Speeding up Adobe Reader 6 load time

If you hate opening PDF files with your browser because of the long time it takes to load Adobe Reader then How to use liposuction to repair Adobe Reader 6 is an article for you. It explains how to greatly improve the load time of Adobe Reader 6 by leaving a lot of not often used plugins out.

Update: for version 7 How to make Adobe Reader 7.0 load faster tells you what to do.

Web 2.0 beta: Google Error

Coming to an internet near you:

Colour Blindness Check – Etre

Colour Blindness Check – Etre is a color blindness simulator that reveals how images may appear to users with a variety of color blindness conditions. Upload a JPEG image, choose the color blindness condition and see how colour blind users may see it.

wikiCalc

The creator of the spreadsheet, Dan Bricklin, is now busy developing wikiCalc. It’s a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose, like schedules, lists, and tables. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet. The program can publish pages by FTP and there is no need to set up server-side programs like CGI. An early Windows version is available for download.

Sudoku with Flickr photo’s

If you’re a fan of Sudoku, you might like Flickr Sudoku, where you play with images from Flickr instead of the numbers 1 through 9.

gada.be

There’s a new search engine on th net that combines results from 140 services across the web: gada.be. See what’s being written about by doing a search for gada. I certainly have to check this out later!

Dynamic Drive

Dynamic Drive is a collection of cross-browser compatible DHTML & Javascripts in several categories like Dynamic Content, Form Effects, Games and Menus & Navigation. The scripts are free for personal and commercial use.

U3

U3 lets you carry programs and personal preferences, launch software, and access all of your own data on any Windows XP or Windows 2000 PC from a USB stick.

Wink

Wink is software to create tutorials on how to use software by capturing screenshots, and adding explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc. The result can be Flash, EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML and even fxed images.

Google Reader

Google released Reader, an online aggregator. At the moment I’m not very impressed with it. First it gave some errors while using it (Server error, please try again in 30 seconds), and importing my subscriptions from Bloglines didn’t seem to have any result. But today I tried again and now it worked ok, so perhaps it was just a hiccup.

The way Reader presents new articles doesn’t really fit my reading habits of scanning for interesting articles, because you only see one article at a time. Strangely enough articles are sorted by ‘relevance’ by default. I’m curious what defines the relevance of an article? You can switch to sort by date, which means you see the most recent articles first.

You can’t get to the bottom of the list of unread articles. To catch up sometimes I read articles from back to front, but that’s not possible here.

I know the service is only a beta, but Google, where are the improvements over existing services? Perhaps you’re interested in some suggestions:

• Show more articles at once.
• Add a way to switch between titles and full articles, perhaps like the way e-mail conversations are presented in GMail.
• Let me choose the subscription to see articles from: all, subscriptions with a label or a single subscription.
• Include the number of unread articles for subscriptions and labels.
• Add support for e-mail subscriptions for example by extending the filter options from GMail.
• Show incoming links from other sites to an article.
• RSS/Atom support?