Useful plans to build a weatherproof wi-fi antenna. Great for sticking it to the man (your ISP) and sharing the cost of your connection with a few neighbors. This design supposedly triples the gain compared to a standard antenna.

Compact Powerful Weatherproof Wifi Antenna [link]

Wanting to take full control of his Christmas tree, Brian from Hackszine used the open-source Arduino microcontroller to drive a homemade grid array of 64 LEDs. Pretty nice. Again, a nice project that can be decontextualized, rehashed and reinterpreted in the true hacker/xmas spirit.

Arduino-Powered Holiday Lights [link] [via]

I’m guessing that there are thousands of tons of perfectly good earphones in landfills today, all because their owners threw them away when the mini jack connector came loose, broke off, or got all “squelchy”. This instructable should be printed on the packaging of the earphones when you buy them. It teaches you how to fix the connector when (intentionally not if) it gets damaged.

There’s one thing that bothers me about it though, it’s the look of the finished repair. Very sketchy. I would have used heat-shrink tubing instead, which would look much nicer and be super durable. This set aside, it’s still a nice and useful instructable.

Mini Audio Connector Repair [link]

Here’s a cool instructable on how to turn your fridge into a Lite-Brite. I find the project to be a bit destructive as it involves painting your fridge with conductive paint, but the concept could be taken out of context and you could build it differently. Perhaps as a hangable picture frame. This is something I’ll definitely look into.

Magnetic Refrigerator Lights [link] [via]