JohnDas FunDas & Ideas

 What are CBR, CBZ, CBT, RAR, ZIP and TAR files?

Computer files are generally compressed into archive data sets to save space and to organize information better. Common archives are RAR, ZIP and TAR. Comics have a “special” set of extensions to designate them as “comics”. CBR, CBZ and TAR files are comic archive files. A CBR file is the same as an RAR file, CBZ the same as a ZIP file, and CBT the same as a TAR file. The designations allow computers to associate comic reading software with files and allow other non-comic products to use the standard extensions.

The ZIP format takes one or more files and compresses them as one file, with a .zip file extension. The RAR format does the same (and has better compression sometimes).

The TAR format is found primarily on UNIX and Linux operating systems; it can be used on Windows and Mac platforms, although the ZIP format has become the most popular. (Most users are not familiar with .tar files.) The .tar file bundles files together, although without any compression. If a user wishes to compress them, they are advised to use gzip (which turns the compressed file into *.tar.gz ) .

Software programs for making/opening/viewing the contents of these .zip, .rar and .tar files can be found on the Internet.

How do I make my own CBR, CBZ and CBT files?

Place all comic scans into a folder and rename them in page order, eg. 001 002 003 and then archive the files using WinZip, WinRAR or other compression software. Now just rename them with the different extentions. Remember .zip files are .cbz; .rar files are .cbr; and .tar files are .cbt. (Viewers, like CDisplay, can read .all of these file formats, among other extensions, but the de facto standard has become .cbz and .cbr. We recommend you use these two formats.)

You can rename a *.cbz file to a *.cbr file and CDisplay will still view it, although it isn’t recommended. (This might be because WinRAR can read both .zip and .rar files.) Please stick to the original file format/extension name, especially if you’re distributing files via DC++ and/or Bit Torrent.

Also, if you are using WinRAR to rar images into an archive for CDisplay to view, you can just rename the extension from *.rar to *.cbr before you actually start the archiving process.

What’s so good about these digital comic viewing programs?

They’re a great way of viewing image archives, including various options which are optimised for digital comics!

 Reading the comic books !!!!

Comic books - .cbz and .cbr files - CDisplay

http://www.fundazone.com/2007/09/comic-books-cbz-and-cbr-files-cdisplay/

 Comic Book Reder - .cbr files and .cbz files

Download the sequential image viewing utility.  Free!

The Windows Image Viewer ‘CDisplay’ was written to ease the viewing of images in JPEG, PNG and static GIF format.  This was partly down to the existing programs currently available being too general purpose and thus awkward to use when simply wanting to view images sequentially.

It was written using Borland C++ Builder 5.0 and has been tested under Windows 98, NT 4, 2000 and XP Tablet.

It is important to understand that this program has NO file write capabilities; files are left totally untouched.  A small amount of configuration data is written to the registry but apart from that the computer and its data is left untouched.

Features:

Loads JPEG, PNG and static GIF images which are automatically ordered and presented for viewing one at a time or two at a time.

The images may be in a zip, rar, ace or tar archive file - no need to decompress before reading.

Page through the images sequentially and scroll around pages with single key presses.

Automatic page sizing: none; fit to screen, fit to width of screen, fit to width of screen if oversized, display at specific height, or display two pages.  Resizing uses Lanczos interpolation for best picture quality.

Automatic colour balance and yellow reduction if desired.

No bloat caused by non-essential general purpose image processing features.

FREE.

    To Install:

Click on the link below to download setup.zip.  Unzip and run setup.exe.  An installer will start which will install and run the CDisplay Image Viewer.

Download version 1.8 NOW    

http://cdisplay.techknight.com/setup.zip

        Quick Start:

Run CDisplay.  CDisplay uses the entire display for images; there is no menu so right mouse click for a popup.  Choose load files.  Browse to the pages to read.  The whole directory will be pre-selected - just press go to read.  Or select a range of the files using left mouse click, shift left click and/or control left click (ie standard windows multiple selection keys) and press ok. Alternatively, select one ZIP or RAR file and press ok. The first page is displayed.  Use the space bar, page up, page down, home, end and the arrow keys to view the images.

See the ReadMe file or the help (F1 key) for a more detailed description of usage and configuration.

