Make Your PC and Mac Share Stuff Like Best Friends: Getting PCs and Macs to play nice over a home network seems like something that should be trivially easy by now; incompatibilities like that feel like a relic from the 90s. Yet somehow, after all these years, it's still a pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you read this guide.

Totally Overhaul Your Phones With Google Voice : You've probably heard about Google Voice in abstract terms, and with a unified, multi-phone phone number, a web-based voicemail dashboard, free text messaging and cheap international calls, it probably sounds great. Also: confusing. Here's how to get totally and painlessly set up with Google Voice.

Clean Your Filthy Gadgets: Look down at your keyboard. Your smartphone. Your PMP. Your DSLR. Your HDTV. Notice how some of the most expensive things you own are completely disgusting? Here's how to clean them up on the cheap.

Back Up Any Smartphone: Smartphones do just about everything your PC used to, so why don't we care about backing them up? We should, and in this post, we do. iPhone, Pre, WinMo, BlackBerry, Android—instructions are all there, ready to indulge your sexxxilyy cautious urges.

Make Windows 7 Play Nice With All Your Gadgets: Windows 7 is the first version of Windows that really respects the gadget hound—it knows us, it understands us, and it gives us tools. Getting your media players, phones, network devices, displays and cameras to work with Windows is easier than it's ever been, but it's also fairly different than it used to be. If you sense tension between your gear and your new Windows 7 PC, look no further.

Hackintosh a Dell Mini 10v Into the Ultimate Snow Leopard Netbook: From dumpy Dell to full-on Mac netbook in one lazy afternoon. I use mine everyday (for pooping!) and you will to.

Survive Boot Camp (and Run Win 7 on a Mac): Boot Camp, the Mac app that lets you dual boot Windows with OS X, works pretty well, except when it doesn't. Matt runs us through the simplest ways to make sure your Windows 7 install goes smoothly, and how to salvage it when it doesn't.

How To: Virtualize Any OS For Free: A great man once said, "Any sufficiently advanced virtualization software is indistinguishable from magic." Something like that, yes! Who cares. Point is, Virtualbox is free, and it lets you install pretty much any OS within any other OS, so you can introduce your Zune to your Mac, your Word to your Linux, your Ubuntu to your Snow Pussy. Again, magic! And again, free!

Install Homebrew On Palm Pre 1.2.1There's really no reason not to crack your Pre open for homebrew, which offers new apps, new functionality, themes, etc. Plus, software updates don't usually break your patches, like iPhone updates do jailbreaks. The version numbers in this guide are old and the software tools a bit different, but hey, the equivalent tools still work.

Rip Your Music Like a Pro: Please, please don't just leave your music ripping up to iTunes. Do right by your music, by ripping it as cleanly and purely as possible. It's actually pretty easy, once you've got the right tools. Your ears will thank you.

Back Up All Your Stuff For Free, No Hard Drive Needed: Excuse the grotty MacBook, it's been replaced. Which was pretty painless, because I backed up all my important stuff for free! Peace of mind, people.

Kick Your Torrent Addiction With Usenet: Usenet trolls sent me actual death threats over posting this article, which apparently threatened to ruin their top-secret file haven (did you jerks know I went on the radio with this thing? Ha!) So it with it with the utmost glee that I backlink here. Usenet is awesome—faster than just about anything else, and full of sweet, sweet filezs. Here's how you, person who doesn't really know what Usenet is, can be saturdating your internet connection within an hour.

Bake Your Own Chrome OS, Right Now: You can actually download the real Chrome now, so it wouldn't really make much sense to follow this guide today. But it's worth a read, if just to see how close Chrome matched our sad, modest expectations. To the people who said they hope Chrome is nothing like the imagined version in this post: oh well!

Install Windows Mobile 6.5 Right Now: A lot of newer Windows Mobile phones have official updaters, so you can bring your handset up to speed without resorting to hacks. Older ones, though, don't. The ROMs will be different that listed in this guide—better, now—but the process still works.

Calibrate Your Turntable For the Best Possible Sound: Because having a poorly calibrated turntable is more damaging to your audiophile cred than not having one at all.

Manage An All-Lossless Music Library With iTunes: From a music listener's standpoint, lossless music is the way to go. From a person-who-has-to-use-iTunes-because-that's-just-how-things-are-nowadays' standpoint, it doesn't. Luckily, it is possible to make iTunes and a lossless library play nice.

