Top 10 Ways to Unlock the Unlockable

Getting locked out of your home, your computer, or anywhere else you want to be can suck. The same goes for those times when your gadgets prevent you from doing what you want to do with them, but it doesn't have to be that way. Here are the top 10 ways you can break into virtually anything with a literal or figurative lock.

10. Open a Garage from the Outside

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This is pretty easy to do, sadly, but fortunately easy to prevent as well. To unlock a garage from the outside, all you need to do is thread a piece of wire or a coat hanger through the top of the door to open the emergency latch. To prevent it, all you really need is a plastic zip tie (pictured to the left, hopefully).

9. Unlock Your Computer Wirelessly

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Whether you're using your Android to unlock with Wi-Fi or practically any Bluetooth device to unlock your Mac (or Ubuntu), you can avoid unnecessary typing by just being in the vicinity. So long as you don't put your phone or other gadget in the wrong hands you'll have both safety and convenience.

8. Break Into an Airplane Lavatory

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You know, for emergency purposes. All you need to do is flip up the sign push the lever into the unlocked position. We verified this on a recent flight and the tip comes from our trustworthy friends over at Hipmunk, so watch your back next time you're peeing on a plane. Or, of course, get that door open if someone is having an emergency and stuck inside the bathroom.

7. Unlock Region-Free Encoding on Your DVD or Blu-ray Player

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One of the more annoying aspects of DVD and Blu-ray players is the region encoding, forcing you to only play discs made for you part of the world. Want to import a movie from another country? You're probably out of luck. Fortunately VideoHelp.com has DVD/Blu-ray player unlocking database so you can perform the necessary operation and watch whatever you want from wherever it came from.

6. Eliminate PDF Passwords

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It's pretty annoying when you find a PDF or get one in your mailbox and it's locked down by a password. If you want to get rid of that password, Amit Agarwal has a Pdfs Pdfss guide to opening PDFs regardless of their protection. You can also check out Free PDF Unlocker (Windows-only) if you only need to enable copy and paste functionality. Just be sure to only use these options if you lose a password or you have a good reason to break in.

5. Unlock Your Camera's True Capabilities

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If you've got a Canon point-and-shoot, you can install custom firmware CHDK to unlock a ton of features Canon didn't offer with your model. If you've got a Canon or Panasonic DSLR or micro-4/3rds camera, Magic Lantern can do the same (although it's video-oriented). If you wish your camera was a little bit better or you can't afford an upgrade right now, these hacks are great and providing you with features you probably should've had in the first place.

4. Access Locked Web Sites and Services Using a Proxy

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When you're on the web, you're bound to run into blocked sites now and again. This sucks, but fortunately there are plenty of ways to get around those restrictions. Whether you want to access Pandora, Hulu, the BBC iPlayer, or anything else, you're not out of luck. If there's not a specific hack, you'll generally be able to get through the blockage with a proxy. One of our favorites is TunnelBear, as it's as simple as flipping a switch.

3. Pick Locks and Crack Safes

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Learning to pick locks (regular ones or on your car) and crack safes may seem likes a thieve's trade, but knowing how to do it can provide you with a few legal benefits. First of all, you'll have a better understanding of how locks work so you can survey your own and protect yourself against their vulnerabilities. Additionally, should you lock yourself out, you'll know how to get back in.

2. Crack Passwords

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Whether you're cracking a Wi-Fi password or learning how to break into a computer, cracking passwords can be useful. As with anything that falls more on the dark side, knowing these unsavory tactics can help you protect yourself. But when it comes to Wi-Fi, sometimes you just need to borrow a network temporarily and that's really harmful to anyone. Also, you might forget your own password and need to break back into your computer. Whatever the case may be, use these skills for good!

