Toshiba Announces End of HD DVD, Sony’s Blu-ray Triumphs

I was just reading in the papers about the decision of Wal-Mart dropping HD DVD for Blu-ray, and wondering what the impact of that would be. I guess I found out. Toshiba has just officially announced the discontinuation of its high-definition video format, HD DVD, after numerous bigwigs such as Wal-Mart, Netflix, Best Buy and many others abandoned HD DVD for Sony’s Blu-ray.

It appears that Wal-Mart was the final straw. With no major players backing up its format, Toshiba could only admit defeat. HD DVD was the first to appear on the market, and is cheaper by a margin, but it appears that Blu-ray wins out. It’s not a bad thing, because Blu-ray is technologically more superior. In any case, it’s still a fact that is made even clearer after this episode that the majority of consumers will create enormous market forces that can make or break a new technology or format.

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How To Solve “No available system font while editing PDF in Adobe Acrobat” Problem

If you’ve tried editing PDF documents using Adobe Acrobat (using the Acrobat Touch Up Text Tool), then you’ve most probably come across this problem that says “No available system font”. Bummer.

Now some of you might legitimately have the font when you created the PDF, but might have switched computers, went through an upgrade, or anything of that sort that caused you to not have that particular system font now.

The conventional way was to go out there and buy that font again, so that you edit your PDF document in Adobe Acrobat right? Well — that will work, but it’s not a very scalable solution. Imagine having multiple fonts that you had to buy, or perhaps you only had to edit the document, and having the exact same font didn’t matter at all to you.

That was the problem I faced — the fonts that I used were pretty, but it wasn’t crucial that I continued using them. In fact, I would have been happy with just Arial or even Times New Roman. So the main thing is to get the editing operation to work.

So I gave it some thought, and I realised that I could actually masquerade some fonts as the required fonts by Adobe Acrobat. However, it wasn’t as easy as I thought. I discovered that just changing the font’s filename wouldn’t work, so I searched around this software download site for a solution, and found it in the form of FontCreator, a font software created by High-Logic.

FontCreator is, in essence, a very powerful font-creation tool that even professional typographers and graphic designers use. But it’s simple and user-friendly, and best of all, affordable enough for home users to buy.

The font editor allows you to easily select and modify the entire character set of any TrueType® font and fonts based on OpenType® font technology. You can even convert images to outlines! I tried scanning in my signature, and made a font with my own signature. Then I tried the same process with my handwriting! So now I can select “My Handwriting” as the font in any application (such as Microsoft Word), and have my documents written in my signature, digitally!

Most importantly though, it allowed me to edit the property of an existing font. So I made a copy of an existing font in my system (I can’t remember which!), and then used FontCreator to change the name of the font to the one that was embedded in my PDF document. Next, I opened up Adobe Acrobat again to edit my font, and viola! IT WORKED.

So if you’re looking for a long-term solution that’s infinitely more scalable than always having to buy individual fonts again and again, try out FontCreator. It’s a great piece of software to add to your collection, and you get to have added functionality like creating a customised font to mimic your handwriting!

Update: Ah! I found a coupon for 10% off…but only after I made my purchase!

If anyone wants the 10% discount coupon for FontCreator, it’s “VGHK-D515″ (without the quotes).

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Logitech Ultraslim Keyboard Dark Pearl (with Soft Touch Technology) Review

Urgh. I wanted to get a new keyboard for myself because I’m using a 17″ LCD monitor to extend my desktop from my Thinkpad notebook, so an external keyboard and mouse makes things easier to use.

I thought keyboards were all the same, and the only difference was the touch or feeling of the keys. Well, I thought wrong.

Logitech has an ultraslim keyboard that has really nice Soft Touch keys — they’re soft of like the keys that notebooks use, so it’s really comfortable and easy to type.

What I didn’t count on what that the key layout was totally different. It’s not like the full 104 key keyboards where the arrow keys live in an isolated area of their own, as with the numpad keys and the group of Page Down, Page Up, Insert, etc keys.

In this logitech keyboard, the keys were all squeezed together. That’s right — there’s no gap at all between any group of keys, arrow keys, numpad, or otherwise. That makes this keyboard really hard to use. It’s fine if you type without mistakes or require very little editing because the main group of keys are FANTASTIC to type on. It’s still by far the most comfortable keyboard I’ve used.

