Read Comics (CBR/CBZ) on Your Symbian S60v3 Phone N86

First of all, please be warned that I am not responsible if you brick your Nokia mobile. This is not exactly a hack, all you need to do is install a trialware software to read comics. So here goes.

Please note that I am using a Nokia N86 8MP phone. This kind of phone is OS 9.1 but it might as well be an S60v3 phone. For Nokia touch devices or ^3 phones, just download and Google for TouchComic 1.91. TouchComic is a great program for Nokia touch phones but it's not very ideal for non-touch phones like we have.

First thing you need to install is X-Plore. This app is a file manager with a shit ton of features. It can read text files, it can unzip, it can unrar, and it can even play some video formats quite well. This app is not free but it is trialware. However, your trial does not end. The app just has a 3 second nag when started and ended. That's not a very irritating nag, but if you have money, please buy the product and support the author.

Now that you have X-Plore installed, all you need is to download a CBR or CBZ file. Once in your phone, fire up X-Plore and locate the CBR/CBZ file. Rename the CBZ file to zip and rename the CBR file to rar. Now, after that, X-Plore will be able to read the files inside the archives.

Just click on the picture file (JPG), X-Plore will display the picture. Now this is where X-Plore comes in very handy more than the built-in Nokia picture explorer - hot keys. Once the picture (the comic page) is displayed, you can zoom in the page to read the word balloons using the number 5 on your keypad. To zoom out just press 0. To go to the next page, just press 3.

Isn't this awesome. The cool thing about X-Plore is that it will also remember the folder that you were before after you exit the app. This makes it the best comic book reader for our Nokia Symbian phone. 

I Made a Cool DropPages Website

Have you heard of DropPages? DropPages is a cool new website creation system hosted in your Dropbox. DropPages is great for one-shot static webpages. Sure, you can use this as a blog too, but you need to edit the HTML every time.

That said, I think that this is just the start of cool hacks using Dropbox. I'm excited to see what other crazy hacks people can create with this technology.

Testing Windows Live Writer

This is a test post for Windows Live Writer for XP. I’m now using Windows XP on my main netbook, an Asus 701. I’m still dicking around this blog posting app and trying to look at the features. It looks ok so far, but the real test is if this entry gets posted to the blog. If not then this text will be erased and you will never see this crap materialize.

The UI is easy to understand. Just type away in Live Writer and then post your entry. That’s basically it. The setup was just a matter of entering your blog platform as well as your username and password.

One immediate downside is that the app does not seem to recognize my drafts. So essentially I still need to open a browser and edit my drafts in Blogger. Maybe I made a mistake, but I can’t be sure. So email me if I’m wrong on this one point.

Edit: I just found out that you can retrieve the drafts with “open.” Dang, good thing I figured it out. I almost deleted Live Writer.

How I Made Windows Vista Start Faster

It's not a secret that any version of Windows will start to slow down as the install gets older. This certainly apply to Windows Vista most of all. This Acer PC that we bought years ago came with Windows Vista. We bought it a few weeks within the release date of Windows 7. That's what I get for being impatient. So, as months and years passed by, the Vista install in this desktop started slowing down, most especially at boot.

The only way I knew how to make the boot faster is MSCONFIG. However, what if I need some apps to launch at start-up? MSCONFIG has no ability to delay launching of apps. But this cool app called Startup Delayer can. This is literally the only thing I did to make my boot faster than before.

Of course I had to defrag my hard drive and clean my registry once in a while, but Startup Delayer did everything after that.

I'm not affiliated with the Startup Delayer folks. This is not a paid post, just to be clear. I was never paid to post, nor will I ever accept money to post positive reviews for anything.

Free & Legal Marvel Comics

If  you are a Google Chrome user, you might have heard of the Google Chrome Web Store. I recently browsed a few apps in the web store and found some interesting stuff. One such thing is the Marvel Comics app. If you believe in digital comics then you have to give this app a try. You can check out a few free Marvel comic books there and enjoy the future of comics.

Check out the web store.

WinFF - freeware audio / video converter

WinFF is a frontend for FFMPEG. It's a crossplatform, opensource application that can easily convert any audio or video format to any other audio or video format you need.

It can convert xvid to mpeg to avi to mp3 to wav to flv to 3gp and a lot more. Try out any video or audio format you may have, and this baby can convert it for you. It's free and easy to use.

Try it out for XP or Linux. I love this app and I use it to convert my favorite podcasts to 16k MP3's.

You can also try Cdex for free audio encoding and CD ripping.

Read ebooks using your mobile phone

Ebook readers are all the rage today. E-ink technology is still in its infancy, but we are lucky that the promise of perfect paperless reading will happen in our lifetime.

Amazon has the Kindle and Sony has their own ebook reader. Both companies use the new E-ink technology. While not perfect, it's really best suited for any amount of sustained reading on an electronic device.

Now, if you want to read ebooks, but you don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on these new gizmos, then allow me to tell you how to take advantage of pre-existing technology that you may already have.

The picture above is an open source application called ReadManiac. It's essentially a midlet creator. It creates jar / jad files that can be easily installed even on midp 1.0 cellphones. The midlets can be made into a standalone application (for phones with file systems) or a midlet with an emebeded book.

