Hot Gadget Hacks How-Tos

How To: Build a beeping electronic practical joke

Watch as Kipkay from MAKE Magazine shows you how to make something really cool for the office, with parts from RadioShack. One of the original practical jokes is the gravity activated subwoofer simulator, or better known as the Whoopee Cushion. See how to make a high tech prank... the Joke-A-Tron. This electronic prank device will beep and beep to keep your enemies on their toes.

How To: Install Joomla 1.5 on Windows Server 2003 with IIS6

Installing Joomla on a Windows server can be tricky, on Windows running IIS even more so. Installing Joomla 1.5 in this scenario has caused many frustrations.In this video, we take the process step by step and jump over the hurdles that cause some people to wind up pulling their hair out. If you follow along closely, you will be up and running in no time, and if you haven't already tried to do this, you will wonder why people find it so difficult. There are some prerequisites to the steps in ...

How To: Install Joomla CMS 1.0.13 on Windows 2003 with IIS

If you have been looking for a way to get the popular Joomla Content Management system running on Windows with IIS, you may have run into many problems. In fact, many people spend days trying to get Joomla running on IIS and run into roadblock after roadblock. The problem is getting PHP, MySQL, Joomla and IIS to all play nicely together. As you search for solutions, it is easy to find part of the answer, but rarely do you find it all in one place... until now. In this video tutorial we start ...

How To: Reverse a cathode-ray picture tube

Reversing the image on a CRT computer monitor can be a great joke to play on your coworker, if you have the time to play a prank like this. If you have a lot of spare time on your hands, and love to see people miserable, then this is perfect for you. This also works with television sets.

How To: Build an application on Android for mobile devices

This video tutorial is about Android, and no it's not a robotic creature, it's a software platform and operating system form mobile phones and PDAs. The Android system is based on Linux and was developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. Code is managed in the Java language, but can be written in C also, although C is not officially supported. A lot of the new cell phone and other mobile devices will be running off of Android, so know how to use it.

How To: Add places to Google Maps

In Google Maps, you can add any place that does not already appear on the map. From your favorite town square to little-known landmarks, make sure everyone can find the places most important to you.

How To: Work with KML in Google

In this hands-on workshop, Googlers Mano Marks and Pamela Fox show how to use tools within Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Spreadsheets to create, import, and edit KML. They also show a quick integration of KML in the Maps API, and briefly mention geo search and indexing. This talk is useful for developers who haven't had a chance to play with the Maps or Earth creation tools yet, and are looking for quick ways to create and share geo-data.

How To: Wire a 555 timer chip for PWM

This demonstrates how to wire a 555 timer chip for Pulse Width Modulation. Items used: solderless breadboard, 555 chip, 510 ohm resistor, 100k ohm variable resistor, 1 RGB LED at 20-25ma, wires, and 9v battery. And those vertical lines are what i mean in terms of what you can see only on the camera. You can see the led light of course without the camera.