How-To Geek

Affordable performance cars with manual transmissions have become increasingly rare, as stricter emissions regulations and changing consumer preferences continue to reshape the market. For enthusiasts, every discontinued three-pedal model feels like another reminder that the golden age of accessible sports sedans is slowly fading.

The Android home screen hasn’t changed much in the last 15 years. It’s still essentially a grid for app icons and widgets. I wanted to try using my phone without what we’ve come to know as a “home screen,” and I’m glad I did.

If you're a new homeowner getting ready to start projects or maintain your home, you'll need some capable new power tools. And while there are multiple brands to choose from, Ryobi is a fan favorite for its affordability and being readily available at Home Depot.

Google offers some very convenient and highly advanced software—there's no doubt about that—but it comes at the cost of pervasive user tracking. Not everyone is comfortable with that, and some of those who have yet to ditch Google surely have a nagging sense of unease, knowing their private lives are logged, monitored, tracked, and profiled. You can do something about it, and learning about great alternatives is a start.

My family has enough solar panels on our roof to offset all of our annual home energy needs, but just covering our roof with photovoltaic panels was not enough to make our renewable energy dreams come true. Here are the other investments we've made along the way.

Windows gets a lot of criticism, and plenty of people have switched to Linux because of the issues with the OS. While Microsoft doesn't have the best track record with Windows 11, thanks to all the bugs, the company has done a good job bringing in features that make me think twice about running to Linux entirely. This round of updates actually added many features I liked.

For decades, buying a luxury SUV usually meant choosing between BMW, Mercedes-Benz, or Audi. But rising prices and higher ownership costs are giving buyers a reason to look elsewhere.

Compact SUVs may be practical, but a lot of them are honestly quite boring. Despite their dull driving dynamics, they remain some of the most popular vehicles on the road. This boils down to the simple fact that people value practicality above most other things in their lives. Whether you're starting a family or hauling lots of equipment all the time, compact SUVs offer space that more entertaining cars simply don't.

Most people who use AI assistants spend more time switching windows than they think. You copy something, alt+tab to a browser, open a chat window, paste it in, wait, copy the response, and tab back to wherever you were. If you do that twenty times a day, you're losing more time to that routine than to the actual problem you're trying to solve. Wiring your Windows clipboard directly to Claude's API will help you out.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is dominating online conversation as fans figure out where to slot the movie in their rankings for his best movies. However, don't sleep on television—streamers are continuing to release original projects and new seasons of returning shows.

The all-new 2026 Mazda CX-5 may be grabbing the headlines, but the SUV it replaced has one major advantage: a proven track record. More than a decade after it launched, the 2015 model continues to stand out as one of the most dependable compact SUVs you can buy used.

Yes, I know that Samsung Galaxy devices are basically the iPhones of the Android world, and there are other, less polished, but more interesting options out there. But Samsung has this market domination for a reason, and part of it comes from its genuinely useful bespoke features.

Self-hosting is really a hobby in itself. Once you get the bug, it's hard to stop adding more and more self-hosted services or spending even more money on your home lab setup. Self-hosting also makes several hobbies possible that wouldn't really work without it.

Awards are certainly not the most important aspect for judging a movie's quality. Other elements, including box office and cultural impact, can help influence how an audience reacts to a movie. However, awards can influence your decision when choosing a movie, especially on Netflix, a streaming service with thousands of movies to watch.

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.

I used to let my router choose between 2.4GHz and 5GHz for every device in my house, but I realized I was leaving a ton of performance on the table. Once I took control by moving specific devices to the faster 5GHz lane, my streams and downloads finally stopped buffering.

LG exited the smartphone market five years ago, but before it did, the brand released a frankly shocking number of cool, wild, and uniquely weird phones that helped it stand out from the competition. In fact, the list of weird LG phones is so long that I couldn't fit them all into one article, and I was only focusing on fairly modern Android phones from 2011 onward.

Passwords are a problem. Not only have they reached a point where a "strong" password is one no human can remember (much less remember dozens of them), but they simply aren't as secure as they need to be. Passkeys combine a public and private cryptographic key pair with local authentication such as a fingerprint or facial scan. The device can prove its identity beyond doubt, and the assumption is that only you can unlock it.

Every gamer has a graphics card they still talk about years later after it left their rig. Most gamers also have that one GPU that got away, the GPU they really wanted to get, but couldn't. Many of these graphics cards have earned legendary status over the years.

Apple Maps was a joke magnet when it first launched, but it's now good enough that one of the world's largest automakers will depend on it. Ford has revealed that Apple Maps will underpin navigation in EVs based on the company's new Universal Electic Vehicle (UEV) platform, including the highly touted $30,000 electric pickup truck.