Sate your afternoon sugar cravings with a dead-easy chocolate cake recipe that only requires hot chocolate mix, flour, an egg, cooking spray, and oil (all stuff you've got in your pantry anyway). Grab the biggest microwavable coffee mug you've got in your cupboard, and cover the inside with cooking spray. Mix up four tablespoons of flour and nine tablespoons of hot chocolate mix, then throw in three tablespoons of water, three tablespoons of oil and one egg. Once it's thoroughly mixed into an even batter, microwave the whole shebang for three minutes on high. Watch how high it rises from the cup in the video below:

When you hear that BEEEP of completion, you'll have yourself a piping hot, single-serving cake in a cup. In the name of research (ahem), I gave this a try myself this afternoon, and the result was—well, not the best cake I've ever had.

The boys & girls of Lifehacker have shown you how to build your own "Hackintosh", a computer running Mac's OS X system with PC parts. Now The Wired How-To Wiki goes even cheaper, detailing a process for installing the Apple OS on the ultra-portable (and pretty cheap) Eee PC. The method explained requires finding a suitably tweaked OS X image, an external DVD drive, and the patience to run through all the system configuration and terminal tweaks. Once you're up and running, however, the author says it runs decently swift, even with just the stock 1GB of RAM. Hit the link for a complete walkthrough.

Let's face it, the default theme on current Ubuntu releases is more aimed at the (boring) business folks: no transparency, no effects, no shiny icons and cool wallpapers.

This howto document will walk you through some easy steps to customize your Ubuntu Gnome - for better usability and better looks (to impress your windows buddies?).

[Haters: this guide is only for Gnome - the default environment for Ubuntu, not KDE.]

Some samples:

More pictures after the break.

Question? How do you take the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) processor from an off-the-shelf Sony® PLAYSTATION® 3 (PS3) and use it to construct a piece of Linux®-based laboratory equipment (in essence, taking the Cell/B.E. from fab to hab to lab)? In this series, Lewin Edwards shows you how to go from game console to simple audio-bandwidth spectrum analyzer and function generator. First up, uncover the design intent of the project and then make a close inspection of the details of the user interface implementation as you start a journey to generate and analyze signals on the Cell/B.E. processor.

Find the answer here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-ps3lab1

If you don't like using the Input Menu (System Preferences: International: Input Menu tab) to activate the Keyboard Viewer and Character Palette, here are two AppleScripts that do the same thing:

Keyboard Viewer: Get this script

Character Palette: Get this script

Once the scripts are created, you can put them in your Dock, Sidebar, assign a hot key (via your favorite third-party tool), etc.

Run REGEDIT and go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\Shell. Right-click the Shell part, select New > Key and call it
Aero On.

Right-click the Aero On key you’ve created, and create a new key called command. Double-click this (in the right-hand side of the screen) and give it the value Rundll32 dwmApi #102.

Right-click the Shell key again, select New > Key, and call this Aero Off. Create a command key below it, as you’ve just done, and give it the value Rundll32 dwmApi #104.

Now, right-click an empty part of the desktop to see your options, and select Aero On when you want fancy effects like Flip 3D, and Aero Off when you’re after raw speed.

More tips at: http://www.windowsvistamagazine.com/UK/4352741765893343994/pc-heaven.htm...

From personal experience, the most techno-phobic aunt, uncle, or boss-with-a-favor-to-ask can hook up with you through CrossLoop, a dead-simple app that uses simple access codes to make sure it's the right two screens hooking up. The How-To Geek has a full screenshot walk-through on hooking up the connection (remember to have the help-ees click "Unblock"!). If you're truly tech-savvy, you can even make some money in CrossLoop's Marketplace, helping similarly lost souls battle it out with their systems.

If you shy away from VNC connections more out of security concerns than difficulty level, it's not too much work to create a secure VNC connection with Hamachi. If you don't like dealing with all those port numbers, IP addresses, and such, ShowMyPC wraps up a VNC client, SSH, and a simple two-way password authorization, similar to CrossLoop, but with clients for Linux and OS X as well.

No, you won't actually have a Mac at the end of this transformation tutorial and, yes, it's just a tad bit, well, excessive. But if you're going to go through the effort of turning your Linux desktop into a Leopard clone, you may as well give it the full ride. Make Tech Easier tackles how to transform your menu bar, add a dock and retractable widgets, create a floating stack over your places menu—even your boot-up screen is given the cold-steel apple and a minimalist progress bar. If you've got the time, it's at least worth the confused faces on your friends' and co-workers' faces.

Popular Mechanics illustrates step-by-step how to build your own home speakers from start to finish. The author starts with a speaker kit that costs $369 for a pair, which sounds expensive until the author suggests that the results sound better than $500 speaker sets. (Okay, even after hearing that it still sounds expensive.) Overall it's a pretty ambitious DIYproject. Luckily Popular Science details the entire thing with tons of helpful start-to-finish photos. If you've ever tackled a similar speaker project, let's hear about it (including whether it was worth it) in the comments.

You already know that typing say something into the Mac's Terminal will literally make your Mac say "something." The UsingMac blog posts a few more nifty text-to-speech commands that will make your Mac sing. Literally. Copy and paste the following to the command line:

say -v Good oooooooooooooooooooooooooo

See? Get a few more Terminal songs (one with kinda funny lyrics, even) at the UsingMac page. Then check out 10 more things you forgot your Mac can do.

If you're a Windows Vista user tired of seeing lower-right-corner reminders about security, system updates, or other occasionally annoying speech balloon announcements, the How-To Geek has got a cure-all fix. It shouldn't be undertaken by anybody who isn't sure if they can live without system or application system tray pop-ups, but if you're set on having a distraction-free desktop, you can head to this registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

and change the EnableBalloonTips value to 0. If you'd rather not spend the time searching that out, the Geek has a double-click registry fix for download at the link below.

Opera has 9 Speed Dials by default but you can add more in Opera 9.50.

1. Note the path to Opera directory (Help > About Opera).
2. Close Opera.
3. Open speeddial.ini file in any text editor from Opera directory.
4. Add the following lines and adjust number of rows & columns to your requirement. If you use widescreen monitor, increase number of columns.
   [Size]
Rows=4
Columns=4
5. Restart Opera.

Here's a screenshot:

By default, Windows users are able to format a USB flash drive with FAT or FAT32 file systems only, but not with NTFS. It confuses some of them. NTFS (New Technology File System) is the standard file system Microsoft uses for their Operating Systems starting from Windows NT 3.1 till Vista. But when you try to format a USB flash drive with this standard file system, you don't have this option available.

Why do users want to set up the NTFS file system on flash drives? What advantages could it bring them?