Preston Gralla’s Big Book of Windows Hacks has hit the streets, and we’re really excited about it. It’s truly big: 600 pages and 188 hacks. You’ll learn how to bend Vista and XP to your will, get the most out of gadgets like the Zune, your networking hardware, and Windows Home Servers. Here’s some of […]
You can use the Quality of Service (QoS) feature on many routers to optimize your internet connection for devices and services that are most important to you. Adam at Lifehacker put together a quick walkthrough for tuning the QoS settings on our favorite router firmware, the open-source DD-WRT. Your internet connection is an indispensable part […]
Tom Hoffman has posted some quick and easy instructions for running Sugar (“essentially a virtual XO”) on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. If you don’t have a giant screen, check out these instructions for tips on using a lower resolution (you’ll need to do something like vi `which sugar-emulator` to edit the startup script). This might hold […]
Paul McGuinness sent us a howto for installing Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC. For the most part, the install is fairly straightforward, but there are a few performance tweaks that are different from a typical desktop system. The big one is that you want to disable the access time feature (noatime parameter in fstab) […]
What do you do when good hard drives go bad? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You spend a year or two filling up an enormous external hard drive, and just as you start thinking it might be a good idea to buy another enormous drive to back up your data, you boot your computer […]
There are a couple decent software packages available for using your soundcard as an oscilloscope. Using the line-in or mic-in will allow you to sample signals below 44.1kHz with 16-bit resolution (depending on your soundcard). For Linux, there’s an open source GTK package called xoscope that is pretty well maintained. On the PC side, you […]
With just a wire, a wood screw, and a drinking straw you can go MacGyver on your PC’s WiFi and make yourself an omnidirectional “range extender” antenna, similar to what you’d find in the store for $30. There isn’t a lot of talk about the reasoning behind the antenna design… it’s just a straight duplicate […]
