15 Awesome Projects Worth Tackling on the Extra Day of Your Long Weekend

Looking for a project to make the most out of your long holiday weekend? Here are 15 of our favorite DIY and how-to projects, most of which you can tackle in the time left in your holiday. Photo by Morgan. Back Up and Play Your Wii Games from an External Hard Drive Connecting an external hard drive to your Wii to back up and play your games is a simple way to keep expensive discs out of harms way, decrease game load times, and organize your collection with swanky cover art. Here's how it works. More » Turn Your XBMC Media Center into a Video Game Console We love XBMC media centers for watching movies and TV, but if you like video games, they can do so much more. With a simple plug-in, some configuration, and a USB gamepad, you can play video games straight from your set-top box. More » Try Your Hand at Cracking a Wi-Fi Network's WEP Password You already know that if you want to lock down your Wi-Fi network, you should opt for WPA encryption because WEP is easy to crack. But did you know how easy? Take a look. More » Get Started with Usenet in Three Simple Steps Usenet is a wonderful service for finding and downloading digital media, giving you speed and reliability you won't find with other file-sharing options-like, say, BitTorrent. Here's a quick guide on setting up and getting started with Usenet. More » Boost Your BitTorrent Speed and Privacy BitTorrent's been around for a whopping ten years, but it continues to evolve and remains one of the best file-sharing tools available. If you really want to make your downloads soar-and keep Big Brother out of your business-this guide's for you. More » Build a Hackintosh Mac and Install OS X in Eight Easy Steps We'll likely update this guide with a new build once Lion comes out (read: soon), but if you're interested in taking the Lifehacker train to Hackintoshville, this step-by-step guide's a good place to start. More » Run Mac OS X in VirtualBox on Windows If you're on Windows, need to use OS X, but don't want to buy or build a new computer, reader Bobby Patton shows us how to run Snow Leopard in a virtual machine on Windows with just a few tweaks. More » Jailbreak Your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad Jailbreaking is a process that changes little by little with each iOS upgrade. Rather than always publishing new guides, we're simply going to keep this one up to date. If you want to jailbreak your iOS device, you've come to the right page. More » Downgrade Your iPhone 3G[S] from iOS 4 to iOS 3.1.3 A lot of iPhone 3G owners—myself included—have discovered that upgrading to iOS 4 has slowed their devices to a crawl. If you decide the new features and shortcuts just aren't worth the glacial performance, here's how to downgrade your iDevice. More » Plan Your Purchases for 2011 Good things, and better prices, come to those who wait. Buy your furniture now, laptops in April, appliances in September, and make other better-timed purchases with our buying guide, and you'll save a few bucks with off-season, inventory-moving prices. More » Turn Your Point-and-Shoot into a Super-Camera If you're using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you've got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box. With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on your existing camera. Let's transform your point-and-shoot into a super camera just by adding a little special sauce to its firmware. More » Transform Your DSLR into a Supercharged, Professional Video Camera If you've got one of Canon's amazing video-capable DSLRs, you know you've got a powerful camera. What you may not know is that you can add some incredible features, for free, with an open-source firmware add-on called Magic Lantern. Here's how. More » Burn Almost Any Video File to a Playable DVD Putting any old video file—like the DivX/Xvid-encoded videos you've downloaded with BitTorrent—onto a DVD to play on your TV can be a daunting task. There's plenty of software that tackles this sort of thing for a price, but as a lover of open source software, free's always my first choice. More » Play a Few Harmless Geek Pranks Being a geek in a world of "non-tech-savvy" people can get frustrating, but it has its advantages. Here are some of our favorite geeky pranks you can play on your unsuspecting co-workers and friends. More » Control Multiple Computers with a Single Keyboard and Mouse If you have two or more computers at one desk, you don't want two or more sets of keyboards and mice cluttering up your workspace, too. You can buy a hardware gadget that lets you share a single keyboard and mouse with several computers (which involves a mess of tangled wires), or you could use a free software solution called Synergy. More »