CDisplay forum

TechKnight CDisplay files

 Parent Directory        17-Jun-2003 10:14      -
 CDisplayDebugKit.zip    22-Sep-2003 01:07   232k
 cdisplay-subtitles.zip  30-Jun-2004 05:26   699k
 examplepages.zip        30-Jun-2004 05:32   1.2M
 setup.zip               20-Apr-2004 06:08   1.1M

davidayton

Files with a “.cbr” extension are basically a compressed set of JPG, PNG, or GIF images.
You can open them with the freeware program CDisplay (a comic book reader software).

Available here: http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay.html

You can open .cbr files with WinRar (they are just .rar files with the file extension changed)
And .cbz files can be opened even with Windows XP’s default Compressed folder software (rename all .cbz files to .zip files and all .cbr files to .rar files)

Here is a list of free software that can be used to open .cbr files and .cbz files

Windows:

* CDisplay, the Windows Sequential Image Viewer for Windows by David Dayton.
Available here: http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay.html

* pixelComic, a skinnable comic book viewer written in C++.
Available here: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/pixelComic/1058250114/1

* CBViewer
Available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cbviewer

Linux:

* cbrPager: a simple comic pager for Linux (using GTK+)
Available here: http://www.jcoppens.com/soft/cbrpager/index.en.php

* QComicBook (using Qt)
Available here: http://freshmeat.net/projects/qcomicbook/

* Comical, the UNIX, Linux and MacOS X Sequential Image Viewer (using wxWidgets)
Available here: http://www.sketchyorigins.com/comics/forumdisplay.php?f=47

* PyComicsViewer, for Linux and Windows
Available here: http://borco.net/html/PyComicsViewer/

* CBView, written in GTK2-perl
Available here: http://elvine.org/code/cbview/

* Asparagino’s Comic Viewer
Available here: http://home.asparagine.net/software/comicviewer/

Mac OSX:

* FFView
Available here: http://www.feedface.com/projects/ffview.html

* Comic Book Viewer
Available here: http://gumby.misplacedmac.com/

* Jomic (written in Java, so should be cross-platform as well)
Availabe here: http://jomic.sourceforge.net/

These are free software image viewing programs designed specifically for reading digital comic book files, particularly those in .cbr and .cbz formats (and .rar and .zip formats, if they haven’t had their file extensions changed to .cbr and .cbz yet).

Who is Shakespeare - The Bard of Avon ?

Did ghost writers author this playwright-dramatist’s books ? England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon” (or simply “The Bard”) belonging to Stratford on Avon.

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. He traveled to London sometime between 1585 and 1592 and began a successful career as an actor, writer, and part-owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later known as the King’s Men). He later retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later in 1616. Few records of Shakespeare’s private life survive and considerable speculation has been poured into this void, including questions concerning his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by others.

A small cohort of contrarian scholars who traffic in conspiracy theories about “who really wrote” the plays of William Shakespeare has been joined by two luminaries of the British stage — Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance — along with 285 other skeptics, who recently signed a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare.

The declaration, which is sponsored by the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, takes no position on who wrote the masterpieces of English drama if Shakespeare himself did not. It merely cites what it characterizes as the skimpy evidence to support Shakespeare’s authorship, and asserts, not very trippingly on the tongue, that mainstream scholars should allow the issue to be the subject of research and discussion — without smirking.

The skeptics also cite a panoply of literary lights, including Charlie Chaplin and Sigmund Freud, who expressed doubt that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. After that lengthy exegesis, it’s unclear whether the skeptics are gilding the lily or just protesting too much. Regardless, they will have some difficulty persuading the virtually unanimous chorus of literary scholars who have dismissed the so-called “authorship question” as nonsense Anyway, those of you who want to read the Works of Shakespear(???) online, here is MIT’s free online library right here for download http://shakespeare.mit.edu/

This was the Web’s first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. The site has offered Shakespeare’s plays and poetry to the Internet community since 1993.

Announcement: The restoration of the site following a disk failure has been delayed. The text of the plays is available now. The poetry and other services, including the search engine and forums, will return shortly. (Nov. 13, 2000)

For other Shakespeare resources, visit the Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet Web site.

The original electronic source for this server is the Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare, which is freely available online. The HTML versions of the plays provided here are placed in the public domain.