Remote Control Your Home Computer From Anywhere With VNC: VNC, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Vee-Enn-See: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Vee. Enn. See.

Use BitTorrent Like a Pro: It's embarrassing to admit that you don't know how to use torrents properly in this day in age, but let's face it—most people don't. Give them this guide! Or use it yourself, discreetly.

Create Stunningly Realistic High Dynamic Range Photographs: Love them or hate them, high dynamic range (HDR) photos are something any good photographer should know how to take. Ex Gizzer Johnathan Mahoogles lays down the steps to snapping hyperreal photos, one by one.

Rip Blu-ray Discs: Optical media is dead! Well, it should be. Here's how to help kill it, by ripping your entire Blu-ray collection to your PC where it belongs.

Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9 Into the Ultimate OS X Netbook: Remember that Dell 10v hackintosh guide up above? This is that, except for the older, more popular Dell Mini 9.

Install Ubuntu On Your PS3 For Vintage Gaming Emulation: So your PS3 can run Linux, BFD. But what the really means is that your PS3 can play pretty much any vintage game, ever, through emulators. It's all about phrasing!

Add Wi-Fi To Your Xbox 360 Smartly and Cheaply: I was really hoping this guide would be obsolete by now, but man, Xbox wireless adapters are still way, way too expensive. Buying and bridging an entire router, as described here, is still a better deal.

So that's about it (for this year)! Let us know in the comments if there's anything you'd like to see in 2010. Happy holidays, folks.

Some of the shots look like they're close, but all I can think about is how fucked we are when the Terminator thing goes down and all we have are sparklers. Videos like this make me think the liberal middle class (me) should think again about the NRA and shotguns. [Pasqualy]

Called Intimacy, the dress' smart fabric reacts to variations in the electric current, smoothly changing its opacity until it gets completely transparent—and viceversa. The change is controlled by a ball, which has an RF tag that gets detected by circuitry in the dress' collar. On a related note, this is what happens to my underpants whenever my fiancée gets close to me, with no RF tag involved whatsoever. [Roosegaarde and v2 via Styleguru via Fashion Tech]

Kids have always been smart enough to bust Santa if they wanted to. Now that video tools are easy, faith in the jolly fat bastard ends when kids are old enough and curious enough to click record on their 99 dollar flash camcorders. Unless you're an actor with spare time on your hands like Peter, consider this battle lost, parents. [Twitter]

Apparently this itty bitty transistor "has a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts" and "could behave just like a silicon transistor." This is an incredible achievement because of the potential applications in nanomachines since a few atoms would be enough to "perform complex calculations." What I wonder is how long it'll take for these molecular transistors to go from being demonstrated to being put into research use to being something we see in consumer electronics. How much smaller could some gadgets get? [Wired]

Regina Porter most recently signed for the "iSlate" trademark for Slate Computing this past August—showing Apple's continued with "slate" beyond its initial registration for iSlate.com and the "iSlate" trademark in 2006. In Europe, a law firm Apple typically uses to register trademarks has also filed for major domains containing "iSlate," while another they use has filed for a trademark on ISlate in the European Union, registered to a corporation in Trinidad & Tobago, a country Apple's used to register European trademarks before, including for the iPhone.

Curiously, another trademark registered by Slate Computing in the US is "Magic Slate," which follows the same naming convention as Magic Mouse, obviously. MacRumors wonders if it might be something like a multitouch trackpad for computers, like with a screen (which we've wanted for a long time).

Whatever's going on, Apple's obviously gone through a lot of work to discreetly register a whole lot of "slate" stuff, which seems like a ton of effort for nothing, or simply a ruse to throw people off. It's funny, actually, that everybody "knew" what the iPhone was going to be called years before Steve Jobs took the stage to announce it, but no one really knows the tablet's name. I've always figured that, whatever it is, it'll have just two syllables. iSlate fits the bill. And for now, it's the only one with any evidence. [MacRumors, TechCrunch]

The Montgomery DA already tweets about legal events—sometimes seriously and sometimes with incredible humor—so this new program will just be expanding on that habit. I may not live in Montgomery Country, or Texas for that matter, but I'll be following along to see if he keeps up this mix.

