How to open (non-DRM) iBooks without an iPad or iPhone

By William Chinda | Published: August 3, 2012

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iTunes can do a lot of things. You can buy media (like music or movies) and play them. But when it comes to books, you’ll find you can buy them, but can’t open them with iTunes. If you believe Apple’s own documentation, you can apparently only open iBooks on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch (the latter two running iOS 4.0 or later). For iTunes users not familiar with these limitations, it can be an incredibly frustrating experience to buy something only to realize you can’t open it.

If you’ve found yourself in this situation, there’s a potential workaround thanks to Apple’s use of ePUB, the closest thing that exists to a digital book standard. The only hitch is that many books for sale on the iBooks store have been copy protected, meaning you can’t open them without any of the aforementioned iDevices. In this article, I’ll be detailing exactly how to open an iBook (without copy protection) on your computer.

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How to add high res photos to Tumblr

By William Chinda | Published: November 13, 2011

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It’s time once again, to explore the deepest and darkest corners of Tumblr. This time around, I’ve got a question from rajvir92, who asks:

I am an amateur photographer and i use tumblr to upload my photos. however whenever i post my photos tumblr shows it in small size not in its orginal size. how can i post the picture of its original size. is there a way or any theme that can show the photo in bigger size than the regular size that tumblr shows?

There’s a couple different options available to change this, and what you choose will depend on the amount of tweaking you’ll want to do.

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How to Borrow Kindle eBooks from the Library

By William Chinda | Published: September 25, 2011

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Up until this week, library users who checked out ebooks did not have the option of reading those books on any of Amazon’s Kindle devices or apps. That’s all changed, thanks to a nationwide roll-out by Amazon to over 11,000 libraries in the US. Unlike checking out a book with Adobe Digital Editions, the process is dead simple, and in this video I’ll be showing you how.

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Turn a Webcam into a Motion Sensing Security Camera

By William Chinda | Published: August 2, 2011

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Thanks to the cheapness and ubiquity of the webcam, it’s now both easy and affordable to roll your own surveillance system. In this video tutorial, I’ll be demonstrating how to turn a cheap webcam into a motion-sensing surveillance camera.

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What’s New in Tumblr

By William Chinda | Published: June 25, 2011

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In June of 2011, Tumblr went through a major redesign that simplified it’s user interface and eliminated some of its features entirely. In this video tutorial, I’ll be going through some of these changes.

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Move Your Time Machine Backup to a New Drive

By William Chinda | Published: June 3, 2011

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One thing that’s been a constant in personal computing has been that hard drives will continually get bigger and cheaper. So it’s inevitable that you’ll one day want to relocate your Time Machine backups to a newer, roomier drive. In this video tutorial, I’ll be going through the process for prepping and transferring these files.

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Simplify your job search with RSS and Indeed

By William Chinda | Published: May 22, 2011

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Is your online job search a repetitive and tiring chore? There’s an easier way that is both automatic and capable of aggregating results from multiple job sites. In this tutorial, I’ll be showing you how with the help of RSS and Indeed.com.

All about RSS

First off, you need to know about this icon.

You might have noticed it on various websites, particularly blogs or sites that are updated often. It’s a link to an RSS feed, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. Paste this link into an RSS reader, and any updates to the feed are automatically sent to it. This means that you don’t have to spend every day visiting a dozen different websites to do your job search. Just use your RSS reader to aggregate feeds.

I’ll be using Google Reader to demo in this video, but if you don’t care for Google, there’s a multitude of RSS readers out there to choose from. Further instructions and a list of other RSS readers can be found after the jump.

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Tumblr: How to add photos to reblog captions

By William Chinda | Published: May 9, 2011

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It’s time for another audience question from my How to Use Tumblr video!

crimsonvipor asks “If I reblog something, how do I post a picture in the comments section (or Caption)?”

So the problem that we’ve got is that a normal text post has a link off to the side where you can upload photos, doing a reblog doesn’t give you that same link.

If you look at the toolbar, however, there is this green tree icon.

If I click on it, it’ll give me the option of posting a photo if I happen to have its URL.

But how do I get a URL when I can’t upload a photo? I could use a third party photo posting site like Flickr, but I want to keep all my Tumblr stuff together. That’s where this workaround comes in.

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Open ePub files on your iOS device without syncing

By William Chinda | Published: April 9, 2011

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I’ve previously detailed how you can transfer ePub files to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using iTunes and USB syncing, but what if you’re away from your computer or don’t want to deal with the hassle of working with files? Thanks to this article by Adam Engst at Tidbits, you can now use your iOS device to open any ePub file directly from Safari.

In this example, I’m opening a free book from Project Gutenberg’s website in Safari. If you’re given the option of file type, select ePub.

You’ll then be given two options. If you select “Open in iBooks,” you’ll be switched to iBooks, where the file will open. If you select “Open with…” you’ll be given the option of selecting the app to open it with.

The apps that you have to select from will depend on which apps you have installed. Any app that is capable of opening ePub files should appear in this list.

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Your Tumblr Questions Answered

By William Chinda | Published: March 20, 2011

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Since I first put up my How to use Tumblr video in September, there’s been an amazing response, and I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who watched and commented. I hope it’s been useful to you.

That said, a couple people have asked some questions that I felt deserved a bit more elaboration than I could give in the comments.

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