Even though Auto-tune - that funky robot effect that ruled the radio for a big chunk of 2008 - has been officially declared dead by no less a rap superstar than Jay-Z himself, people still went nuts for T-Pain's Auto-tune app on the iPhone. You don't have to have an iPhone (or pay hundreds of dollars for official Antares Auto-tune software) to get that T-Pain sound, though. In fact, you can do it with an app that comes preloaded on the average Mac: Garageband. Check out the gallery for a step-by-step guide to bringing the T-Pain.

While in in many cases it would be a security risk, having your Windows XP computer log in automatically can be useful. For example, I have my Windows XP instance running under a virtual machine on my Mac. The easiest way to do this would be to use the Administrator account and simply leave the password blank. However, this has two distinct disadvantages: you can't log onto a domain with a machine that is not using a password, and you cannot have a machine configured this way accept Remote Desktop connections.

I have no need to use Remote Desktop to access my virtual machine, but since my XP instance needs to access a Windows network, I do need a password set. In the past, the easiest way to configure your machine to automatically log on was to use TweakUI powertoy for XP, where there is a setting under Logon for configuring automatic logons.

But there's an even faster way do do this.

On the machine that you want to configure to auto-login, click Start, Run, then type "control userpasswords2" (without the quotation marks) and press enter. In the window that pops up, click on the user account that you would like to automatically log in, then uncheck the "Users must enter a username and password to use this computer" checkbox. You will now be asked for the password for this account. Set it, click OK and OK, and you're done.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. While using a proxy server might violate the usage license of your ISP or the site you are using, it is as far as I know, not illegal. Still, if you are cautious or in doubt, check with a real lawyer or just refrain from using this type of tool.

For anyone who lives outside the US (or is a US citizen but goes outside the country for vacation), one of the more frustrating aspects of most of the TV streaming services I wrote about earlier is that they are restricted to users accessing the site from the United States. On the flip-side, the BBC's iPlayer is restricted to UK users only, because the BBC is funded by the British public.

OK, fine, I understand the BBC position. If I paid taxes to sponsor the programming, I might be miffed if the rest of the world had free access too. But what if you are a UK resident who happens to go on holiday to another part of Europe? Should you really have to miss "EastEnders?" I say, "no."

So, how do you access sites restricted by location? The same way savvy Chinese users can break pas the Great Firewall of China: proxy servers.

Ah, Flickr. How we love you. We loved the idyllic pre-Yahoo! days, and held back our tears with the Yahoo! phase of growth. But even when things seem so good, we wonder what the future holds. Microsoft? AOL? An undead uprising?

Now couple our fears with our stupidity. All those photos we uploaded over the past year or two? The ones housed safely on our hard drive? Yeah, right... the hard drive we, in our infinite wisdom, managed to reformat during a routine upgrade?

Flickr, you are our only hope. You hold our memories safe and secure on a server bank. Somewhere. And it's not that we don't trust you. It's Microsoft, AOL, and zombies we have problems with. Sure, some of us could do a mass download from your servers on to our machines. But for others, there's that Microsoft thing again.

We use Linux, and but for one word, we'd be horribly out of luck.

For the past six months, SuTree has been collecting user-generated videos that show you how to do stuff. All sorts of stuff, from taking care of a pet to speeding up your web browser. There are over 10,000 videos currently online. Now the site is launching a bunch of new features that should make it easier to find the videos you're looking for and share them with the rest of the world.

First up, SuTree is rolling out a new "courses" feature that lets video makers bundle a series of related videos into an online course. Got a 7 part series on how to clean a toilet? Make it into a course. Users can also "wrap & send" a group of videos to friends.

There are also now RSS feeds that let you susbcribe to tags, categories, or all new videos uploaded to the site. For web publishers, there's a new widget feature that lets web publishers embed a SuTree search box in their site to let users search for instructional videos.

While we often find ourselves thinking the last thing we really need is yet another website that lets users upload, share, and vote on videos, we might make an exception for Graspr. Like SuTree and 5min, Graspr is focused on how-to videos.

Sure, you can find out how to knit or shave with a straight razor on YouTube, but it's hard to find good instructional videos because there's just so much stuff to sift through on a general purpose site.

Graspr has a clean, easy to navigate interface. For example, the computers & internet section actually has useful subcategories like networking, hardware, internet, programming & design, security, software, and general. All too often, it seems like these instructional websites aren't geared toward geeks, so we appreciate it when we find a site that is.

And for a service that just launched this week, there are already a good number of instructional videos to browse through, thanks to a successful beta period. We also like how registered users can take notes on videos and read notes left by other members of the community.

There are still a few kinks to work out. When we tried to copy the embed code for a video using the "copy , we got a site not found error. But by copying the code manually, we managed to embed a video after the jump.

