Surely the whole point of purchasing a commercial product to run a few homebrew games or activate a few cheat codes is that there's no soldering required: that's not the case with the Datel Drive Doctor for Wii. The $34.95 Drive Doctor is designed to allow Wii owners to connect their console to their PC with a USB 2.0 cable, enabling you to review the internal statistics of the Wii, eventually run homebrew games, and even inject code "into the data stream ... it's fun!" Unfortunately, the press release mentions that it'll require a little soldering of wires in order to get the little box that clips on the back into a working state. Most people won't find that fun, but then again most people wouldn't find the idea of accidentally injecting code that kills their Wii fun either. We're left thinking that this one's strictly for the intermediate or pro hacker, so stay away if your coding and soldering isn't up to scratch. Us mere mortals will wait for something a little more dumb-consumer friendly, thank you very much.

[Via Nintendo Wii Fanboy]

We like using a few computers at the same time -- big surprise, right? Ubuntu box here, Vista box there, Leopard box, well, somewhere; but unless the speakers have multiple audio inputs, it's a bit difficult to get audio from our everything in our stack of machines hooked up. Today's How-To involved a late night parts run, some Bawls, and some true and proper self humiliation.

Maybe you've got a few HD devices around and only one component video input on your HDTV. We've even got component out on our dear old laserdisc player. So we were rooting around in our box of parts and realized that we could make our own component video switch. HDTV switches are ungodly expensive, but KVM have gotten dirt cheap; in today's How-to we'll show you how to turn one into a component video switch.