Online Image Tools

Fro those who have an account on worth1000, you most likely will have received the same email about the launch of a new online image editing site: aviary. If you are not those, and you will like creating images, aviary may worth your visit.

Pi to 1,000,000 places

It is the number originally from http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com. You can now get it as an attachment to pito1millionplaces.

Hope I won't kill the server as http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com did.

More on reading on an ebook reader

Some pdf come formatted in two columns. As the device's screen is small, I read it in landscape mode and need to go up and down to continue reading after the first column.

Recently, I found papercorp [more info here] which converts pdf into image sequence (and then save back as pdf). The software can detect multiple columns and save them in sequential images - I don't need to scroll up and down anymore.

a very nice tool!

Warner Brothers & The Pirate Bay

If you click on the logo of the Pirate Bay, you will be able to download a pdf announcing the acquisition of TPB by Warner Brothers for 13.37 billion in a stock for stock transaction.

TPB is currently the largest bit torrent sharing website with over 1.6 million torrents on tracker and over 9 million seeders and another 9.4 million leechers.

This news would be the greatest surprise for me! Given today is April 1, I am taking this with a handful of salt. :-)

Sony PRS-505 ebook reader

Recently, I bought a Sony PRS-505 ebook reader. After using it for a few days, I generally like it. Because of my eye sight, I read in medium font in landscape mode. All the reading I have done are pdf files. I can use it under direct sunlight - which is good.

Apart from the default "s" mode (which can stand for standard or small), medium and large fonts are available. However, these later modes are a re-flow of the pdf text. It did not work for a Chinese pdf I was reading. I have not tested on other Chinese pdf yet.

Some of my pdf has a fairly large white margin, if there is a magnifier mode so that I can fill the screen with text and push the margin outside, I would be able to read the pdf without using re-flow.

However there are a few improvements that may make it better.

1. Non-reflective coating of the screen will help in situation where is a high contrast of light and shadow.

2. The processor performance should improve. Yes, the screen refresh is slow compared to other display technology, it does not hence imply a low performing processor. I generally find switching pages in medium or large font mode too slow possibly due to the need of re-flowing.

3. A different magnification mode may also be useful. (see above)

4. A larger display area would certainly help. Given it is an ebook reader, I suppose the target market would be people like me, ie old enough to still read books, have some eye sight issues (need reading glasses all the time). A small screen is certainly no good.

5. My reader come with a leather jacket. I find that I cannot fold the cover back and hence I need one hand to keep the cover open, very ignoring.