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Enjoy your holiday season! Stay warm, safe, and ninja!

Deck the halls with boughs of USB Christmas lights! Today, its time to get your hands dirty with a DIY project. You could be generic and use a wall-outlet powered Christmas string of lights, but if you are looking for a fun project to dress up your mobile device (Laptop?), or your Desktop computer, then this is for you!

What you need:

• USB Connector Cable
  (The male end of a USB cable… I had some spare useless USB cables laying around)
• Battery operated Christmas lights (5 volt powered: 2-3 battery)
• A few miscellaneous tools

Make these lights!

1. Cut your USB cable in half (If it has a plug on each side).
   You want to strip the end of the USB cable to access the red (+) and black (-) wires. Disregard the metal wrapping and the two other colored wires.
2. Cut the battery pack off of your Christmas lights. Be sure to note the polarity of the wires (+ and -).
3. Strip the two ends of your Christmas lights.
4. Solder or simply tie + electrical tape both positives and negatives together from the USB cable and the string of lights. Positive to positive, negative to negative.
5. Plug your USB lights into your USB port, and dress your desk (or computer) up with some festive USB Christmas lights!

Tip! Colored and white lights work, LEDs work best because they are most power efficient. They must be battery powered lights or this will not work, USB only outputs 5 +/- 0.25v. Standard wall-powered Christmas lights consume at least 12 volts.

Christmas is literally right around the corner. Less than three weeks from now, the Holiday season will be over. If you haven’t hung up any Christmas decorations yet, now is the time! When you go to check if your lights are working this year and find some broken, Terry Ritter has the solution for you on fixing those Christmas lights.

The lights in these strings [Christmas lights] are basically in series, and any open connection, whether in a wire, at a socket, or even inside a bulb, will turn off that whole circuit. Normally the bulbs have a “shunt” which shorts the bulb when it experiences full line voltage. That leaves the bad bulb OFF, and the rest of that circuit ON, which shows which bulb to replace. Unfortunately, the shunt often fails to operate, and then an entire circuit is off.

Obviously, if the lights your trying to fix are 5 years old, its probably in your best interest to buy some new LED Christmas lights. If the lights your trying to fix are from last year, then you might want to do some diagnosing.

[Via Ciphers By Ritter]