Category: First Day

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How to copy text from McGraw Hill Connect

McGraw-Hill’s Copy Prevention

Copying text from McGraw-Hill’s online accounting textbooks has long been prohibited, creating difficulties for students, including myself. Not only does this prevent offline reading, but it hampers studying and taking digital notes on practice problems as well.

While disabling website copy blocking through changing browser settings dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to true was thought to be one workaround, McGraw-Hill employs JavaScript to achieve their copy protection. Fortunately, I have finally found a solution that does not require circumventing their copy prevention.

Introducing NormCap

I discovered NordCap, an OCR-powered screenshot tool, entirely by accident while browsing the featured category in the Gnome software store on my Linux system (Vanilla OS). Curious, I installed it to try it out.

NordCap allows users to copy text from a wide range of sources, not just images. It enables extracting text from online resources like McGraw Hill Connect as well as videos, photos, GIFs, and essentially any content displayed on the screen.

Instead of capturing images, NordCap is able to detect and extract the text. As shown in the GIF below.

NormCap Demonstration GIF

Step-By-Step Guide

  1. You will need to download and install NormCap via https://dynobo.github.io/normcap/
  2. Start NormCap, a pink border will appear after the permissions have been given by the user
  3. Select the region of text you wish to copy, the text is now copied
  4. Paste the text anywhere or press Ctrl+V to paste from clipboard
  5. Done!

Note: Settings can be accessed by starting NormCap or pressing Capture in the tray icon while NormCap is running, Settings will be located in the top right of the screen as of v0.4.1

NormCap Usage

NormCap provides a free and open source tool for students to capture notes and problem sets. Once NormCap is installed and configured, it enables students to easily copy down assignments and materials to review and study. NormCap offers this functionality without any ads, allowing students to focus on their coursework.

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How to Connect to CU-Resident Wi-Fi

Getting connected to Wi-Fi at CU may seem straightforward, but the process can be intricate, similar to connecting to a printer here… This guide will walk through the steps to connect your device to the CU-Resident Wi-Fi network and enable extra security using the free quad9.net DNS service. It’s recommended to connect to a Wi-Fi network as “CU-Guest” is heavily bandwidth limited, meaning on average on CU-Guest you would normally get 10mbps while on “CU-Resident” you can achieve speeds on average of 100mbps. Though, if you add a custom DNS through quad9.net you can achieve speeds well over 100mpbs, while increasing privacy and security of your devices.

CU-Resident only allows on campus residents to log in to register their devices.

Registering a Device (Required)

Although registering a device may seem complicated, this guide simplifies the process and makes it straightforward. The only requirement is that you have a device already connected to the network, which can be either CU-Resident or Cornerstone.

  1. Visit – https://clearpass.cornerstone.eduNote - If you are not connected to either CU-Resident or Cornerstone, the site will return an error "We can’t connect to the server at clearpass.cornerstone.edu."
  2. Login – to clear pass by using the following format Username is "first initial, followed by a 0, then ID number" example “a0123456”. Password is your Microsoft account password.
  3. Click – "Guest Management" located under "ClearPass Guest"
  4. Click – Add Device located on the right near "List Devices" and the "Logout" button.
  5. Add – a "Device Name", it’s recommended to not personally identify the real device. I would put device 1, device 2, device 3, etc. This increases privacy a little bit.
  6. Add – the "Mac Address" of the device, this can be found in various places on a variety of devices. I recommend to lookup on YouTube, “How to find mac address for (blank product)”Apple Products - Settings → General → About → "Wi-Fi address"Windows - Settings → Network & Internet → Ethernet or Wi-Fi → Select the connection → Properties → "Physical address (MAC)"Linux - Open Terminal/Console → Type and enter "ip link" → Mac address → Mac address will be listed after "link/ether"
  7. Press – "Create Device" once you have entered your device’s Mac address, be sure to leave "Enable AirGroup" blank.Note - CU only allows 3 devices to be connected to one account, meaning you can only have 3 devices registered per account.

