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News: DIY Snowflake Cultivation with 2,000 Volts of Thermoelectric Cooling

Snowflakes aren't much to look at during a storm, but when you look real close, you can see just how marvelous they really are. But winter is over and most of us can no longer enjoy the intricate nature of ice crystallization, unless you're sticking your head in your freezer. Or unless you build your own snowflake cultivation machine, which shoots 2,000 volts of electricity through a cold, moist chamber.

How To: Make an Exploding Ashtray Prank for April Fool's Day

The exploding ashtray prank was once fairly commonplace long before the Internet was born. Using flash cotton to create a startling explosion, this prank is certainly effective at getting a reaction. Flash cotton is a staple of many magic acts; used for its ability to create a brilliant flash of fire without causing a burn to the skin.

How To: Induce Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dreaming refers to the mental state when you are conscious of the fact that you are dreaming while you are dreaming. Though lucid dreaming is a rare occurrence for most people when they are sleeping, you can actually mentally train yourself during the waking hours and incorporate a number of techniques to increase your chances of achieving a lucid dreaming state.

WTFoto News Scoop Sundays: Puttin' It to Putin!

For those of you behind on their international politics, Vladimir Putin has once again been elected as President of Russia. And right now, there are over 20,000 protesters in Moscow yelling about election fraud. Now, whether or not you think they're right, or whether or not you think Putin is a badass (he is, for the record), you have to admit he is an amazingly interesting cultural figure. And what do we do with amazing cultural figures? Why, we make fun of them with Impact-laden photos, of ...

WTFoto Image Macro Challenge: Give Us Your Best Hobo Advice!

Hey guys, gals, and everyone in-between! This week's WTFoto Challenge is a real humdinger. For the first time ever, we're asking you to ply your image macro skills and make us belly laugh like a drunken hillbilly at a corn festival. We've created our very own image macro for you to memify—Hobo Advice! Check out the full instructions below to get started.

Goodnight Byte: HackThisSite, Realistic 5 - Real Hacking Simulations

Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, Realistic 5, the fifth and last in my series of realistic hacking simulation missions. This time, telemarketers are invading people's privacy, and it was up to us to stop them! The job was to get root on the site and delete the contact database in order to return the right of privacy to its victims.

Advanced Social Engineering: The Mind Hacks Behind Brainwashing

Brainwashing is something that happens to us every day, whether you believe it or not. It doesn't take fancy tools or space-age technology. Even if our country didn't intentionally brainwash people (believe me, they do), our country's media is brainwashing people nonstop. Just sit back and think about it for a second—about the way things work in the world and media. But before you do that, let's learn what brainwashing really is.

How To: Make a Change-of-IP Notifier in Python

In this article I'll show you how to make a simple IP address notifier. The program will text you your new IP address, in the event that it changes. For those of you with dynamic IPs, this is very useful. I'm constantly frustrated when my IP changes, and it's handy to be notified via text when it happens. To use the program, you'll need Python 2.7 or later, urllib2, and a program called "text" (see this article here to get it).

Weekly Tips #1: Building Around Your Environment

One of the best ways to make a great build is to build around the environment. Fancy plugins like World Edit and Voxel Sniper aren't always necessary. In the real world, people can't just edit the environment to their every whim and need. They have to work around it. Not only does building around your environment help to make your build look nicer, it helps to make it look more realistic. In the above picture, I could only make a small house because I wanted this build to work with the enviro...

Edit on a Dime: The Week Ahead

Happy Monday to all of you out there, thankfully the Consumer Electronics Show is now behind us. It feels quite possible that a cold was caught by yours truly simply by reading the numerous reports of germs being spread from booth to booth on the show floor. I'll do my best to soldier on, in the meantime if you haven't already, you can experience the convention vicariously by reading my 'Best of CES' post here.

News: The Best of CES

This year's Consumer Electronics Show is nearing an end so of course it's an occasion for the 'best of' lists. To save you time I thought I'd compile my 'best of' the 'best of' lists.

News: Print 3D Models of Your Minecraft Creations with Mineways

Want to see your Minecraft creations in real physical form outside of your server? Mineways is a free program for Linux or Windows users that renders all of your Minecraft builds into full color 3D model files. Those files can then be sculpted using your own 3D printer (if you have one), or uploaded to Shapeways, a company that will print your 3D models creations in colored plastic, which you can then purchase or sell in their online gallery.

