Setting Up Your Home Office

We may earn a commission from links on this page. I'm not sure what it says about us that we can't get enough of Ed Gein, of all people. While lacking the type of body count that would put him among American's most prolific serial murderers, his penchant for crafting housewares from human skin has more than earned him a spot in that dark pantheon. Beyond his appeal to true crime enthusiasts, his deeds have generated multiple major media franchises: nine Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies at last count, as well as several films and a TV show based on Robert Bloch's Psycho series of novels—all of them loosely, but definitely, based on Gein. All that's before we get into the do…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Based on the (really rather excellent) comic book series from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, Prime Video's satirical superhero romp The Boys picks up the genre deconstructionist torch passed by Alan Moore's Watchmen. The tone is less philosophical but even more cynical, suggesting that power doesn't just corrupt—it makes people absolute dicks. It's set in a world where people with superpowers work for a powerful multinational corporation, with plenty of money and a powerful PR machine behind them to clean up their messes and excesses, and keep them in the public's good graces. When the girlfriend of Hughie Campbell (Ja…

Wordle became an instant classic almost as soon as it launched, but its simplicity is also the source of a new problem: what to play when you've already guessed the day's word? Fortunately, the years since Wordle's appearance have blessed us with dozens of other guessing games that borrowed one or more of Wordle’s features—five-letter solutions, or yellow and green squares, or sometimes just the concept of guessing and getting hints to narrow down the possibilities. Here are 14 of the best. Waffle Credit: Waffle Let’s start out…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. There’s a little game I like to play sometimes, and it seems to be popular with other folks who tend to work out at home: What equipment would I buy if I were starting a new home gym from scratch? You can also play the advanced version: If you already have (insert common items here), what would you buy next? What follow are my picks for anybody starting a new home gym or looking to expand the one they have—whether that means a corner of your bedroom or a full-on garage-based weightlifting paradise. I'll start with space- and budget-friendly items, then move on to some bigger-ticket buys. Kettlebells If I had to put togeth…

There are about 85 million single-family homes in the United States, which is a lot of houses. If you own one of them, then you already know what you don’t know—from real estate terms to the actual cost of owning the place. Buying and maintaining a house is a life-long learning process. But no matter how long you’ve owned your home, there are probably aspects of it that you have no clue about. This can be a problem because you’re relying on this structure to protect you and your family from the elements, to be a valuable asset in your financial portfolio, and to be an attractive place you can be proud to show off to friends and family. In order for that to happen, you nee…

The dock, an iconic Mac feature, is used to launch apps, switch between them, and as a hub for displaying key apps and minimized windows while they're open. By default, the dock has a clean look and features a few apps that your computer thinks you might want to use. However, you can get a lot out of customizing your dock, like removing the icons for default Apple apps you don't use. You can also change its placement and its look. Here's what you need to know to do just that, plus a bit extra. Remove apps you're not going to use Credit: Pranay Parab …

Apple's MacBook Neo is exactly the laptop many budget-conscious people have been looking for. It's priced under $500 for students ($599 for everyone else), and has decent enough specs to be a great starter laptop for most users. To make it a 'budget laptop,' though, a few corners had to be cut. As a result, the MacBook Neo is lacking a few features that you might have come to expect from a MacBook. Here are the biggest trade-offs Apple is making to hit the Neo's lower price point. No Touch ID in the base modelThe MacBook Neo's base model doesn't have a Touch ID sensor, which means you'll have to type out your passwords every time you need to enter them. Some people might …