What I do wonder is whether this will really be a crime deterrent as the county hopes. While the tradition of newspapers publishing the names of individuals busted for DWIs or DUIs has been going for years, no one seems to care about a bit of local shame. Could easily retweetable blurbs actually make someone think twice about driving like a loon? Or will this have about as much of an effect as tweeting mugshots? [Twitter via PC World]

While there were many pleasant surprises, I can tell you that I most definitely did not get everything I wanted this year. (Unless one of you kidnapped Tony Stark, left him wearing nothing but a bow, and sneaked him under my tree in the past hour, that is.)

Photo by di_the_huntress

All the hallmarks of the newly deposed corporate dining king—Google—are present in Frances Dinkelspiels' tour of Facebook HQ's cafeteria. (And not just Josef Desimone, the chef Facebook poached from Google last year.) Whereas pre-Recession America went gaga over the "Google 15", today we're supposed to pity/hate Facebook employees who pack on the "Facebook 15" due to all that "glistening pink lox":

Fred Labbe, a credit analyst who arrives at work at 5:45 a.m. to reach the European markets, said he ate at least two meals a day at Facebook. "The food is fantastic," Mr. Labbe said one recent morning as he savored a plate of scrambled eggs and a bagel smothered in glistening pink lox.

In the six months since he started at Facebook, Mr. Labbe said, he has put on at least four pounds - a problem so common that employees joke about gaining the "Facebook 15" after they begin work at the company.

In Google's considerable perks portfolio, free food always held a special place. More than a simple convenience, the gourmet cafeterias piled high with lobster or whatever were a potent symbol of both the dedication of the young Google employees—they don't even have time to pack a lunch!—and the all-encompassing, slightly sinister embrace of the big G. Now it's Facebook playing surrogate mother figure to its fresh-faced employees while gently pushing them to take over the world:

Offering free food, and copious amounts of it, is part of Facebook's strategy to encourage employees to work long hours. A significant number of the 800 employees at the company's main campus are in their early 20s, fresh off their college years where they pulled all-nighters and hung out talking in their dorm rooms. Facebook is famous for its regular "hackathons," where employees are invited to stay up all night and work on programs and platforms that are not part of their normal assignments; the kitchen staff participates by creating new dishes that are served at midnight, 3 a.m. and at breakfast time.

In short, food is a lubricant that helps keep the innovation machine running.

In fact, Facebook is taking the food obsession a step further, allowing employees to actually cook it via highly-coveted "Internships" with the head chef. When employees are begging to cook food for other employees you know you've tapped into a self-perpetuating anthill force that's begging to be bent towards global domination.

And, of course the requisite note about how bougie all the food is:

[Chef Josef Desimone] said he tried to use meat from animals that had not been exposed to antibiotics or genetically modified feed; organic produce; milk and butter from local purveyors like Strauss Dairy and Clover Farms; and live-caught or sustainable fish.

The Facebook vs. Google rivalry might swivel on a pivot made of Thai-spiced cilantro chicken with red curry sauce.

Who Wants To Be a Millionaire was, as I recall, the only thing people watched on TV in 2000. The one-liners were usable in so many situations. Is that your final answer? Do you want to phone a friend? How did we say these things before this show began? We must have had a really good system of grunts and gestures.

Regis Philbin, man. What a hot piece of manmeat. Yum. But you know what really used to get me off? The fact that, after shelling out thousands of pennies for the PS1 version of the game, Reege had no qualms about reminding me that I was not a REAL millionaire.

"We have it in the company vault, but that's as far as it goes," he says. Do you think that ABC still has a million dollars in the company vault? It'd be worth what now...like $300,000? Philbie continues: "You're only a pretend millionaire. Do you see the difference?" Ooh baby. A man putting me down? I'm getting all sweaty just thinking about it. I mean, I was all, "I won! I'm rich!" and then Regis was all, "No you're not! " and I was all, "Oh right, I have two maxed-out credit cards and have had nothing but Annie's Mac and Cheese for the last week. And I am living at my dad's and fighting with my brother about bathroom time. But please, Regis: Tell me a bit more about how pathetic I am. Hold on—wait, first let me get a drink. Waiter? Tap water, please. Neat. Now Regis, please go on. I'm glad we had this talk."

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Photography

What Everybody Should Know About Cameras
The essentials of digital camera knowledge, from all the different types of cameras to image sensors to jargon like ISO, all in one epic spot.

