Weak wireless signal? Boost it for free with aluminum foil!
I had always heard it was possible to increase the range of my wireless router using tinfoil but I never really needed to try. That need has suddenly arisen: since setting up my home office (which the modem and router is in for the strongest possible signal on my work computer), my wifi signal to the living room is pretty weak and has frequent dropouts. Since my gaming/video computer is in the living room hooked to my 1080p 52″ Sanyo, it’s kind of a big deal when you keep getting booted from Left4Dead servers or have problems seeing pics in Facebook.
Read MoreWhat you need to know before buying an Amazon Kindle
The Kindle 2 is pretty damn amazing, but there are some misconceptions about it’s features and a few things you should know before ordering.
Read MoreReading PDFs on Kindle for free
After much anticipation, I have finally received my new Kindle 2 in the mail. Before I purchased the Kindle, I was assured by Amazon’s Kindle purchase page that PDF was natively supported. As I have a rather large collection of PDF eBooks and documents from Project Gutenberg and more, I was sold. Having my entire library with me (which would weigh a few metric tons if printed to paper) would now weigh only 10 ounces and fit in the palm of my hand. Brilliant!
Read MoreHow to use proxies in iMacros Firefox plugin, and adjust firefox settings on the fly!
If you haven’t used iMacros for Firefox yet, you’re missing out. You can do things like record your browsing habbits (button clicks, entered text, responses to dialogs, etc) to automate them. It has CSV support, so you can even use stored data to dynamically execute macros, directly from Firefox on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Read Moreabout:config hacks in Firefox 3
This is going to be a quick tutorial of a few of the cool things you can do with the Firefox 3 about:config window.
The about:config window lets you change pretty much all of Firefox’s settings. Be careful when you’re adjusting your settings, as you can give Firefox brain damage 
Commonly Misused Phrases
I don’t want to say that this is for the guys I work with… but yeah. This is for the guys I work with. This is the only language (most) of you know, and primary to most…. don’t you think you should at least understand it?
Read MoreMaking the Ubuntu Switch Easier – 30 Essential Linux Applications
Below is a collection of cloned applications that I used on Windows that made the switch to Ubuntu (almost) seamless.
Read MoreInstalling Valve’s STEAM and Counterstrike on Ubuntu
This is only my experience downloading and installing Steam and Valve games like Counterstrike 1.6 and TFC on Linux. Your experience may vary.
Read MoreGuide to Roms (console game emulation) on Ubuntu
Gaming console emulation on PC is nothing new. An emulator is a program that mimics the hardware and firmware from a gaming console (such as the Super Nintendo), to play roms. Roms are just computerized copies of console games. For PSX and other CD-based systems Roms are called ISOs. This guide is just my personal notes on emulating the different game consoles on Ubuntu Linux (Feisty 7.04 in this article).
Read MoreUbuntu Linux Games – Top Picks
If you’ve switched to Ubuntu (as I have) or any other Linux distribution, you may consider the following free (and in most cases open-source) games, as they’ve been favorites of mine for some time now.
Read MoreGraphics from the Command Line
ImageMagik is something nearly all developers can all appreciate. It’s a little software suite that allows you to create or modify batch images on-the-fly from PHP, C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and several other languages. It can be tricky getting used to, but I’ve located a guide that explains the basics. Once reading through this, you should be pretty familiar with ImageMagik, and how you might apply it in your applications:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-graf/?ca=dnt-428
Read MoreColorization Using Optimization
This is a bit advanced, but the outcome is very cool. This process takes a black and white (or color) image, lets you scribble in some colors, and the colorization application accurately fills in and shades the rest. It can even do animated clips, as shown below.
Read MoreAttention GIMP Image Editor Users!
For those of you not familiar with the GIMP image editor., it’s a powerful cross-platform image editor licensed under the GNU GPL. Out of the box, GIMP is pretty powerful, but it can parallel (or as some might claim – exceed) the usability of Photoshop once you add some community-created plugins or scripts.
In 2006 a thread started at nintendo.com detailing some very useful tricks for the GIMP image editor. While the tutorials on this site are geared towards creating and editing video-game related images (signatures, banners, avatars, etcetera), the tips can be quite useful for all GIMP users.
Read MoreStencil Revolution
I stumbled upon an interesting thread on stencilrevolution.com
Check it out. It outlines a process to inexpensively “tattoo” your clothes with a stencil and some bleach. The outcome can be really neat:
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