How Smoke Detectors Work [Science]

Smoke detectors are a common household fixture so small as to be almost unnoticeable, yet inside is a host of interesting technology and scientific principles at work. Check out this great video from Bill Hammack–the Engineer Guy–to see how they work.

Visualize How Your Tax Dollars are Spent at The Data Viz Challenge

It’s Tax Day; curious where all your tax dollars go? Thanks to this year’s Data Viz Challenge you can look at dozens of interesting data visualization tools to see just where your money is going.
Earlier this year Google launched the Data Viz Challenge–a five week competition that challenged developers to visualize how federal income tax is spent. Watch the video above for a sneak peek or follow the link below to see the grand prize winner, the runners up, or browse through dozens of additional entries.
Visualize Your Taxes; The Data Viz Challenge 2010 [Data Viz Challenge via The Official Google Blog]

How To Save, Share, Download, and Install Custom Photoshop Actions

Photoshop Actions, you may remember, allow users to do record and replay complex tasks with no programming skill. But exporting, sharing, and installing downloaded actions can be confusing. Here’s simple instructions on how you can do all three.

How to Convert a Hard Drive or Flash Drive from FAT32 to NTFS Format

If you’ve got a hard drive formatted with the FAT32 file system, you might have found that you can’t copy large files to that drive. So how do you fix that, and convert the file system over to NTFS? Here’s how.
Scratching your head? Here’s the deal: the FAT32 file system, which most external drives are still shipped with, can’t handle files larger than about 4 GB in size—which means most full-length movies and anything

How to Properly Clean Your Camera Lens [Video]

Everybody is familiar with the most rudimentary of lens cleaning techniques–a swipe with a clean sleeve–but what about giving your lens a thorough and lens-friendly cleaning? This detailed video shows you how to get the cleanest lens around.

How To Change the Pitch and Tempo of an Audio Track Independently

When you’re putting audio tracks together, you’ll often notice that there are discrepancies between them. Using Audacity, you can easily change the tempo of a song independently of the pitch, or vice-versa, to better suit your project.

How to Remotely Control Your PC (Even When it Crashes)

Being able to remotely control your computer is an age old geek trick. But what about changing BIOS settings or installing an operating system remotely? With Intel AMT KMS this is within reach for any geek with the right hardware.
Intel vPro is a management platform built into Intel processors and other hardware that allows companies to