HOWTO

Hot off the editing floor is the latest Scientific Tuesday video. Just in time for.... TUESDAY!

A little known fact is that money is actually not made from paper but made from Cotton and silk and some other items. Because of this, we can soak up alcohol and light it on fire without any damage. Have a look!

For the latest Household Hacker video, I replied to some viewer email and decided to build an "Upside Down Shelf".

Take a look at the video and tutorial:



If you have any questions or suggestions of your own, make sure you sound off in the comments.

A lot of people have problems switching to linux, here's a guide to see if linux is right for you and how to work it if you like it.

First things first, burning the disc.

When you download a linux OS it's going to be a file called an ISO image (.iso). The question is, what the hell do you do with it? To burn an .iso on Windows XP you need a special disc burning software so you can burn the .iso file as an image onto the disc. I used CDBurnerXP to burn my .iso, it's free and it works. Now I'm assuming that you figured out by now that you're going to need a blank CD and a computer that can burn CDs (pretty much any CD burner made past the second half of the last decade should). Now once you have the disc popped in and the file downloaded open CDBurnerXP (or whatever program you're using) then go to burn iso image. It's the simple!

Booting a Live CD.

Assuming your Linux has a Live CD in it (Ubuntu does, openSUSE too if I'm not mistaken) I'm going to want you to boot to it first. To boot to your live CD just restart your computer with your Disc that you burnt in it. Most computers will boot to the CD automatically but if it doesn't then press F12 (or whatever function key it says before "boot" when your computer starts) and select "Boot from CD-Drive/USB". From there you'll get the screen below if you used Ubuntu.



Press enter when the "try w/o changing anything" is highlighted and from there you'll boot from the Disc. From here you can test the system and see if you like it or not, there's going to be an adjustment period though b/c you're changing your whole Operating System. I suggest any beginners to do a Dual-Boot and to look for linux alternatives to any programs that don't offer a linux version (Personally all I use are Firefox Thunderbird Pidgin Skye and Frostwire) and steadily creep over to the Open-Source side.

Setting Up Flash/Java.

Just copy+paste these into the Terminal

$ sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

This is a quick guide on saving harddrive space on Windows XP.

Step 1: Go to My Computer, then right click where it says Local Disk (C)->Click Properties

Then click where it says Disk Cleanup



It'll scan for awhile, once it's done check all the boxes and hit OK.

Total Amount of Space Cleaned: Over 20 GB!

Step 2: Download CCleaner

Click Run Cleaner