1. Jailbreaking/Rooting Your Smartphone

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Jailbreaking your iPhone and rooting your Android are just about the most necessary feature-unlocking hacks for one of the most relevant pieces of technology available today. If you need some incentives, here's why jailbreaking is awesome and the ten best apps that requite rooting your Android. Both are generally pretty easy to do and very worthwhile, so get to it!

Title image remixed from originals by Odin M. Eidskrem and Lisa Fischer (Shutterstock)

(From Life Hacker)

Visualizing Webpages in 3D with Tilt (WebGL)

Tilt is a Firefox extension that creates a a 3D representation of a webpage. Tilt uses WebGL for the rendering.

You can find and install Titl from HERE.

Tilt is a fun new Firefox extension focused on creating a 3D visualization of a webpage, drawn using WebGL. Since the DOM is essentially a tree-like representation of a document, this tool layers each node based on the nesting in the tree, creating stacks of elements, each having a corresponding depth and being textured according to the webpage rendering.

Various information besides the actual contents will be displayed on request, regarding each node’s type, class, id, and other attributes if available. The rendering will be dynamic, in-browser, using WebGL and GLSL shaders.

Tilt also offers the possibility of inspecting the html, css, and attributes of each node in the DOM tree, refreshes its contents if the webpage has been modified with other tools such as Firebug, and exporting the webpage to a 3D mesh or a screenshot.

For compatibility, this add-on will require WebGL capabilities. Go to http://get.webgl.org/ to check availability and troubleshoot any issues.

To start Tilt, hit Control+Shift+M (or Command+Shift+M if you’re on Mac OS).

From (geeks3d)

How to Stop Your Smartphone from Constantly Tracking Your Location

Your smartphone tracks your location for all sorts of useful things—driving navigation, updating the weather forecast, and even live traffic updates. However, if you'd rather not have Google and Apple tracking that information—not to mention having it available on your phone for thieves to find—here's how you can turn off location tracking.

Photo remixed from an original by Yurchyks/Shutterstock.

Location tracking actually provides lots of useful things to us, but while Google and Apple collect all that data anonymously, it's still stored on your phone (and in Apple's case, your computer). Anyone with the right tools could easily find out where you've been with your phone over a significant period of time, so if you're worried about this, you may want to turn this features off. Here's how.

Disable Location Caching on Android

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Luckily, Android's location tracking is actually an opt-in feature. You may or may not have enabled it when you first set up your phone. To find out, head to Settings > Location and Security, and uncheck "Use Wireless Networks". This will make applications like Maps a bit slower to grab your current location, and it won't be quite as accurate, but Google won't be collecting any location data, nor will it be stored on your phone thereafter.

However, if you want to clear the previously cached locations from your phone, you'll need to rooted your device. Then after installing the free Location Cache app, you can view a map of your tracked locations on it, as well as clear them from your phone and disable the cache with one tap.

Disable Location Tracking on iOS

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In iOS, the situation is a bit more complicated. Turning off location services will stop sending data back to Apple, but it will still cache your location on your phone, so anyone with access to your computer or your phone can see where you've been (since iOS syncs all that information back to iTunes).

The only way to do anything about it is to jailbreak your device and install the previously mentioned Untrackerd app. Untrackerd is very simple, though, just install it, and it'll clear your location cache and prevent it from recording anything in the future. It doesn't even have an icon on your home screen—just install it and forget it.

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Location tracking can be a great thing—in fact, we think it's one of the best things about smartphones. However, if you don't like the idea of big brother knowing your whereabouts—or if you're concerned about what could happen if your phone was lost or stolen—these simple tips should help keep your phones clean of location information.

(From Life Hacker)

Crack Almost Any Electronic Safe with the Bounce Technique

View A Video On This

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hhWQF14Jb9M

If you have a digital safe with a passcode entry, a few things could go wrong. You could forget the code, the electronic mechanism could fail, or someone could change the code without you knowing. In the event you need to break into your own electronic safe, here's how to do it.

