Here's what you'll need for this home-made smartphone stand, based off a slightly modified version of a design first aired by Flickr user TheCase:

• Two hard-plastic cards (we've used old iTunes gift cards, but old credit cards would work too)

• Sharp scissors (ask your parents before using them)

• This template.

First, download the template and use it to measure and mark up your plastic cards. Once you've drawn your outline, cut carefully, remembering not to slice up the large, triangular part you get out of the middle incision. You'll need this later to make the back part of the stand.

You should end up with two plastic cards that look like a square-root symbol and a triangular off-cut.

From there, carefully make the incisions that allow the whole thing to clip together.

Grab your off-cut, and use it to brace the back of the stand. Without it, the whole thing will likely collapse in on itself.

From there, grab your smartphone and test it out.

Once it works, stare at your own magnificence, and rejoice that it didn't cost you a cent.

If you liked making your own smartphone stand, we've also put together a how-to on making your own ultrabook stand.

Watch the video for some arts, crafts and Prometheus trailer fun.

A robotics student at Pennsylvania State University in the US has built a turret that talks, tracks movement with a laser-guided system and fires foam bullets at its target.

The turret sees the world via a webcam, controlled via a script written in MATLAB. Most importantly, it sings out all of the adorable phrases we've come to enjoy hearing while we're being shot at in a test chamber.

Now that the technology is working, the student is building a shell to make it look more like the Portal turret.

This isn't the only real-life Portal kit we've seen. Last year, we were delighted to see that Atlassian built its own Portal-style videoconferencing system to connect its offices.

Watch the video to see a naked turret shoot a man in a pink shirt.

In a photo walkthrough posted to Reddit this week, a user found that by inserting Australian reference tags into the US store's URL, the transaction is processed at lower prices than what you can get on the Australian Adobe store.

We love a bargain, and hate the Australia tax, so we thought we'd give it a go.

Has Adobe already become wise to our act?

Watch the video to find out.

This unfortunately named "BlueBusters" spoof video was recently unearthed and posted to YouTube by Network World. It shows three protagonists armed with Macintosh-powered proton packs wandering around, zapping away IBM PCs and replacing them with Apple units.

The video ends with an amazing shot of the late Steve Jobs dressed in one of the weaponised Macintosh suits, singing along to the BlueBusters adaptation of the Ghostbusters theme song.

The clip was supposedly put together for Apple's 1984 worldwide staff meeting in Hawaii.

One YouTube comment sums it up perfectly: "these are like leaked sex tapes for Apple nerds".

Watch the video to see Apple cross the streams.

If you're a nerd, it's tough to get excited about the office football-tipping competition. I mean, it's just a bunch of strong men doing laps on a field, right? It's also tough to stay on task on Friday afternoons with so many great cat pictures on the internet.

Why not kill two birds with one nerd? Combat Friday afternoon distractions and invent your own tipping competition at the same time, with Google Maps racing.

Decide on a route, draw up a weekly leader board and then head on over to the Google Maps racing page and belt through your own urban rally course.

Watch the video for the inaugural Sydney rally special stage.

With more and more access and transaction cards going contactless, it's OK to be a little paranoid and invest in a Faraday cage wallet.

A Faraday cage wallet serves to disperse electromagnetic fields across a metal surface to stop them from interacting with cards. A good one can cost anywhere between $30 and $200, which isn't so bad when you think about the retail cost of a standard folding leather wallet. But here at Nerdcam, we like to do things on the cheap, so today we'll look at how to make one for less than $10.

To build this Faraday wallet, we tried a modified version of a method developed by the geniuses over at Wired. The base of the wallet follows the Wired design, but our method splits off when we go on to create the card pouch.

You'll need:

• Duct tape
• Sticky tape
• Aluminium foil
Scissors (ask your parents before using them, kids).

Cut six strips of duct tape, 16 centimetres in length, and lay them on top of each other to create two panels of three strips each.

