While people may already know this, you can change the screen resolution to prank and annoy your friends to High Contrast Mode, which is supposed to be used to allow you to see icons and text better. While we don’t recommend that you actually do this (to us), we want to show you how to do it – since we are away, and we have nothing better to fill up content.

To do this, you have to press Left Alt + Left Shift + PrintScreen – and it must be the Left Shift! Now, all you have to do is sit there and see your friends fumbling to switch back to the normal resolution.

However, Microsoft has added a option to TURN THIS FEATURE OFF in Vista. Go to the Control Panel, then click on the “Ease of Access” category, then click on the “Ease of Access Center” link. After that, click on “Set Up High Contrast”, then tick off the option “Turn on or off High Contrast when left ALT + Left SHIFT + PRINT SCREEN is pressed”.

By turning this off, you will no longer be the target of this prank. Just make sure to reset your computer in order to change the computer’s settings.

TECHGEEK.com.au is back with another beginner’s guide, and this one is the follow-up to our previous guide of “HTML for Beginners”. This time, we are taking you back to the world of XHTML, a HTML variant used in many modern websites (like ours). Unfortunately, it also mixes another web standard called XML, or eXtensible Markup Language; thus meaning that the entire HTML basics are thrown out of the window.

However, have no fear. TECHGEEK.com.au will teach you the basics of XHTML, so you can use it for commenting on different sites – just not MySpace.

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First it was Mail Goggles and then this? You can now play Snake on G-Mail – and its very easy to do so. First you have to make sure you have Keyboard Shortcuts enabled (you can find this in the Settings), and then go to the Labs tab, and scroll down to find “Old Snakey” and make sure you enable it.

After that, you can now play this awesome time-wasting game by pressing Shift + 7 to play the game. As you can see, to move the “snake”, you move the arrow keys around. To restart, press the space bar; and to pause the game, just press zero.

Just make sure your boss doesn’t catch you.

Australia, like the US, is tech-savvy, and we really want to watch television shows online. However, since we live in Australia, and most of our favourite shows are either produced in the US or the UK, we don’t really have an option to watch shows online. Or do we?

TECHGEEK has produce a list of several sites that we think might help. Let’s start of the list:

ABC iView

The ABC has decided to follow its British counterpart, the BBC, in making content available online. While it has been doing it since 2005, it was only limited to news and current affairs programming (and Media Watch). With the iView, it allows users to watch shows for 14 days after transmission, longer than what the BBC allows.

However, unlike the BBC’s iPlayer, its content is limited – with not everything on the ABC’s two channels being put up. But you will be able to watch The Bill and Doctor Who, both not produced by the ABC. The interface is entirely in Flash, and it has four “channels”, with different content in all of them. One is dedicated to catching up to shows, one is dedicated to documentaries, one is dedicated to news programming and another is for the kids.

While the video claims to be in high quality, which it is, Australians will see their internet sucked up pretty quickly – since Australians don’t have unlimited internet usage. The good thing is that the ABC is negotiating with the ISPs to have it unmetered, but only one has signed up – iiNet.

Channel Ten

Channel Ten has decided to offer up some of its shows online, from 90210 to Good News Week. The interface is sort-of ugly, but it is understandable, but choosing a video gets a bit confusing, but there are links at the bottom that will take you straight there. But, some of them are a bit misleading, like the Rove link will just show clips of a previous episode.

Ten has put in limited commercials, with some having no commercials at all, in the videos; and it offers the entire back catalogue of the show (that I know of), but we think that it will take them down after 2008. But like the iView, it’s interface is made up of Flash, but it does not take up the full screen of your computer.

The great thing is that you can share the video, but we wish they expand the options to include other social bookmarking sites. As well, you can keep up to date by subscribing to the RSS feeds, so once a new episode is posted, you can see it in your RSS reader.

SBS

SBS started to provide full episodes online a year back with Newstopia; and after that became a success, it has slowly adding more content. All the episodes last for a week. The interface is clean, and you can tell if it has finished progressively download (meaning to download the show while you are watching it, similar to YouTube).

Content, however, is limited to Newstopia, Bogan Pride (a new SBS comedy), RockWiz and a couple of documentaries, like the one you see above. However, since SBS is a “niche” channel owned by the Government, you can expect the quality of the programming to be high.

But you can also blame SBS for not letting us watch South Park episodes online.

The Daily Show/The Colbert Report

Funny enough, Comedy Central has allowed full episodes of both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report available to Australian users, even though Foxtel/The Comedy Channel has the rights to air the show. The interface combines Flash and HTML, so it won’t take long to load the page. Like Channel Ten, you can add it to many social bookmarking sites, and you can share your opinions on a certain episode by commenting.

Since both shows are partnered up with each other, you can watch the episode of its sister show right after watching the episode, by clicking on the link that shows up. However, the video is not in widescreen, but this is because the show is recorded using the 3:4 aspect ratio.

Videos are available for four weeks after transmission, and the interface is pretty clean. The video is at the very top, and does not have any distracting graphics or images on the sides of the player, except for the logo and the two buttons. However, since the interface is in HTML, every time you play a episode, it will send you to a new page containing the episode.

But that is just the full episodes page for both their sites. Their main pages include almost every moment from the previous episodes, and when we mean previous episodes, we mean their entire length. All the videos from the main site are embeddable, so you can put it up on your blog.

Got any other suggestions? Why not comment below and tell us, so we can add it to this list.

The iPhone DevTeam has released new versions of their ever-popular QuickPwn and Pwnage Tools for the new iPod/iPhone touch Firmware 2.1. As well, they managed to combat iTunes 8 without patching it, but we will wait for a response from Apple.

The tools, however, are only for Macs this time, it is expected that a Windows version is in the works. Also, those who got the iPod touch 2G device are out of luck as well, because it does not "address" it, meaning it won't work.

As well, they also say that once you finished downloading the application that you COPY the application to your Applications folder or Desktop before running it, as if you running it directly from the Disk Image will cause errors.

Other than that, you can download the two tools here.

MySpace is a popular social networking site which allows you to customize everything - but that is not our tutorial for today. This tutorial is basically for the comments, where you can add images and change colours to text, among other things.

But many, like new users, do not know what <b> means. So, TECHGEEK is pleased to bring out the basics of HTML.

This tutorial is to be used with MYSPACE ONLY! Many new social networks use XHTML, which is a variation of HTML and there are things under this lesson which are not supported. You can comment on the TECHGEEK blog, however, do not use this tutorial - a follow up will be up soon (like next week.)

Like this Tutorial? Need your questions answered? Suggesting a new tutorial? Comment below!

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Firefox has this neat feature where it can be used as a search box as well. However, unlike the search box, it is reliant on Google. Sometimes, we need to give the other search engines a chance. So, in this TECHGEEK Quick Tip, we are going to teach you how to change the search feature on the address bar from Google to Yahoo and Windows Live.

I bet you are now screaming: Why in the F**k would I do that? Well, we are doing this to keep this fair and balanced. (Now I'm starting to sound like Fox News!)

In our previous tip, we showed you the basics of the about:config in Firefox. You should read this before doing this tutorial, since this will tell you some basic functions of the about:config page. We will still put in the instructions the steps on how to do the about:config if you are just too lazy to read.

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Sooo, you want to smash your iPhone open? Well this is exacly what two guys done on youtube. Really all you have to do is get a big hammer and break it. So why don't you try it yourself? Link.