How Do It Work?

How do things work? People (myself included) are incredibly ignorant as to the workings of everyday devices and services. I recently performed surgery on a toaster, and I still don't know exactly how it works. I don't really know how a CD stereo works; How does it read the stream of 0's and 1's off of the disc, and then how does that translate into sound at the speakers? The sound has to be within certain frequencies, or I won't hear it. How do sound waves travel, or any energy wave?

The reason I thought of this is this: How does an Etch-a-Sketch work? I've never really thought about that. Obviously somebody was curious, so the folks at HowStuffWorks decided to delve it one's innards. There are all kinds of things like this around. How in the world do they work? I briefly searched around, trying to find how a Rubik's Cube works. I didn't find any answers that truly addressed the question. Surely somebody has taken one apart, but they didn't take the initiative and share their findings with us.

Like I said, there are tons of things you can look around at and wonder, how does that work? A good example for technologically inclined people is the Nintendo Wii. While this isn't a hands-on walk-through, it is interesting and tells some interesting facts.

Questions. They're why change occurs.