For quite a long time, I used Adobe Acrobat Reader to open and view PDF files that I downloaded from the web or received via email. However, for the past few months I’ve been using Foxit Reader and it is awesome. It uses less memory than Adobe’s Reader, loads quickly, and works just as well (actually better) than Acrobat Reader.
Adobe Acrobat (not Reader, just Acrobat) allows you to write almost any text or image file, webpage, or whatever file to a PDF. I find this very handy, but I never wanted to shell out $299.99+ for a copy. I’ve always used a free alternative. Years ago, when I first started writing PDFs, I used FreePDF, which worked, but was a bit kludgey and time-consuming to install. For the past year and a half or so I have been using PrimoPDF, and much like Foxit, it also rocks.
Both programs are completely free, dead simple to install, and work great. If you are asking yourself, “Why would I want to write PDFs?” I can give you a couple of reasons:
- to have the benefits of a printout without wasting paper or toner/ink
- to store something that you want to print for later
- many more, that I can’t think of right now
Trust me, once you start writing PDFs, you’ll wonder what you ever did before. Download them both now!
Today at MacWorld San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced some cool new gadgets:
Apple iPhone and
AppleTV.
Also, they changed their company name from Apple Computer, Inc. to simply Apple, Inc.
Other sites will surely have more in-depth analysis on these product and the keynote address in general, but I figured I would make a quick note of it here too. What do you think of these new technologies?
OK, so my wife and I got hooked on the Fox television show “Vanished.” Before the show started, the promos for it looked really good and interesting enough that we both decided that we would watch it once it aired. It has been a while, but I think it originally aired on Monday nights at 9 PM after “Prison Break,” which despite its popularity, we never got into.
So we were happily tuning in each Monday night to watch “Vanished,” and then after one of the episodes, the network announced that it would be moving the show to Friday nights at 8 PM. OK, that was mildly annoying, but we really wanted to see what will happen and if the senator’s wife will ever be returned alive and well. This was also after the World Series and the playoffs leading up to said series interrupted the Monday night schedule.
Next, after a Friday viewing or two the show decided to really apply its own name to itself. We would tune in each Friday to find either a cheesy movie and/or “Trading Spouses.” What happened to “Vanished”?
On Sunday after the Jets beat up on Brett Favre and the Packers, I was watching the Giants/Cowboys game which was pretty boring. My mind wandered and I started thinking of “Vanished” again. I fired up my browser and navigated to Fox’s website. I found their show listings and clicked on the link for “Vanished.” Their page says that the remaining 4 episodes will stream online, and to go to their MySpace page (link removed; outdated) to watch. Three out of four episodes were already up, so we watched them to get all caught up. The series finale will be available on Friday, December 8th at 12:01 Pacific, I am not sure if that is AM or PM. If you have watched the season on TV, I urge you to watch the remaining episodes online, especially the first online episode, ASAP because they will only have three episodes posted at a time. In other words, once they post the series finale, the first online episode will be removed from the website.
A couple of annoyances to deal with: the streaming video site does not work with Firefox. I had to use IE. Also, it makes you download a plug-in to watch whatever weird video format that they use. Each episode has a few commercials, all for Cisco, but at least each commercial break is only one commercial and then on with the show. The overall viewer experience is pretty bad, with long unnatural breaks in the video and some audio out of sync with the video, but at least you can find out how the series ends.
/public service announcement
