This hack will put some elevator cars into an express mode, sending you directly to your desired floor, bypassing any requests from patrons at floors in between your originating and destination floors.

Youtube is chock full of other geeks demonstrating this same hack.

Kipkay comes through again; one of his most popular hacks was the “Hack your laptop batteries, save some money“.

Now it’s time to hack your $20 throwaway digital camera, extend it’s life to equal those much more expensive cameras and enable you to download the pics to your PC, again and again and again…

The folks at Evil Mad Scientist bring us step by step instructions for this tiny bot that uses the vibrating bristles of a toothbrush for locomotion.

The bot’s parts list is made up of a toothbrush, a battery and a pager motor. Can’t be much easier than that, can it?

In the youtube video instructions below, skip ahead to 2:15 if you want to just watch this little bugger in motion. 

(YouTube video here.)

Context Menus are the menus you see in your operating system when you right click on an object. Unless you’re a manly man and use a command line shell.

Windows XP has had the ability to encrypt files, it wasn’t too cumbersome but it wasn’t intuitive either.

Vista enables you to Encrypt or Decrypt files by simply clicking on the file or folder and choosing the option via the context menu. The curious thing is that to enable this faster access to the Encrypted File System requires a registry modification, so it’s not enabled in the context menus by default. Perhaps the file system or security folks just ran out of time during the development process to fully support this method?

In this pic you can clearly see the Encrypt option highlighted in the context menu when I right clicked on a folder on my desktop.

To enable it follow these instructions:

1. Launch the Registry Editor. Note: if you don’t know how to do this then you really shouldn’t be following these instructions because you’re not a computer geek, just stop and please for god’s sake don’t do it. Else you may hose yourself
2. Go to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
3. Create a new 32bit DWORD in that ‘Advanced’ key
4. Call this new DWORD EncryptionContextMenu
5. Change the value to 1
6. It’s already enabled now, go check it out for yourself by right clicking on a file or folder.

Omnimatter has posted a brilliant DIY article to use some commonly found items with radioactive properties to act as a poor man’s x-ray device.

Items you’ll need:

1. A Polaroid SX-70, Type 600, or Spectra camera
2. A package of unexposed Type 600 or Spectra Polaroid film
3. One metal cookie tin at least six inches in diameter
4. A few sheets/roll of aluminum foil
5. Radioactive material

[via Neatorama]