Saturday, January 28, 2006

More Geekery

For my untergeek pals (nice one, Battlepanda), the essentials of what I use in free, spiffy software here in the Lifehacker Pack. The Foxit pdf reader alone is worth the look. Do you hate how Adobe takes thrity seconds grinding into gear like a choking '67 Ford when you try to open a pdf? Yeah, so do I, especially as I buy almost all my gaming books in pdf format. Go get the good stuff.

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:13 AM

    > Do you hate how Adobe takes thrity seconds grinding into gear

    This was certainly the case for v6 of the reader, but v7 is much better. They're all very fast (as in more or less instant) once you've applied PDF SpeedUp to them, removing the splash, loading of plugins and modifiying the GUI to remove the "ads" and other crap you don't want.

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  2. but for people who are not savvy enough to do all that -- Foxit is God.

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  3. w00+! on gaming books in PDF.

    Having moved an average of 300 lbs of books five times in the last five years I've overcome my aversion to reading off a screen and printing out the odd choice bit.

    Unfortunately, my wife is a college teacher and her books don't come in PDF yet...

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  4. Mac's come with a little program called Preview, which loads in about a second and will display just about any document format. Another reason Apple's are superior to PC's. I know these are fightin' words.

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  5. Tried to buy my son an iPod for his birthday and figured out that I'm not just a geek underachiever. I'm thoroughly illiterate.

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  6. Anonymous10:59 AM

    It is all the plug-ins that are enabled by default slowing Acrobat reader down. After removing all but 3, it loads pretty much instantly.

    Here's how to do it:

    1. Go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader (replace the C if you installed on another drive, like I did).
    2. Create a new folder called Optional (if it doesn't already exist).
    3. Move all files from the plug_ins folder to the Optional folder.
    4. You're done.

    The trick works great and changed my Acrobat startup time from 15-25 secs to about 2 secs

    TTFD

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