It’s just that the key layout really annoys me. This surfaces when I try to use the keyboard to navigate around (with the arrow keys) or perform editing operations (shift-home, shift-end, delete, backspace, etc). Normally I can do it without even looking at the keyboard, but with this particular Logitech keyboard, I have to actually look down and make sure I’m pressing on the right key. I’ve tried not looking, but I’m always hitting on the wrong key. That makes it really slow and awkward for me.

It got to a point where I couldn’t stand it anymore and pried out the less-important keys so that I could regain some of my productivity back. You can see from the picture above that I took out the Insert key and the Numpad 0 key. Things are slightly better this way, but it’s still a temporary measure.

Verdict? I’m going to sell off this keyboard, and get a better keyboard. One which is full-sized, so all the keys are where they should be, but also with the Soft Touch technology, which makes typing such a joy.

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Recursively Delete Selected Files or Folders In Windows

I was looking around for a way to recursively delete files and folders of a specific name in Windows. For example, imagine having “/folderA/folderB/file1.doc” and “/folderA/folderC/file1.doc”, and I wanted to remove all instances of file1.doc. Now imagine this file1.doc being presented in hundreds of folders. Deleting each file manually would drive anyone crazy.

I know Unix has a more powerful commandline interface, so operations like this should be a snap, but I was certain Windows had a similar functionality too. So I went about searching for a simple solution to do so. I was so intent on finding a simple batch file or DOS command that would do the recursive delete that I didn’t think of anything else until it suddenly slammed into me like a bullet train.

I could just use the search function in Windows! Yes that’s right — the normal Windows search is already a powerful enough function that accepts wildcards and does recursive searching. So I went to Windows search, specified my folder, and put in my filename. Sure enough, all the hundred or more instances of that file popped up almost instantly. From there it was just a matter of selecting all of them and deleting them. Everything took less than 10 seconds!

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Best Free PHP Forum Script

The best PHP forum software has got to be vBulletin, because it has unparalleled features and support. The only problem is it costs over a hundred dollars. So that may be a problem if you’re just starting out.

It used to be that the single largest competitor to vBulletin was phpBB, but it’s no longer the case. Recently I discovered a few VERY good free php forum scripts. I’m really amazed by them because all these scripts are lightweight, elegant, and fast! If you are looking to start your own forum, then these are the best free forum scripts that you can find. In no order of preference, they are:

1. PunBB
2. Vanilla
3. BBPress

One thing that you MUST consider, however, is the future of your website. These relatively-new forum scripts have a rather different backend structure as compared to vBulletin — and looking through the current database importer scripts that vBulletin provides, only phpBB can be seamlessly imported into vBulletin with ease.

So if you’re looking to upgrade to something like vBulletin, then these forums might not be such a good idea. If you’d like something safer, go with phpBB. It’s free, it’s feature-packed, and it has a huge community that provides support and mods free. In fact, one hugely popular free mod for phpBB is a free WordPress and phpBB bridge plugin.

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Connecting SpeedTouch ST536 with Wireless Router

So I switched from cable to ADSL, but didn’t check if my wireless router could work out of the box. Well, it turned out that it could because I could surf the Internet just fine, or so I thought.

By not changing the settings to accomodate the ADSL modem, there was a weird phenomenon happening that caused frequent time-outs, FTP uploads failing, MSN messages not being sent or received properly, message loss, and the dreaded Page “Unable To Display” message in your browser until you refresh.

With such a host of problems, I did more research on my network configuration and tried to get my SpeedTouch ST536 ADSL modem to work with my Belkin wireless router properly. In fact, I was about to flash the SpeedTouch and get everything working in a bridge-mode setup until I discovered that there was an easier way!

If you think about it — the SpeedTouch can actually function as a router, and you can just use your wireless router as an access point. It means you don’t really fully maximise your router’s capabilities, but by using this setup, you ensure the fastest and most optimal way to configure your network.

How To Configure Your Wireless Router

In order for this configuration to work, you’ll need to do just a few things, in this order:

1.) Change your wireless router’s IP to 192.168.1.2 (it most probably was 192.168.2.1 or 192.168.0.1 etc.)
2.) Disable DHCP (dynamic IP assignment) in your wireless router’s configuration panel
3.) Plug the ST536 modem’s cable into your wireless router’s LAN port (not WAN port or MODEM port). This is the same type of port that your computer is connected to your router by.
4.) Disconnect and connect any computers that are currently connected to your network.

Done! This method worked for me, and I’m darn happy with my network now!

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Toastmasters Table Topic Ideas for Impromptu Speaking - The Best Job

Write down several professions on pieces of paper, then have your Table Topics speakers come up and explain why the job on the paper in front of them is the best job in the world (or the worst!)

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