One of my colleagues at Geek.com wrote about this today and it was so great I had to share it with the world. The video posits the question: what if Mario had a Portal gun?

Well, the honest answer is that he’d be kind of a dick, really – but in the most hilarious way. You know, the way you probably would if you actually had one in the game. I almost feel really bad for Bowser there too, that’s pretty rough the way Mario did him in. Twice. Check out the video:

[ Dorkly :: Mario with a Portal Gun ]

You know, I could get used to this.

And honestly, here’s hoping I have the opportunity. Apparently the weekend before last and the time before that were well enough received by the team at Lifehacker (and of course, the community,) that the crew there asked me back again, and I was more than happy to do it.

So I had the chance to take the reins again last Sunday and churn out content for Lifehacker, and I like to think this week was even better than the last. Here’s what you missed, if you weren’t paying attention:

• Simple Tips that Make Moving Easier

  It helps that I’ll be moving soon, but I had to share some great tips that I stumbled on around how to make the moving process a little easier. I mean, it sucks no matter which way you go about it, but you can make it easier on yourself by preparing properly, making sure you keep the most important things available and identified so you can unpack them first, and organize things the way you want them when you get to the new place. Minimizing a bit also helps. As for me, I’m in the middle of doing all of those things.

• Say No Without Wrecking Your Career

  If there’s anything I’ve learned in trying to navigate the corporate maze, it’s about how to let your supervisors and management know clearly that you’re pretty much tapped out – without, of course, being disrespectful and landing yourself in a position where someone questions your capability to work effectively. In this piece, I share how to go about doing it.

• Five Best Cheap Travel Booking Sites

  This post and its predecessor where I called upon the readers to let us know what their favorite sites to book cheap travel with are part of the Hive Five series. The sites that made it into the roundup are pretty much the ones I expected, but there were still a few surprises. The ITA/Matrix site is a new one to me, but I’ll tell you here’s one thing I didn’t realize until I saw the votes: Kayak clearly has a posse.

• Family-Friendly Spring Exercise Tips

  When I got the call to do another weekend, I knew I wanted to share an outdoors-y type exercise post. Sadly, they don’t seem to resonate quite so much with the LH readers, but I think it was well liked anyway – honestly, I think there’s still a strong “tech” element to the Lifehacker name, even if there have been more lifestyle posts lately. Still, I found a great article about how to encourage your friends and family to get out and get some exercise, and considering the weather is getting warmer, why not share it?

• Bridg.me Calls You When the Conference Starts

  I actually stumbled on this one a bit late: the download I was thinking about writing about on Thursday got snapped up by another writer on Friday, so I had to adjust at the last minute. No worries though, this new service promises to call you when your conference call is supposed to begin instead of forcing you and your call participants to join a bridge line. With some more detail, I think it can get some real traction.

• One-Line Tips to Stay Creative

  Sometimes, my friends are some of the best sources of inspiration for me, and I stumbled onto this piece at Tumblr thanks to one of my friends’ tweets. I took it to heart personally, seeing as I’m a writer by and large, and would like to be more of a writer if at all possible. Just because it’s my passion though doesn’t mean that I don’t have those times where I just can’t figure out what to write about. Now I have a little cheat sheet to help me stay motivated.

• Use Plasti Dip to Fix Stripped Headphone Wires

  I almost didn’t expect this one to get the traction it got, but it did – I mean, the makers of the product started following me on Twitter and expressed their appreciation. All I did was write about it guys, the guy over at Instructables that originally posted the tip deserves the credit! Still – it does look like an awesome product and an awesome idea. I’ve lost several great headphones to separated wires like this, and I’m definitely going to try it next time one of my pair starts to go this way.

That does it! Now all I have to do is see if anything else comes from this round of guest posts, and I certainly hope it does. I really enjoyed guest posting at LH, and I’m hoping they ask me back again soon!

I love these types of articles. The same way as I was intrigued when I saw the most common passwords that users had in the database that hackers retrieved from Gawker when they were hacked, I love seeing some of the silliest passwords people have seen or used that are the most prone to hacking if someone smart enough wants their hands on that user’s data.

PCMag asked Twitter what some of those most awful passwords they’ve ever seen were, and the results are hilarious. Including such gems as “asdfhgjkl” and the ever-present venerable “password,” the list is full of good ones.

The thing that really bothers me is the commenter who thinks that “everyone knows better than this” and “most sites” require stronger passwords. Oh, you poor poor sheltered thing. If only that were the truth.