From there, cut or fold two pieces of aluminium foil to stick to the duct-tape panels you've created. You'll want the aluminium foil to be about a centimetre smaller in area than the duct-tape panel. Place the aluminium foil onto the duct-tape panels, and secure the edges in place with sticky tape.

From there, sandwich the two pieces of duct tape together to create the wallet, and fold it in half.

Set your sandwich aside for a moment, and cut two more pieces of duct tape approximately 8 centimetres in length. This will be for the card pouch.

Line the card pouch with a strip of aluminium foil, using the same method we did to create the wallet section, and stick it onto one of the wallet's inside halves to create the card pouch.

Gently lift the top of the pouch you just stuck down to place your card into it.

From there, you can touch up the corners of the wallet, or apply your own designs to make it look a little nicer, and you're done.

Head to your nearest contactless swipe point to test your work. If the card is still able to be used, you haven't covered it completely with aluminium foil.

Alternatively, if you don't want to make your own wallet, you can always just line one particular card pouch in your existing wallet with a bi-fold strip of aluminium foil.

This method, however, requires a little more finesse than merely creating a foil-lined wallet, as the card needs to be completely covered, but still be easily accessible.

Watch the video for a hands-on how-to of both methods.

First, you need to figure out if the pixel is stuck, or actually dead. Dead pixels will either be solid black or solid white, depending on the panel. If it's not, then it's likely just stuck.

There are a few different methods to fix a stuck pixel, but this is an easy one to try (at your own risk).

To flush that stuck pixel out, display an all-black image across the screen, and, using a rounded object, like the end of a make-up brush or a sharpie, gently tap on the stuck pixel until it rights itself. Alternatively, you can add light pressure to the area with a damp cloth or tissue.

You want to make sure that you don't do more damage than you started with, so open up a full-screen white image after your work is done to make sure there's no lasting damage.

You can also try using a few different screensavers, YouTube videos or software programs to rectify your issue.

If nothing works, better start fishing out that warranty card and filling out the requisition forms for a new monitor.

First, you'll want to download those old photos to your local computer using Instaport.

Instaport will ask you to authorise your account, and, from there, you can click on the "New Export" button. Instaport will put all of your photos into a ZIP file before you can listen to a single Death Cab for Cutie track.

Once the export is ready, just click the "Download Photos" button and bam! Your photos are stored locally.

Now that those photos are safe, you can rid yourself of your Instagram account. Head on over to the Instagram help page for account deactivation. Your log-in should still be remembered in your browser from when you used Instaport.

Select your reason for leaving as "Privacy Issues" and enter your password again to confirm. From there, hit the delete button and feel a pang of sadness as Instagram bids you a fond farewell.

From there, you won't have to worry about incriminating photos stopping you from getting at your dream corporate job anymore.

Watch the video above to see how to remove your Instagram photos.

Account Activity allows you to see how many emails you've sent per month, who they were sent to, and compare it with previous months.

It's only a beta version right now and it's kind of buried inside Google's slew of products. Today, we're going to show you how to get at it.

Watch the video to get your number geek on

The video sees Qantas completely revamping the Boeing 747 aircraft, tearing the innards down to the bare metal and replacing the carpet throughout, while replacing seats in economy and business class across two decks.

New in-flight entertainment screens are fitted and tested, bathing the cabin in a lovely blue hue as the workers busily work on the finer details in the cabin. Qantas technicians then seal the hangar before completely repainting the aeroplane's livery in a process that sees the craft lifted up to make sure that nothing's missed.

Qantas has today announced that it's putting another one of these re-tooled luxury 747s into service on its long-haul routes between Australia and the US later this month.

Alison Webster, Qantas executive general manager, Customer Experience, said in a statement that the 747s are being aligned with the airline's luxury Airbus A380 aircraft.

The new 747 marks the fourth re-tooled aircraft that has gone into service under the new strategy. Qantas added that it will have nine of the shiny 747s in service by the end of the year.

Watch the video above to see the aircraft makeover.

