Name These Connectors! stupid one. i can tell b/w PCI-E and AGP but why i dont see the point in comparing the connectors of PCI-E, DDR, and a 7 year obsolete RAM memory standard.

Run All Your Essential Apps on a USB Stick
Been running Port.Apps for years and i have portable and standalone versions of Norton System Works, Photoshop CS3, and others

Straighten the Pins on an Older CPU
AWESOME trick. wish i'd known about the mechanical pencil trick years ago. modern CPUs use LGA-type CPUs with contacts on the CPU and no pins. the motherboards, however, have a new incarnation of the CPU pin, only it's even easier to bend and harder to straighten.

Know the 13 Basic HTML Tags
i think i have 1/2 of these. the rest are googlable. i havent coded anything in years and dont care to. we got 3 software guys at work and only 1 is as good with hardware as me so it works out very well.

Get Through to Executive Customer Service
One trick i've learned is to dial 0 when you get the answering machine; it usually puts you straight through to an operator. ask for a lvl 2 tech from there. also, Live Chat options are usually better than calling b/c you can better understand the Indian dudes. you can also create a list of canned responses or type away your problem ahead of time detailing asnwers to every Q he'd normally ask.

Beat Quake in Under an Hour
I was more of an Unreal guy. i never had the attention span to play the same single player repeatedly, it gets boring and i need to move on. Mario Bros speed runs are awesome

Build a Hackintosh
ironic...i installed Hackintosh on a Virtual PC i created yesterday

Watch TV Shows on the Internet (Legally!)
Hulu is AWESOME. i watch it all day at work. there's like 3 short video ad breaks through 30 min shows but it's not intrusive at all and the video is usually pretty high quality for streaming. i stopped DLing standard TV shows now b/c of Hulu.

Get Around the Content Filter on Public Computers
Tor is cool, but now I'M the content restrictor! We disabled write privileges for students to all local machines so now they can only save shit to their personal networked drives. all we gotta do now is search U: for tor.exe and theyre toast. there's online proxies and redirects we have a hard time blocking. most of the time our content restrictions hurt teachers more than students but w/e.

Recite pi to 23 Decimal Places
no thanks...i memorized it to the 10th place for a HS project.

Replace the Controller Board on a Hard Drive
never done it but it's easy. ive only had 1 drive die on me outside of warranty and i didnt really need it anyway.

Benchmark Your Computer
Do you want my 3dmark 06, Vantage, SuperPi, OCCT, Sandra 2008, Everest, or wPrime results?

Decorate Your Room Using Only Printer Paper
lol.

Securely Erase Your Data So it Can't be Recovered
not hard with any partition manager. Partition Magic did Dpt of Def standards and higher erasing, many other programs do it now. DoD wipe = 7 passes of writing 0's to the drive.

Get into a Windows Computer if you Forgot Your Password
Hiren's has had Active Password Recovery app or some shit for years that worked great until Vista came out. the app they linked looks even better

Hide Porn from Your Significant Other
no brainer

Explain What E=MC^2 Means to a Liberal Arts Major
explain to me lol

Abstain from Buying Extended Warranties
Sometime's theyre actually worth it. Most projection TV extended warranties come with 1 free bulb replacement. since the bulbs are usually $70-100, a $100-120 extended warranty isnt a bad idea. Plus, accidental damage warranties let you destroy your product the day before the warranty expires, then you usually get a gift card worth the original purchase price, or worst case scenario a refurbed model similar to yours. complain enough and youll usually get the giftcard.

Use Photoshop or GIMP to Imperceptibly Doctor a Photo
Random Picture Thread.

Use a DSLR in Full Manual Mode
I wish this were so since my dad has over $4k in camera+lenses but it's not. i keep it on Auto and ask my dad for ISO adjustments.

Mooch Your Neighbor's Wi-Fi
could but no need. 16mbps connection + very private torrent trackers + out of country seedboxes. plus im on v.good terms with my neighbors and they're mostly all tech saavy.

Protect your Wi-Fi
WPA2-PSK, but even that was recently cracked. i keep the SSID public and dont limit by MAC address and just rely on WPA2. though i have my router's status and client table bookmarked.

Create an Animated Spray in Valve Games
i gave up trying to get transparency working, let alone animations! not enough attn span for me.

Set up a RAID
i've actually never done this. wish i had. i'll have the chance to learn soon enough. i know most of the basics but no experience.

