When I was in college, there wasn’t much you could do to decorate your dorm room.  A lot of people put up posters, but the really impressive decorations were things like Christmas lights and, if you really wanted to show off, glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.  The only downfall was that the stars weren’t permanent, and if the glue gave way, you’d be picking stars up off the floor for ages.

These days, with extreme home makeovers being all the rage, a must-have feature for any home theater is a starry sky made out of fiber optic lights.  If you want to make one yourself, but don’t have the budget for a theater makeover, then perhaps these Instructibles directions (complete with pictures) will help you replicate the effect for pennies on the dollar!

It’s a pretty cool effect, but I’d want it to be an actual star map of my area, so that way I could look up at my bedroom ceiling and see the same lights that’d be overhead on a summer night.  Still, it’s great for a kid’s room as a nightlight replacement, isn’t it?

Want to know where Santa is right now?  Just use the official the official NORAD Santa Tracker, powered by Google Earth!  Right now Santa is over Russia, and he seems to be making good time.

The tradition of NORAD tracking Santa Claus’s flight over the Earth dates back to 1955, according to this BBC article.  Due to a misprint in a Colorado advertisement, people phoning a Santa hotline were actually calling the Continental Air Defense Command, the predecessor to NORAD.  An official at CONAD took the calls and pretended to be Santa Claus, and the tradition took off from there!

Tracking Santa is high tech.  You can ask questions of NORAD volunteers by emailing noradtrackssanta@gmail.com, check the Santa tracking Facebook page, browse the Picasa photo album, install a browser plugin to keep tabs on St. Nick, subscrube to the official NORAD Santa Twitter feed to track of his progress and give interesting facts about the stops along the way, and even get SMS updates of Santa’s progress sent to your cell phone!

I can tell you, right now, what the hot costume this year is going to be.  That, my friends, is the zombie.  Zombies are back, thanks to the excellent Zombieland, and zombie walks and zombie-themed everything has been all over the place lately.  So don’t get left out in the cold, get some grease paint and latex, and make yourself a zombie, too!

There are a lot of zombie makeup guides out there, but I’m terribly partial to About.com’s excellent How to Zombie Makeup.  It’s easy to do, has a LOT of great pictures of the process, takes things slowly, and the results are… well, you can see the results up there.  It’s pretty stellar.

We live in a world increasingly in need of step-by-step directions.  Rarely are things simple, one-button accomplishments.  No, these days, everything needs a flow chart and thankfully, Popgadget passed along a great place to find those flow charts.

No matter what you might be having difficulties with, TechPosters has a flow chart poster for it.  Can’t remember your keyboard shortcuts for FrontPage 2003?  No problem!  Need a little help navigating Apple Word 2008 or Photoshop Elements?  You got it!

This is quite possibly one of the more useful thing I’ve ever seen, because as a power user of Word, sometimes even I forget those mouse-saving keyboard commands if I don’t use them for awhile.  When it comes to trying to learn new programs, there’s nothing quite as helpful as tricks from the professionals and a quick reference guide!

Passwords are an awful fact of modern life.  You need passwords for everything.  Log into Amazon?  Password.  Email?  Password.  Post to your well-loved electronics blog?  Password.  Everything and everywhere (even pizza ordering!) requires you to have a password.

I’m about out of password ideas.  Fortunately, Macworld has some password tips, just in time to aid me in my hour of need.  For example, you can always lean on a password manager if you’re like me and can’t remember what password you made for which password slot.  This is why my next laptop is going to have one of those thumbprint identification pads on it.  I can forget passwords all day long, but odds are I won’t forget my thumbs.

At least I hope I won’t forget my thumb!

Image: MacWorld

If you’re a Twitter user, I have little doubt you’ve seen the ominous warnings about the first of what will be many worms targeting the service.  The StalkDaily or Mikeyy worm is currently making the rounds on the service for the fourth day in a row.  Twitter is fighting the good fight, but the worm keeps mutating.  How do you protect yourself?  PC World has some good tips and specific instructions on removing the worm if you are infected.

As for avoiding Mikeyy?  Most of those directions are common sense.  Don’t click on any links related to StalkDaily or retweet any suspicious messages.  Using a third party Twitter client (like TweetDeck) will help protect you.  DIsable JavaScript if you have to.  Change your passwords regularly.  You know the drill by now.  Twitter is just like anything else, and it requires the same precautions that every other web-based anything recommends.

