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 »

Prevent Windows from Auto Sleep, Standby or Hibernate

If you have noticed that keeping a system idle for some time say 10 minutes or so, dims the computer screen (by default) or 30 minutes puts the computer to sleep. This is the default settings of the power plan in Windows 7. But there are occasions when you need to run the system for than this time without getting it sleep or hibernated.

Say you are showing some presentation on the system but not moving the mouse or pressing the key dims the screen, which of course don’t look good. Or consider a situation where you are downloading something from the internet and using the system, then after 30 minutes you find it in sleep state.

You can easily change the power plan according to you but the thing is there are people who forget to change it back when done thereby compromising on the battery power. For this situation, here is a simple tool called Don’t Sleep.

Don’t Sleep is a simple to use and free tool that can prevent system shutdown, Standby, Hibernate, Turn Off and Restart when idle. What you need to do is just run the app, select the option you want to disable like that of shutdown or hibernate and it will start working on it instantly.

The tool can also be accessed over internet using the system’s IP address in any web browser.

Download Don’t Sleep

Top 10 Simple Privacy Tricks Everyone Should Use

Protecting your privacy on the internet these days seems like a hefty undertaking, but there are a few things you can do to protect your privacy with just the click of a button. Here are our favorite super-simple tricks. We've talked about our 10 favorite privacy hacks before, but a lot of times inducing a privacy-oriented overhaul on your workflow is time consuming, and sometimes it just might not fit the way you work (it's not imperative, of course, that everyone quit Facebook without quitting Facebook, and your less tech-savvy friends and relatives may not have the patience for the more involved set-ups. These tweaks are, instead, very simple tricks that we think everyone should use, whether you're a tin-foil hat wearer or you just want to reduce the spam in your email inbox. They're so simple, in fact, that even the less tech-savvy should have no problem setting them up with a few clicks. 10. Use Temporary Credit Cards to Avoid Repeat Billing Whether you want to add some extra security to your online purchases, or you just want to save yourself from overbilling,temporary credit cards are a great help. Most card issuers have them (usually called "safe shopping" cards or "gift cards"), and you can choose the card's spending limit, expiration date, and more. That way, you can make sure that automatic billing doesn't kick in unless you absolutely want it too (after all, it can't charge you if there's no money left on the card). Plus, if anyone ever gets a hold of your account information, all they have is a gift card with a spending limit, not your real credit card. Photo by _Dinkel_. 9. Leave Your Home Address Off Your GPS Unit If you aren't into everyone knowing where you are at all times, you'll want to make sure any given app doesn't share your location. Usually this is pretty simple: don't use services like Foursquare, turn off Facebook Places, etc. But don't ignore the obvious, either: the "Home" button on your smartphone or navigation unit, for example, could lead any car thief right to your home. Instead, use a nearby landmark as your "home" location—that way, your navigation unit will always lead you close enough so you know how to get back, but won't lead any ne'er-do-wells right to your front door. Photo by D'Arcy Norman. 8. Use a Fake Birthday for Web Signups Most of the information web sites ask for when you sign up is unnecessary, and sometimes even unsafe. Identity thieves can do quite a bit of damage with just your birthday. Make sure you don't post both the date and the year of your birthday on anything public like Facebook, and if you're required to use it for a web signup, just use an un-birthday to keep their demographic data in place, but without giving out all your personal information. 7. Change Your Gender for Less Annoying Ads If the ads on your favorite web site are particularly obnoxious, an easy way to avoid them is to try changing the gender on your account. Spotify, for example, seems to only advertise Spotify features and music albums to women. Similarly, setting your gender as male can help you escape the annoying diet or motherhood ads on certain sites if you're a woman. It differs from site to site which ads are less annoying, too. I don't really need the birth control pills Pandora's selling me, but those ads are far less intrusive than the giant, animated Bud Light ads it had when my account was "male". 6. Use HTTPS Whenever Possible HTTPS is a super easy way to stay safe on the net, and a lot of services will use it by default with a quick settings tweak. You can enable it on Facebook,Twitter, and Gmail by just ticking a checkbox. For everything else, there's theHTTPS Everywhere extension, which will use HTTPS on any site that allows it. 5. Use AdBlock, Even if You Don't Block Ads You may have heard a lot about extensions like AdBlock Plus, but ignored them because you want to support the sites you visit (and we thank you for that). However, AdBlock extensions are great privacy tools, even if you aren't blocking ads. They can keep you protected from known malware spreaders, and even keep sites like Pandora from hijacking your Facebook login. All you need is a few simple filters in place to put another brick on the privacy wall. 4. Save Yourself from IM Distractions and Annoyances There's nothing more annoying (or distracting) than getting an instant message from someone you don't want to talk to. Luckily, there are quite a few things you can do to keep your IMs more private, like only allowing your friends to message you, go invisible on a schedule, or only show your online status to the Facebook friends you actually like. 3. Use Disposable Email Addresses to Avoid Spam One of the best ways to wipe out spam in your inbox is to use a disposable email address for the internet's sketchier sites. If you visit a site that requires an email address but that you don't fully trust, using a service likepreviously mentioned Trashmailor the simpler 10 Minute Mail, you can use a quick temporary email address to get the necessary "confirmation email" and ignore any future spam that might come your way. 2. Create Secure, Easy-to-Remember Passwords While the most secure password is one you can't remember, there are a lot of tricks to creating easy, memorable passwords without making them easy to guess. We've shared many password-creation tricks before, likestoring your passwords in a dictionary, or making sure youuse multi-word phrases for better protection. Even just adding a space or two to your passwords can make it much harder to break—just make sure you have a good system in place so you can easily remember them all. 1. Keep Your Security Questions as Private as Your Passwords Strong passwords are important, but they're utterly useless if your "security question" is something anyone can answer. Instead of going the traditional security question route, you could use a formula to create a memorable, yet indecipherable security question, or even shift your hands on the keyboard. In addition, you could just use word association to make the question easy for you, but hard for others—e.g., "What's your mother's maiden name?" could be answered with your favorite Iron Maiden album instead.

