How-To Geek

Why settle for just a Death Star ornament when you can have a Death Star ornament you built yourself from LEGO? These DIY ornaments are a perfect geeky touch for your tree or gift for a LEGO loving friend.

If you’re looking for a way to quickly find large email attachments in your Gmail account, this undocumented search operator makes it simple to zero in on the hulking attachments hiding out in your inbox.

Earlier this week we asked you if you’d cut the cable and switched to alternate media sources to get your movie and TV fix. You responded and we’re back with a What You Said roundup.

Chrome: If you’re outside the United States you know all too well how irritating it can be when you’re denied access to streaming services because of your location. Stop missing out and start streaming with Chrome extension Media Hint.

It’s safe to assume that there is a lot more going on inside your modern DSLR than your grandfather’s Kodak Brownie, but just how much hardware is packed into the small casing of your average DSLR is quite surprising.

Many cases allow you to mount drives in vertical or horizontal configurations and external drives can be easily repositioned. Does the orientation of the hard drive affect the performance and longevity of the drive?

While the basic shape of keyboards has remained largely unchanged over the last thirty years, the guts have undergone several transformations. Read on to explore the history of the computer keyboard.

If you checked out the Raspberry Pi-powered arcade table we shared earlier this week but want an all-in-one solution that doesn’t require as much configuration, this table uses a pre-programmed board that comes loaded with arcade classics.

While Apple has has a mountain of commercial successes, every once in awhile the crew in Cupertino strikes out. Here are some of the less successful and prematurely retired Apple products from the last two decades.

The proliferation of streaming services and diverse media content has made cutting the cable cord an appetizing option for many people. Have you cut the cord, stuck with traditional services, or mixed the two together?

Anyone who has played online multiplayer games, especially those focused on combat, can attest to how caustic other players can be. League of Legends creators are fighting that, rather successfully, with a positive-reinforcement honor system.

This week Action Comics Superman #14 hits the stands and DC comics reveals the actual location of Kyrpton, delivered by none other than beloved astrophysicist Neil Tyson.

Boy, they sure were ambitious back in the 70s; while today we’re happy to have a small apartment-sized environment in orbit, back then they were dreaming of entire cities in space.

Increasingly GPUs are being used for non-graphical tasks like risk computations, fluid dynamics calculations, and seismic analysis. What’s to stop us from adopting GPU-driven devices?

When you map out the Daylight Saving Time adjusted sunrise and sunset times over the course of the year, an interesting pattern emerges.

If you’re trying to remove all the crap off a friend’s bogged down computer, Toolbar Cleaner is a handy little app that does a thorough job stripping away spammy toolbars, dubious add-ons, and browser helper objects.

We’ve seen quite a few Tesla-coil tricks over the years but never choreographed fighting between two guys balanced on Tesla coils.

NASA has released a high-resolution self portrait of Curiosity. The photo, a composite of images snapped by the rover’s agile arm and MAHLI camera, shows Curiosity in front of Mount Sharp.

If your living room is boring for want of a plethora of arcade hits, this DIY project parks a Raspberry Pi powered arcade machine in a coffee table for at-your-finger-tips retro gaming.

In this video, rendered over a million CPU hours by the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA’s Ames Research Center, we see the birth and life of a massive disk galaxy.

We’re fairly certain the guys at ThrashLab just put this video together for a chance to film themselves smashing things in slow motion. We’re completely OK with that.

We clearly tapped into a subject you all have a strong opinion about with this week’s Ask the Readers post; read on to see how your fellow readers manage their email on, off, and across desktops and devices.

Why do some new technologies cause ripples and reactionary backlash in society but others slip into our daily lives almost entirely uncontested? It turns out there’s a rather specific combination of things the new technology must do to upset the public.

How do you design an audiobook player for an elderly book lover who doesn’t want to wrestle with new technology? Simple and with a single button interface is a great place to start.

The advent of economical consumer grade multi-core processors raises the question for many users: how do you effectively calculate the real speed of a multi-core system? Is a 4-core 3Ghz system really 12Ghz? Read on as we investigate.