[ PC Mag :: Your Worst Passwords, Ever ]

PC Mag took your votes in multiple categories to come up with a definitive list of the most influential products of all time. From mobile devices to gaming to desktops to operating systems, they laid out the candidates and the public voted on which products have made the most impact in the technology world.

I wouldn’t have included the image of the Atari 2600 if it hadn’t won in the gaming category, but the original Nintendo Entertainment System was pretty close behind, nipping at its heels. The battle in the operating system category between Windows 3.1 and MacOS was pretty fierce, as was the battle between the Apple Macintosh and the Commodore 64 in the desktops category, but you’ll have to click through to see the results of that battle: I’m not about to spoil it for you.

[ PC Mag :: The Five Most Influential Tech Products of All Time ]

This is a story I covered very happily over at Geek.com, but I had to share it again. One man, 2 actuators, 4 motors, and a ton of Lego pieces – oh, and toss in a passion for all things Starcraft, and this is what you get – a working RC siege tank. Check out the video:

Isn’t that a thing of beauty? Like I said there, I just wish he said “I’m about to drop the hammer and dispense some indiscriminate justice!” but I’ll take the true-to-game sound effects that the RC tank makes. Read the whole thing over at Geek.com:

[ Geek.com :: Starcraft 2 Remote-Controlled Siege Tank Made from Lego Bricks ]

According to a report by Royal Pingdom, the iPad is already a more popular computing platform than Linux. Ouch – I know a lot of Linux evangelists that are going to be mad about this – and are likely already coming up with ways to dismiss the report entirely.

Over at Geek.com I wrote a story about how XP has finally lost top spot in market share to Windows 7, but down there near the bottom of the chart in that story is another, equally interesting story: that “Other” category.

Inside that “Other” category, if you break it out by mobile OS to iOS, and then again to the iPad specifically, you get 1.18%. Which is still bigger than Linux’s overall 0.71%. Pingdom confirms:

These market share numbers are from Statcounter and are based on visitor statistics averaged from 3+ million websites. In other words, they represent computers used to access the Web. Mobile phones and other small-screen devices are not included.

In other words, the iOS market share you see in the chart is only for iPad. It does not include the iPhone or iPod Touch. We’ve verified this with Statcounter, just to be entirely sure.

Not only is iPad now so widely used that it shows up in this list, iOS for iPad has managed to pass Linux as a “desktop OS” (we use quotes, because tablets will probably soon make up their own category). In fact, it passed Linux sometime around December. Not bad for a device that was launched just back in April of 2010.

Wow. Talk about a rise of a product – it’s clear that one of the things that people with iPads do most often is surf the Web. Head over to Royal Pingdom for more details.

[ Royal Pingdom :: The iPad is Already More Used than Linux Computers ]

I hear it all the time: everyone wants a smartphone, but not everyone wants to type on a screen, no matter how good alternative screen keyboards like Swype or SwiftKey really are. Considering the most powerful and popular phones entering the market frequently don’t have physical keyboards, does it mean that you’re relegated to a cruddy phone if you prefer a physical keyboard? Not at all!

Over at PC Mag, there’s a great roundup of 10 phones that have physical keyboards, including the T-Mobile HTC G2, shown above. You also have the amazing Samsung Epic 4G, the Droid 2 Global, and the Droid Pro. It’s good to know that if you just don’t think you can do without a physical keyboard, you have options.

[ PCMag :: The 10 Best Phones with Keyboards ]

Far be it from me to turn the lovely folks at Lifehacker away when they ask me to join them for a little guest posting action, but this time they had something special in store for me: a whole day on the weekend, Sunday, in fact, where it was all me, my ideas, and my posts at what’s very much one of the Web’s best tech and tip blogs.

It was a blast, and I don’t say that lightly. It was so much fun to do, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to do it. In case you missed the work, here’s a roundup of the pieces I posted, complete with links:

• Get Spring Produce Early, Keep It Tasty All Summer

  Here I share some tips I picked up on how to make sure that the delicious fresh spring and summer produce that you’re likely going to see on store shelves in the next couple of weeks manage to stay fresh, delicious, and available for you to enjoy well into the hot weather months, even when they’re not readily available anymore.

• How to Keep Your Task List Healthy and Focused

  I’m a huge fan of the GTD philosophy, and I think I resonated with this article a bit more than some of the commenters did, but it’s authored by Amber Mac, who I can’t say I don’t adore, and her tips hit home with me. Of special note, I like how she pointed out that you should make sure to reward yourself for the work that you do, and make that a task on your to-do list. I could get used to that.