Mike Daisey
(Credit: Luke Hopewell/ZDNet Australia)

Daisey brought his show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" to the Sydney Opera House last October during the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Before the show hit the Sydney stage, the Sydney Opera House got in touch, asking if Nerdcam would be interested in speaking with Daisey. Naturally, we leapt at the opportunity.

Daisey told ZDNet Australia that his show presents two interwoven stories; one being the rise of Steve Jobs, his expulsion from the company and eventual return to lead it to new heights, while the other was a recounting of his trip to China, where he went to the factories of Foxconn and spoke to the workers who make Apple products in what he declared were truly third-world conditions.

During our interview, Daisey described the himself as a monologist and described his performance as "kind of storytelling and kind of journalism".

It seems that statement revealed more than we originally thought.

Last week, This American Life (which had featured Daisey on a show aired in January of this year) exposed the monologist as having fabricated much of his story, thanks to the work of Rob Schmitz, a radio correspondent working in China who tracked down and interviewed Daisey's translator.

Host of This American Life, Ira Glass, brought Daisey back onto the program and challenged the facts aired not only in Daisey's stage show, but also what he broadcast to This American Life's hundreds of thousands of listeners. Daisey apologised for his misrepresentation, saying only that he had worked hard to meld together a carefully constructed blend of fact and fiction to make people feel something about the subject matter.

The fiction in Daisey's stage monologue included the fabrication of having spoken to a group of Foxconn workers and the fabrication of the n-Hexane poisoning incident at a Foxconn facility.

Daisey admitted taking shortcuts in his passion to be heard on the issue of workers' rights:

Everything I have done in making this monologue for the theatre has been toward that end — to make people care. I'm not going to say that I didn't take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work.

My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret, is that I had it on [This American Life] as journalism and it's not journalism. It's theatre.

I use the tools of theatre and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is that it makes — has made — other people delve.

Daisey said that the presentation wasn't held to rigorous journalistic standards and apologised to those who felt betrayed by his words.

As This American Life has apologised for airing Daisey's fabrications, so too do we. The original Nerdcam broadcast was not sufficiently vetted prior to publishing and we pledge to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Apple threw open the doors to the Sydney flagship store this morning to sell the new iPad, complete with Retina Display, new camera and beefed-up processor, to customers who had been lining up for days.

If you thought that the enthusiasm of Apple staff would begin to wane after the death of Steve Jobs, take a minute to watch just how special they make these customers feel, using everything from dancing, whooping, cheering and clapping right through to getting a soccer chant up for the new tablet owners.

Is this something you want from a retail experience?

What in the name of Linus Torvalds is the Raspberry Pi, you ask? The Raspberry Pi is a computer roughly the size of a credit card, featuring a CPU clocking in at 700MHz, with 256MB of RAM and a bevy of ports, including a USB and LAN port, an SD card slot, HDMI out, audio out and, of course, a power port. The Model B Raspberry Pi system-on-a-chip sold out within minutes on 29 February, leaving suppliers RS Components and Element 14 flooded with registrations of interest for the device.

But what can you do with it? Here are five ideas to get you started.

You could use it as a media centre or storage solution by referencing the guides on the Raspberry Pi forums to install XBMC via an SD card. From there, connect a couple of massive external hard drives and stick it all in a cupboard or behind your television or up your nose!

Remember that it's not the world's fastest PC for streaming media, but for 38 bucks, who cares?

Tired of all the stupid tablets on the market and how they don't suit your needs? Why not make your own? Raspberry Pi Foundation says it's not unfeasible to plug in a touchscreen module and use it as an input device. From there you can install Android via the SD card and build your own tablet. You're on your way to being the next Steve Jobs!

If you're like me, you dislike giving tech support to everyone in your family. Why not build something for them that's damn near unbreakable for your nan? Run Fedora, throw a monitor, mouse and keyboard at it and you're away!

If you're hyper paranoid, you can use the Raspberry Pi as your very own Doomsday cloud. Essentially, what you do is put all of your precious information onto the Raspberry Pi, build a case around it and stick it in a safe somewhere. From there, you've built yourself a secure computer that you know everything about and that nobody else can access. Much like a burn box, it's what you grab when your house is going up in smoke!