SUBMIT: New Year's Cell Phone Photo by January 2nd. WIN: Camera Lens Mug

Now that the holiday weekend is over, there's only one more celebration this year, and that's saying goodbye to 2011 and welcoming 2012 with open arms! For this week's Phone Snap challenge, we'd like to ring in the new year with you and see your best cell phone photo from your celebration. Take a picture right as the clock strikes twelve or show us something that represents what the end of the year and the beginning of another means to you.

How To: Fix the Unreadable USB Glitch in VirtualBox

Many users of the virtualization software VirtualBox may have noticed that the USB system has been pretty buggy for quite a long time. I've had my USB randomly duck out on me way too many times to count. This can really be difficult to deal with when you require access to the devices and files from the host system.

News: What Was the First Adventure Game?

Adventure gamers would love to know what was the first adventure game. Well, it was a 1970s computer game titled "Colossal Cave Adventure", also known as "Adventure". Designed by Will Crowther, the game was in FORTRAN and initially had 700 lines of code and data, which was later expanded to 3,000 lines of code and more than 1000 lines of data.

How To: Make a Self-Watering Greenhouse

I've been hell-bent on complete self sufficiency for a long time now. There was a point where I was living in a self-sustaining community in the mountains in Colorado, and we had a very large greenhouse there. Dragging the hose around to water plants was a real pain, and that stuck in the back of my mind even after I left the place. It would have been much easier to integrate watering into the frame at construction time than doing that hose dance every day.

News: Indie Developer Fights Pirates with Piracy

No Time To Explain is the first game by two man indie developer tiny Build Games. It's a fun and very stylish platformer in it's own right, available for $10 from the tiny Build website. Articles about the game on RockPaperShotgun, Destructoid, and other prominent PC sites helped it develop substantial hype and raise more than $26,000 via Kickstarter to fund development.

News: Firing Tank Caught at 18,000 FPS Looks Just As Awesome As It Sounds

It's like the H-bomb. In slo-mo, it's stunning. In real life, it's terrifying. The footage below was uploaded by YouTube user NielsBorg, unfortunately lacking in description, but offers the following information via headline: "T90 shot taken by Photron camera at 18000 fps". The T-90 is a brute of a tank, a third-generation battle vehicle used by the Russian Ground Forces and Naval Infantry. The tank contains an autoloader which can carry 22 ready-to-fire rounds, loadable and ready to go in 5-...

News: Indie Games Get Their Own Indie Film

Video games and movies have a history of interaction dogged by failure. Video game movies and movie video games both tend to be terrible. There has never been a good feature film based on a video game franchise. Even documentaries about games, which should be rife given the rapid rise of games on the cultural stage over the last thirty years, have been few and far between. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is by far the best, and for several years now has been the only really stirring f...

News: Discover the Hidden World Around You with the Trover iPhone App

You're in a new city and you want to explore—what mobile app is best? If you want to know what club is hopping that night, use SceneTap. If you want to know if any friends are at a nearby get-together, use Foursquare. If you want to know what restaurant is best, try Yelp. But if you're looking to get a real feel for the city, skip the more touristy destinations and take to the streets—discover where some great graffiti is located or where the best view of the city is with the Trover iPhone ap...

News: Mind the Epic Gap!

"Mind Your Step" is a gargantuan street illusion staged in Stockholm's most public square, Sergels torg. Created by artist Erik Johansson, the illusion will be up until June 12th, so swing by if you happen to be in Sweden. Erik has documented his entire creative process here, including this great little tutorial on how to create your own optical illusion.

News: 11.3 Million Video Game Deaths Visualized

Nope, it’s not the McDonalds menu, but close enough. Jim Blackhurst has mapped 11 million deaths onto a 3-dimensional point cloud for video game Just Cause 2. The result is an amazing virtual heat map of a world where every white dot represents a death on impact: The millions of deaths formulate a detailed outline of major structures and roads in the game, visually mapping "extractions" at every square inch. In most traditional games, this would not be possible—players more often than not sta...

News: Google +1 Button Now Available for Websites

Google's sociable equivalent to the Facebook Like button is finally here, and it works very similar to your favorite social network's recommendation system, except it shows up directly in Google search results. Whenever your Google friend gives a website or webpage the +1, you'll see it in your search results, as long as you're signed into your Google Account.

New Bronze Audio Format: Never Play a Song the Same Way Twice

Thanks to digital media, music lovers can listen to the newest tune from their favorite band whenever they want, however they want. Audio files can be played in many different formats on many different devices, from iTunes on your computer to Pandora on your cell phone. The music you love will always be instantly available to you, note for note, word for word—just how you like it. But as a result of today's software-driven world, you now have another, less static option for listening to your ...