Article written by jcjjica.

If you have a computer and want to get better graphics, you can update your PC’s graphics card. Most people don’t know how to do this, or that it can even be done.

First, you need to check the graphics card driver on your PC, which can be done very easily. Go to the Control Panel’s Device Manager (Start menu - Control panel - System - Hardware tab) that is available on all Microsoft computers. Then go to the display adapter. There, you will see which video card you are using.
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“Cookies?” you ask. “Are you saying that you’re getting rid of all the delicious cookies?”
“No, I’m saying that I’m going to delete the cookies from my computer!” your friend says impatiently.

Many often think of computer cookies as the type of cookies that you snack on once you get home. Of course, most people do not know what computer cookies actually are, as they have never been exposed to high-tech terminology as much as others have. But, there is always something new to learn about your computer, right?

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WHOA! What happened to your computer? For a moment, it was working perfectly fine, and now, it’s all… frozen! If only you knew the reason behind that. Why does your computer decide to freeze up on you anyways? It doesn’t like you? Yeah, treat your computer nicely, and it will decide whether you deserve the respect back. There is a way to treat your computer nicely, or in other words, keep it “healthy.” That way, your computer will not “misbehave.” (more…)

Now that high capacity memory sticks are getting cheaper and people use it for all kind of apparels like digicams, phones or even ebook readers, they often find that these higher capacity (more than 4GB) memorysticks seems slower than the lower capacity ones (up to 2GB).

This is because the higher capacities memorysticks are formatted in FAT32  by default. Although this format is better than the old FAT16 in the sense of disk slack and filesize limits, it’s slower for read and writes. Especially for the gadgets with lower processingpower than a PC.

If you’re experiencing this problem, you might want to format the stick to FAT16. This will speed up the read and write process tremendously.

If you’re using XP, just open command prompt (XP-explorer won’t allow you to format to FAT16 on higher capacity cards) and type in:

format z: /q /FS:FAT /x

Where z is your memorystick driveletter.

You will be asked some confirmation questions. Answer as appropriate and try it out.

If you’re using a Mac or running Linux, you should be smart enough to know how to format a simple stick, so I won’t even bother explaining.

In a world that invents technology so quickly, many people often want to buy everything. It is not essential for one to purchase every new product that comes out in stores these days. For example, the newly introduced laptops that have been selling quickly in stores.
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What is a computer virus? Yeah, yeah, it’s this disease that infects your computer so that all your hardwares aren’t working properly. You can’t surf the web and your hard disk is completely messed up and erased. The virus could be so contagious that other computers become infected as well.

That is one way to look at it from a “human perspective.” If you look at it from the “computer’s perspective,” you will realize that the two are very different from each other. From a “computer’s perspective,” a computer virus originates from puny software programs that are made to spread from computer to computer. The virus blocks the computer from functioning properly.

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While we’re waiting for the new Bookeen reader to emerge, Sony seems to have been busy. Lately, the current Sony Reader PRS500 has been on sale. Could it be that it’s making way for the new model?

One online store has leaked out the first view on the new Sony Reader, codenamed PRS505 SC for a suggested price of 299 dollar.

The improvements?

• Better ergonomics
• USB2.0 (PRS500 USB-transfer is SLOOOOW)
• Slim : “Old” Reader: 175.6mm x 123.6mm x 13.8mm New Reader: 175mm x 122mm x 8mm
• More memory (160 books instead of 80. The old reader has about 90MB of RAM, this one about 200?) which should speeding up rendering.

ETA October 2007 (Bookeen ETA’s September 2007)

Here’s how it looks like.

it seems that the new sony reader is going to be in two colors. Silver and blue. PRS505sc for the silver, prs505lc for our familiar metallic blue/black

This reader would probably be using the new vizplex screen, but exact details were not given. According to the description on the product page, it seems that the on-board memory has doubled, as it’s specced to be able to hold 160 books instead of 80.

I’m not sure I like the move on the numeric buttons. It makes the reader seems bulky…

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The history: RasterFarian got removed from mobileread because it was using a licensed tool, pdcat.exe from pdf-tools.com. There was a whole ruckus about it.

Ironicly, that tool was doing nothing more than “copying” (cat) the original PDF to another location, so it was not even needed…

Alex_D once gave me the green light to release a patched/debugged version of RasterFarian, so I’ve taken my freedom to just patching it to NOT use the licensed tool anymore.

I’ve removed the pdcat.exe from the package, and instead I’m merely using windows builtin “copy”-command to do the things.

Download rasterfarian (patched)

PS. as far as I know, only the pdcat-too was licensed, the rest are opensource or free tools.

PS2. This patched version is released “as is”. I haven’t tested it extensively, but on a few PDF-files i’ve made, it seems to work without probs. If you found bugs, report here and I’ll see what I can do, but can’t promise anything. I’m not the original author, and I don’t like shellprogramming, so I rather dislike giving support.

PS3. A “thank you”-comment is appreciated.

At the moment of writing there are a few rasterizing-tools available to create LRF files from PDF. I’ve made a comparison of these three products.

The chose settings:

Rasterfarian: settings as described here

PDFread: no cropping, dilation 300, edge level: 5, optimize PNGs

pdflrf: simply nosplitpage, nosmartcut, no cropping, rotation=0.

Converting a file with pdfread creates the smallest lrf, namely 266KB. However, the image quality is very bad. The lines aren’t smooth, and the text in the bubbles are hard to read.

pdflrf is better. The images are clear and readable, but lacks contrast. The size of the resulting LRF is 604KB though. Chosing 4 colors produces smaller size (285KB) but it produces less sharp and more washed out images compared to rasterfarian.

The same PDF-file converted with Rasterfarian result in a 300KB-lrf and the image quality as loaded in the reader has the highest contrast as well as clearity. Text are smooth and many details remains.

So… it’s obvious for me, Rasterfarian is a true winner for the creation of imagebased-lrffiles. Not only does it create the best quality images, it’s filesize is great too.

However, PDFread and PDFLRF both have a nice windows userinterface. Rasterfarian might be somewhat more complicated to use.

The pdf-files and the resulting LRF-files are attached to this article

Original PDF-file for rasterization

PDFlrf converted manga

PDFlrf converted manga 4 colors

PDFread converted manga

Manga converted with rasterfaran

Here’s the promised, but majorly delayed tutorial on how to use Manga2Ebook and rasterfarian to create PDF-files.

The first step is to Manga2Ebook to convert a collection of manga-books into PDF-form. The program itself has a usage-explanation, and the default values are optimzed for creating manga-pdfs for the Sony Reader already, so I’m not going to explain that.

Just select the directory where you have your manga, type in a title and chose start to create portrait manga.

(if you want to create comics like this:

Chose “resize based on width” and disable rotate. It’ll fit all the comic strips into a page)

When the PDF is done, start rasterfarian by rightclicking on the PDF-file in windows and chose “rasterfarian”, then follow these steps:

1. Chose advanced interface
2. Chose priority belownormal (so you can do other things)
3. Autocrop the file: no
4. Arrange as: 1)whole pages per screen
5. Level of post-processing: full
6. Level of boldness: 6
7. Level of edge enhancement: 7
8. Preview page: Skip (takes too long and result on a monitor is poor anyways)
9. Number of threads: your CPU-core times 2. I have a QuadCore CPU, so I chose 4×2=8
10. Enter a title/author: whatever you want

Now it will create the lrf-file you want.