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 [...]

What 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.

Reading 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 [...]

How 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.

The iMacros [...]

about: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
To open the config window, [...]

Making 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. Most of these apps are extremely customizable, though all are functional and set to the most common preferences once installed. A few important notes for new Ubuntu/Linux users:

If you don’t already have Ubuntu, download [...]

Installing 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.
Here’s what you’ll need:

A purchased copy of Half Life Platinum (if you’re into the old versions of Counter Strike and Team Fortress Classic – still going strong with thousands of gamers on 24/7) [...]

Guide 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 [...]

Graphics 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, [...]

Colorization 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.

More examples can [...]

Attention 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 [...]

Stencil 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:

Quote from the thread:
“ This Japanese Koi design was created specifically for this tutorial. (my original drawing in fig. 1.) I wanted to create and [...]