How-To Geek

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.

If you have a relatively new vehicle, it probably has USB-A and newer USB-C ports on the dash, in the center console, and maybe in the back for passengers. They're everywhere, and it makes charging phones fast and easy, right? Nope.

Smart TVs looked like the obvious move when they launched. One less box under the TV, everything built in, nothing extra to buy. A few years later, many people are watching their menus get slower every month, waiting for apps to load, and realizing their TV hasn't seen a meaningful update in years and no longer feels new. A $20 Fire TV Stick doesn't fix the screen, but it quietly fixes almost everything else.

For a very long time, if you wanted to try Linux on a semi-permanent basis, you needed to shrink your Windows partition, install a Linux distro of some variety, and just suffer through any of the numerous problems that can occur with dual booting.

Are you looking for a private, alternative search engine? Google is king, but its rivals are quickly catching up. With the recent general shift toward privacy awareness, perhaps one of them is right for you.

Google just gave you a new account login option to help escape the maze of password resets and recovery contacts. The company has introduced a selfie video sign-in feature that can get you in even when you're locked out or using a different device.

Are you ready for another batch of fun (and useful) homelab projects to try out this weekend? From building your own speed test server to some media server maintenance, here are three projects for you to finish before Monday rolls around.

When it comes to single-board computers, you have other flavors of Pi to choose from than just Raspberry these days. The Orange PI series of competing products might lack the vast community support and software library of the Raspberry Pi, but when it comes to one specific use case, the choice is much less clear.