Stout Beaver

It's extremely easy to share your Dropbox folders with friends but there is no mechanism for letting them upload files. Dropbox Uploader is a PHP script that turns your web server into a Dropbox portal so your friend can upload with ease. More »

Yesterday Facebook rolled out a new feature called Places that lets you and your friends check in to locations, Foursquare-style. If you'd prefer to keep your location private, or at least stop your friends from posting it, here's how. More »

We recently featured a way to launch applications and perform actions on another computer with Dropbox and AutoHotkey, but it was a bit complicated. Here's an updated version, that just requires a quick keyboard shortcut and a bit of AutoHotkey scripting knowledge. More »

The newest DSLRs on the market are sporting some pretty fancy HD movie features. If you have an older Canon DSLR, however, you can use a bit of software to turn it into an HD video camera. More »

If you're a widescreen lover who'd prefer your browser take up fewer vertical pixels and are happy to sacrifice a few horizontally to your tabs, Chrome's new side tabs feature (available in the Dev channel) is a nice option. More »

Restaurants use pricey high-end broilers to crank out perfectly cooked steaks. You can recreate the experience of a dry-aged and deliciously broiled steak at home for a fraction of the price with this clever and inexpensive hack from foodie extraordinaire Alton Brown. More »



Steak - Meat - Beef - Cooking - Home

Last summer we detailed how to crack a Wi-Fi network's WEP password using BackTrack. Now video blog Tinkernut revisits the subject with a great video step-by-step of the process.

Before you go calling the cops or putting on your bank robber mask, a helpful reminder from our original post:

Knowledge is power, but power doesn't mean you should be a jerk, or do anything illegal. Knowing how to pick a lock doesn't make you a thief. Consider this post educational, or a proof-of-concept intellectual exercise.

BackTrack has also updated to version 4 since we last featured it, but the process appears to have remained basically the same. The interesting thing about BackTrack is how easy it is to crack a WEP-encrypted network, which serves as a very good reminder to use WPA encryption to significantly boost your home network security.

We've covered building your own pizza oven before, from nice and cheap to really cheap. But none of these were crowned Best Pizza Food Cart by vlog Ah Nom Nom; that title belongs to San Franciscan PizzaHacker and his modified Weber Grill.

Sure, PizzaHacker's pizza is delicious because it uses choice ingredients and a sourdough recipe to die for—but the other half of the equation is FrankenWeber, his modified Weber-grill-turned-mobile-pizza-oven. If you're looking for an easy, movable outdoor solution to your DIY pizza needs, this might be the way to go:

Part of what makes this open air culinary spectacle work is the heavily modded Webber 22.5" grill that's been outfitted with fireproof blocks and a domed top comprised of refactory cement and perlite that's been molded in the original Webber top. Using chunks of wood and charcoal, the Franken-Webber quickly reaches 1000F (the ideal temperature for cooking authentic Neopolitan-style pizza).

For a closer look at the FrankenWeber and its inner workings, check out the above video on Pizzahacker by Ah Nom Nom. There's no specific how-to for building it, but it shouldn't be difficult with the above materials and the close-up view in the video. If you've been hankering for some DIY pizza action but our past options just haven't done it for you, this might just be the solution.

Ever stumble onto a pay wall at the likes of the Wall Street Journal but aren't ready to subscribe just to read one article? Tech blog Digital Inspiration highlights a classic Google hack for breaking through the pay wall for free.

Google launched a new First Click Free program at the beginning of last month that aimed to address these sort of workarounds for pay-walled content when readers were coming from Google News, but as Amit from Digital Inspiration notes, they still don't seem to have done anything to change the behavior from the search box.

[D]ue to a possible bug in the implementation, the registration prompt gets bypassed for Google visitors giving them free access to all the news articles — even the premium content meant for subscribers.

It works like this. You first copy the web address of any news article that is behind the registration firewall and paste that URL into the Google Search box. Now click the first Google result and you'll be able to read the full text of the corresponding story without registering or subscribing.

As I said, using Google to bypass the pay wall isn't exactly a new trick, but it's a handy one we've never highlighted before. Use it wisely, and, of course, if you're using it a lot, it's probably worth your time to go ahead and subscribe to skip the hassle altogether.

Ever stumble onto a pay wall at the likes of the Wall Street Journal but aren't ready to subscribe just to read one article? Tech blog Digital Inspiration highlights a classic Google hack for breaking through the pay wall for free.

Google launched a new First Click Free program at the beginning of last month that aimed to address these sort of workarounds for pay-walled content when readers were coming from Google News, but as Amit from Digital Inspiration notes, they still don't seem to have done anything to change the behavior from the search box.

[D]ue to a possible bug in the implementation, the registration prompt gets bypassed for Google visitors giving them free access to all the news articles — even the premium content meant for subscribers.

It works like this. You first copy the web address of any news article that is behind the registration firewall and paste that URL into the Google Search box. Now click the first Google result and you'll be able to read the full text of the corresponding story without registering or subscribing.

As I said, using Google to bypass the pay wall isn't exactly a new trick, but it's a handy one we've never highlighted before. Use it wisely, and, of course, if you're using it a lot, it's probably worth your time to go ahead and subscribe to skip the hassle altogether.