hacks

Paul and Laura are back in action and here to bring you the hot stories that 'Softies are pinging each other about. Stories like these:   Microsoft on the ones and twos! Hacker hired Xbox 360: Not just for games Panoramic street views

A very interesting project described at PetaPixel shows how the sliders on a MIDI mixing board can be used to control parameters in applications, in this case Adobe Lightroom. The open source application is called PADDY for Lightroom and can be downloaded here. You can also see a video of the…

A friend of mine just tweeted an interesting tip from LifeHacker: you can add your Dropbox folder directly to the Windows 7 Start Menu. For those of you that don’t know, Dropbox is a file synchronization service that lets you keep files on multiple computers in sync similar to Windows Live Sync or…

If you're looking for a little more out of your Windows 7 network activity indicator, HowToGeek.com has a tweek that will get you back to the classic twin monitor indicator with the screens that light up when there is network activity. The tweek includes downloading a file, extracting to…

The folks over at hack7mc.com have just debuted a new section of their website: a central location for Windows Media Center themes created both by the site’s authors as well as individual contributors like yourselves. The new theme directory is available at Theme7MC.com. Now, theming your Media…

Did you know you can change your Media Center background? Neither did I until I read this recent post. Although not officially a part of the Media Center software, there is a way to do it. It’s not the easiest thing in the world as it involves applying a new registry file and editing permissions.…

Mike Halsey just came up with an ingenious way to add system icons like the Control Panel, Recycle Bin, Devices and Printers, and more to the new Windows 7 taskbar, all while keeping them separate from the other icons already docked there. Mike’s hack builds off of the WinVistaClub forum tip about…

In the UK, the BBC iPlayer allows residents to watch full-length TV episodes on their computers or select mobile phones. But unfortunately, Windows Mobile phones didn’t make the list of approved devices. Since there’s no official client for WiMo users, a hacker over on the XDA-Developers forum…

Yes, a toaster mod. A Windows Home Server modder by the name of Edgar Voorbraak sent in photos to the Home Server Hacks blog showing off his WHS build that is enclosed in an old toaster casing. He even used some of the toaster buttons to operate the computer - for example, the toaster time knob…

Remember how I told you that you could add Wikipedia to your choices in Windows Vista's default search? Well, there are other ones you can add, too, like these: Live Search: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%+IMDB: http://search.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%+Dictionary Search:…