All in One Compress/Archive Utility: IZArc

File compression or archiving saves lot of space but the thing is that there are lots of compression formats available today. It may be the case one of your friends, sends an email to you with some important file but in some weird compressed format that you haven’t heard till now. So what will you do? The answer is simple, if the file is in some compressed format, then you can decompress it easily.

With the help of this free tool called IZArc, you can create archives in any of the following formats like -ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP and ZOO.

Not only this, you can also create self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, convert from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more. IZArc also has build-in multi language support.

The tool also provides you with an additional feature of opening CD image files like ISO,BIN, CDI and NRG. You can even convert from image to another using this tool like from BIN to NRG or vice versa. The tool can also repair a broken archive for you, which is by far the best feature of it. Moreover the tool is free to use.

Download IZArc

GeeMail: Gmail Desktop Client to use Gmail outside the Browser

If you need to check your Gmail inbox time and again but don’t like opening the browserfor it, and configuring the Outlook seems complicated to you, then here is a desktop client solely for Gmail. Using this you can access your Gmail account and all the emails without running the browser.

GeeMail is a Gmail desktop client which is used to access your Gmail account and the emails inside it. You can not only read/send/forward/reply but also schedule the email in the offline mode. The biggest advantage of GeeMail is that it is very simple to use. You don’t need to configure it for any settings, just install it and run it using your Gmail login credentials.

Another major advantage of this is that it can be run in the offline mode that is it can be used to not only read the emails without internet connection but you can also schedule the email to be sent, which will be sent right away when you connect it to the internet connection.

The tool has a similar UI as compared to the actual Gmail, so that you don’t feel any troubles in understanding or using the tool for the first time. Moreover it can be used on any OS say Windows or Mac.

The only limitation is that it requires Adobe AIR to be installed in the system (which should not be a problem I guess).

