Speed up Adobe Reader 8

Adobe Acrobat Reader got you down?

By cavtroop

I installed Acrobat Reader 8.0, and every single time I open a document, I was presented with a “please wait while the document is being prepared” message, that would sometimes stay for minutes as it indexed the entire document. This presented issues with both usability, and when giving presentations.

To remove this ‘feature’, simply navigate to your %Program Files%\Adobe\Reader 8.0\reader\plug_ins folder, and rename (delete, copy elsewhere) the ‘accessability.api’ file. The same file exists, but in slightly different locations, in older version of Acrobat Reader.

Poof! No more annoying messages preventing you from actually reading the file. Keep in mind, the ‘reader’ functionality will no longer work, but who uses that anyways? Next time you open a file, Acrobat will complain that this version doesn’t have ‘reader’ functionality built in. Check the box, and click OK, and that’s the last you will hear from them on that!

Source: ArsGeek - Adobe Acrobat Reader got you down?

Prices jump when auction minimums drop

By RACHEL KONRAD
AP Technology Writer

Most auction sites let sellers set a “reserve” price under which they are not obligated to sell the item. Sellers are assured they won’t have to unload their item at a loss; sites make more on their commissions with such minimums.

So PropertyRoom.com took a big risk when it dropped the reserve-price option and started all bids at $1. But the move yielded surprising results: the average price increased 30 percent and the average number of bidders per item surged 50 percent.

“The board of directors was biting their fingernails,” said P.J. Bellomo, the company’s chief operating officer. “But more people keep showing up.”

The site, which sells items seized or found by police departments nationwide, quietly began informing sellers about the change earlier this year. The change covers nearly all items, including diamond rings, computers, coins and Rolex watches.

The company also has a no-reserve format for automobiles, but police departments may set the opening price higher than $1. Bellomo said the company may soon require $1 starts on cars, too.

Amar Cheema, a marketing professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said PropertyRoom.com bidders probably think they’re getting great deals - even though they’re paying 30 percent more than before.

“When an individual is looking at an auction and they know there’s a reserve price, it discourages entry,” said Cheema, who studies consumer behavior and auctions. “Because there is no reserve, more people are likely to enter, and when you have more people entering the bids go up.”

Source: Prices jump when auction minimums drop - 05/16/2007 - MiamiHerald.com

Buying a Safe Used Car

What Will Your Daughter Drive?

Culling the List of Used-Car Options
Based on Safety and Reliability
May 14, 2007; Page D5

Buying a car that’s appropriate for a teenage driver is no easy task. But since I may have to attempt it soon, I decided to dust off the Eyes on the Road Teen Car Search System.

My younger daughter, who is six months away from qualifying for a driver’s license, has somehow acquired a robust interest in cars. She has strong opinions about the kind of ride she wants, and clipped out of the newspaper a dozen or so classified ads for cars she’d be willing to drive. (See the list) Let’s assume I am willing to spend the money, so as to free myself of the occasional obligation to act as a part-time taxi driver. Should I buy one of the cars on her list?

The system I use is nothing fancy. It’s based on correlating information that’s available on the Web in several different places. I started where most experts in automotive safety say you should begin a search for a young person’s car, ruling out body-on-frame pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles. These vehicles, with their high centers of gravity and higher-than-average rollover risk, can be unforgiving in the hands of an inexperienced driver.

That limits the field mainly to passenger cars. Safety experts prefer larger cars with smaller engines. Many teens like smaller cars, especially now with gasoline around $3 a gallon.

I decided to first look for used cars with head-protecting side airbags as either standard or optional equipment. Fortunately, sifting for vehicles with a specific feature on a car shopping Web site is getting easier. Kelley Blue Book (www.kbb.com) has a function called “perfect car finder” that helped me to sort for vehicles with head-protecting airbags priced below $15,000. Other car shopping sites have, or soon will have, similar functions. That price level may be too high for some families, and it might seem not enough for others. But based on the results, that price seemed about right to give me a choice of later model compacts, and older midsize or large models.

From there, I tried to narrow the field to vehicles that had at least average reliability scores, as measured by Consumer Reports, and had good safety ratings from both the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

My filters didn’t let a lot of my daughter’s picks get through.

Right away, one of my daughter’s favorite cars fell by the wayside. That’s the original Scion xB, the boxy little mini-wagon, known to its fans as the “Toaster.” The Scion xB has been a sales hit for Toyota Motor Corp.

But this vehicle, designed for the Japanese market, is very light — just about 2,500 pounds — and lacks head-protecting side airbags. It earned three out of five stars on the NHTSA side impact test – and garnered a “poor” side impact score from the Insurance Institute. The new Scion xB, launching now, has head-protecting side airbags and is larger overall, the better to protect occupants. But the new xB is less of a bargain with a starting price of $15,650, up $1,620 from the old model.

Another car my daughter picked out of the classifieds, based on its low price, was a 2004 Chevrolet Cavalier. But it fell off the list because it was rated poor on the Insurance Institute’s front crash test, and earned only one star for side-impact protection from the NHTSA. Indeed, NHTSA’s site flags the Cavalier’s side impact score with a boldface black “safety concern” label. A 2002 Chevy Malibu had “acceptable” crash ratings from NHTSA, but Consumer Reports labels it “much worse than average” for reliability.