Throughout my academic and professional journeys, one thing has remained my constant ally: Google Docs. Not only is having all your documents available no matter where you are helpful, but the software itself is surprisingly versatile and intricate. I have used it for over 15 years to manage basically my entire life. I have never encountered anything I couldn’t do with Google Docs, from signing a contract to seamlessly working with huge groups of collaborators. There are other, smaller hacks for the word processor that you may not even know about, though, whether you're a student or not. Google Docs hacks for essays and notesSo much of schoolwork centers on writing, from…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Noah Wiley can't seem to escape the emergency room. After spending more than a decade on NBC's '90s mega-hit E.R., he's back in scrubs for HBO's buzzy new doctor show The Pitt. If that show hasn't quite scratched your itch for medical drama, there are plenty of other shows to stream. The genre's roots can be traced back to the early '60s, and the sexy Dr. Kildare, but it really exploded in the '70s with shows like Medical Center, Emergency!, and Quincy, M.E., all of them fairly soapy dramas with plenty of action and occasional doses of silliness. Later in the decade, M.A.S.H. became a hit by lacing the sit-com formula with…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan's new series Pluribus has earned a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. It's just an excellent show, featuring an end-of-the-world science fiction story with a wildly inventive apocalypse: instead of zombies or nuclear bombs, Pluribus' world ends with humanity literally coming together. Through a transmission from space, everyone on Earth is melded into a single consciousness, so there's no more conflict or hunger, but there's no more individuality, either. Mysteriously, a handful of people were left out of the great melting, including Carol (Rhea Seehorn) a cynical, hard-drinking writer wh…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Black Friday sales officially start Friday, November 28, and run through Cyber Monday, December 1, and Lifehacker is sharing the best sales based on product reviews, comparisons, and price-tracking tools before it's over. Follow our live blog to stay up-to-date on the best sales we find. Browse our editors’ picks for a curated list of our favorite sales on laptops, fitness tech, appliances, and more. Subscribe to our shopping newsletter, Add to Cart, for the best sales sent to your inbox. Sales are accurate at the time of publication, but prices an…