• Five Best Job Search Sites

  This post and its predecessor where I called upon the readers to shout out the sites they wanted in the roundup, I was pretty busy. I’m still surprised some of my favorite job sites didn’t make it into the roundup, but I think we got a great roundup regardless. Best of all, it’s a great bookmark-able article for people who are out looking for work and need solid resources to do so.

• Add Ground Effects to Your Bed for Gentle Night Lighting

  This one is one my favorite, I think. Partially because it’s just so cool, but partially because I had the opportunity to write about ground effects and pimping out beds on a site like Lifehacker. I think the readers loved it too, actually, and I’m seriously thinking about doing something like this when I move into my next apartment. After all, it’s so incredibly simple to do!

• Use Metal Hairpins to Easily Pit Cherries and Olives

  This one is one of my favorites as well – I’m a huge fan of using things you already have in your home or have lying around to do uncommon tasks, and I’m an even bigger fan of using things that are cheap to replace expensive uni-taskers in your kitchen. I’ve talked about this before, but the idea of using a hairpin to pit an oliver or a cherry, or a baby food spoon to fill a deviled egg? Really resonates with me – and it should resonate with you, too!

• Greplin Adds Faster, As-You-Type Search to Gmail

  Greplin was a fun little tool to use: it really does improve Gmail search as much as they say it does, and it’s a great super-search utility that can search everything across your online life, as long as it has access to those accounts and services. And there’s the rub: it has to know everything about you in order to index it. Yowch.

• How to Save Money on Warm-Weather Energy Bills

  This one is a little early, but according to some of the commenters I might be a little late on the energy-saving tips for warm weather months. After all, I know that the biggest part of my electric bill in the spring and summer is air conditioning, and I’m always on the lookout for ways to keep my power costs down. It’s pretty likely that you are too, so I snagged some tips, wrote them up, and provided them to you. Enjoy!

The best part is that they’ve asked me back to post again this weekend! More on that later, but in the meantime, click on through and let me know what you think, either in the comments here or there. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Thanks for reading!

Gina Trapani made a return to Lifehacker last week to remind us all to do something that’s very important: clean out the dust bunnies from our PCs. Seriously – it’s the spring, so it’s time for a good dose of Spring Cleaning! Besides, all the dust that’s collected in your computer is making it run hot and slow, so now is as good a time as any to clean it all out, especially if you’re doing spring cleaning about your home anyway.

She says:

If your PC’s been humming along under your desk for more than a year or two, I’ve got news for you: Chances are inside that case, half a dozen dust bunnies are dancing around your hard drive, leeching onto your CPU fan and fluttering about your motherboard having a grand old time. This is not good. Today we’ll go over how to clean out the guts of your computer, tighten, tune and oil things up to make your PC happier, healthier, and more likely to stick around longer.

Sure enough, she walks us through the process, from opening up our system to dusting it out with compressed air, all the way through lubricating our system fans to make sure they run nice and smoothly in the future. They’re simple, quick tips that will instantly make a huge improvement in your computer’s performance – or at least its hygeine.

[ Lifehacker :: Spring Cleaning for Your Computer: Evacuate PC Dust Bunnies ]

The beautiful thing about this tiny, tiny crossbow is that it can fire real bolts and do some serious damage with them.

The crossbow is made by the same person who made the tiny cannon that made the viral video rounds a while back, and just like the tiny cannon, this puppy can put on the hurt. Best of all, he completely intended it to be a beautiful piece of jewelry: it just happens to also be able to effectively fire bolts over long distances with enough force to pop balloons and break through thin objects.

Here’s what the YouTube video description says:

built it entirely out of solid sterling silver and 22k gold (except the bow itself and the string which are made of steel).
It is all handmade and is an original design.
Although it is intended as a high-quality jewelry piece, it functions quite well as a miniature weapon and is able to inflict significant damage.

This miniature crossbow works in exactly the same way as the common full-size hunting crossbow, but in terms of power to weight ratio, the mini crossbow is almost 4X stronger.

It shoots three types of handmade aluminum arrows:
1. Basic (steel-tipped) arrows
2. Ramming arrows
3. Flare arrows

It took me many hours and countless experiments to build and perfect this mini-crossbow and its arrows. Every part was tested and modified countless times until the optimal technical and ergonomic level was reached, as well as becoming a thing of beauty.
The mini-crossbow was much harder to build than the mini-cannon which appears in my previous videos.

With that said, here’s the video:

[ Mini Crossbow Shooting Targets ]