My Hard Drive Crashed. I Lost All My Data! What Do I Do?

Hard Drive Head by AMagillPhoto courtesy of AMagill
When your hard drive crashes, its pretty scary. Whether its the spinning beach ball followed by “The file could not be read or written”, the silent blue screen on startup or my favorite: the flashing folder with the question mark, its all the same cause – hard drive issues. You do have a backup, right?

Here’s what you can do to try recovering your data from a bad hard drive.

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The Open Source World’s Answer to Photoshop – The Simplest way to Install the GIMP on OS X

GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)Photo courtesy of gimp.org
Doctoring, editing, and manipulating photographs and images can all be done for free without using an Adobe product. All it takes is the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) – the open source world’s answer to Photoshop. As great as GIMP is, installing it can be tricky if you’re new to the world of open source software packages. Forget compiling it from source, here’s the simplest way to install and run GIMP.

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Just How Good are the Legal TV Sites Compared to BitTorrent?

TV; Brainwashed by Aaron EscobarPhoto courtesy of Aaron Escobar

Now that the fall TV season is upon us with new shows and fresh episodes, the networks are pushing their own legal alternatives to torrent sites. I’ll be honest, I tried the ABC.com viewer two years ago and it sucked. Big time. Let’s see if the networks got their act together since then…

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Ten Quick and Useful Terminal Tricks

OS X TerminalPhoto courtesy of OS X

The Terminal is the most powerful application within OS X. It is your gateway into the “OS within the OS”, the UNIX core of OS X. Hidden tricks, hacks, workarounds and functions are loaded into the Terminal’s commands. The following list of ten useful Terminal tricks is by no means the only tricks, in fact there’s probably hundreds of them, many in previously written articles. I decided to compile a quick list of ten Terminal tricks based on their usefulness.

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Easily Save and Archive Web Pages with Paparazzi

Paparazzi by Derailer.orgPhoto courtesy of Derailer.org

With so much information on the internet, there has to be a good way to save and archive some of it. Bookmarks are alright but you have to be online for them and what happens when the site isn’t there anymore? You can print them but have you ever tried to print a web page and it looks nothing like what was on the screen? Saving the pages just results in a file plus a folder and it still doesn’t look the same. With many pages saved, it can get confusing as well. For the past year or so, I found a quick and simple solution to this that I’m going to share with you.

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