Why Lenses Are the Real Key to Stunning Photos
Despite what stupid spec wars would have you believe, a fancy slice of glass is just as important as silicon to taking a stunning photo.

When (Not) To Use Your Camera's Flash
What is photography's greatest scourge? Cellphone cameras? MySpace self-portraiture? No, it's that dratted flash—here's when and how you should-and more importantly, shouldn't-use it.

Why More Megapixels Isn't Always Better
In short, twelve megapixels stuffed onto a tiny ass sensor looks like crap. Twelve megapixels with plenty of a room on a full-frame sensor can look pretty great.

Television

The Ultimate HDTV Cheat Sheet and Buying Guide
Read this before you go buy and HDTV, and you'll have the Best Buy employee spinning in circles. Or at least, he won't be able to take you for a spin.

The Difference Between a $600 TV and a $6000 TV
There is a difference, and it goes way beyond the logo sitting front and center. How much do all those extra inches cost? What about 120Hz, or hell 240Hz? The cost of a fancy ass TV, broken down.

What's So Great About LED-Backlit LCDs
Any LCD display worth its salt—especially when it comes to laptops—is lit up by a bunch of LEDs, not the fluorescent bulbs that light up high school cafeterias. But, not all LED displays are created equal.

Audio

Why You Can't Get Decent Headphones for Under $100
Building truly great in-ear headphones is hard. Which means it's expensive. We got an earful of the secret sauce that goes into the pricey headphones that sound oh-so-delicious, and why you can't buy 'em for a song.

The Difference Between $100 and $100,000 Speakers
Well the title really says it all, don't it?

Why Analog Audio Cables Really Aren't All the Same
Yes, there really is a difference between analog cables. And you want there to be.

Computers and Software

Why Quantum Computing Is the Future, But a Distant One
Computing with quantum physics! It's as crazy as it sounds, so we'll let quantum physicists explain it.

Why Stuff Crashes, and Why It Happens Less Often Now
Ever wondered what causes a BSOD or kernel panic? Notice how it happens a less often than it used to? (Though Firefox crashing every five minutes seems to make up for it.)

Android and How It Will Take Over the World
No, it's not because of the mysterious Nexus One. The true nature of Android is a little more complex than you might realize, able to run everything from phones to nooks to set-top boxes. And Google's giving it away for free.

GPGPU Computing and Why It'll Melt Your Face Off
Graphics cards, they're not just for PC gametards anymore. Thanks to new programming standards they'll be accelerating everything on a computer that can take advantage of oodles of processing cores.

How Apple Affects Your Tech World Through Standards (Even You, Windows Guy)
The easy way to have power over technology and people outside of your own little domain: Create tech standards. Here's a few Apple's been instrumental in getting out there.

Microsoft and Standards
The flip side to how Apple plays with industry-wide standards, Microsoft just establishes them de facto, when it can. Here's some of the bigger ones they're responsible for.

Cellphones

How Cell Towers Work
Until Wilson explained how cell towers work, I always thought Stormtrooper fairies carried the signals from my phone to the Death Star and then to my mom's cellphone.

Why WiMax and LTE Wireless 4G Data Will Blow Your Mind
WiMax is really here (at least in some places) and LTE from Verizon and AT&T will be ramping in short order. The days of ubiquitous wireless broadband are very nearly here. Exciting, and scary.

Bill Nye Explains Oleophobic Screens
Uh, Bill Nye. Explaining stuff. Do I need to say anymore?

Electricity

Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug
There actually are reasons there's like a billion different types of power plugs scattered across the world. I know you want to know why.

How Electrocution Really Kills You (With Adam Savage)
MythBuster Adam Savage tells us how electricity really kills you—surprisingly, it's not by poaching your brains inside of your skull.

Coffee

How to Actually Make Coffee
Odds are, you're doin' it wrong. Here's most of the major ways to make delicious coffee, with advice from our friends at Ninth St. Espresso, Intelligentsia Coffee and La Marzocco.

Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about cameras, processors, or anything else crazy complicated to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

There's also an arrow through an apple for when you're feeling wacky, an ear earbud for your meta moods, and a mushroom for when... you're dodging Bowser's fireballs?

Don't be put off by the sad mannequin heads: these buds are definitely for you. Available at the Solid Alliance store in Japan for about $22. [Solid Alliance via technabob]