Turning Power on at a House

Ever wonder how all of those tiny chips and components can fit inside your laptop or smartphone? If you tried to squeeze them in there yourself, your laptop would quickly become too heavy for your lap, and your mobile phone would need wheels to stay mobile. The secret to mini ...more

Matador, the label behind our favorite indie bands is turning 21 this year. To celebrate they're having this awesome festival in Vegas! Guided By Voices will be reuniting to play the Matador at 21 Festival along with Belle & Sebastian, Cat Power, Cold Cave, The New Pornographe ...more

Surely, constantly forgetting what you were doing in the middle of doing something and constantly looking for your misplaced house keys is not the ideal way to spend your golden years. Don't wait until it is too late to start thinking about improving your memory. If you are b ...more

The Armadillo For Robert Lowell This is the time of year when almost every night the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. Climbing the mountain height, rising toward a saint still honored in these parts, the paper chambers flush and fill with light that comes and goes, like ...more

Does the above card seem a bit unfair to you? I see that Bacheeze has already poisoned your minds with his anti-blue propaganda. These are the words of one who has had his 7 mana-Force of Nature Unsummoned one too many times. He seems to think that those of us who play blue ar ...more

You've seen his explanation of a combination lock's inner workings. You'll never lose another game of Jenga, thanks to his winning wooden pistol. And nearly 4 million YouTube users have marveled at his wooden marble machine sculpture. He's Matthias Wandel, and he's accomplishe ...more

Go to someones house while they are asleep and kill the house' s power. Dress in realistic werewolf costume. Acquire 30 ounce tank of sulfur hexa flouride and conceal it in costume. Attach an outlet tube from tank leading into werewolf's mouth Breathe in the dense gas and ...more

Get a scary looking dude. Print up a fake newspaper with the guy’s face on it saying he just broke out of prison. Give the victim the newspaper. Later that night disconnect the phone line and take his/her cell phone. Make sure there are no weapons in the bedroom. After the per ...more

April Fools may be over, but any day is a good day to prank someone, and the best time to do it is when everyone's eyes are glued to the television. Turning off a TV during a climatic moment is the best way to prank a TV-obsessed sibling or friend, but it's even more hilariou ...more

With the microwave oven transformer (M.O.T.) salvaged in a previous project, a simple electrical circuit can be rigged to get high voltage arcs to fly outward and upward along a "V" shaped spark gap. You can look, but don't touch! These arcs of plasma are lethal enough to kil ...more

Modern versions of Windows have revamped the lock screen to make it a lot more useful. If you're coming from Windows 7 and older versions of the OS, this lock screen is both new and useful (though you can turn it off if you just don't want it). Don't Miss: Everything You Need ...more

The Gorillaz have launched a new app in promotion for their new album Humanz that allows you to "[s]tep inside the hallowed halls of the Gorillaz house" through the power of augmented reality. The app uses AR technology via the camera app on an iPhone or Android smartphone to ...more

Amongst the trove of high-end features on the Galaxy S5, the display may be the most impressive. Sporting a 5.1-inch Full HD Super AMOLED (Samsung's version of OLED) display with 1920 x 1080 resolution and 432 pixels per inch, Samsung's flagship has one of the best smartphone ...more

One of the roles our government has taken on is to provide us with information to be used in making decisions. For example, the EPA stickers on the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt state that these electric cars can travel 93 and 99 miles per equivalent gallon. Unfortunately, the ...more

The sweet aroma of cooked fruit filling your kitchen is one of the trademark scents of summer. Yet attaining the perfect consistency for homemade jam can be difficult to master. Often it ends up a watery mess or over-solidifies into thick mystery goo that is destined for the t ...more

"The best season for food is the worst season for cooking." These words, spoken by food blogger Dave Klopfenstein of Dave's Kitchen, couldn't be more true. As spring turns into summer, farmer's markets and grocery stores are loaded with fresh, juicy fruits and vegetables—but ...more

Though not as flashy as Face ID and other features, Low Power Mode has become one of the unsung heroes of iOS. When you're away from a charger, enabling this feature will dial back performance and networking to help you eke out up to three extra hours of battery life. If your ...more

Control is important. Mankind inherently wants to control its environment, which is why we have things like indoor plumbing, electric lights, air conditioning, and more. Likewise, Minecraft has redstone, which is a way for users to control their environment and manipulate it t ...more

Apple got rid of the iPhone's home button and assigned its long-press action (Siri) to the power button. Since it now did more than sleep and wake the screen and bring up the power off dialog, they renamed it the "Side button." Well, Samsung just removed the Bixby key, and the ...more

Turning your abode into a haunted house of horror for Halloween takes a lot of time and work. Finding ways to build props on your own can save you some money that's better spent elsewhere. If you're looking to add some flare to your household decorations, try out this DIY bur ...more

Welcome back, my rookie hackers! So many readers come to Null Byte to learn how to hack Wi-Fi networks (this is the most popular hacking area on Null Byte) that I thought I should write a "how-to" on selecting a good Wi-Fi hacking strategy. Many beginners come here looking t ...more