The technique you use to crack an electronic safe is called safe bouncing (which is an accurate name once you see how it's done). It's apparently easy enough for a kid to do, but looks like it could take a bit of practice. As you can see in the video above, you literally drop part of the safe against the table (or whatever surface it's resting upon) while turning the locking knob. If your timing is right, you'll have turned the knob when the safe's lock bounces open for a brief moment. This works because many cheaper safes have locks that lift. Better safes have counterweight mechanisms so the lock is held in place even when the safe is moving. You won't be able to bounce those open, but you'll have no problem with the lower-end options. If you're successful, the deadbolts will recede into the safe's door and you'll be able to open it up.

While good for those times when you lose your passcode, it's not so great for those times when someone tries to rob you. If you're concerned about the safety of a given safe, you might want to try this bouncing technique before your purchase.

Safe Bouncing | YouTube

(From LifeHacker)

How to Choose the Best Web Browser

The recent launch of Firefox 3.5 was just the latest in a crescendo of activity on the browser front over the past few months. We've seen Google tout speed with its bare-bones Chrome 2. We've seen Apple's Safari 4 bring on both the speed and all the interface eye candy we've come to expect. Opera has come in with not only a beta of its feature-packed version 10, but also an alpha of an app called Opera Unite that makes the browser a server as well as a consumer. Starting it all was that juggernaut Microsoft, coming out with Internet Explorer 8, which the company claimed was more compliant with open Web standards.

But it turns out that standards are a far murkier issue than they may first seem. Firefox's promoters will brand IE as a completely behind-the-times, non-standards-supporting browser, but the standards Firefox supports haven't yet been ratified by the organization that's been the official keeper of the standards, the W3C. Firefox's support for the

Overclock Your CPU, GPU, and RAM

Looking to upgrade your PC performance on the cheap? Overclocking your components is free, easy, and safe--if you do it right.

You want the best performance possible from your computer, but you can't afford any hardware upgrades. No problem--we'll show you how to safely overclock your existing desktop PC's CPU, GPU, and RAM and give it an extra shot in the arm.

Safety first! Modifying components like these could void your warranty (though some PC parts are sold specifically for use by overclockers, and their warranties tend to be more lenient). Also, no one will replace equipment that has been physically damaged by overclocking, so make sure that you're completely comfortable taking your PC's life into your own hands before you change anything.

It's important to have system-monitoring software to keep track of your tweaks. CPU-Z is good for tracking your various components' speeds. In addition, clean your PC's case thoroughly and keep your components as cool as possible. Overclocking entails pushing your PC past its specified peak performance, and the extra power creates more heat, so you may want to consider adding extra air-cooling equipment. Better yet, see our instructions on how to build your own liquid-cooling system.

Overclocking Your CPU

The advertised speed of your CPU is calculated by multiplying the base clock rate by a multiplier. To get more performance from your processor, you need to increase one of these two variables. If you don't have an unlocked processor (Intel's K-Series and Extreme Edition, or AMD's Black Edition), you'll have less flexibility, as unlocked processors offer more multipliers to adjust. But you'll still be able to get some extra mileage out of your CPU.

You can tweak the multiplier in your BIOS.We tried overclocking a test machine running one of Intel's unlocked K-Series chips, a Core i7-2600K CPU running at a base speed of 3.4GHz (that number is the product of the processor's base clock rate, 99.8MHz, times the multiplier, 34). With K-Series chips, you can easily modify the multiplier from the ‘Performance' settings in your BIOS. Just boot into the BIOS, increase the CPU multiplier number by one, save, and boot into Windows.

Check the Core Speed and Multiplier tabs.If this boot doesn't produce error messages or furious restarting by your machine, you're on the right path. Check your system specs via CPU-Z to confirm that your settings held-they can be lost if something goes wrong during the tweaking process. On CPU-Z's ‘CPU' tab, look at the number under ‘Core Speed and Multiplier'. That number will fluctuate, depending on what your PC is doing from moment to moment.

