How-To Geek

Competitive gaming has evolved far beyond flashy shooters and fantasy worlds. Some of the most surprisingly intense e-sports scenes are built around software you probably used at work today. Here are some of the biggest ones.

3D printers have brought us closer to the world of Star Trek replicators, but we are still far away from sci-fi machines that can make anything at the press of a button. No single 3D printer is good at everything in equal measure.

I've been building PCs for something around 20 years, and seeing as it's a major hobby for me, I like to lurk around various PC building communities or talk to other PC owners. And one of the things that I see most often is worrying about the expensive stuff. Makes sense: if you spend over $1,000 on a GPU, you want to keep it safe.

Smart home forums are full of posts from people showing off the incredible dashboards that they've created, often displayed on wall-mounted tablets. While these dashboards can show you a lot of information about your smart home, there are many ways in which a simple E-Ink dashboard is a better option.

Everyone knows devices use more battery when screens are on—pushing pixels on a high-resolution display isn’t easy. But what if I told you enabling the always-on display on a Samsung Galaxy Watch could bring better battery life? Sounds wrong, but it’s true.

While the Western genre and its archetypes epitomize an iconic era in American history, most movies are generally just works of fiction. And while they make for great movies, it’s always those that are inspired by or at least nominally depict true stories that draw the most attention.

There are now more than a dozen Plug-in Hybrid (PHEV) SUVs available for sale, with nearly every mainstream automaker offering at least one. Models like the Honda CR-V, Toyota RAV4, Hyundai Tucson, and Mazda CX-70 are popular options. My personal favorite is the Lamborghini Urus SE, though its price tag is higher than the Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and Mazda combined!

Kevin Hart is known for cracking jokes about his peers onstage. Now, the tables are turned, as Hart will be in the hot seat for The Roast of Kevin Hart, which streams live tonight on Netflix at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT. The roast will take place at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles.

The Linux terminal is a powerful way to run programs on your computer from the command line. Using scripts, you can easily repeat common tasks, even using complex programming logic.

AI is already working its way into the average office worker's day, whether that means cleaning up emails, organizing notes, explaining confusing language, or making a giant document less painful to deal with. And with so many AI tools and subscription tiers out there, the real question isn't whether AI can summarize something. It's whether the summary is good enough to trust.

You can improve many items with 3D printed upgrades, but things don’t always fit perfectly the first time around. It’s frustrating to spend time and money waiting for an object to print, only to find out it was all for naught and you have to start again.

Buying a sports car usually means accepting one painful reality: depreciation. Most performance cars lose value quickly, especially once newer and faster models arrive. While practical cars like the Toyota Corolla are famous for holding their value well, enthusiast cars typically sit on the opposite end of the spectrum.

When Volvo launched the first-generation XC90 at the 2002 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, it was, as the Scandinavian automaker described it, the most flexible vehicle they had ever designed. While its contemporaries were often truck-based and arguably cumbersome, the XC90 rode on a car-based platform that felt like a sedan (one of the tag lines was “drives like a car, but loads like a wagon”).

You can program without programming tools, and integrated development environments (IDEs) are popular among developers. I take a different approach. I treat my Linux system, with its array of programming tools, as an IDE in itself.

I've been using Google Messages since it launched in 2014 and replaced the old Android messaging app. Despite having it on my phone for so long, it took me a while to discover everything it could do. I missed these features for a long time, and if you're only using the app for basic messaging, you might have too.

Everyone in tech has heard of the 3-2-1 backup rule. It's the kind of advice that gets repeated so often it starts to feel like background noise, the digital equivalent of "eat your vegetables." It's simple, it works, and it has saved countless people from catastrophic data loss.

I'm mostly a Roku and media PC user, so my Fire TV sticks aren't my primary setup. Still, I've got two Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max devices in the house, and after digging into what my Roku boxes were collecting, it felt worth taking a closer look at what Amazon was doing on its side.

People think of Motorola phones as having clean, minimal software similar to Google’s, but there’s more than meets the eye. You’ll find a surprising number of gestures exclusive to Motorola phones, and they’re very useful.

NAS units are great. They're small, energy-efficient, and easy to get running right out of the box. If the only thing you want is a backup solution for your files, and you're not picky about cost, they're a good option. However, if you want a real homelab, you're much better off picking up some secondhand components instead—your machine will be more powerful, and you'll learn more in the process.

When you had to wait for a mechanical hard drive to load your operating system and applications, fast start-up made sense. Today, however, Fast Start-up isn't worth the trouble. I've seen it cause all sorts of strange problems that were difficult to narrow down.