The works available are :

Chapter 1

The Dark Lord Ascending

The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow,
moonlit lane. For a second they stood quite still, wands directed
at each other’s chests; then, recognizing each other , they
stowed their wands beneath their cloaks and started walking briskly in the
same direction.
“News?” asked the taller of the two.
”The best,” replied Severus Snape.
The lane was bordered on the left by wild, low-growing brambles, on the
right by a high, nearly manicured hedge. The men’s long cloaks flapped around
their ankles as they marched.
“Thought I might be late,” said Yaxley, his blunt features sliding in and out
of sight as the branches of overhanging tress broke the moonlight. “It was
a little trickier than I expected. But I hope he will be satisfied. You should
confident that your reception will be good?”
Snape nodded, but did not elaborate. They turned right, into a wide driveway
that led off the lane. The high hedge curved into them, running off into the
distance beyond the pair of impressive wrought-iron gates barring the men’s
way. Neither of them broke step; In silence both raised their left arms in a
kind of salute and passed straight through, as though the dark metal weresmoke.
The yew hedges muffled the sound of the men’s footsteps. There was a
rustle somewhere to their right; Yaxley drew his wand again, pointing it over
his companion’s head, but the source of the noise proved to be nothing more
than a pure-white peacock, strutting majestically along the top of the hedge.
“He always did himself well, Lucius. Peacocks . . . ” Yaxley thrust his wand
back under his cloak with a snort.
A handsome manor house grew out of the darkness at the end of the straight
drive, lights glinting in the diamond-paned downstairs windows. Somewhere
in the dark garden beyond the hedge a fountain was playing. Gravel crackled
beneath their feet as Snape and Yaxley sped toward the front door, which
swung inward at their approach, though nobody had visibly opened it.
The hallway was large, dimly light, and sumptuously decorated, with a
magnificent carpet covering most of the stone floor. The eyes of the pale-faced
portraits on the walls followed Snape and Yaxley as they strode past. The two
men halted at a heavy wooden door leading into the next room, hesitated for
the space of a heartbeat, then Snape turned the bronze handle.
The drawing room was full of silent people, sitting at a long and ornate
table. The room’s usual furniture had been pushed carelessly up against the
walls. Illumination came from a roaring fire beneath a handsome marble mantelpiece
surmounted by a gilded mirror. Snape and Yaxley lingered for a moment
on the threshold. As their eyes grew accustomed to the lack of light, they
were drawn upward to the strangest feature of the scenes an apparently unconscious
human figure hanging upside down over the table, revolving slowly as
if suspended by an invisible rope, and reflected in the mirror and in the bare,
polished surface of the table below it. He seemed unable to prevent himself
from glancing upward every minute or so.
“Yaxley, Snape,” said a high, clear voice from the head of the table. “You are
very nearly late.”
The speaker was seated directly in front of the fireplace, so that it was diffi-
cult, at first, for the new arrivals to make out more than his silhouette. As theydrew nearer, however, this face shone through the gloom, hairless, snakelike,
with slits for nostrils and gleaming red eyes whose pupils were vertical. He
was so pale that he seemed to emit a pearly glow.
“Severus, here,” said Voldemort, indication the seat on his immediate right.
“Yaxley—beside Dolohov.”
The two men took their allotted places. Most of the eyes around the table
followed Snape, and it was to him that Voldemort spoke first.
“So?”
“My Lord, the Order of the Phoenix intends to move Harry Potter from his
current place of safety on Saturday next, at nightfall.”
The interest around the table sharpened palpably; Some stiffened, others
fidgeted, all gazing at Snape and Voldemort.
“Saturday . . . at nightfall,” repeated Voldemort. His red eyes fastened upon
Snape’s black ones with such intensity that some of the watchers looked away,
apparently fearful that they themselves would be scorched by the ferocity of
the gaze. Snape, however, looked calmly back into Voldemort’s face and, after a
moment or two. Voldemort’s lipless mouth curved into something like a smile.
“Good. very good. And this information comes—”
“—from the source we discussed,” said Snape.
“My Lord.”
Yaxley had leaned forward to look down the long table at Voldemort and
Snape. All faces turned to him.
“My Lord, I have heard differently,”
Yaxley waited but Voldemort did not speak, so he went on, “Dawlish, the
Auror, let slip that Potter will not be moved until the thirtieth, the night before
the boy turns seventeen.”
Snape was smiling,
“My source told me that there are plans to lay a false trail; this must be it.
No doubt a Confundus Charm has been placed upon Dawlish. It would not be
the first time; he is known to be susceptible.”
“I assure you, my Lord, Dawlish seemed quite certain,” said Yaxley.

(more…)