Team Hack-a-Day

DrNathan demonstrates how a couple of dollars and a few minutes can turn your broken Xbox 360 DVD drive into a fully functioning unit again by tackling a common point of failure – the drive belt that runs the tray mechanism.

Forum member snorkle256 didn’t let a stepped-on Xbox 360 controller ruin his night of gaming.  He took the challenge of replacing the broken thumbstick head-on, using a controller from the original Xbox as an ‘organ donor’.  Head on over to his blog to see how he got his Franken-controller up and running again.

Typically, changing your BIOS’ SATA configuration to enable AHCI or RAID after you have already installed Windows results in a BSOD each time you reboot the machine. DrNathan shows us how he solved that problem on an Intel board with an ICH10R SATA controller using a little manual driver installation magic.

For those of you unfamiliar with the MyVu Personal Video Device, it resembles a set of sunglasses with video screens and a pair of headphones built in.  It’s a great little product, but forum member RetroPlayer did not like the fact that his MyVu was tethered only to his iPod.  He decided he wanted to [...]

In an attempt to ensure that all of his digits survive the 4th of July, forum member morehpperliter has devised a simple but elegant replacement to the time-honored tradition of “light the fuse and run like hell!”  Using an Arduino and a bit of code know-how, you too can keep yourself out of the emergency [...]

Forum member Cerberus posted a tutorial on how to rig up an always-on USB charging port for your PC using a spare USB port, a resistor, and a few pieces of wire.
It requires a small bit of soldering know-how, but anyone who has used an iron at least one time can pull this off.  It [...]

I like having the ability to remotely access my PC at home while I am away in case I want to grab an important file I have left there, or if I need to finish something I didn’t quite get around to.  For ages I simply set port forwarding on my router allowing port 3389 [...]

I saw a recent article on Lifehacker about cleanly shutting down and restarting explorer.exe in Windows Vista. I gave it a try in XP just for the sake of it, and not surprisingly, it did not work.
I did however find a way to do it in Windows XP that I wanted to share with [...]

Forum member DrNathan posted a quick write-up on how to use Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 2, Beta 3, and Beta 4 side-by-side without causing any profile conflicts or corruption. It only takes minutes and is a nice way to give the new iteration of Firefox a spin before the final version is [...]