Script.aculo.us is an amazing framework for enriching your website's user experience very easily. Built on top of the very popular prototype javascript framework, scriptaculous makes AJAX cake, and gives everyone the power to have a sexy AJAX-powered website, yes everyone. Scriptaculous is a tiny (140kb) javascript framework that gives you the power of effects, several dynamic data components, and all you need to know is a little bit about HTML and how to read. If you already have your own website, it is not hard to do. Follow these steps to AJAX up your site in no time:

1. Download script.aculo.us. Click on any of these links to begin downloading the zip, tar.gz, or tar.bz2 version.
   
   
2. Unzip the archive somewhere, preferably somewhere you will find it again. This is key.
   
   
3. Upload the whole thing to your web server, and put it where ever you like, again, it should be somewhere you can find it. Once again, finding it is key. You will need to link to these files from your web page, so putting the files in a sub folder of your home directory (root for you unix junkies) is a good idea.
   
   
4. In the header section of your web pages, you need to put this code:
   

   <script src="ajax/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
   <script src="ajax/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

   As you might notice, the code has to point to your uploaded script.aculo.us files. You would replace the "ajax/" portion with your own path depending on the name of your subfolder.
   
   
5. Next, put the one line of code into your pages or posts where ever you want the effect to take place. Let's say you have a content div element you want to have all the sudden appear in the page, all you do is wire the "SlideDown" effect (one of many in script.aculo.us, download the cheat sheet here) to a button, link, or other clickable element on your page. The code to trigger the SlideDown effect from a link looks like this:
   
   <a href="#" onclick="Effect.SlideDown('content');">SlideDown Now!</a>
   
   Why use an <a> tag? First, it is super simple to code (everyone knows it), and second, users think it is an ordinary link. They will be quite surprised when they find out it isn't normal at all. I call this "hacking old-skool users into using web 2.0 unknowingly" (or something like that).
   
   
6. Anyway...be sure your div tag has the id="content" because that is the name of the element the SlideDown effect will be applied to once you click the "link" we just made. Make sense? Good. NOTE: Something to remember is that your DIV will be shown on the page automatically by default, unless you first hide it, so the visual magic of an effect such as SlideDown can really be displayed. To "hide" our div by default so your content won't appear until you click the link we just made, you will need to add an inline CSS style (or add one in your CSS file, if you have one) so the content div ends up looking like this:
   

   <div id="content" style="display: none;">This is the content.</div>

   You'll notice (I hope) that the underlined code is the part that hides this div by default. When the SlideDown effect is triggered by clicking on the <a> link, it will automatically change the div's display property, so don't worry about having to do that.
   
7. Try it out, and have fun! It should slide down your content, which can be anything you put in that div tag, video, audio, pictures, more javascript, an iframe, whatever, use your imagination. There are tons of different effects you can use, so you should check them out at script.aculo.us's website, since they have great demos and even combination demos for different sets of effects.
   
   Since the script.aculo.us wiki is large and contains a lot of information to consume all at once, I have compiled a basic script.aculo.us effects cheat sheet of sorts for your quick and dirty coding enjoyment. You can download my PDF cheat sheet here.

Have fun AJAXing your site, and once you're done, come back and give us a link to your site so we can see what you've done with the place. I'd love to check out your site with the framework in action. It can do some wicked cool stuff. You can build entire sites out of script.aculo.us including AJAX drop-downs, AJAX page loading, and custom stuff. Let me know how your site turns out with it.

NOTE (to lightbox and TinyMCE users): There are some special instructions on integrating script.aculo.us with both of these other frameworks, since they all use Prototype to some extent. You can find TinyMCE help here (script.aculo.us wiki) and most lightbox frameworks list this info on their support page or forums section of the site. Have fun!

This holiday "gift" for you and yours comes from PC World. Their new video area offers practical guides on the small screen (PC that is) on how to replace a graphics card, set up a wi-fi network, and others. The gift part is that you can enjoy a nearly "my-new-technology-doesn't-work" phone-call free holiday season. Okay, I am dreaming a little bit here, but you get the idea. The videos are fairly good, and actually do offer some help for the average to beginner PC user. There was adequate detail on the video I watched, but it wasn't too drawn out, for example they showed going to the nVidia and ATI websites to download drivers, but since that was self-explanatory they whizzed by it, which was fine with me. These videos are obviously not for the uber-all-hours geeks and modders that hang out here, but for those you invariably end up supporting, most likely during a holiday family gathering, to do it themselves.

FreeComputerBooks.com has many free resources clumped into compact pages, so you so whiz through them quickly to find what you want. The site is ad supported but most of the content I found actually was free. There are links to many tutorials, books, articles, and other resources online that may be of use to programmers, database developers and such. I found a good article on AJAX that contained some info I needed for a project I am working, so my visit to the site proved useful. Only one link I clicked on went somewhere to buy a book, but the rest I clicked on were free resources, FYI.