Finally, you can use it as a digital time capsule. Build a resilient case around the device after you've filled it with all the relics from the time you live in and go bury it somewhere. Create a fun little message on it, too, if you like. Tell future generations where it is and let them marvel at our primitive technology, Nyan Cat and internets when they dig it up.

Let us know what you'd do with the Raspberry Pi in the comments section below.

Watch the video to see Luke in a bin, rolling around on a floor and hiding in a cupboard.

We sat down in the studio with Brian Haverty, CBS Interactive's editorial director and fluent Japanese speaker, to challenge Siri's linguistic capabilities.

Challenges included, "what's the weather like in Osaka?", "read my new text message" and "what is the meaning of life?".

Needless to say, the service works well, but it still shows signs that it's a beta product, given its inability to look up directions or understand "how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood".

Watch the video to see two grown men try to make a machine say "domo arigato, Mr Roboto".

Jonathan Corbett took to his TSA Out of Our Pants! blog to show the world a simple smuggling method that involves sewing a small pouch into the side of a shirt and stashing a metal item in there to take it through TSA body scanners.

Corbett found that metallic and warning items appear on the TSA scanners as black on a white subject when detected, and show the subject's outline on a black background. He subsequently used the black on black to his advantage, and was able to slip a metallic case through two different TSA scanners by hiding it on his side.

"I bought a sewing kit from the dollar store, broke out my 8th-grade home ec[onomics] skills, and sewed a pocket directly on the side of a shirt. Then I took a random metallic object, in this case a heavy metal carrying case that would easily alarm any of the 'old' metal detectors, and walked through a backscatter x-ray at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. On video, of course.

"While I'm not about to win any videography awards for my hidden-camera footage, you can watch as I walk through the security line with the metal object in my new side pocket. My camera gets placed on the conveyer belt and goes through its own x-ray, and, when it comes out, I'm through, and the object never left my pocket."

Thinking that it might have been a fluke the first time around, Corbett tried again at the Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport, with one of the TSA's millimetre-wave machines.

"With the metallic object in my side pocket, I enter the security line, my device goes through its own x-ray, I pass through and exit with the object without any complaints from the TSA," he said, adding that such a flaw poses huge security risks.

"While I carried the metal case empty, by [some]one with [a malicious intention], it could easily have been filled with razor blades, explosives or one of Charlie Sheen's infamous seven-gram rocks of cocaine. With a bigger pocket, perhaps sewn on the inside of the shirt, even a firearm could get through. It's important to note that any metal object of any size can use this technique."

Corbett warned, however, that the scanner flaw isn't perfect, as it often triggers false positives that can lead to a physical inspection of your person.

"I don't urge you to try to bring contraband through security, as the nude body scanners often have false positives; so, while the metal on your side might get through, a button on your shirt or a sweaty armpit might 'look suspicious', and earn you a pat-down anyway."

Corbett sent his findings to the TSA and urged them to take action, while at the same time accusing them of being "worse than ineffective" at stopping contraband from making its way through airports.

"The TSA must immediately end the nude body-scanner program, and return to the tried-and-true metal detectors that actually work, and work without invading our privacy, as well as implement better solutions for non-metallic explosives, such as bomb-sniffing dogs and trace-detection machines," he added.

Australia is set to install new body scanners in its international airports after a successful trial of the technology last year.

(Front page image credit: Department of Infrastructure and Transport)

It's very simple to do and you'll only need a few things to do it.

You'll need a copy of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, available for download here, a USB drive with around 4 gigabytes of storage, a backed-up Mac with around 20 gigabytes of storage free for partitioning, and something to keep you occupied for about an hour.

You can install the Windows 8 beta much faster using a virtual machine product like Parallels, but we're doing it on the cheap today using Boot Camp Assistant.

Watch the video for the Windows 8 beta how to.