Download GeeMail

How to Make Your Entire Home AirPlay-Compatible

Apple's new media-streaming technology, AirPlay, is a great way to stream devices across your home, but it only works on Apple-approved destinations out of the box. Here's how to make your entire home AirPlay-compatible, so that whether you're using Windows or Mac, Android or iOS, XBMC or another media center, you can stream media seamlessly between each. On its own, AirPlay only streams media from iTunes or iOS to the Apple TV or AirPort Express routers. You could make up for this disadvantage by using alternatives to AirPlay instead, but AirPlay is so simple to use, and the most well integrated option, that it's the best option out there for inter-device media streaming. With just a few third-party programs and tweaks, you can stream music, photos and video over AirPlay to nearly any device in your house—even the non-Apple ones. For a quick demonstration of how AirPlay works, see the video above. What You'll Need When you stream via AirPlay, you have two devices to worry about: the source (that is, the device doing the streaming), and the destination (the device receiving the media). So at minimum, you'll need one device you can set up as a source, and one device you can set up as a destination. Below, we'll explain how to set up: AirPlay Destinations: A Windows PC A Mac An iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch An Android Phone A Media Center Running XBMC, Boxee, or Plex Then we'll walk through how to set up: AirPlay Sources iOS Apps Not Designed to Work With AirPlay Desktop Apps Not Designed to Work With AirPlay An Android Phone Turning Unsupported Devices into AirPlay Destinations In this section, we'll detail how to set up Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and XBMC to work as AirPlay destinations. Remember that you'll need an AirPlay source, too, like iTunes, iOS, or one of the sources we talk about in the second section. Once you have them set up as destinations, all you need to do to play media on them is choose them from the AirPlay list on your source device, as seen at the left. Streaming to Windows If you have an iPhone but you use Windows on the desktop (or you just have a diverse house of Windows PCs and Macs), you can stream AirPlay music to Windows using free utilityShairport4w. It's a completely portable application that sits in your system tray, broadcasting your PC as an AirPlay destination. Sadly, it doesn't stream video, and there isn't currently a working AirPlay video player for Windows, so this is all we have. Streaming to Your Mac To stream media to your Mac,all you need is the simple, open source AirMac. It sits in your menu bar and broadcasts your Mac as an AirPlay-compatible device, so once you've started it up, it should show up in all the AirPlay menus around your house. Once you start streaming media to it, it will play in a new QuickTime X window. Streaming to iOS Streaming audio and video from iTunes to iOS is actually built-in to iTunes, but it isn't under the banner of AirPlay, which might cause a lot of people to miss it. All you need to do is log into Home Sharing in iTunes on the computer holding all the media, then log into Home Sharing in Settings > iPod on your iPhone or iPad (on iPod touches, it's in Settings > Music). Once you do, you should see a new "Shared" tab pop up in your iPod app (you might need to hit "More" to see it). From there, you can navigate to your iTunes library and play any music or video from that library, including videos that weren't purchased on iTunes. Sadly, if you want to stream from non-iTunes sources, you're out of luck for now—Apple keeps pulling apps that let you do this from the App Store, and those developers have yet to put their apps in Cydia for jailbroken users. Streaming to Android If you'd like to stream music to music on your Android phone, a simple app called AirBubble will set it up as an AirPlay destination. Just install the app (you'll need to make sure "Unknown Sources" is checked under Android's Settings > Applications), start it up, and you'll see "AirBubble" show up as an AirPlay destination in iTunes, iOS, and other streaming devices. You can then stream that music right to your phone as you would to anything else. Sadly, it does not stream video at this time. Streaming to XBMC, Boxee, and Plex If you have a home theater PC running XBMC, Boxee, or Plex, you can use the AirPlayerPython script to use it as an AirPlay destination.. Installation is different on every system, so we won't go too deeply into it here. Check out this page for more detailed installation instructions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. If you're running a Live XBMC installation like on our standalone XBMC media center, you'll want to follow these instructions to get AirPlay up and running. Note that AirPlayer only streams video; it won't work with music. Turning Unsupported Devices into AirPlay Sources iTunes and iOS will stream music and video just fine, but if you listen to music and watch videos using other apps or platforms, here's how to turn them into AirPlay sources. Streaming from Other Apps in iOS While the Music and Video apps in iOS will stream over AirPlay out of the box, apps like Safari or VLC won't. If you've jailbroken your iPhone or iPad, however, you can usepreviously mentioned AirVieoEnabler to enable AirPlay in other iOS apps. Just install the app from Cydia, restart your device, and you should see the AirPlay icon pop up in most other media playing apps. Streaming from Android One of our favorite Android media players, DoubleTwist, can actually stream music and video via AirPlay with its $5 AirSync add-on. Once you've installed doubleTwist and AirSync, open up doubleTwist's Settings and go to "AirTwist & AirPlay". Check the "AirTwist & AirPlay" box to enable it. Now, whenever you play a song or video in doubleTwist, you'll see a small Wi-Fi icon next to the player controls. Tap this to pick from a list of AirPlay-compatible devices and stream the video to them. Streaming from Other Apps on Your PC or Mac If you want to stream audio from, say, a non-iTunes music player or your browser to an AirPort Express (or other AirPlay-enabled device), you have a few options. The best option is Airfoil, which is a $30 app for both Windows and Mac that will sync and stream audio from any source to AirPlay-compatible hardware. If you want to do that for free,previously mentioned RaopX will do the trick nicely on OS X, albeit with a bit of extra work and a significant audio delay. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a good free option for Windows.