Connecting a Device (Required)

Once you have completed all the steps to register your devices, you can now simply connect to "CU-Resident" as you would with any other Wi-Fi network. I do highly recommend setting up quad9 as a custom DNS with the instructions below, but it’s only optional.

This is an optional step but is highly recommend as not only does it give your devices more security and privacy, but it could increase Wi-Fi speed quite significantly. Based on my tests alone, it allowed a number of my friends to download/update various PlayStation games well over 50 GB’s in less than 10 minutes. Since quad9 is relatively a big non-profit organization, they have crafted a handful of guides made per devices and operating systems.

https://quad9.net/support/set-up-guides

While I highly recommended adding quad9 to your devices simply due to it being a trustworthy non-profit organization, and it’s free. If you are looking for a secure and fast VPN, I recommend either ProtonVPN, Mullvad or IVPN. Although I have a custom code for "Proton Mail Plus" as they are allowing me to give away one month of Proton Mail Plus completely free. Which gives you access to many perks including a secure and private VPN.

Free One Month of Proton Mail Plus Click Here

Note - If you are connected to CU Wi-Fi, they block any website name with the words "VPN" due to VPNs having the capability to unblock all network restrictions on their censored networks.

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How to Convert PDF’s to Images with GIMP

Introduction

Sometimes you may need to convert a PDF to an image PDF, which is a PDF file that contains images instead of text displayed over images. This can be useful for a variety of reasons, such as when you want to preserve the formatting of the original PDF or when you want to share the PDF with others who may not have the same fonts installed on their computer. This can also be used to prevent getting falsely accused of plagiarizing with AI software, more info on that topic can be found here.

Fortunately, GIMP, the popular open-source image editing software, can be used to easily convert a PDF to an image PDF. Here’s how to do it:

Instructions

Install GIMP

First, you need to have GIMP installed on your computer. If you don’t have it already, you can download it for free from the official GIMP website: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Open the PDF File in GIMP

Once you have GIMP installed, open it and go to "File" > "Open" to open the PDF file you want to convert to an image PDF.

Import Pages as Layers

GIMP will show a dialog box asking you how you want to import the PDF file. Choose the "Open pages as Layers" option, and click "Import". GIMP will then import each page of the PDF as a separate image. You can view these images by clicking on the Layers tab on the right-hand side of the screen.

Export as PDF

To export the images to an image PDF, go to "File" > "Export As". In the "Export Image" dialog box, choose a location to save the image PDF file, and give it a name. Under "Select File Type", choose "PDF" from the drop-down menu. Click on the "Export" button to convert the images to a PDF.

Choose PDF Export Options

In the "Export Images as PDF" dialog box, make sure the "Layers as pages (bottom layers first)" option is selected, and click "Export".

Save the Image PDF File

GIMP will then save the image PDF file to the location you specified. You can now view and use the image PDF file just like any other PDF file.

That’s it! With these steps, you can easily convert a PDF to an image PDF using GIMP. Converting a PDF to an image PDF can be a useful skill to have, especially if you work with PDF files frequently. Give it a try and see how it can benefit you!

How does Turnitin react?

Many people ask, How does Turnitin react to PDFs that are made up of images? Well it simply doesn’t, Turnitin can’t scan text in images they can only scan text on images. Upon submitting your PDFs made up of images to Turnitin, you will likely be prompted with this result.

Turnitin Result

In order to see the displayed messages on a Turnitin submission, you must hover over the "x" with your mouse cursor

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Useful Links for Any Student

Bypass Paywalls – Bypasses Article Paywalls

Website

  • Bypass Paywalls is a web browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites.

Note: A full list of sites can be found at the link provided above. Firefox is recommended.

