Howstuffworks is one of the sites that I love to read, but their RSS feed was too bloated, means, I get no choice but to get updates on everything. But that will change now. They have redesigned thier RSS feeds so that I can be more selective in my subscriptions.
Due to popular demand, HowStuffWorks now has 13 RSS feeds to choose from. Pick from Future Cars, Science, Health, Entertainment and everything in-between.
JustFreeBooks search the content of more than 450 web sites, including gutenberg.org, wikibooks.org and archive.org etc. With JustFreeBooks you can find public domain texts, open books, free audio books, ad-supported books and more. Just type in the search box the book, author or theme you want to find.
Just free books is powerd by Google Custom Search engine
Whenever I get time, I tends to read a lot from the web. But it is not really as good as holding a newspaper or a nice magazine, because of the added interactivity, the flashiness and all other sort of shiny stuff. Gearfire productivity suggests using a firefox extension called Aardvark
Aardvark makes reading easier and saves paper and ink when printing. It is a Firefox extension, but is also available as a bookmarklet for Internet Explorer and Safari.
This will be particularly useful when a site dosen’t have a printer friendly version that removes everything except the main article in question.This extension offers many features. Try it out, it is useful.
These are some of the stories that I find intersting these days, hope you ejoy it too!
I have a collection of articles that I collected throughout the years and converted to pdf documents. But recently I have to send some of them to my friend, being on dial up, I know that it will be a messy business if I try to send them without trying to reduce the size of the documents.
This is No. 1 suggestion for reducing the sizes of PDFs. After you make any changes to your PDF, select Save As, instead of just Save, this will overwrite the entire PDF. Otherwise, if you just click Save, changes are appended to your file, and you’ll notice a slow and steady accretion of kilobytes.
By selecting Advanced > PDF Optimizer > Audit Space Usage, you can find out which elements in your PDF (fonts? images?) are taking up the most space and make changes accordingly.
We all knew that image files takes many times more the disk space than text. So reduce them or use optimized images, if necessary.
Vector-based graphics scale perfectly, look better and take up less space than their GIF counterparts.
If you have to insert a graphic as a bitmap, prepare it for maximum compression and minimum dimensions. Don’t compress the graphic beforehand, because distilling them in the PDF may cause the creation of noticeable artifacts in the image.
To experiment with the image compression quality to size ratios, select Advanced > PDF Optimizer, and on the images tab select compression options for color, grayscale, and monochrome images. Or, select Enable Adaptive Compression and drag the slider to balance file size and quality.
PGB uses less space than CMYK, so if you are not intending to print the documents in high quality it is recommended to use RGB than CMYK
Fonts use space, try to use minimal space and don’t embed many fonts as this will increase the size of the document considerably.
Use the latest version of the software, as there will be minor improvements in the compression algorithms that may help you to achieve the desired results. an example Acrobat 5 (PDF version 1.4) introduced JBIG2 (Joint Bilevel Image Experts Group) compression, which is superior to the CCITT or Zip algorithms that previous versions used when compressing scanned monochromatic copy. Most PDF users have made the switch to newer versions of Acrobat, but if you’re still using an old copy, it may be time to make the switch.
There are specialized software that can reduce the size of the document. Here are a few links that may of help.
A new API from Google that generates information charts in a dynamic way. its usage is quite straightforward: you link to an image in the form of a parameterized URL, such as http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=
p3&chd=t:90,49&chs=400×200&chl=data|bling.
“cht=p3” is the chart type, in this case, a pie chart.
“chd=t:90,49” are the chart values, text-encoded, and separated by a comma.
“chs=400×200” is the custom chart size, 400 by 200 pixels.
“chl=Data|Bling” are the different labels for the pie chart sections, separated via the pipe character.
chart types include: line charts, bar charts, pie charts, Venn diagrams & scatterplots.
Alien Eyes 