You can turn some of your best gear into so much more with a few of the right modifications. The problem is, hacking your gadgetry often means voiding your warranty. Today, forget the shackles of warranty terms and dive right in.

10. Hack Your IKEA Furniture

IKEA furniture doesn't necessarily come with a warranty to void, but they have a ridiculously generous return policy. You can ensure you'll never be able to return your IKEA furniture by hacking, modding, and generating new uses for the inexpensive products they sell. For a full listing, check out our IKEA Hacks tag page, but favorites include the double LACK media center, the picture-ledge or door-stopper monitor stand, and using a door as a desk.

9. Hackintosh a Netbook

Even with the new MacBook Air, Apple doesn't exactly have a netbook. There's no super cheap, ultra low power mini laptop you can buy with OS X. You can make one however, and the Dell Mini 10v is an excellent candidate for Hackintoshing. While it's not your only option, it's one of the most OS X-compatible netbooks you can buy. We prefer more powerful machines, however, so if you don't want to void your netbooks warranty but want a fast OS X desktop, we recommend building one yourself. A Hackintosh Mac is a bit more work, but it's well worth the trouble and a very fun project.

8. Add Amazing New Features to Your Canon Camera

CHDK, or Canon Hacker's Development Kit, is a firmware enhancement that can turn your Canon point-and-shoot into a super camera. If your camera doesn't support RAW, CHDK can add it. CHDK can also make your exposure settings a lot more flexible (like adding support for extremely long and extremely short exposure lengths), it provides you with more on-screen information, and it runs tons of awesome program scripts. While it's only for Canon point-and-shoots, if that's what you've got it's well worth the effort and the voided warranty.

6. Add an Inexpensive Touchscreen to Your Netbook

If all the iPad touchscreen hype has got you drooling over touch capabilities but you don't want to sacrifice your keyboard, installing a touchscreen overlay to your netbook is a lot easier than you might think. As evidenced in the video above, awhile back I mutilated my Hackintoshed HP Mini 1000 to create a slim, OS X tablet computer and wrote a basic Adobe AIR application to create a heads up display. While adding a touchscreen is pretty easy, once you have one there are a lot of new possibilities for what you can do with it. Touch is a lot of fun, especially if you retain the versatility of a keyboard.

5. Replace Your Optical Drive with a Solid-State Drive

Solid-state drives, or SSDs, are expensive but well worth the investment. You can upgrade to a faster processor or add more RAM, but adding an SSD is really the most significant upgrade you can make. SSDs get very expensive as their spacial allotments grow larger, so one solution is ditching your optical drive to install an SSD in its place. That way you can keep your laptop's existing hard drive around for mass storage and use your new SSD as the boot disk. We have a guide for swapping your MacBook's optical drive for an SSD, but in theory you can perform this (or a similar) mod with virtually any laptop. If you do this, be sure to research how your laptop connects to its optical drive so you order a compatible SSD.

5. Turn a Pogoplug into a Fully-Featured Linux Web Server

Although a bit of work, turning your PogoPlug into a web server is completely worth the effort. You can pick up one of these devices for about $50 nowadays, and it makes for a really excellent web server. While it might be a little underpowered to serve up a popular site, it's at least capable of being a good staging server for your various projects. It runs surprisingly quick, and although the process is a little intimidating at first it's pretty easy to do. If you're in need of a low-power, local web server for your various coding projects the hacked PogoPlug is an excellent option.

4. Hack Your Wii for Homebrew

Any gaming console modifications will net you a voided warranty, but we love hacking the Wii for the convenience of backing up and playing games from an external hard drive. This is also a great way to play games out of your country's region. Whatever your reason for hacking, the convenience of having all your Wii games at the ready is hard to beat.