By now, you are no doubt familiar with lobbying efforts by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) to try and push through anti-piracy bills (SOPA and PIPA) that will, if ever enacted, grant them sweeping powers. But this isn't just happening in the US. We here in Canada have a Bill in the House of Commons that has already gone to a second reading.

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Recently, I was building a Wordpress powered site for which I needed to pipe an RSS feed from an external site. I also required this RSS feed to publish, not in a widget but, as a regular post. I was able to find and configure a plugin called RSS Digest that could do almost everything I wanted. In fact, save for a few minor bells and whistle I wish it did have such as the ability to specifiy a default Featured Image or image thumbnail, it is a very handy plugin.

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One of the questions I get asked most often about GIMP are how to properly resize and crop images. Ok. I guess that’s more like 2 questions, but they are quite often part of the same workflow. I will discuss resizing images for printing in a future article. For now, I thought I’d go over the basics of cropping with you.

Let’s start by launching GIMP and opening up an image. Next, let’s select the Crop Tool from the Toolbox.

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If you’d like to add a simple border to your images in GIMP, the process is fairly straightforward. This particular technique uses the Decor>Add Border filter to create a flat or slightly beveled border. Keep in mind that this filter creates a border outside the dimensions of your image, not an overlay, so you’ll need to consider this when sizing and cropping your image prior.

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A client brought in a laptop a few weeks ago with the rather thorny issue of being locked out of his computer because someone had inadvertently set a BIOS password and, worse, enabled fingerprint security. While in many cases simply cracking open the laptop and removing the CMOS battery for a few minutes or locating the reset jumper will do the trick, this particular laptop was playing hardball.

Not very old, this Acer Travelmate running Vista had a Phoenix BIOS and I had quickly exhausted any trick I had. So, as any normal PC tech who runs up against a wall, I turned to Google and started sorting through all the garbage posts and forum threads that led nowhere. The "backdoor" passwords being suggested, which I suspect are a load of hogwash but tried regardless, didn't work. Trying to boot up into Hiren's and running the DOS based BIOS apps didn't work.  Add a comment

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Many iPhone lovers were disappointed when the much anticipated iPhone 5 failed to make an appearance a few weeks ago. In its place, Apple introduced the iPhone 4S. While the 4S is not a huge version upgrade, it does have some very nice new and improved features over the older device, and is an excellent addition to cell phone plans.


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