How To: Boost Your Wireless Signal With a Homemade Wifi Extender

It's amazing what a few sheets of tinfoil can do for the strength of your wireless signal. As shown above, by carefully folding tinfoil into a parabola, you can boost your wireless strength tremendously. The fellas in the video saw gains from 82% to just under 100%, though I only saw boosts of around five percent, so your mileage may vary. This project should only take about three minutes and will hopefully leave you with impressive results. If you don't want to attach unsightly parabolic boosters and you're using the same basic router as the fellas in the video, you can also upgrade your firmware to DD-WRT—a free hack that will turn your $60 router into a $600 router and allow you to boost your Wi-Fi signal from your router's control panel.

How To: Boost Your Wireless Signal With a Homemade Wifi Extender

Hack Attack: Turn your $60 router into a $600 router

Of all the great DIY projects at this year's Maker Faire, the one project that really caught my eye involved converting a regular old $60 router into a powerful, highly configurable $600 router. The router has an interesting history, but all you really need to know is that the special sauce lies in embedding Linux in your router. I found this project especially attractive because: 1) It's easy, and 2) it's totally free.

Hack Attack: Turn your $60 router into a $600 router

YouTube Annotations

YouTube added a new feature for video creators: annotations. "Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos. Use them to add background information about the video, create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene) or link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video."

YouTube Annotations

Two Quotes on Simplicity | Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English

The first is by Antione de Saint Exupéry, author of The Little Prince and a pioneer in aviation:

Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.

The second is by William of Occam (1288-1347) You might know the name from Occam's Razor.

It is vain to do more with what can be done with less.

Two Quotes on Simplicity | Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English

TinEye - Upload an Image and Find It on the Web

TinEye tries to do that and the best part is that it mostly succeeds. The new image search engine, powered by Idée's technology and currently in private beta, has an index of 487 million images (Google's index is at least 12 times bigger) and manages to find identical versions of an image or alterations. According to the FAQ, "TinEye frequently returns image results with colour adjustments, added or removed text, crops, and slight rotations. TinEye can also detect images that are part of a collage or have been blended with another image."

TinEye - Upload an Image and Find It on the Web: "TinEye - Upload an Image and Find It on the Web"

Ensode - Free PDF Unlock Online Utility (Beta)

Some PDF documents prevent the user from copying and pasting or printing it's contents. This sometimes presents a problem since the author of the PDF might have used a font that is not available in the sytem trying to read it. This page contains a free online utility that allows you to upload a PDF, once uploaded, a version of the PDF without printing or copying/pasting restrictions is displayed in a new browser window.

To unlock a PDF file, enter it's location in the "PDF file to unlock" field, by either typing it in the field or clicking on the "browse" button, then navigating to it's location.

The unlocked version of the PDF will be displayed in a new browser window, opened in the default PDF application for your system (usually Adobe Acrobat Reader)

Ensode - Free PDF Unlock Online Utility (Beta): "Free PDF Unlock Online Utility"

Page2RSS - Create an RSS feed for any web page

It is a service that helps you monitor web sites that do not publish feeds. It will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS aggregator.

Page2RSS - Create an RSS feed for any web page