Calculate a Pitcher�s Earned Run Average
i suck @ math but i can do this easily. only b/c i watch a lot of baseball. a lot. it's aka the Thinking Man's Sport yet i still love it!

Run Two Operating Systems
used to dual-boot win98 and 2000, then XP and RedHat 7. Virtual Machines are far easier now for what i do.

Install a Hard Drive in a Laptop
literally hundreds of drives installed in the last few years. laptop HDD is the 2nd easiest hardware component thing to install in the world behind laptop memory.

Pull Off an Elaborate Prank
nope

Rocket Jump Without Using a Macro
what macro?

Wire Your Home with Ethernet Cable
i'm not ethernet shy and not afraid of running through walls, just no need for it atm.

Know the 6 Most Important Linux Commands
i know cd and rm...i dont do command lines. gimme a GUI plz

Rip Your CDs to FLAC
FLAC is too large. i wish i had 3 TBs of space avail for just music, and then compressed copies for my ipod. as it is, 67GB of MP3s and OGGs after deleted a few GB of trash. i only encode at 256 OGG and DL 256 or higher MP3s, though.

Stream Your Movies, Music, and Photos to Any TV in Your House
easy...

Install and Configure a Virtual Machine
VMWare Player + Hackintosh, CentOS5, Fedora10, and xUbuntu

Run Multiple Monitors Like a Pro
i had dual displays at one point but then i built a new PC and used the old as a file server/IM client/torrent box/etc.

Hack Firmware on a Router
my WRT54G is too new of a revision for Tomato, but an old BEFSR wired router ran some hacked firmware i found and added QoS support which rocked.

Pick a Lock
hahahah i wish

Differentiate Between Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb
Pepper is good but Pibb isnt really around here

Avoid DRM on everything
the only reason i bought an iPod Video was b/c it had been rockboxed to remove all DRM support and the need of iTunes, among other things.

Download Flash Video and Bend it to Your Will
Firefox plugin DownloadHelper makes it a breeze...but i have no need to download it and convert it. FLVs are usually shitty quality anyway. plus who doesnt have an internet connection everywhere they go thesedays?

Get Around In DOS
i know as much as ive ever needed to know...cd, ?, and exit. yea im not booting into DOS...i'll take the command prompt and stick to GUIs

Rip a DVD to h.264
could if i wanted to. i dont really mess with DVDs anymore, it's all 720p HDTV or blurays and i dont have either yet...

Overclock Your PC and Tune Your BIOS
C2Q6700 @3.6ghz, 'nuff said.

Use Remote Desktop
i can remote into work, then remote into any computer in the district, or remote into my work machine and have PXE control over every PC.

Debate the Relative Merits of an Imperial Star Destroyer vs. the USS Enterprise
i watched a few Star Treks growing up and i do enjoy all Star Wars movies, but i'm not a pencil-pushin faggot that'd waste time blabbering about made-up shit when i could be getting really drunk.

Build Your Own Computer
How many?

holy shit that was long...

if you skipped the wall of text you didnt miss anything
good find

Holy shit Jif...didn't expect a write up on each item.

I'll pick one of those and go into a bit of detail.

"Hack Firmware on a Router"

A while ago there was a company called Fon that was giving out free wireless AP's. They were quite powerful and the only limitation was the shitty firmware on them from the company. Basically their firmware forced the AP to share your Internet connection in your neighborhood and their overall goal was to get tons of people doing this in order to provide Internet to everyone. Well, you can see the exploit here...

Anyways, I belonged to a group that started hacking these to allow open source firmware to run on them. The firmware being .

To access the memory on the AP, I had to use a RS-232 adapter that allows you to connect a serial cable to the TTL connection on the breadboard. Then you can use telnet to access the bootloader and flash the firmware over xmodem.

Now for some pictures...

TTL pin header on the breadboard:
forum/files/images/header.jpg

Connection to the AP via serial:
forum/files/images/fonserial.jpg

Telnet:
forum/files/images/transfer.jpg

...and of course I had to mod it. The processor got a tad warm so I decided to add a fan.

Underside of top cover with fan mounted and wires soldered:
forum/files/images/step5.jpg

Connection to power:
forum/files/images/step6.jpg

Finished product:
forum/files/images/step7.jpg


I have 3 of these AP's in total, and only one has the fan. If anyone wants to buy one, I'll sell it to you preloaded with DD-WRT and it'll be plug and play for you!

jesus christ

So wait..... what does it do now?