How-To Geek

Working as a developer doesn't mean you always code. Often, you're assigned boring, mundane tasks. Be it converting data formats, encoding and decoding data, or validating their structure, jumping from tool to tool is cumbersome. That's where Dev Toolbox comes into play.

If you’ve been shopping for a Prius because of its affordable starting price, but dream of something more refined and luxurious, the used market has an intriguing alternative. For roughly the same price you’d pay for a new Prius, you can step into a German sedan with premium appointments, thoughtful design, and the kind of build quality usually reserved for higher price brackets. It’s a rare opportunity to get true luxury without stretching your budget.

You're probably familiar with the most common ways to trigger automations in Home Assistant. You can trigger an automation when the state of an entity changes, when you press a button, when presence is detected, or at a specific time of day. Today we're going to take at some lesser-known triggers that can be just as useful.

BYROW is the gold standard for row-based math in Excel. By housing your formulas in one spilled range, you eliminate the risk of manual overrides, keep your files lean, and make your data more scalable. It's the easiest way to turn a fragile, messy workbook into a robust tool that actually works.

The one thing that slows me down (or at least used to slow me down) was having to look up documentation or commands while working with Termux. So I found a way to bring an AI assistant (not a coding agent) into Termux. Now I can look up commands and search for stuff on the fly without leaving the terminal. It's helping me learn Termux faster and saves me the trouble of switching between apps.

Most people getting into Linux just use Ubuntu, but there are a lot of other distros out there. One of them is Fedora, which is actually pretty cool.

Luxury and frugality don’t usually go hand in hand. Most people assume a luxury vehicle comes with indulgence, not savings—but some SUVs are proving you can have both.

Today's the big day: Home Assistant 2026.2 is now rolling out. It includes a new default Home Dashboard, a redesigned quick search, opt-in data collection for the new device database, and much more.

As streaming has become the preferred way to listen to music, buying physical CDs has grown less common. Yet this isn’t new; physical music purchases began to decline when digital downloads became available through services like iTunes.

Visual Studio Code releases major updates once a month, and right on schedule, version 1.109 is now rolling out to desktop platforms. It's the continuation of Microsoft's push for making VS Code "the home for multi-agent development," but there are some non-AI improvements as well.

In a segment crowded with practical four-doors, one affordable family sedan has quietly built a reputation for reliability that outpaces many of its rivals. While competitors focus on style, tech, or brand prestige, this model delivers consistently dependable performance and low ownership costs, making it a smart choice for buyers who want peace of mind alongside everyday usability.

The old-school flashlight is legendary. It was heavy, dependable, and ate up those big, bulky D-cell batteries. I used to think the weight of a metal tube meant quality, and that the sputtering yellow glow from an incandescent bulb showed you were really ready for anything. In reality, these old flashlights that seem so dependable are outdated.

The Discord messaging application is getting a much-needed speed boost on desktop platforms. There are also new improvements to screenshots and game streams, a new way to share times, and much more.

Once, each new generation of graphics card promised to bring large performance gains, and if you wanted to play the latest and greatest AAA games at high resolutions, you needed to upgrade or be left behind. However, NVIDIA's continued improvements to DLSS have made upgrading less important than it used to be.

On Linux, pipes and redirection let you use the output from commands in powerful ways. Capture it in files, or use it as input with other commands. Here’s what you need to know.

Keeping a hard drive on a drawer is probably the most common approach to storing files over the long term. A lot of people don't do it properly, though, to the point I've actually discouraged this practice previously.

Welcome to the film and television capital of the country. Thanks to Hollywood, Los Angeles continues to be directly associated with the entertainment industry. Many of the major studios, including Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures, still have production lots either in Los Angeles or the surrounding cities.

It’s that time of year when Google releases a budget version of its most recent “flagship” phone. The Pixel 10 series launched last Fall, and now we’re getting our first official look at the Pixel 10a. Google is teasing us with some close-up shots, but not much else.

IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, PhpStorm, and other JetBrains IDEs are finally adopting Wayland. That means sharper text and better performance on most Linux systems, but there are still some bugs to be worked out.

3D printing model repositories are full of items designed to hold food and drink or be used in the kitchen to prepare food. But before you print any of these, you need to understand the risks involved in mixing 3D prints and food.