*disclaimer: I do not condone hacking other people’s wireless network. This was done for educational purpose.

This article is provided for informational purposes only. [byvolce] and its affiliates accept no liability for providing this information. Please only use to test configurations on your own equipment. Accessing WIFI networks that do not belong to you is ILLEGAL.  -from thew0rd (though it applies to this post)

If you’re nerdy like me, you have probably seen articles on WEP hacking and how to do so. It may seem daunting when you first look at it (I mean all those scripts to type into terminal, come on!), but I can honestly say that it is really weak and does not require a genius or a nerd, or even a grown up really, to hack into a WEP protected router. All you need is to be able to follow direction. You probably won’t even need perseverance.

How easy is it? Broken on the first try in less than an hour by a high school student. You don’t even need fancy tools or to waste money. All you need is a computer with wifi.

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Popularity: 17% [?]

Synaptic Touchpad

Did you know most, if not all, (PC) laptop on the market with a Touchpad has the ability to launch program, scroll, and manipulate windows like minimize and maximize? It’s not really a Touchpad hack per se because it actually comes with your laptop. This is true because most laptop these days uses a Synaptics Touchpad. Even if your laptop doesn’t have those special scroller marking, your laptop’s Touchpad can still scroll! On top of that you can also play the drum, theremin and more on your Touchpad. All this is just hidden under the control panel.

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Popularity: 30% [?]

How to create a 3d styled graphic in Photoshop

In the season of giving, I would like to share with you this Photoshop tutorial I made. I hope you have a Happy Holiday!

A while ago I saw a cool illustration made by Adam Woodhouse and I was inspired to take a crack at something similar. I hope the tutorial will teach you to mimick the 3d style using only photoshop. This will be especially useful for people who don’t have a special 3d program. We will be using a lot of clipping mask and creativity. (more…)

Popularity: 14% [?]

It’s ok guys, I am not dead yet! Neither am I lost, because I have my trusty Becker Traffic Assist Highspeed GPS (Also known as Becker Traffic Assist Highspeed 7934 GPS outside of the US) with me! Well not really because of it but it makes a good intro doesn’t it? So like what you would expect from me I got this gps on sale and it was a pretty good deal. I know it’s not the usual Tom Tom or Garmin (it’s a German brand so it is not as common on this side of the Atlantic) but it’s a pretty good gps overall. The device has a 3.5″ touch screen with a 400MHz processor and an SD card slot for the map and storage and runs on Navteq and Navigon. The device officially can view pictures and play mp3/wma; but if you’re into hacking you can do so much more. More on that later.

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Popularity: 62% [?]

So yesterday I turned 15. My life hasn’t been all that bad so far. I’ve learned many things along the way. So today, I would like to share with you what I’ve learned in my short life so far. And since I am a high school student, my goal is to fit in. In other words, be cool. So alternately I could’ve titled this, “How to be cool”. Just kidding. But I hope you can take away something from this. So here we go.
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Popularity: 3% [?]

Ladies and gentleman presenting DIY: SlimWallet++ (formerly known as DIY: slimmy 2) a DIY wallet inspired by the awesome Slimmy Wallet. If you read my last DIY SlimWallet post you probably noticed that the last one was vers. 1.5. Well that one was suppose to be vers. 2. The reason it was 1.5 was that there was a few cutting errors which resulted in a lower than satisfaction result. For this tutorial, I’ve made another one just for you guys so you can see what it’s suppose to look like. If that didn’t make sense at all, don’t worry about it and just read on.

So the reason this is called SlimWallet++ was so I don’t have to write “diy slimmy” anymore and because I’ve added my own “improvements” to it. I’ve taken the liberty of adding a quick pocket outside for your ID card and 2 pockets with a cover on top (for coins from change, receipts, and what not). But the wallet still follows the Slimmy principle of being a slim and “front pocketable” wallet.  I still recommend not using coins and keeping to many things in your wallet to keep it from bloating, but sometimes it is inevitable. As for the name it is a play on C++ and Notepad++ and the fact that it isn’t really a slimmy anymore although it serves the same purpose.

Also, keep in mind this is only a blue print. You should take it as far as you can go. Try using other stronger materials such as tyvex, duct tape, or other materials. Modify it as much as you want, I would be happy to see your creation. Post a link in the comments if you give it a crack. So enough talk, and lets get down to it.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

If you still remember, a while ago I wrote about my DIY: Duct tape SlimWallet. Looking back, I’m pretty impressed with how it turned out. But over the course of it last time, it sure did die out. Mostly because the lints from my pants began sticking to the duct tape. So after many patches and rips, I’ve decided to make another one. But as you can see, this time I’ve decided on going through the faux leather route instead of duct tape. It may not be as Geeky, but I’m sure it won’t have as much lint sticking to it.

Luckily, this time I remembered to take pictures along the way. Hopefully I can write up a short tutorial on it soon. I’ve made some design changes and added to the basic SlimWallet, but overall it’s still the same concept. For now you can enjoy pictures at my flickr pool

Teaser after the break

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Popularity: 3% [?]

So here is another frustrating, fun and challenging adventure I undertook. The goal of the project is to use an old laptop (Pentium III, 64mb ram) to create a good enough system that can serve as a portable internet tv. In other words, a box capable of running macromedia flash with sound, and do it wirelessly. Sounds simple enough right? Not when you have an old system.

So the choice of distribution (because of their superiority on old computers) was either DSL (Damn Small Linux) or Puppy Linux. The option of xubuntu has been ruled out because it seems to be less compatible than the above 2 (by that I mean, I can’t even install it, it get stuck on downloading a lib and complains it can’t read the disk. Yes I checked that the disc is working). So after burning many cds, approx. 5, on different distribution (live, installation only, messed up, etc.) I was finally able to get it to work. But not without many problems and lessons along the way.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

So a couple of days ago, I decided my computer was starting to lag too much and I should reinstall it. The original plan was to create a new partition (using my trusty sysresccd which has qtparted. A free hard drive partitioner that can resize ntfs.) on my hard drive to place all my files into and reformat the other partition. Then after reinstalling the OS I would place the file back, then join all the partition back. Sounds great right? On paper it did, but when I went ahead and executed it, a big giant head exploding problem happened. My computer crashed while partitioning. Naturally my first hope was to check if my files was still there, no dice. At that point a part of me died. (more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

I know this is a totally random post compared to all my other post, but hey, why not. Maybe some lucky chap out there will benefit from it. So what’s better than living frugally? other than not? Well instead of buying a new shoe, I decided to see how far I can turn my old raggity shoe back into a faux new shoe sneakers kicks. I’ll show you what I did and how it turned out. So I guess you can call this a tutorial/how to. But How to clean dirty shoes doesn’t really have a nice ring to it. Alas I digress.

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Popularity: 10% [?]