Weblog mental_floss rounds up 10 short and sweet words for getting rid of your tough-to-unload but point-heavy letters at your rousing weekend game of Scrabble. We're talking words like Aa, Qat, Zax, Cwm, Xu, and five others that are short enough to fit anywhere and will hold up to a dictionary inquest. Got your own favourites? Expand our vocabulary in the comments. Photo by allyrose18.

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Nintendo doesn't exactly advertise it, but the remotes for the Wii gaming console—including the balance board that comes with Wii Fit—have Bluetooth capabilities. That means you can connect your Wii peripherals to your computer to operate the media centre hooked up to your TV, play emulated games with a Nunchuk, Classic Controller, or even a Balance Board, and pretty much have them do anything you can do with a keyboard. Let's walk through linking up your Wii peripherals and putting them in control of your Mac, PC, or Linux box.

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Windows only: If you have a game installed on your computer but have lost the original documents that came with it, you can still retrieve the product keys for safekeeping. Game Key Revealer is a small portable application that can help you recover your lost game keys.

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If you're the kind of person who salivated when you learnt how to hack the Wii, can name every Mario game without getting confused and would purchase the overseas and local versions of a censored title like Fallout 3 just so you could make YouTube clips demonstrating the difference, we may have the perfect job for you. Logan at our sibling title Kotaku is moving on, so Kotaku needs an editor -- the perfect opportunity for a gaming enthusiast with energy, enthusiasm and excellent expression,. Get the full lowdown at the Kotaku site.

You've hacked your Wii to run homebrew apps and play back DVDs without any difficult hardware hacking and now you want to dive into more of your homebrew options. Let's take a closer look at how to install new homebrew applications on your Wii through the homebrew channel, play back virtually any video or audio format, run old-school video game emulators, and more. Oh, and we'll play a little Doom, naturally.

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Looks like the legal action against Scrabulous by the owners of the Scrabble trademark has finally kicked in worldwide. I'd previously reported on how to work around the block for US players, but now accessing Scrabulous in Australia results in a "this application is not available to you" message. All references to the Facebook version have also been removed from the main Scrabulous site (where the game remains playable). If you want a Scrabble-style wordgame within Facebook itself, your options are the official version (which annoyingly doesn't let you play anyone in the States) or the Scrabulous successor Wordscraper. If there's other word games on Facebook you'd recommend for leisure and vocabulary extension, share them in the comments.

Wired's How-To Wiki details step-by-step how to set up port forwarding to make sure you're getting the best experience from your Xbox 360 and Xbox Live game play. Depending on your router you may never have needed to do this, but if you've ever experienced long wait-times between games and other suspicious network problems, there's a fair chance that a quick trip through your router's settings could make a big difference. While you're at it, you may be interested in tweaking your router to ensure your Xbox gets the lion's share of your bandwidth when you need it. Finally, now that you're gaming is set up for top performance, maybe it's time you do more than just game on your 360.

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Millions of homes have an Xbox 360 sitting in the living room, but if you're only using your 360 to game, you're missing out. With some free tools and a little elbow grease, that compact, networked PC sitting under your television can offer a whole lot of useful media functionality. The fact is, your 360 is capable of so much more than just gaming. Let's take a look at a few ways you can get more from your Xbox 360. (We covered some of this territory in our recent guide to what to do with your new cheap Xbox 360, but there's plenty of extra goodness to be had.

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As both Nick at Gizmodo and Logan at Kotaku reported this morning, Microsoft has dropped the Australian price of the Xbox 360, making the cheapest model $349. Those price cuts might well tempt you to add the Xbox 360 to your technology arsenal, but remember that the machine isn't just a console and media player. Check after the jump for five mods you can make to your new discounted Xbox to render it more useful and more efficient.

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The Screen Play gaming column at The Age and SMH is regularly turned over to readers, and the latest contribution from James "DexX" Dominguez is a corker: a comparison of whether it's cheaper to buy games (and controllers) from Australian stores, overseas importers or on eBay. The results unsurprisingly vary by platform, but there was hardly any context where local purchases were cheaper, even after factoring in postage from Hong Kong. Not good news for games retailers, who already have the challenges of piracy and the ludicrous games rating system to contend with. (Thanks to MrAndyPuppy for the heads up.)
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