How-To Geek

Google Maps has quietly evolved far beyond turn-by-turn directions. Buried in its settings and menus are tools that can change how you explore, navigate, and trust the places you visit. Here are three worth turning on.

You might not have heard of Xteink, but it's shaking up the eReader world through the miniscule size of its devices: you can fit them in your pocket so that you're more likely to read your favorite book than your Instagram feed. The Chinese brand is capitalizing on this by releasing the X4 Pro, a similarly tiny reader that adds some heavily-requested features.

The modern gaming landscape has changed drastically over the past decade. In the early-to-mid 2010s, games like Grand Theft Auto V, Far Cry 4, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt heavily favored strong single-core performance. This played directly into Intel's strengths. With its focus on strong single-core performance and fewer but faster cores, Intel's CPUs dominated gaming for years.

If you've ever used Win+Shift+S for quick screenshots, you'll know how handy it can be and how much time it can save. But there's another shortcut that's even more useful. On recent versions of Windows 11, Win+Shift+T extracts editable text directly from your screen, turning information trapped in images, PDFs, and presentation slides into text you can immediately reuse.

Tom Hiddleston is fascinated by Pompeii. As he tells me below, "Pompeii isn't just a place; it's the people." Outside of acting, one of Hiddleston's true passions in life is the ancient world. Stealing a page out of his character Loki's playbook on the Marvel show on Disney+, Hiddleston attempts to travel back to 79 AD to investigate the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston.

Blu-ray may very well be the last physical media we get when it comes to video content, but if history had gone just a little differently, it would be HD-DVDs being frantically collected by media nerds today, and not Sony's gift to image quality purists.

The luxury SUV market is full of expensive options, but not every buyer wants to pay a premium price for a premium badge. More shoppers are looking for vehicles that deliver comfort, technology, and refinement without the long-term costs associated with traditional luxury brands.

Muscle memory is hard to shake. If you've spent years in Photoshop, you're not going to have a good time switching to GIMP. It took me three tries to switch over, and even then, tools like PhotoGIMP were incredibly helpful. You're unlearning years of shortcuts and what feels ingrained, which is hard to commit to for a tool you've never used before. If you're on the fence about switching to an alternative, then this tool is exactly what you need.

Mesh Wi-Fi is supposed to fix dead zones without filling your home with Ethernet cables. After all, Ethernet is fantastic, but only if you can easily run the cable from place A to place B, and preferably without it becoming an eyesore.

For me, being a fan of physical media never went out of style. I've never much cared for streaming, and when I douse it, I'm selective or self-host whenever possible. With some companies ditching physical media altogether, there's never been a better time to start collecting again. Of course, prior to now, streaming services have always been missing episodes of our favorite show despite its convenience. So I grabbed three of my favorite shows on DVD so I could have a complete collection.

Samsung is following Apple into the credit card space. The company has announced a Galaxy Card that not only rewards you for buying its own devices (such as the imminent Galaxy Z Fold 8), but also for some of the services you'd use regardless of platform.

Virtually every modern smartphone is big, but there was a time when companies made extra-wide phablets (a portmanteau of "phone tablets") and were proud of it. Samsung's early Galaxy Note models are the classic examples, but there were several others that made screen width their selling angle. Now, they're coming back.

Buying a used luxury SUV can feel like a gamble. Some become expensive headaches the moment the factory warranty expires.

Are you looking for a fun and unique way to get around this summer? Look no further than Ausom's e-scooter lineup; the brand offers several models, from entry-level to high-performance options. Best of all, even though Ausom closed its Soccer Season Sale on July 20, it has decided to offer How-To Geek readers a special extension for another 48 hours starting today. Which means this is your last chance to grab the deal of the year. Customers will get $70 off with code: HTGSP. So, now’s a good time to consider riding an e-scooter to your next destination.

Tablets are great. You can use them for anything from browsing the web to watching your favorite shows. They're incredibly versatile, but that versatility can come at a cost. There are plenty of things that a jailbroken Kindle can do better.

I've spent a whole lot of money on networking gear over the years, but time and time again, it's some of my cheapest purchases that keep surprising me (in a good way). One of the first was my USB-to-Ethernet adapter, and now, I'll tell you a bit more about my second favorite: a five-port unmanaged gigabit switch.

Pi-hole is one of the simplest and most useful things you can set up on your home network. It acts as a DNS sinkhole that blocks requests to domains associated with known ad servers or trackers. This gives you a far better browsing experience, but if you're only running a single instance of Pi-hole, things can go wrong.

You know your Samsung Galaxy phone has a fingerprint scanner. But what you might not know is that the fingerprint scanner can be used to launch apps and shortcuts (I didn’t). Samsung hid this ability behind a poorly named feature in Good Lock, and I’m glad to have found it.

The way to use a chatbot is given in the name. They are designed to be used by having two-way conversations with the LLM using natural language. You type something into the chatbot, and it replies. In some cases, continually typing stuff into a chatbot isn't the most efficient way to do things, so I set up a system that does it for me.

Lexus is Toyota's luxury division, but Toyota often builds a Lexus-badged twin to capture buyers who want that extra refinement without the higher sticker price. The Grand Highlander and the Lexus TX mimic that pattern as closely as any two vehicles have. Both are three-row midsize SUVs, both ride on a version of the same platform, and both come from the same Toyota Motor Manufacturing plant in Princeton, Indiana.