but there were just one or two things it didn't excel at, and those areas are right where Ubuntu shines.

If you're the person everybody calls when their PC breaks down, I'm sure you can relate to all those times when somebody randomly asks you to fix their PC on the spot.

Google's answer to free streaming services like The Roku Channel and Tubi is now much more appealing if you like control over what you watch. Google TV Freeplay now has on-demand movies and TV shows as well as an expanded live channel lineup.

For years, the Jeep Grand Wagoneer had a pretty obvious problem: it looked and felt like a luxury SUV, but it asked luxury-SUV money for a Jeep badge. That made it tough to justify next to established names like Cadillac and Lincoln.

Back-to-school season brings a list of new costs for families with a teen driver in the house, from a parking permit to gas money to maybe a vehicle of their own. Car insurance is yet another cost that joins that seemingly endless list.

When you think of open-source OSes, you might think of Linux distros, but BSD-based systems have been around for a long time. Here are some of the best BSD systems that you can try that can give Linux distros a run for their money.

Most people who switched away from Bixby didn’t leave because it was bad at what it was built to do. They left because something shinier showed up, and going back never crossed their mind. I was the same way. I moved from Bixby to Google Assistant to Gemini without really thinking about it, and I assumed Bixby had quietly died somewhere along the way because it was somehow bad. But it’s actually giving Gemini a run for its money.

The days of digging through your car's owner's manual might soon be over. Ford is now broadly rolling out an AI assistant that can answer questions about your car, including some that would normally involve thumbing through a book or talking to a service technician.

There are plenty of three-row SUVs that can haul a family, swallow a pile of luggage, and get everyone where they need to go. What’s harder to find is one that makes you feel like you spent considerably more than you actually did.

Many of the streaming media players on the market are built on Android—this includes Fire TV and, of course, Google TV. So, why can’t an Android phone be used as a streaming stick? They can, and that’s exactly what I did with an old Samsung Galaxy phone.

Image editors and desktop publishing tools keep getting better all the time. While I love a good dedicated publishing tool like Scribus, sometimes I need something quick to test layouts or make images/videos fast. There are plenty of image editing tools out there, but Canva and PenPot are two of the most powerful that I've used. So I decided to compare them and see how they both fit into my workflow.

Some tech projects generate a lot of information, and that information isn't always used as well as it could be. I have a Raspberry Pi project running bird detection software, and it's identified a large number of species. I decided to see if I could take the audio that it had captured and turn it into an educational game.

You might want to think carefully the next time you copy-paste text from an AI chatbot. Anthropic has confirmed that its Claude AI models now watermark generated text and files, making it easier to gauge the authenticity of material — with major ramifications for slop and privacy issues.

With Nvidia's RTX 50 Super a pipe dream, and GPU prices crazier than ever, now is not the time to get a new graphics card. Look, I wouldn't mind, but no. The prices are way too wild.

I've used Windows for most of my life, but I've become increasingly frustrated with the way Microsoft expects me to work. Search is still unreliable, useful context-menu options are hidden behind an extra click, and Windows can use my internet connection to help distribute updates to other PCs through Delivery Optimization. Add in Microsoft's recommendations I never asked for and constant interface changes, and there's no shortage of reasons to consider leaving Windows.

In Home Alone 2, Kevin McCallister scoffs at Cedric when asked if he knows how the television works. "I'm 10 years old. TV's my life," Kevin tells Cedric before tipping him with gum. I'm much older than Kevin, but I can relate to what he said about TV. It's not my entire life, but it's certainly a crucial part, considering I write for How-To Geek's streaming vertical.