Sometimes the data conflicted. A 2004 Kia Spectra, well within the target price range, has side-curtain airbags. It got a four-star ratings from NHTSA for both front and driver’s side-impact protection. But the IIHS rated it poor in its frontal crash test.

The 2001 Toyota Corolla, a paragon of reliability according to Consumer Reports, merits only four stars out of five for front crash safety and three out of five for side-impact protection on NHTSA’s test.

Honda

2005 Honda Accord

Among the cars that stood out from the pack is the 2005 Honda Accord LX. It has five star NHTSA front crash ratings and four-star side-impact ratings. It earned “good” ratings from IIHS, and has demonstrated much-better-than-average reliability. A two-year old Accord has a likely selling price of around $14,000, according to KBB.com.

Another good choice would be a 2006 Honda Civic, with a five-star front, four-star side crash rating from NHTSA, double “good” scores from the IIHS, better-than-average quality scores and a price pegged just under $15,000.

A 2002 Volvo S60 also makes the cut. NHTSA gave it a four-star front crash rating, five star side. It has a “good” score from the Insurance Institute and Consumer Reports rates it better than average. Likely price: Around $13,270 according to KBB.com.

This points out a good strategy for scoring a second-hand car with better-than-average safety technology — buy a used luxury car. You may pay about the same for a five- or six-year-old luxury car that you would for a much newer, mass-market brand model. But European luxury cars, such as the Audi A4, moved more rapidly than mainstream American and Japanese brands to adopt side airbags and anti-lock brakes.

A Volkswagen Passat of 2001 or 2004 vintage got over the bar with NHTSA scores of five stars for front crash, four-star ratings for side-impact protection. It has side curtain airbags and an average rating for reliability.

If you can find a 2004 Chevy Impala with the optional side airbags it scored five front, four side on NHTSA’s tests, a “good” score on the IIHS front crash test and scores average on reliability.

I looked at two other popular midsized cars: the 2004 Toyota Camry and 2004 Ford Taurus. The Camry and Taurus didn’t score as well the Impala on the NHTSA front crash test, with four-star ratings each. Both are rated good by the IIHS for performance in its front crash test. The Camry scored a good for side-impact protection, when equipped with optional side-curtain airbags. The Taurus has no side-impact score from the IIHS, but rated a better than average reliability rating from Consumer Reports, and the Camry earned a much better than average rating from Consumer Reports. As with the Impala, the key is to make sure the used car you buy has the optional side airbags.

My daughter was pleased to learn that the Pontiac Vibe, a youth oriented mini-wagon that’s in plentiful supply in the Detroit area, got through the hurdles. But the Vibe also illustrates how the welter of different rating systems used by the various scorekeepers of automotive goodness can be confusing for consumers.

The 2004 Pontiac Vibe earned a five-star front and a five-star side crash rating from NHTSA — and there aren’t that many cars that get a five-star side-impact score. This is somewhat surprising, because the 2004 Vibe was tested without side airbags, according to NHTSA’s site. The car did have available chest-protecting side airbags from 2003 on, according to a Pontiac spokesman. (The IIHS doesn’t post a ranking for the model.) Consumer Reports rates the Vibe much better than average. And this may be a selling point for some: The Vibe and the mechanically similar Toyota Matrix are both built by union workers in a California factory that’s owned by a joint venture of Toyota and General Motors Corp.

But when NHTSA retested 2005 model Vibes, following some design changes to the interior, it got only three stars for front seat occupant protection in the government side-impact crash test. A spokesman for Pontiac says the Vibe’s chest-protecting side airbag was made less powerful in 2005 in response to a change in NHTSA’s test. The change was aimed at making cars safer for very small drivers. But the less powerful side airbag resulted in less protection for a larger driver.

NHTSA hasn’t posted a side-impact score for the 2007 model Vibe equipped with side-curtain airbags. So the 2004 Vibe is provisionally on my list, although I would rather hold out for a car that had good scores AND head-protecting side airbags.

My daughter may not be excited about the prospect that the “right” car for her could be something as plain as a second-hand Honda Accord. Then again, she could just keep on riding her bike.

Source: Free Article - WSJ.com

Word - Squeezing Everything In

 From WordTips:

You’ve finished your masterpiece, and you are ready to “go to press” (even if the press is a small printer in the corner of your work area). You take a look at the document, and notice that it is a certain number of pages long. You go to the last page, and find that there are only two lines or so on the final page. If you could just get rid of those lines…

This is a common problem for many writers. It doesn’t matter if you are writing letters or novellas—the problem of fitting text to a specific print area can be frustrating. What can you do? Well, there is a simple approach and a better approach. Let’s look at each of them.

First of all, for the simple approach. If you display your document in Print Preview, you notice that there is a button on the toolbar that will condense your document by a page. Actually, it doesn’t really do that. Instead, it reduces the font size of all the fonts used in your document, thereby allowing more text to be fit into the area you have available. It also affects font sizes differently. For instance, a document with a 14-point, 12-point, 10-point, and 8-point text has those sizes reduced, respectively, to 12-point, 10.5-point, 8.5-point, and 7 point. This might not give the desired results.

