Are you planning to record some professional audio but don't own a good microphone? Turns out, that old phone you've been keeping in your drawer for years is nearly as good, if not as good, as some of the cheap USB microphones out there. With some setup around your recording space, you can get good audio quality without compromising your wallet.
Excel is usually filed under spreadsheets, yet its formulas and macros can carry software that goes well beyond budgets and pivot tables. From schedulers to games to financial dashboards, these three kinds of programs show how far a workbook can stretch before it needs a separate application.
<p>There was a time when creating automations on your phone required powerful third-party apps with complex tools. Nowadays, most Android phones come with built-in automation features. You can easily set them up without much effort.</p><img src='https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/rules-on-pixel-10.jpg' />
Microsoft replaced Battery Saver with Energy Saver in Windows 11 a couple of years ago. The new feature includes an always-on toggle that, if left enabled, can reduce your PC's performance without you even noticing. Combine that with a power mode set to favor efficiency, and your Windows PC might throttle itself even when it's plugged in.
My home network has grown into a small lab with computers, virtual machines, storage devices, and plenty of other things that occasionally decide to behave strangely. When something goes wrong, figuring out what happened can be difficult because the useful information may already be gone by the time I start investigating.
<p>The Apple iPad is an exceptionally long-lived device. There's no reason to upgrade them frequently and in my personal experience these tablets don't show much battery wear over the years either.</p><img src='https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/old-ipad-sparkle.png' />
Waze is one of the most popular navigation apps, thanks to its excellent live road alerts, traffic avoidance, and crowdsourced hazards and map corrections. If you use Waze for navigation, a few key settings are worth changing for the best experience.
A Walk Through setState continuation:How React Actually Renders: Understanding the Render LifecycleWhen building with React, it's easy to focus on writing components and managing state without fully understanding what happens under the hood. However, grasping how React transforms a state update into real browser pixels is essential for writing performant applications and debugging edge cases.Let's break down the core mechanics of React rendering, clear up common misconceptions, and establ
Most people run a speed test the same way you check weight on a scale, as if one number tells the whole story. The number tends to look good, but it is a really narrow way to judge your connection quality. That Wi-Fi speed test has almost nothing to do with how a connection works in real conditions. It's better to know what it is doing before you assume it is correc
AI-generated UI is pretty convincing when you’re building the first screen.Ask for a SaaS dashboard and you’ll usually get something decent within minutes: sidebar, cards, tables, forms, buttons.The trouble starts once you keep going.By page two or three, the project already has components worth reusing, and that’s where AI coding agents often start inventing alternatives.There’s already a Button, but another one appears.There’s a Card, but the new page gets a slightly different implementation.T
The developer who could assemble a component library but could not explain this is about to reappear in AI form. This time, the blast radius is not just the front end.By @vgutierrez, developer at KWAN · September 2026 · 10 min readEvery hiring loop now has a version of the same question: how does the model actually produce that answer?The candidate is fluent. They name their assistant, their agent framework, the prompt library they open every morning. The demo works. Then you ask what happens be
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Most people assume their printer is the least interesting thing on the home network. It sits there, waits for jobs, and doesn't do much else. But it's actually one of the most active and noisy devices on your whole network. The settings I changed after that audit weren't dramatic, but they kept me safer than I have been in years.
Unemployment fell across Sonoma, Solano, Marin, Napa, Mendocino and Lake counties in August, primarily due to a shrinking labor pool rather than rapid hiring increases, says an economist on state figures released Friday.<img src='https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1661787356057-190a8c51b523?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwyMzg1fDB8MXxzZWFyY2h8NHx8Sm9iJTIwTWFya2V0fGVufDB8fDJ8fDE2NjIwMjgwNTM&ixlib=rb-1.2.1&q=80&w=1080' />
Moments which stand out in a screenplay can not only grab a reader’s attention, they can also convey a story’s theme.Hollywood’s first great movie producer was Irving Thalberg and he was famously quoted as telling the writers he oversaw at MGM, “Just give me five great moments and I can sell that movie.”There’s a reason why producers and studio executives talk about the importance of “trailer moments.”Moments are how most of us remember mov
What’s the difference between render state and domain state?Render state drives pixels: selection, panel open/close, column order, scroll offsets, hover, active tab, in-flight drag positions. Domain state is the business data from the server, normalized and cached, with mutations and invalidation. When these are mixed, you get re-render storms, bloated payloads, and painful debugging.I keep them apart. Domain state lives in a server-state cache (TanStack Query v5.47 or RTK Query 2.2.4). Re
Hi HN!As a freelancer, I usually do a requirements workshops + one or two months of development in the pre-ai era. Which was enough to pay the bills and save up. Now I can do things in a matter of days. Do I charge my clients the old time + rate, or just the new reality (which means I'd need more gigs in order to make the same amount of money)Would love to hear your answers, cause charing them the previous moths feels 'off' but then again hard to win so many clients now to close t
Hi HN, I'm Salman. I started ReacherX as a side project in mid 2023 while studying at university, working part-time, and freelancing. I went full-time on it in June 2026. First time sharing something I built on Hacker News ;)ReacherX is an open-source platform for finding the people you're looking for on X/Twitter and LinkedIn.There's also an interactive demo linked in the README, prepopulated with fictional data, so you can click around and get a feel for the product without
The August jobs report was much celebrated by the White House, which pointed to a reported gain of 162,000 jobs in August.<img src='https://images.pexels.com/photos/5990945/pexels-photo-5990945.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&w=1200' />
I'd heard the name Linux Mint, but I only knew it was a derivative of Ubuntu. I've been with Ubuntu and Debian for most of my Linux life. I decided to check out Linux Mint recently, and I was impressed by what I saw.
