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Have you seen the move “The Pursuit of Happyness” starring Will Smith and his real son ? If not, go watch it when you get the chance. But this article is not about Will Smith or his movie. This is about Randall Munroe.

Do you know who that is ? No ?

What about xkcd.com ?

Well, its one of the best webcomics I’ve seen in terms of ideas and geeky jokes that I like. Calvin and Hobbes is, and will ever has been my favourite, but this xkcd webcomic appeals to my technical side.

Now to the topic of discussion, “How do you read in bed ?”

This is what Randall Blagged,

The Pursuit of Laziness

Since I was a kid, I’ve been looking for the perfect way to read in bed. The ideal position would involve no sustained muscle effort, so I could just let my eyes drift shut as I read, without the book falling shut or my hand slipping or anything. One way is to sit up against something and hold the book on your lap, but that’s not great for falling asleep. So I usually end up reading on my side.

The problem is, you have to hold the book to see both pages, and in either case, you’re using some muscles to hold it where it is.

This has worked for most of my life, but it’s still not that ultimate relaxation.

However, I recently got a Kindle. I was intending to use it mainly as a mobile web browser, but I’ve surprised myself by using it to read an awful lot. And, with apologies to all the bibliophiles out there, I find the ergonomics better than a paperback. When snacking and reading, I can lay it flat on a table without the use of a book weight to hold it opened, and when lying in bed, I don’t have to keep moving it to read.

But it’s not perfect. There’s no way to hold it with a finger on the ‘next page’ buttons that doesn’t require a few muscles to hold it upright:

Either I work to hold my hand off the bed, or I awkwardly curl my fingers around it. Either way, it tips over if I relax my arm, even if it’s leaning against a pillow, and I’m startled awake by this:

I started to wonder if I could do even better. I got out of bed one night, went to the closet, and got a steel coat hanger and some pliers. After a few minutes of twisting, I created this:

Read on to find out WHAT IT IS …

Read more…

 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 :