A better approach is the old tried-and-true manual method of adjusting the parameters that affect the text on your page. The first thing you should try has to do with the content of your document itself. Don’t be afraid to take another look at your content and edit it to make it shorter. Remove superfluous words and strive to be more concise in your descriptions.

Next, you can hyphenate your document. This can close up some lines, simply by pulling “partial” words up to previous lines. This works particularly well if the right side of your document is quite ragged (has a lot of white space).

Now you can look at adjusting the margins. You can often reduce margins on all four sides of your paper by .1 inch, and no one will notice. Don’t forget to examine the gutter margin, if your layout uses one.

Another thing to try is reducing the paragraph line spacing. You can set spacing to a specific number of points, but a “trickier” method is to set the line spacing to Multiple, and then use a percentage in the At box. For instance, set your line spacing to .99, and the paragraph then uses 99% of its normal line spacing. You can keep reducing the line spacing by a percent at a time, and the incremental effect on your reader is barely noticeable—the effect on your document length can be dramatic, depending on the number of pages in the document.

A related trick is to reduce the space between paragraphs. Unfortunately, you can do this only in one-point increments, but the difference between 12 points and 11 points between paragraphs is minuscule and virtually undetectable.

When the above approaches have been used, it is time to reduce point size on your document’s text. It is best to start out at small increments—Word can handle increments as small as one-half (.5) points. Thus, you could reduce from 12-point text to 11.5-point text. This is barely noticeable to a reader, but can have a huge impact on document length.

Finally, you can condense character spacing. Here you can be quite precise, adjusting the spacing by as little as one-tenth (.1) point. Even a small adjustment here can significantly increase the amount of material on each line in your document.

As you can tell, there are quite a few different settings you can tinker with to get your document down to size. The drawback to this is that sometimes tinkering can lead to unintended results. For instance, you may end up with a document that looks funny because you applied your “fixes” sporadically throughout the document. A more consistent approach is to use styles to define the appearance of your text. Your “tinkering” can then be done to the styles themselves, and they will be applied evenly and consistently throughout your document. (Provided, of course, you applied styles consistently to begin with.) Styles are at the heart of any professional presentation of text in Word, and have been covered extensively in other issues of WordTips.

The bottom line is to take a look at what you are trying to convey in your document, and then make the formatting changes that detract from your message the least. This means that an approach you take in one document may not be appropriate for another. You need to decide what is best for your purposes.

Source: Squeezing Everything In

SearchMash

Doing the SearchMash

Recently, Google rolled a new user interface test bed, SearchMash, and it is worth checking out. You won't see the Google brand anywhere on the front page or the search results, but rest assured that, under the hood, the Google engine is purring.

You have almost all the search functionality of the regular Google web search; phrase searching works, as do the usual Boolean operators, and format and field limiters, although there is no advanced search page on SearchMash. And don't look for any sponsored links; there is no advertising on this beta search site.

But what sets it apart is the search results page. For starters, SearchMash sorts the results into web pages, images, blogs, videos, and Wikipedia entries, all on one screen. The first ten web pages are displayed in a somewhat abbreviated format:

Saugerties Garlic Festival
hopefarm.com - The Garlic Festival is a two day event held on Saturday & Sunday, the last full weekend in September, from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM. [...]

Note that the search result displays the domain of the retrieved page, but not the specific URL for that page (in this example, the retrieved page is http://www.hopefarm.com/garlic.htm). This actually simplifies the work of skimming search results for relevant sites. Interestingly, there is an option for an even briefer display -- just the page's title and domain.

Although the search results do not show the full URL, SearchMash offers a cool tool for drilling down into any of the retrieved web sites. Click on the linked domain in the search results page and SearchMash executes a search of that entire domain for your search terms. So, for example, if I clicked the hopefarm.com link from the example above, SearchMash will execute a search on garlic festival site:www.hopefarm.com.

This is a more useful tool than it first appears. Experienced searchers know that one of the limitations of a search engine is that it only displays a few web pages from any domain, even if many web pages from that domain match the search criteria. By using SearchMash, you can expand your search within a relevant domain without having to retype your query.

As mentioned above, one of the search results page features I find tremendously valuable is the clustering of results from the "rest" of the Google index – images, blogs, and videos – and from Wikipedia. Each of these clusters can be viewed by clicking on a + next to the category; the default is to see six thumbnails of images and videos, and three blog and Wikipedia entries. If you click any of the video images, the image expands and you can view the video from within the search results page.

And I am delighted to see that SearchMash finally has something close to MSN Live Search's "infinite scroll." SearchMash's version isn't as smooth as Live Search, but it's not bad. When you click the "Next" link at the bottom of a SearchMash search results page, you see not only the next set of pages but the previous set as well. So, you can review the first 10 results, click "Next", and now you have a page that has the first 20 results. Click "Next" again, and now there are 30 results, and so on.

As a beta site, SearchMash may change over time, so check it out and see if you find it as useful as I have.

Source: BatesInfoTip newsletter - May 2007 - SearchMash