(Also, the new Avengers trailer has to be seen to be believed.)

After some searching online, I discovered that the best laptop stand for my 11-inch MacBook Air would set me back $69.95, and would take a few days to be shipped to me. Sure, it looked nice, I thought, but I can think of a few better things to do with $69.95 than buying a laptop stand.

So, here's how to make your own and save yourself a few pennies.

What you'll need:

• The lid from a spindle of CDs
• Scissors
• Your favourite ultrabook
• Three minutes to spare.

Measure the thickest point of your ultrabook to the depth of the lid, and cut a slit on each side of the lid for the ultrabook to rest in. Make sure to avoid the tabs on each side that are meant to secure the lid to the spindle.

Then just grab your favourite ultrabook, and test it out!

Watch the video for one we prepared earlier.

Two weeks ago, we told you we'd be building our own weather balloon with a camera attached so that we could photograph near space, with the intention of showing you how to do it too. Since then, we've spoken to a few people who have some interesting advice.

This week we heard from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) and the Bureau of Meteorology.

CASA regulations state that weather balloons often don't need to be registered for use in Australian airspace due to their size and speed, but it did say that it needs to be notified of what you're doing, especially if you plan on sending an unmanned craft up above 400 feet in the air.

CASA also stated that you'll need to inform every aerodrome within 30 kilometres of your launch site of your intentions. An aerodrome is anything from a major international airport, right down to a tiny, rural airstrip.

It's also important that you avoid all commercial jet routes if sending something up thousands of feet in the air, so that you don't send your unmanned craft into the engine of a jetliner.

We also spoke to the Bureau of Meteorology who had some important warning information to impart.

Watch the video to hear about things exploding.

After a year of planning, this screen, housed in the Darling Harbour IMAX complex, was set to be replaced, so Nerdcam went behind the scenes to watch the monster go up.

The screen is more than just a piece of perforated vinyl painted with silver paint, it's a dizzying array of numbers. It weighs over 800 kilograms. It will take 350 kilograms of paint to cover over 12 days. It covers over 1000 square metres. It takes 31 riggers just to lift it into place. It took 12 months of planning and $250,000 to install.

IMAX CEO Mark Bretherton said that IMAX Australia is replacing the screen to give viewers a bigger, better and brighter 3D experience, but added that the company won't be replacing the projector anytime soon in favour of digital due to the issues involved.

Watch the video for some epic screen action and a chat with Mark Bretherton or see the photos here.

NASA recently received the first images from one of its Gravity Recovery and Interior Recovery (GRAIL) spacecraft that were sent to photograph the dark side of the moon. These images will be used as part of an education program for middle school students in the US.

The GRAIL mission sees two washing-machine-sized spacecraft orbit the moon with a view to mapping lunar gravity, learning about its interior and thermal history. Congratulations to NASA for successfully kicking off this complex mission and best of luck for the remainder of the project.

You're likely asking why we're talking about space so much. That's because we're going to go there. All of us, together.

Nerdcam is officially announcing a plan to journey to the moon, or as close as it can possibly get using a large balloon attached to a tiny craft. Best-case scenario, we'll be able to photograph the curvature of the earth before plummeting back down through the atmosphere at an estimated speed of close to 40km/h with a camera on hand to capture the whole ordeal.

Sounds fun, but what we need is a mission. It's all well and good to go to space, but we need a reason to be there. What we want you to do, dear reader, is to leave a note in the Talkback below about what we should do.

Should we send up an Australian Lego man to show those Canadians what a proper makeshift space program looks like? Should we send a signal to distant galaxies to ask them politely not to attack Australia? Should we attempt to contact the Doctor and his TARDIS? Should we just go up there to take some pretty pictures?

Also, if you want to go one better, you can leave your golden idea for a spacecraft we could make, too. Should it just be a bit of rigging fired into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, or a foam esky craft with a hole for the photos? You decide.

Welcome to the Nerdcam space program.

Watch the video to see the dark side of the moon, and our new mission briefing.