ChatGPT – A Better Siri

Website

  • ChatGPT is a powerful, open-source language model developed by OpenAI that is specifically designed for generating human-like text in response to user input. It is built on the GPT-3 architecture, which allows it to generate high-quality text in a variety of styles and formats. Unlike many other language models, ChatGPT is designed to be highly interactive, making it suitable for use in chatbots, dialogue systems, and other applications that require real-time, natural language generation. Additionally, ChatGPT has been trained on a massive amount of diverse data, allowing it to generate text that is both fluent and relevant to a wide range of topics. (This description was generated by it.)

LanguageTool – Checks Your Writing

Website

  • LanguageTool’s multilingual grammar, style, and spell checker supports Libreoffice, Apache OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, Ulysses, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.
  • Also, available as a standalone application. Supports about 20 languages (on different levels) and allows customization.

Mybib – Citation Generator

Website

  • Automatically create bibliographies, references, and citations in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and over 8,000 more styles with a totally free and no-ads citation generator.
  • MyBib is a free bibliography and citation generator that makes accurate citations for you to copy straight into your academic assignments and papers.
  • There are tools that already do this, but they’ve stagnated, become infested with ads, and charge you for features that should be free (especially for students).
  • If you’re a student, academic, or teacher, and you’re tired of the poor bibliography and citation tools out there, then you’re going to love MyBib. MyBib’s auto citations are the best and most accurate one out there, so you can create accurate citations automatically for books, journals, websites, and videos just by searching for a title or identifier (like a URL or ISBN).
  • You can also download your formatted bibliography in multiple different formats, or export it to be added in several other managers like Zotero or Mendeley.

Extra’s That Can’t Be Linked, But Are Very Useful (Ranked Best – Worst)

  • z-library (Note: The only official z-library domain is the tor & i2p one)
  • Libgen
  • Annas-archive
  • OceanofPDF
  • PDFDrive
  • Lbryworm
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How to Index Any Question Across All of Quizlet

Here is a guide on how the search engine command site:quizlet.com can be useful to any student who is searching for answers:

  1. First, go to your preferred search engine (e.g. Duckduckgo, Google, etc.) and type in your search query followed by site:quizlet.com. For example: “photosynthesis site:quizlet.com”
  2. This will return all search results from Quizlet that are relevant to your query.
  3. You can use this command to narrow down your search to only include results from Quizlet, which can be useful if you want to find study materials or practice quizzes on a specific topic.
  4. You can also use the site:quizlet.com command to find answers to specific questions. For example: “site:quizlet.com [question]”
Format

This will return any Quizlet sets that include the question and answer you are looking for.

Results
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Orbot – A Guide for College Students on Restricted Networks

Orbot is a free and open-source software application that allows users to access the internet anonymously through the Tor network. It can be particularly useful for college students who are on a restricted or blocked network.

Here is a guide on how to use Orbot to benefit as a college student on a restricted network:

  1. Download Orbot from the App Store or Google Play Store.
  2. Once Orbot is installed, open the app and tap on the “Start” button to start the Tor network. Note: On iOS devices, you may need to authenticate a VPN profile with your phone's passcode before continuing.
  3. Orbot will now establish a connection to the Tor network. This may take a few minutes.
  4. Once Orbot is connected to the Tor network, you can use it to access websites that may be blocked or restricted on your college’s network.
  5. You can begin browsing the internet anonymously through the Tor network. Any websites that were previously blocked on your college’s network should now be accessible.
  6. If you want to stop using Orbot, simply tap on the “Stop” button in the app. This will disconnect you from the Tor network.
  7. If you want to customize your Orbot settings, tap on the “Settings” button in the app. Here, you can change various settings such as the proxy type, the number of hops, and the location of the Tor entry node.

By using Orbot, you can bypass internet restrictions and access blocked websites on your college’s network. This can be particularly useful for researching or accessing course materials that may be restricted on the college’s network. I hope this guide helps you get started with using Orbot as a college student on a restricted network!