How To

Lifehacker has a great post on turning your XBOX 360 into a media center using a few free tools off the internet and a little elbow grease. The only downside to this is it requires a dedicated Windows computer running Windows XP Media Center but hey, it's a cheap way to get that HTPC you've always wanted and once you're setup you can begin streaming Netflix videos right to the XBOX 360. How cool is that.

It's always pretty cool seeing how ingenious people can be when it comes to making something out of nothing. Case in point. Can't afford to go buy a racing simulator for your PC, already have a Wii Fit and a Wii Board? Your in luck. This video shows how you too an make your very own Wii Racing Simulator. Alrighty then.

Can't figure out what not to take on that next vacation. Watch this most excellent "How To" video and learn all about how to choose those bare essentials and pack like a stripper.

WD-40 is the all purpose spray so remember what they say, you only need two things to do any job. Duct tape and WD-40. If it turns and it's not supposed to, use duct tape. If it doesn't turn and it's supposed to, use WD-40.

Break in the new baseball glove - Forget sitting on the new baseball glove for weeks waiting on the new leather to soften up. Rub it down with WD-40 then put a baseball in the palm and fold it sideways. Tie the glove tight and let it sit overnight. The leather will loosen and help it fit your hand better.

Clean Carpet Stains - Every household has this problem. Don't waste tons of money on those fancy cleaners, just run to the garage and grab the WD-40. Spray, scrub and rinse.

Clean oil spots from the driveway - The next time your beer drinking friends bring over their rattle traps that leak oil all over your concrete drive. Give'em a can of WD-40 and tell'em to clean up their mess.

Degrease your hands - Eve been caught in one of those situations where you grabbed something greasy or oily and didn't have degreaser handy to get it off. WD-40 an fix that too, just spray on your hands, rub them together like soap and rinse.

Free stuck fingers from a bottle - Much like the problem with a stuck ring, a little WD-40 around the rim, let it sit for a few minutes and the finger slips right out.

Insect Repellant - Ever gotten to the woods and realized you forgot the bug spray? Never fear, just coat yourself in WD-40 and the bugs will avoid you like the plague.

Prevent Wasps from building nests - Remember, it doubles as a sting medicine so you can piss them off and remove the pain all in one spray.

Relieve Arthritis - Getting old is a bitch sometimes, the bones ache all the time. Some old timers swear that you can help relieve the symptoms of Arthritis by rubbing your joints with WD-40.

This question was asked in a comment the other day. I wasn't sure of the context of the question and whether the commenter was asking how to get an rss feed from another site or how to add a feed to his own site. So here's a quickie on how to add a feed to Wordpress.

How to add a feed to Wordpress

Install Wordpress. Ok, done.

Seriously, that's it. This functionality is already in Wordpress but there are some ways to enhance it. I like Feedburner so I use their service to manage my feeds. Their stats are nice and since the Pro version is now free I'm enjoying it even more. To get Feedburner feeds on your site all you have to do is go to feedburner.com and register an account then "burn a feed" from your current Wordpress feed url.

Your wordpress feed url will be something like: http://www.realitywired.com/feed

Once you've done that, you can add any number of widgets to publicize your feed and allow your readers to subscribe to your feed.

I also use a plugin titled: Feedburner Feedsmith that redirects all other Wordpress rss links to your Feedburner feed. This is handy because it allows you to detect all the different ways people are subscribing to your feed.

Lorelle has a huge list of additional Wordpress plugins designed to enhance and/or manipulate your feed.

Something to consider. Some versions of Wordpress create summary posts in your feeds and if you happen to use the <!-- more --> tag you'll also get summary posts. There is some debate over whether that's better than publishing a full rss feed. That decision is up to the blog owner but a nifty plugin that will force Wordpress to generate a full rss feed can be found here.

Does this ever sound like a silly question but in the space of 3 hours I've had two people ask what it was. So what is RSS or an RSS feed for that matter? In short, it's a way to read what's published on another site without actually going there. Then there is the long answer; any one of a number of file formats (usually XML) that are used to syndicate web content via such things as blogs or podcasts.

A user wishing to keep abreast of the goings on of a site (this site) for example, can simply subscribe to the newsfeed (click here). Using software called "feed readers" you can subscribe to our feed and then anytime we post new content your reader is automatically updated. The advantage is, you can use one view or one tool to keep up with many different sites at once.

Most sites publish only partial feeds, a summary or except that's designed to get you to come to the site to continue reading while others publish full feeds, as we do here. The hope is that as your scanning through the feeds if you find something we've posted interesting you'll visit the site to find more vs. teasing teasing you into coming.

RSS feeds come in various formats, you'll hear terms like Atom, XML and podcasts. They're all basically the same thing, the format is simple a specification that determines how the feed is formated so your news reader can break it down and display it to you in a human readable format.

There's a big list of newsreaders you can choose from here or I recommend just using Google Reader, it's free and does a really good job. Plus you don't have to install anything but you will need to register an account, if you have Gmail your all set.

To subscribe to a sites feed, you simply look for their feed link.

CNN for example uses a combination of text links and image links using a standard orange feed icon located at the bottom of the page.

Blogs, like this one usually make them a little more noticable. Ours is at the top of the page on the right.

- The standardized icon, comes in various sizes.

- Feedburner is a service that aides sites in managing their feeds, works the same for you the reader.

RSS Feed - Others use just a standard text link that links to their feed.

If you want to try it out, click one of the three links just above, we'd certainly appreciate your interest in our site.

I hope this helps explain RSS a little more. I intentionally tried to stay basic with it, but if you really want the gory details visit the RSS section on Wikipedia or you can just read through the entire specification here.

Here's a pretty cool abstract photography article on how to go about photographing smoke. I don't know what I'd ever do with this but you never know, it might come in handy one day. Photocritic.org interviewed Graham Jefferey, of Sensitive Light, and talked to him a little about how to get the smoke just right, lighting techniques for getting that really "cleanly" lit smoke, digital manipulation and some things that inspire him.

Graham points out that he doesn't actually take photographs of smoke, he uses the smoke as a tool and his photographs are more about manipulating the tool in such a way he can capture and impressive photo. He uses different lighting techniques to capture those really cool an interesting effects.

If your into photographing absracts then you'll find this article useful, even if your not playing with smoke. Check it out, it's worth a look. If you have any thoughts or suggestions let us hear them.

Here's a video explaining how to use Photoshop to spice up your pictures. Check it out after the jump. If you have suggestions we'd love to hear them.

Here's a handy video showing how to retouch a photo in Photoshop. It's a bit fast, so it's not really for the novice, but if you make quick use of the pause button you can get a good idea of what the author is trying to explain. Video after the jump.

Retouch Photo In Proffesional Way With Photoshop - video powered by Metacafe

This has been an annoyance for some time. I rarely use IE anymore and when I do it's usually because I'm too lazy to configure Trillian to launch links in something else, so when a friend sends me links to his video blog, I inevitably launch IE and it immediately crashes. I did all the things suggested around the web, upgraded the Divx codecs, Windows Media players, video drivers, etc. Nothing seemed to work. It never really crossed my mind that it might be Flash causing the problem but seeing as that's apparently what both YouTube and Google Videos use to embed their players with , I decided to update Flash and see what happened. Sure enough, this fixed the problem. I can load a page full of embedded videos with IE and it's doesn't crash... yet, anyway. So if your experiencing this problem, give this a try, hopefully it will help you out.

Flash from Adobe