It's getting near Halloween, the perfect time to stream some horror movies. I dug up 15 of the scariest, weirdest, freakiest, and funniest flicks from horror-only streaming service Shudder. I'm leaving off the obvious choices like Psycho and Halloween—if you subscribe to Shudder, you've probably seen all the "classics" at least twice—to focus on movies guaranteed to make you hide your eyes, laugh out loud, or say "what even is this?" A Dark Song (2016) If you like intelligent, slow-burn horror, check out A Dark Song. Like its characters, the debut feature from director Liam Gavin goes places few films dare to tread. Sophia is a grieving mother whose longing for …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Corporations are a driving force behind almost every part of American life—including the movies we watch. It sometimes feels like they hold all the power, and, actually, they kinda do. But if the power of capitalism can’t be overcome, it can at least be checked once in a while. And it can be extremely satisfying to watch a crusader standing up for the rest of us. Here are 15 movies about heroes defying big corporations, most of them at least inspired by true events. Usually, reality is at least as wild as what made it to the screen. As The Constant Gardener author John le Carré observed in the afterward to (and the end cre…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Let's face it: Secret Santa exchanges can be a minefield of disappointing, forgettable gifts. It's tough to shop for someone when you know that gift is going to be opened in front of all your friends, family, or coworkers at some holiday party. Then there's the price limit to contend with—a good gift exchange should keep it under $20, but some creep closer to the $50 range. What's the best way to win at Secret Santa without breaking the bank, or bending the rules? The name of the game for any gift exchange is to get something I call "strategically eccentric." You need to find something quirky and unique, so that you have …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Bridgerton, Shonda Rhimes' candy-colored, ultra-stylized period piece has been a legitimate sensation for Netflix, adapting the Julia Quinn novel series that itself owes plenty to Jane Austen (as does just about any Regency romance). With a large, rotating ensemble—led, perhaps, by Nicola Coughlan's Penelope Bridgerton, who is ably assisted by Adjoa Andoh, Jonathan Bailey, Ruth Gemmell, Polly Walker, and Julie Andrews (as the voice of the mysterious Lady Whistledown)—the show revels in the tropes of the literature of the era while turning up the dial on sex, scandal, and drama. With four seasons and a spin-off, Bridgerton …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Dark began as a mystery involving a missing child and evolved, over its three seasons, into a wildly complex narrative: a time travel-driven story that explores dark family secrets over the course of several generations. Youth may be a sort of protection in some horror stories, but not here, not even a little tiny bit. No one is safe from the show's emotions threats, nor from literally being killed. Dark gets twistier and more compelling throughout its three seasons and, miracle of miracles, ends on its own terms and on a highly satisfying note. There's nothing quite like it out there, which is a big part of the appeal, bu…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Considering we're awaiting word of a (likely) sixth season renewal, it's undeniable that Emily in Paris has been an unqualified success for Netflix, a reliable hit that rivals the success of buzzier genre shows like Stranger Things. Lily Collins stars as the faux pas-prone Emily Cooper, who moves to Paris and lands a temporary job at a glitzy French marketing firm kind of by accident. She doesn't speak the language and doesn't get the culture, but slowly manages to ingratiate herself to the locals while juggling work and romance in a new country. The series hails from Darren Star, creator of Sex and the City, so her buddin…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Zendaya is busy. Euphoria, which she produces in addition to starring in, is finally set to return for its third season on April 12, four years after our last visit to East Highland, and nearly seven since it premiered. As frustrating as these between-season breaks can be, they leave plenty of time to explore other tales of the wild lives of high schoolers. It's all relative, though: While growing up in never a picnic, there's drama, and then there's drama. These 15 streamalikes vary widely in tone and style, but they all make clear that being a young person in the 21st century is not f*cking easy. Stream the first two se…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Prime Video's Fallout, an adaptation of the popular video game series of the same name, is set more than two centuries from now on an Earth still devastated by a long-ago nuclear war between the United States and China. The protagonist, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), emerges from the underground fallout shelter where she's lived her entire life in search of her father, and a fuller understanding of the world above, a wasteland is dominated by warring factions and freakish mutants. It's a gutsy, hilarious adaptation of out-there source material, and it's wild to consider that, in the space of a couple of years, we've gone f…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. After a decade, Stranger Things is at an end. Well, I mean, except for planned animated and live-action spin-offs...and possibly an unlikely secret extra episode related to the 'Conformity Gate' theory; adherents are convinced that the whole thing we watched was just Vecna messing with our Hawkins crew. But the story that started way back in 2016 is mostly over, almost for sure! Given the pace of life these days, the end of the Obama administration feels, somehow, as distant as the series' nostalgic 1980s setting. The show solidified Netflix as the streamer to beat in terms of original programming, and introduced a new gen…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. For all the talk about Stranger Things taking nearly a decade to produce just five seasons of television, consider The Night Manager: It took this British spy thriller 10 years just to get to season two. Luckily, audiences seem to have been willing to wait, as they show performed decently in the streaming ratings when it dropped on Prime Video earlier this year. There's a reason viewers were anxious for more, even after such a long wait: Based on a John le Carré novel and starring Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, the series finds the manager of a luxury Cairo hotel running afoul of an Egyptian crime boss with ties to Dicki…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. From humble beginnings, Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone has grown into TV's one inescapable franchise. The Kevin Costner-led original ended its run after a relatively compact five seasons, but that doesn't reckon with the three official spin-offs, the three others in development, nor with the Sheridan shows (Landman, The Madison, Bass Reeves) that feel like they could extensions of the Yellowstone universe, even if they technically aren't. But given that success only feeds our appetite for more, here are 15 other shows that play with the themes and tones that have made Yellowstone such a phenomenon. The Madison (2026 – ) …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. During his Presidential campaign, new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised an eight-year halt on infectious disease research, presumably because our chances of encountering any sort of infectious disease will be nearly zero once the fluoride is gone from our water supply. As we celebrate the disease-free world of the very near future, let's take a look back at movies that explore worlds in which viruses and diseases (or related metaphors) run rampant. These movies vary wildly in their tones and styles, but there are some recurring themes: Science and scientists (however flawed) are almost alwa…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. It's begin to feel like successful streaming shows are increasingly the exception, rather than the rule, and Slow Horses is something else again: a successful show with a more-than-consistent schedule. With five seasons since 2022, rather than the increasingly common "every few years or when we get to it" scheduling of other streaming shows, it's rather lovely to actually be able to remember the events of the previous series when the new one starts. If this all sounds like damning with faint praise, it's also a smart, brilliantly entertaining show, with Gary Oldman as the slovenly, flatulent, once-brilliant spy Jackson Lam…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. International Women's Day, in one form or another, has existed since around 1909—placing the holiday's inception roughly in line with the early days of film. It seems fitting, then, to take a look at movies that examine and celebrate the accomplishments (and trials) of real women in history. This isn't an exhaustive list of movies about women who've changed the world (or at least changed their worlds), and there are plenty of very important women whose lives have never been touched by filmmakers (and others, sadly, with movies that aren't streaming—I'm looking at you Hypatia of Alexandria and Agora). But, like Internationa…