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…

Would you like a way to keep track of all the conversations that you initiated in your Outlook email? This can be done by combining an Outlook view with a search folder. Follow the steps below and you will have a folder that shows your email as conversation threads: Create a new search folder…

Think your secrets are safe because you removed incriminating text messages or phone numbers from your cell phone's SIM card? Think again! A new tool, called the Cell Phone SIM Card Spy, lets you retrieve that deleted data. To use the device, which is a USB key, you just put the SIM card into the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Do you hate dialing those toll-free numbers that force to you to navigate through a phone tree just to get to a real, live person on the phone? Designed to route calls (and possibly to frustrate people to the point of hanging up), complex phone trees waste your valuable time. A service called…

Hack #1: Multi-Extension Support mod - This hack makes the Zune program support more types of video, audio, and image extensions. This mod converts files for use on the Zune. Files are automatically converted to the exact specifications used on the Zune device, so no guesswork is involved. It…