.:: Arctos' Corner ::.

While I've never been any good at design stuff, this is too much of a good find not to share. Inkscape From its home page: "An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format." What a good option for poor blokes like me too broke to afford those over-priced Adobe software without having to resort to illegal options. Very Simple Designs Choke full of wonderful freebies for the graphics designer, this site has lots of Inkscape tutorials, Photoshop brushes, vector illustrations and more, all for FREE! GIMP The GNU Image Manipulation Program. Just like what Inkscape does for folks too poor to afford Illustrator, GIMP is a wonderful option to those who can't afford Photoshop lots of photo editing and image authoring tools. I'll probably try to add in more from time to time as I come across them. If you're interested, you can check out my older post ...

For those whose harddisk (HDD) are dying or simply looking to upgrade to a bigger, faster drive, here's how to backup your hidden Sony recovery partition to the new drive. Firstly, plug both disks to a computer. For me, I plugged both disks to my desktop (with my original desktop HDD unplugged to avoid accidentally messing with it). Next, get a Linux live CD. There are a few variations available, most commonly Knoppix and Ubuntu . I'd go with Ubuntu for this example. Boot the live CD run the software Disk Utility in Ubuntu to check that both HDD are detected. Make note of the drive letters for each. For my case, as the original is the master drive, it is detected as sda and the new one is detected as sdb . Create a partition in the new HDD about the same size as the hidden partition (around 10GB). Fire up the Linux terminal and copy the hidden partition over. (Note that your partition number may vary. Use Disk Utility to check for the correct partition numbers.) sudo dd if=/d...

As all Sony VAIO owners know, Sony has stopped shipping working Recovery Disks with their VAIOs. Instead, they ship their VAIOs with a hidden recovery partition on the harddisk (HDD) and you are expected to burn your own recovery DVDs using the Sony VAIO wizard BEFORE you do something drastic to your laptop - like trashing the HDD with a messed up Linux installation for example, or simply having a dead HDD which renders the " press F10/F11/F12 key on bootup to access hidden recovery partition recovery " option impossible. Now when it comes time to recovery through the disks you created through the VAIO wizard, it'll be nice if those disks WORKED but nooooo... The SZ-series laptop I got had an outdated version of the Sony Update Center with an equally outdated version of the VAIO Recovery Center (which I didn't know at the time) so the recovery disks I burned, all 3 copies of them (6 DVDs in total), were faulty and unable to be used. Thankfully I had the sense to back...