Wikimedia Philippines, a chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation serving the Philippines and Filipino communities abroad, has issued a statement in support of Wikipedia’s recent 24-hour blackout to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA.

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My hardworking Romans build a domus or house to increase the population that I can sustain.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist using the pun I found from the website for 0 A.D., a free and open source game of ancient warfare. The game, still in the alpha stage, is still far from complete and will probably crash a few times on you, but the quality of the graphics and sound — music and effects — is truly impressive.

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ANYONE who has grown up using a mouse or a trackpad will understand the concept of menus.

In a computer application, menus give us access to commands or functions that a program can carry out. For example, in a word processing program, you could execute a search and replace command by going to a the Edit menu and clicking on “Find & Replace.”

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I’ve always liked the way artists could create pencil sketches from photos. I recently found a cool tutorial that shows you how to do this in Gimp, the free and open source image editor that is available in Linux, Windows and Mac OS. I decided to try my hand at it and created this “sketch” of Charlize Theron from a photo I found online, using the same technique.

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After a months-long hiatus, this blog is back. For the longest time, I had been using Expression Engine to power this blog, but a few months back, the site was hit by a serious glitch that led to some data loss. My host, Ploghost, tried to restore the database as best they could, but I had begun to feel unhappy with the content management software I was using for other reasons. For one thing, it wasn’t very easy to change the look of the blog — and I felt it was a time for a change. I was also discouraged by the scarcity of information on EE on the Internet to help me make these changes.

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VISITORS to Wikipedia last Jan. 18 didn’t get the treasure trove of information they had come to expect. Instead, they got a darkened page that asked them to “Imagine a world without free knowledge.”

“For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history,” the message read. “Right now, the US Congress is  considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.”

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WITH more than 3,100 high-tech companies showing off 20,000 new products over 1.9 million square feet of exhibit space, and 153,000 visitors attending, the Consumer Electronics Show this year in Las Vegas seemed as vibrant as ever.

So why did Jason Perlow of ZDNet predict the show’s death by 2015?

His reasons are compelling.

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A LETTER came across my desk last month that reminds me that little has changed in the way the Philippine Internet domain is managed.

In the letter dated Dec. 20, 2011, the official Philippine domain registry, DotPH, told a giant retail chain that it would find itself temporarily homeless on the Internet if it didn’t agree to drop its current domain name, which is disallowed under current rules.

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