Messy Excel data can be a huge time-waster and a major roadblock to getting real insights. When you deal with an Excel workbook that’s packed with inconsistent entries, missing values, and duplicate rows, navigating it can be a really painful process. At times, it is enough to make you want to shut your laptop and call it a day. In this post, I will share my tried and tested methods for cleaning up even the messiest Excel data.

Joplin is a popular note-taking app known for its open-source nature and wide range of features. Many people use it to store various data, from short to-do lists to big research projects. While Joplin offers many ways to sync data, some prefer complete control by setting up their own Joplin server.

Procreate is the go-to iPad drawing app for many digital artists and illustrators, including tattoo artists and pattern designers.

Ever since ray tracing became a mainstay in modern games, many gamers started believing that they couldn't enjoy peak gaming visuals without an Nvidia graphics card. While it's true that Nvidia still boasts superior ray tracing hardware compared to AMD, the performance difference isn't large enough to ruin your experience on the latter.

Google Photos is a popular photo storage tool, but for more privacy and control, there are plenty of open-source alternatives. If you’re already using open-source image editing tools, you might as well use open-source storage management, too. Some of these tools offer editing as well as storage, saving you a step in your image management process.

Where there is a will, there is a mechanical keyboard. Frankly, there are more varieties of mechanical keyboards than most users know what to do with. I love a high-quality custom or pre-built board as much as the next person, but choosing one keyboard from hundreds can easily get intimidating, especially for someone freshly upgrading to a mechanical keyboard.

Photo by Joe Sargent/Getty Images Netflix says it had a big audience for its live NFL games on Christmas Day, with Nielsen ratings designating them “the most-streamed NFL games in US history.” The Kansas City Chiefs and the Pittsburgh Steelers notched a 24.1M AMA (average minute audience), while the Houston Texans and Baltimore Ravens hit 24.3M AMA, totaling nearly 65 million total viewers.Though Netflix buckled under the weight of the more than 60 million households that tuned into the boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul last month, its systems mostly held up during the two NFL games and star-studded performances from Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. Netflix has also confirmed it will add a standalone replay of the “Beyoncé Bowl” halftime performance to the service later this week after it registered 27 million live viewers — the game’s peak viewership. Now, the league’s broadcast deal will keep Christmas Day games on Netflix for at least the next two years. The NBA, which has traditionally aired basketball without competition from the NFL on the holiday, said that despite the competing Netflix broadcasts, its slate of games delivered the “most-watched Christmas Day in five years, averaging 5.25 million viewers per game in the U.S.” All five games up year-over-year, with viewership overall up 84 percent from 2023.On Wednesday, the NFL offered a preliminary glimpse at viewership, saying the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Pittsburgh Steelers had already become the second most popular live title on Netflix and that one-third of Netflix’s viewers at the time were watching that game.

Donald Trump. | Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Scott Olson, Getty Images President-elect Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to let him negotiate a deal to save TikTok from an imminent US ban.In an amicus brief filed to the court, Trump says he “seeks the ability to resolve the issues at hand through political means once he takes office,” and that he “alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform.”Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments that a bill passed by Congress banning TikTok on national security grounds violates the First Amendment. The bill gives wide latitude to the president to delay its enforcement if there’s progress being made towards a deal that ensures TikTok isn’t fully controlled by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. But the deadline for that determination is January 19th, which is one day before Trump is set to be sworn in.In his Supreme Court filing, Trump asks for the bill’s January 19th deadline to be stayed, arguing that the deal he’d negotiate “would obviate the need for this Court to decide the historically challenging First Amendment question presented here on the current, highly expedited basis.” He offers no details on what said deal would look like, though it would likely have to involve ByteDance selling a signification portion of its ownership in TikTok to an American company.Trump argues that having over 14 million followers on TikTok, along with his ownership of Truth Social, gives him unique ability to “evaluate TikTok’s importance as a unique medium for freedom of expression, including core political speech.” He also cites Brazil’s temporary ban of Elon Musk’s X as an example of “the historic dangers presented” by a government banning a social media platform.While Trump pushed aggressively for a TikTok ban during his first term, he changed his tune after his campaign successfully used the video app during the 2024 election. He recently met with TikTok CEO Shou Chew at Mar-a-Lago and told a crowd that “maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while.”There’s still plenty of political pressure to enforce a TikTok ban, however. A group of senators and congressmen, including Mitch McConnell and Ro Khanna, filed petitions on Friday, joined by 22 U.S. states and former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, urging the Supreme Court to reject TikTok’s appeal.

There are many single-player games out there that could benefit from an additional co-op mode, but not every title has one. Whether the feature was planned and scrapped or never conceived in the first place, modders have been hard at work adding unofficial co-op mods to single-player games. Now, the new Spider-Man game is getting the co-op treatment, and the trailer for the mod is looking pretty juicy.

Once 3D printers learn how to print more 3D printers, we'll never be short of them. Until then, there have always been people who have released schematics for an open-source 3D printer that you can make yourself. Such is the case of the Lemontron, a cool project that lets you make a 3D printer you can disassemble and store in an empty filament box once you're done with it.

You know, modular controllers should be more of a thing. I can't tell you how many times I've been playing with an Xbox Controller (with the A button at the bottom and the B button on the right) and then got tripped up when I moved onto my Switch (with the A on the right and the B at the bottom). Having the ability to shift the buttons around in whatever position I want would be really helpful. So, when Ayaneo dropped their new handheld trailer and showed off that you can just swap the controls around whichever way you please, I was left wondering why other companies don't do this.

I've had an issue with the home network ever since upgrading it from an ISP-supplied router affair to dedicated hardware for switching, routing, and wireless clients. We've gone from a single device for handling everything going in and out of the home, as well as internal traffic, to a cluster of components that make up an advanced home networking solution. It's becoming more common as we add hardware to existing LANs that ISP routers cannot keep up with due to lack of connectivity. The issue arises when you've got too much hardware and nowhere to install it and that's what I recently solved with a networking cabinet — the best and most pointless addition to my home lab.