How-To Geek

Netflix is on fire right now with some new prestige scripted series and movies, from Lord of the Flies and Man on Fire, to Apex and Bugonia, burning up the platform. But sometimes you need a little grounding from all that fiction with a solid dose of documentary—which can be even wilder than fiction.

Staying on top of conversations, whether in meetings, lectures, or even casual calls, can be harder than it sounds. You’re either fully engaged and missing key details, or busy taking notes and losing track of the discussion. And even when you record conversations, you’re often left with long audio files that are time-consuming to sort through.

When I first started using Claude, I treated it like a search bar with brains. I'd type a question into a fresh chat and get annoyed when Claude didn't understand what I wanted. It took me some time to realize that the problem wasn't Claude, it was me. A few changes in how I used Claude made it so much more useful.

If you've noticed your Ryobi lawn mower dying before the backyard is finished, the culprit isn't necessarily a bad or aging battery; it's probably how you're using your favorite feature. And if you've had the mower for a few years, how and when you use this feature becomes even more important.

FFmpeg is one of my favorite tools. It is a multimedia Swiss army knife that powers more media applications than I can count. However, it doesn't include a GUI by default, which can sometimes make it a bit difficult to use.

Router buttons are notoriously bad at making sense. It's not even that many people simply don't know what they're there for; it's that routers don't have one unified form factor the way laptops and desktop PCs do, so you may not even know what you're looking at.

It took a while, but automation tools are now baked into most smartphones. They're actually pretty good, too—with one exception. While Samsung Modes & Routines (even iPhone Shortcuts) are excellent, Google’s Pixel “Rules” are embarrassingly lackluster.

Almost every ESP32 device has Wi-Fi; it’s one of the things that makes the microcontroller so versatile. You can use this functionality to power a variety of wireless projects, from penetration testing to expanding the range of your home network.

Do you find that devices keep dropping off your Zigbee network or are slow to respond? The problem may not be your Zigbee network at all; it may be your Wi-Fi network. Both Zigbee and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi share the same frequency band, and they can get in each other’s way.

There isn't a ton of new stuff landing on Paramount+ this week/weekend, but that doesn't mean there isn't anything great to watch—especially if you want to binge something that you can finish in about a weekend. Paramount+ has a massive library of newer and classic shows for U.S. subscribers to choose from, if you're willing to scroll through and find. Luckily, we love doing just that.

If you've ever found yourself rewriting the same Excel logic in different places, or building long formulas just to reuse parts of them, you're not alone. As spreadsheets grow, formulas tend to get more complex and harder to manage. Excel's LAMBDA function changes that by letting you define logic once and reuse it wherever you need it.

Netflix has some excellent new TV series arriving in the month of May, including a few that are already lighting up Rotten Tomatoes and the Top 10, like Man on Fire and Unchosen. But there's still plenty to come on the streaming service, including what's in store for U.S. subscribers this weekend.

Like a lot of people working in tech, I've found AI creeping into more and more of my day. I'm summarizing long articles, cleaning up drafts, pulling key points out of research, and sanity-checking ideas before I move forward. The problem is, I kept using the same prompts over and over. Not just similar ones, the exact same instructions with small tweaks depending on the situation.

The Tesla Model Y has become the benchmark in the EV SUV space, and for good reason. It consistently leads sales and sets expectations for range, technology, and everyday usability.

Who's ready to head back to the kitchen and hang out with our favorite crew on The Bear? While the new season is still over one month away, Hulu dropped a surprise prequel episode of The Bear earlier this week. Titled Gary, the episode chronicles a trip to Indiana featuring Mikey (Jon Bernthal) and Richie. While it's not an entire season's worth of episodes, it's a nice appetizer before the final season.

Many of my colleagues here at How-To Geek are experts on artificial intelligence and how to incorporate it into your everyday life. Some of my colleagues have shared ideas for making Gemini a more functional tool or using Claude to help with Raspberry Pi projects that come up on a whim. After listening to them speak about AI during our team meetings, I decided to use it myself.

Apple's MacBook Neo upended the PC market in part because of a $599 starting price that put many comparable Windows laptops to shame, but it might have to give up that advantage.

Even with the addition of tabs, the file browsing experience on Windows is still lackluster. The search is as broken as ever. I’m still waiting for bulk renaming, file locks, a bookmarks bar, or secure deletion. Panes have limited file previews and organization is bare bones. Let’s fix it all.

When you think about the history of smartphones, several iconic releases stand out. I'm talking about the Galaxy SIII, iPhone 4, HTC One M7, and even Google's LG-made Nexus 5 was a big deal, even if it didn't have sales numbers to back it up. But one phone that's often overlooked is this huge 12-year-old Motorola phone, the Nexus 6.

Sports cars are usually terrible financial decisions. They’re built to maximize fun, not preserve value, which is why most of them lose a painful amount of money the moment they leave the dealership. Practical sedans like the Toyota Camry are normally the safer long-term bet, at least on paper.