Next, run a benchmark utility to stress-test your CPU's new configuration. Use Prime95's Torture Test mode or Linx to push your PC to its limits, thereby giving you an idea of your system's maximum clock speed. If your computer remains free of blue screens or sudden restarts after a few hours of number-crunching with one of these tools, you're probably in the clear. Then you can stick with the current overclocking settings, or try again with a slightly faster speed.

Overclocking Your GPU

Overclocking a modern graphics board is easier than ever; most of the time, you can raise performance by turning up a few sliders in your GPU configuration utility.

First, make sure that you've downloaded the latest drivers from the manufacturer's Website. You can find the latest Nvidia software here, and AMD's latest drivers here. AMD includes basic overclocking controls in the ATI Overdrive tab of your included Catalyst Control Center software; for an Nvidia card, you'll need to download the Nvidia System Tools utility to change your GPU clock speed settings.

Tweaking in the AMD Catalyst Control Center.Open the utility for your card, and locate the clock speed controls for your GPU's processor and memory. AMD's Catalyst Control Center keeps them under the Overdrive tab; for Nvidia, the clock speed sliders are in the Performance menu. Now, just bump the sliders up in small increments--about 5MHz to 10MHz at a time. As with the CPU upgrade, tweak, save, reboot, and give the new settings a stress test by running free benchmarking software such as Heaven 2.0 or by playing a graphics-intensive game for 15 to 20 minutes to check for graphical corruption--that would be a warning sign that your GPU is starting to fail.

If you see solid blocks of flashing colors or strange flashing pixel formations, you've pushed your GPU too far; in that case, restart and roll back a few increments. Most contemporary PC components are sturdy enough to withstand this kind of tinkering. If you roll back to a stable overclock setting at the first sign of trouble, your components should be fairly safe.

Overclocking Your Memory

Yes, you can overclock your RAM, too. But make sure you have matching sticks of RAM (same speed, manufacturer, and so on) before you start messing with the memory. It's much easier (and safer) to buy more memory than to overclock what you have. But if you've come this far, "easy" and "safe" probably don't mean much to you.

First, open up CPU-Z and flip to the ‘SPD' (Serial Presence Detect) tab to look at your machine's memory specs. Reboot into the BIOS menu and select the performance menu-most likely labeled ‘Performance' or ‘Configuration', depending on your motherboard manufacturer.

Enter the memory configuration menu (it was labeled ‘Memory Overrides' on our test bed), and disable the default memory profile. Adjust your memory multiplier by selecting a preset overclock option or by typing in the RAM clock speed. Use increments, one or two at a time, that match consumer-grade products (DDR3 RAM is typically sold in increments of 800-1066-1333-1600-1867-2133); save the changes; and exit the BIOS. Stress-test as usual, and consider running memory-testing software such as MemTest.

From (pcworld)

nvidia Steps Up There Game With Its New Driver's

R285.62 is WHQL graphics drivers for all GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500-series desktop GPUs as well as ION desktop GPUs. This driver contains fixes and optimizations for Battlefield 3, Rage and Batman: Arkham City as well as performance gains in other games.

R285.62 is an OpenGL 4.2 (complete list of extensions available HERE) and OpenCL 1.1 driver and installs PhysX System Software 9.11.06.21. R285.62 is based on the r285_58-0 development branch.

GPU Caps Viewer 1.14.4

R285.62 Desktop Downloads for Win7 / Vista

• R285.62 Vista / Win7 64-bit
• R285.62 Vista / Win7 32-bit

R285.62 Notebooks Downloads for Win7 / Vista

• Verde (notebook) R285.62 Vista / Win7 64-bit
• Verde (notebook) R285.62 Vista / Win7 32-bit

R285.58 Desktop Downloads for Windows XP

• R285.58 XP 64-bit
• R285.58 XP 32-bit

From (Geeks3d)