Category: Science & Geeks
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PDF: Rape the protection
This secret is almost public: PDF documents protected by a password (to prohibit cut-and-paste or print functions) are badly protected. As a matter of fact, there is even a fereeware utility program available for Windows whose only aim is to run around this protection. Freeware PDF Unlocker, even if it does not do much and…
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Defragment like a God
Defragmenting your hard disc drive may not be the latest fad, but it still is useful to improve the performance of a disc drive that’s been used for months or years and now looks more like a mouldy swiss cheese than a nice little techo-gadget. The solution: defragmenter your disc drive(s). Here are a few…
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Collection of tutorials for Photoshop and GIMP
I collected a long list of tutorials (mostly in English) on my other photo website: Tutorials for Photoshop and The GIMP.
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PHP changes
This is what I told myself when uncovering a little PHP code fragment that stopped working on one of my web sites. So, this is a reminder for those of you inattentive programmers like me: $DOCUMENT_ROOT = $HTTP_SERVER_VARS[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]; is deprecated and works no longer. You must now use the newest form: $DOCUMENT_ROOT = $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’];. Be…
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Multicolor image search
I am quite found of any tool that allow to search inside the contents of images on the web. One such tool is Multicolr Search Lab Flickr set. I really like it because it is able to look for images based on their colors. But not only that. Today they include a lot more images…
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Surprise! You can find color in B&W photos
This is easy to reduce a color photo to a B&W image (any photo software or any B&W photocopier can do it). But the reverse operation seems difficult at best, impossible in most cases. However, a team of French scientists from the French INRIA (Guillaume Charpiat, Matthias Hofmann et Bernhard Schölkopf) presented recently an algorithm…
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CDBurnerXP goes Portable
I always recommended the excellent CDBurnerXP for burning your CD and DVD discs. It’s free and does all the commercial programs do. Now, the editor publishes CDBurnerXP Portable (download it for free). It goes on a USB stick and can follow you everywhere.
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Write down everything to ease maintenance
Some have been surprised by one little habit of mine around my PC (I should say ‘my PCs”): I keep a detailled log of everything I do on my PC in a plain old school paper book. It may be a software installation, a parameter change on another software package, the update of a driver.…
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Stepper motors, step-by-step
Stepper motors are nearly everywhere. this is marvellous for happy hobbyists. Even better, you can find them (and extract them from) a large number of devices that are easy to hack like old floppy disk drives, hard discs. For those of you who would ike to know more and keep an eye on the technology,…