Here is my reply to the article Out of Province Out of Luck in its entirety:

I have just been through the hassle of trying to get an OWSP job. I never thought of myself as an out of provincer having moved here from living in Holland for high school (that is four years of not living in Canada at all). I did move there from Alberta, but that was 7 years before I tried to apply for OSAP so that I could get a job on campus. I got a very short email that said:

“I was looking at Sean’s OSAP file and he is not eligible to apply for OSAP as he is a Alberta student. The work study program offered through OSAP is for Ontario residents only.”

How am I an Alberta student I wondered as I read the email… I have not lived there for 7 years… So I sent a short message back:

“I am an Ontario resident. I have lived in Ontario straight for the last two years.”

(I did go to Alberta for the first summer because I found a job at a refinery out there, good job if you can get it)

To which I got the reply:

“Have you lived in Ontario for at least 12 months in a row without being a full time student at a post-secondary school?”

Well, obviously not, because I wasn’t even living in Canada prior to that… it is in my record I am pretty sure. They must have access to that because they seem to ‘know’ that I am an Alberta student. Since I did not have a house in Alberta, and my parents were still living over seas for the first year that I was at Trent that means that I was not a resident of Canada by OSAP’s logic:

“That is what OSAP uses as a qualifier. If you live in Ontario for a year without going to school, you are contributing to Ontario and eligible to apply for OSAP.”

Apparently paying phone bills, utility bills, university bills, provincial sales tax (I should be exempt from that too seeing as I am an Albertan!), having an Ontario Health Card, living in Ontario, cut off from my parents by more than half of the country does not qualify me as an Ontarian let alone for the Ontario Work Study Program. What a crock… Maybe I should try applying through the TIP program.

Stealth Banjo

Make a little guitar into something useful, like a Banjo!
Everyone plays banjo! Humans are born with it!
Just strum the open strings of a banjo. That’s a G chord. All the other major chords are one finger straight across. Now you know 300 songs!
“Banjo” is the sound the banjo makes. Your thumb hits that funny high string and it’s magically never a wrong note. When you’re saying the word banjo, that’s a banjo song!
Any dog that wags a tail can play banjo too. Just put the banjo and the wagging tail together, and you’ve got a fine sound…

This is mostly just a quick guide for me so that next time I do it, I don’t spend hours setting it up.

First things first, get your bookmarks:

Then get automatix2 and get your graphics card drivers:

That was their website

This is what you see after you install it:

(The driver is not listed because I already installed it)

This is restart time (so that the driver kicks in).

Should be able to get to here now:

Go through the menus and find where you set your resolution (you can play with the other stuff too if you want)

When you are done go to System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution

Then open a terminal and enter sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change the lines where you see:

Modes “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″

to:

Modes “1680×1050″ “1024×768″ “800×600″

(where the first one is the resolution that you have in the default settings listing in your Screen Resolution Preferences window:)

Restart to make sure it worked: and voila, like magic you have just set your resolution to the one that you want! I am sure that this will help anyone out there who is new to Ubuntu (or any Debian based linux system)

Edit:

If you have the latest version of Ubuntu, you should not need to do this. All you have to do is search for the Restricted Drivers Manager in Add/Remove Applications as seen in this screen shot: