How-To Geek

Most people pick a browser once and never think about it again, which is how Chrome ends up with a hundred extensions, a cluttered toolbar, and a memory footprint that slows everything down. Samsung Browser on Windows is worth a serious look at because the integration between the two is genuinely useful in ways that go beyond basic bookmark syncing. Samsung Browser left Galaxy phones, and I'm so happy about it.

Fancy taking on some at-home projects to create smart gadgets without splashing too much cash? Here are 3 upgrades you can make to your tech to create a smart home, while only spending $24 on an Arduino board.

Excel automation doesn't have to mean writing macros or learning VBA. With a few built-in tools, you can make formulas expand automatically, clean up messy data, and speed through repetitive tasks in minutes. These simple tricks put your spreadsheets on autopilot.

If you have ever watched your monitor go completely dark after a routine hardware update, you already know the sinking feeling that follows. A standard driver installation finishes, the machine reboots, and instead of your desktop, you get a black screen or distorted graphics. It's easy to assume the worst, but I've come across this same issue and solved it with one of Windows' built-in repair tools.

The way Android handles notifications and Quick Settings has long been a stand-out feature. For good reason, the core functionality hasn’t changed much over the years. Recently, however, there seems to be some growing discontent with this system. I’m not happy about it.

If you're like me, you might have a bunch of retired storage devices sitting around the house. HDDs, SATA SSDs, NVMes ... Putting them to work for actual storage and backup purposes is great, but the reality is that some older SSDs are better suited to other tasks.

After Amazon announced that older Kindle models, such as my ancient Kindle 4, would lose access to new Kindle Store downloads, I decided to jailbreak it. I added the KOReader reading app and set it up so that it could display my Home Assistant dashboard, but I wondered how else I could use it. It sounded crazy, but could it work as a portable monitor?

Who would've thought that a day would come when an AI could hear your voice and speak just like you. I've used speech AI tools before, such as ElevenLabs. While those are great for voice cloning, they come with a price.

Sometimes, life is too short to sit down and watch a three-hour movie or a show with episodes that push an hour. If you've only got time for a quick Netflix fix, here are some great shows that have episodes of around half an hour or less.

As I write this, there are basically two types of CPU that matter: x86 and ARM. The former belongs to Intel and AMD, which each hold critical patents necessary to make modern PC chips. ARM belongs to, well, ARM, and you'll find that in MacBooks, phones, tablets, and more.

For most of the time I've been using Windows, voice dictation has been pretty fairly clunky. It worked as an accessibility feature or an interesting experiment, but it made for a difficult replacement compared to a mouse and keyboard. However, with the rise of AI, that has changed significantly.

When you install the Home Assistant companion app on your phone, you can allow Home Assistant to track your location. By default, you get a device tracker entity that will toggle between home and not_home based on the Home location that you set up. There are plenty of useful automations you can trigger using the location of your phone.

Most people use about 10% of Excel's actual capabilities, yet beginners often feel pressured to learn the other 90% immediately. That's a recipe for burnout. If you want to actually get work done, skip the noise, ignore the shiny distractions, and focus on the basics that make spreadsheets useful.

When you switch to streaming, you expect instant, perfect 4K video. You're paying for a top-tier, multi-gigabit fiber connection, so it's frustrating when your Amazon Fire TV Stick still freezes during a key movie scene. Buffering like this is one of the most annoying parts of home entertainment, but you can stop it. The problem is rarely the speed of the internet coming into your house. Instead, it's the data's physical struggle to reach your device, so it is great that it has a hidden port for you.

Are you staring at a sea of empty cells and don't know where to begin? Excel feels far less intimidating when you treat it as a toolbox instead of a test. These beginner-friendly projects help you create practical trackers and planners in under an hour while learning core skills.

The newest version of Mazda’s compact SUV may be more modern and more practical than ever before, but not every change has been for the better. As automakers continue moving toward bigger screens, softer driving dynamics, and broader mainstream appeal, some of the sharpness and character that once made certain crossovers stand out is starting to disappear. That is exactly why some buyers may be better off shopping slightly used instead of buying brand new.

You probably already use Claude for the occasional question or writing your emails, but that’s barely scratching the surface of what it can do. There’s a big difference between using Claude as a chatbot and using it as an automation tool that quietly handles the parts of your digital life you’ve been avoiding for years. If you’ve been curious about what agentic AI actually looks like in everyday life, here are five boring tasks I automated with Claude.

Now Playing wasn’t one of the reasons I wanted to switch to Pixel. I knew about it and, aside from thinking, "Okay, so it's an offline Shazam, whatever," I didn’t give it much thought. Worse still, the feature was completely broken during the first few days of owning my Pixel 10 Pro, so I couldn’t even test it.

Pixar is the champion of animation, but not all of their movies have had the chance to shine. For 40 years, the studio has brought families together across 30 movies. Certain movies never enter the discussion of being among the studios' best — they were overshadowed by other films, or they went direct-to-streaming on Disney+.

We all have one sitting in a drawer somewhere. That phone you replaced two or three years ago, still working fine but gathering dust because the battery isn't quite what it used to be, or because the camera on the new one is just better. You keep telling yourself you'll do something with it eventually.