It’s a shame that Mike Mooney couldn’t just let us all have one thing that wasn’t constantly putting us at risk of viruses, isn’t it?

One of the issues that anyone with a computer can attest to is the constant droning of the multitude of cooling fans that our machines need to keep functioning.  The more powerful your machine, the more cooling fans you need.  Given that they make individual cooling fans for video cards and processors in addition to the power fan in the back and, in some cases, an additional fan located in the side of the tower, you’re dealing with a lot of ambient noise.  That’s before you get into the clicking and whirring of drives!

My computer has four fans in various locations and two DVD/CD drives.  It’s a constant source of background noise.  I even turn my computer on at nights to act as a white noise machine if I can’t sleep.  Some computers are as loud as a washing machine or electric toothbrush!

Obviously, the noise doesn’t bother me.  My computer, thanks to its large case and massive side cooling grate, very rarely kicks on during normal usage.  When I’m playing a game, I wouldn’t notice the noise anyway.  However, if you want to build your own extra-quiet computer, CNet UK has a great ten-step guide, complete with pictures.  It’s pretty much fool-proof.

If you’re just looking to reduce the noise on your current machine, CNet’s steps will help with that, too.  If you need more tips, MAKE has a bunch of great links on how to first quiet things down and then maintain the precious silence.

One of the little problems with entering into an agreement with just about any company is that, if you're not careful and don't parse through the legalese that gets sent your way every so often, you'll miss out on some crucial piece of information where your privacy may be threatened. 

Verizon Wireless, for example, has a little clause buried in its new user agreement that allows them to share your personal information with third party affiliates.  We're talking things like who you call, how often you call them, billing info, personal demographic information, and lots of other stuff that's nobody's business.  I actually had no idea this stuff was getting shared until I read the post, and I'm pretty meticulous about reading my service agreements. 

Fortunately, there's a pretty easy way to opt out of the plan, as Boing-Boing shows in a step-by-step method.  It's quite possibly the easiest thing I've ever done involving my cell phone package.  Everything else I might want to change can be kind of a hassle, but that was easy and there's the added benefit of the illusion of data safety!  I know it probably won't affect much on a long enough timeline, but it's nice to close what holes I can while I can.

I love GMail, but I'm also kind of dependent on it.  I have a couple of different websites, and all the mail I get at those locations goes to my GMail account, which I can usually check anywhere.  Unfortunately, when GMail goes down, I'm out of contact with just about everyone and everything.  Here lately, GMail has been giving me a lot of problems.  Thankfully, there are plenty of workarounds!

It's pretty amazing that Google gives you so many options for accessing GMail.  So many free email providers force you into using their newest interface, yet Google gives you access to the old mode, a Java-less mode, an iPhone mode and a general mobile phone mode, a secure mode for use in public settings, and even a safe mode in case some new Google widget is what's giving you email troubles.  For whatever your use, GMail has a mode for it. 

I've used at least four of these GMail modes myself, and I've often used one of the various work-arounds when I was getting some error or another depending on slowdowns in my Internet connection, browser errors, using older computers, or checking my mail on a wireless network or at the library.  I swear by secure mode.  It's a bit slower, but I think the safety is worth it.

H/T and Image:  NewsTechZilla

I love the Tetris fabric that Jenny at Chronically Uncool has designed.  It's colorful and fun, and she even left gaps in at the base of the fabric because any Tetris fan knows full lines always disappear.  Most importantly, it's also free for anyone to use via the Creative Commons, and it fulfills a dream Jenny has had for quite some time.

She's always wanted Tetris fabric.  I've always kind of wanted Tetris curtains myself, like for a game room.  Anyway, she used Spoonflower for her fabric printing needs.  If you have some design that you've always wanted to see made into a quilt or dress or tablecloth, then you too can have your design custom-made! 

I've lost track of how many great ideas I've had that I was never able to put into play because I had no way of getting raw materials.  Thanks to places like Spoonflower and CafePress, the playing field is officially starting to level and all my witty tee-shirt designs can come to fruition (assuming I can remember them or find the notebook I wrote them down in). 

H/T: Wonderland