If you need to hack an Android device, try a remote administration tool. Known more familiarly as a RAT, there are open-source RATs that are barebones and exorbitantly priced RATs that are more polished. There are also low-cost and polished RATs that aren't intended to be RATs ...more

You see the status bar nearly everywhere on your iPhone, and it almost always looks the same. But you can use a few tricks to spice things up a bit — without jailbreaking your iPhone. The status bar's background on iOS is transparent, so you'll see different colors and gradie ...more

"What is dead may never die." That's easily one of the best lines (and episode title) from HBO's Game of Thrones series. While the saying may ring true for the Ironborn, it's not quite as catchy when it comes to batteries. Lithium-ion batteries power tons of consumer electron ...more

While the Apple Watch does have up to 18 hours of battery life each day on a full charge, your results will vary depending on how often you use it and what you're actually doing with it. If your Apple Watch isn't lasting all day long, we've got some battery-saving tips you ca ...more

With the upcycling revolution, folks are turning their otherwise useless junk into something functional for the home. Practically anything that you would normally toss or recycle can be reused for a bigger and better purpose. Your milk jugs, chopsticks, toilet paper cardboard, ...more

When you enter the softModder realm by rooting your Nexus 5, you open up an exciting world of possibilities and deep customizations for your device. Among other things, it gives you the ability to flash custom ROMs which, individually, act as entirely different operating syste ...more

Straight out of the box, the Nexus 5 is an awesome device, but even it can be faster with better battery life. Luckily, one of the things that makes it so awesome is that there are tons of developers creating mods for it, since it runs stock Android by default. When it comes t ...more

Puzzle games are great at giving your brain a workout while keeping things fun and killing time. They stimulate your noggin as you strategize and plan your next move, whether it's to keep your character from getting killed, or to get that special item to finally complete your ...more

Do you like Samsung's TouchWiz and the iPhone's user interface, but wish you could bring the best of both worlds together onto your device? You can! MIUI (pronounced me-you-eye) is a heavily modded custom ROM that brings a different UI experience never before seen on stock And ...more

It wasn't too long ago that the power menu for stock Android didn't offer much beyond turning the device off, but Google has steadily added more functions, like capturing screenshots and provisioning access to emergency information. The latest function is the Quick Access Wal ...more

The iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max are Apple's most powerful iPhones to date with features like USB-C connectivity, improved camera capabilities, and faster CPUs. But no matter how impressive these phones are, they can still freeze, become unre ...more

There are hidden Wi-Fi networks all around you — networks that will never show up in the list of available unlocked and password-protected hotspots that your phone or computer can see — but are they more secure than regular networks that broadcast their name to any nearby devi ...more

Not much about 2020 is what you'd call normal, but if one thing remains the same, it's that Apple will still release new iPhone models. This year, the company is offering four new options: two "Pro" models and two "consumer" devices. If you want to know more about the latter t ...more

If you've ever owned an HTC device or anything in the Nexus line, odds are, you have typed the word "fastboot" into your command line at one time or another. That said, odds are, you have only just barely scratched the surface of what this handy little Android tool can do. Let ...more

The advent of a new Nexus phone begins with the bigwigs at Google partnering with a manufacturer, then selecting that manufacturer's flagship as the model for the new Nexus hardware. Samsung's Galaxy S and Galaxy SII were the base for the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, respectivel ...more

Samsung's TouchWiz skin gets a lot of flak for its appearance, namely the garish colors on the quick settings toggles. The bright green on dark blue scheme is definitely an eyesore compared to the ones in stock Android, and even other manufacturer skins like HTC's Sense. It a ...more

Video chatting has become an important factor in the overall smartphone experience. Even just a few years ago, 37% of teens were making video calls on a regular basis, and that number has surely grown. 85% of households with infants have used video chat apps to call relatives ...more

|Choose Your View: Quick Bullet Points | Detailed Descriptions Android's newest major update is a special one — it's the tenth full version of the world's most commonly used operating system. The latest release, dubbed simply Android 10 (codename Android Q), was first showcas ...more

Samsung devices have two pre-boot menus that every Galaxy owner should know about: recovery mode and download mode. The recovery screen allows users to wipe cache files or perform a factory reset, which can help save the phone from a soft brick. Download mode, on the other han ...more

There are plenty of ways to customize your stock HTC One (or any Android device), from playing retro games to adding rotating live wallpapers. But to get the most out of your device, you need root access. After rooting, the floodgates open and you have free reign over the dev ...more

Turning your oven on in the summer is just asking to convert your house into a sauna. No matter how badly you want to bake cookies during a heat wave, having to deal with the boost in temperature is a deterrent at best. However, this doesn't necessarily mean you have to go co ...more

First off, let me say this—using real steam power is dangerous, and heavy, and just generally not worth it when you have modern alternatives. Except, you know, if you're a Steampunk. Or this guy: Video: . The guy in the above video makes some awesome gadgets, which are unfortu ...more