For example, my k750i is a midp 2.0 phone with a file system. The best midlet for it is the standalone application, because you can store ebooks in your flash card and access it inside the app.

I also have an old Nokia 6230, midp 1.0 phone, without a file system. The best midlet to use is the one with embedded ebook since the phone can't access files through the application.

Here's a list of some less known ReadManiac features:

1. Can read zipped ebooks.

2. Has a configurable eyeguard to remind you that you are reading on a small LCD screen.

3. Bookmarking, search, and goto page quick navigation.

Once you installed a bookreader on your phone, where can you get ebooks to read? Well, you can go to Project Gutenburg for millions of free books, or here for a few commercial bestsellers.

2 ways I use Google Chrome

Chrome is a good browser with the potential to become the dominant choice for web heads in the future. For now it's in beta, and I really don't want to use this browser when accessing my business intranet or anything involving important data.

Here's how I use Chrome from day to day:

1. Using it to make web apps

As most of you already know, Chrome can make shortcuts for web sites. I use it to make web apps of Last.fm, Youtube, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and a lot of web pages that I can live to access in a standalone form.

This frees up my Firefox 3 to do the heavy surfing while avoiding Flash heavy sites.

2. Incognito mode

This is very useful when accessing unknown content. This is not just for porn. Since Incognito will not leave any traces on your hard drive, you can access educational sites like warez, torrentz, ebookz etc. without getting tracking cookies or something similar.



That's how I use Chrome from day to day. It's a good product but not just ready to topple Firefox yet. If you have tips on how to make effective use of Chrome, please write your comments below.

My eeepc and Google Chrome

This is a quick review of Google Chrome, the beta browser of the big G. I'm using it now as I'm typing this entry.

Initial impressions:

1. It feels snappy but it could be psychological.

2. The Google services work like a well oiled machine.

3. The rendering is fast even with initial zero cache use.

4. I have 6 tabs opened and only 26 MB of my eeePC's memory is used.

5. The zoom functionality only works for text. Firefox can zoom out the whole web page, which is crucial (but not a game breaker) for the small screen of the eeePC.

6. Every blank tab page has your most recent / most visited web pages all listed with screenshots.

7. Incognito mode or porn mode as we all know it can be activated anytime.

That's all for now. I am missing my Firefox extensions but not that much.

K-Meleon is Firefox lite for Windows

There's this article by Nate Lanxon where he proposed a Firefox lite for low-end PC's:

There's no doubt Firefox is the best Web browser in the world. I advise everyone to use it. However, I think that the memory-hogging issue isn't really too serious for slightly-above-average PCs these days --they can handle the memory for the most part. Those who can't suffer for it.

As a user of a low-end PC, I can't agree more on his views about the memory issues of Firefox. But I think that if Firefox lite is not being considered by Mozilla, there's K-Meleon as an alternative to Firefox.

K-Meleon is a Windows only browser based on the Gecko rendering engine that Firefox runs on. But since it's a native Windows browser, it's much more optimized, hence the smaller memory footprint.

I've been a user of K-Meleon for about a year now and I find it stable with only minor problems with some websites. I believe that you can use some Firefox extensions as add-ons for K-Meleon, but I haven't figured it out yet. It would kick-ass to have Scribefire in K-Meleon.

The best thing about K-Meleon is the active community and it's open source license. This means you can expect incremental improvements and bug fixes with each latest releases.

Maxthon + Blogex + IeSpell = goodbye FF

I've been using an IE shell called Maxthon since it was MYIE.  I find it very functional and responsive, just right for my power-surfing needs.  I know it's IE and I know the dangers of surfing with IE.  Hey, I live on the razor edge all the time anyway--not really.  But Maxthon just kicks Firefox's butt out of contention.  Maxthon opens faster, has a smaller memory footprint, has plug-ins, and a lot of stuff that I can't enumerate here. 

The big minus for Maxthon is the IE engine, but soon that will be solved when Maxthon version 2 will support the Gecko engine.  I'm not holding my breath, but whatever, it could still happen.  I have nothing against Firefox except my computer is about 10 years old and can barely run the damn thing. 

I love Firefox, but Maxthon is much more practical for me to use as of now.  In fact, I'm blogging right now with Maxthon using Blogex 1.2.0., plus IeSpell.  That's all I need in my browser.  So if you love to live in constant fear of viruses and spyware, join us Maxthonites.  I love to live dangerously.

Note:  Maxthon is actually much safer than plain-vanilla IE since it has patched most of IE's flaws.   

Yay an updated Zoundry

Go to www.zoundry.com for a new version of the Zoundry Blog Writer. It looks good and a great replacement for the once superior, Qumana.

I'll be posting more later about Video game burn out which I'm experiencing right now.

Anyway, I'm thinking of bringing back the Technorati tags. Should I bother? I don't really have a lot of returning visitors even though I get more than 50 page-loads a day. I know how pathetic that number is, so what, I don't care. As long as I help people find the things they want.

Rootkit detection devices

This Cnet blog post by Robert Vamosi is about rootkit removal devices. If you suspect your system to contain any rootkits, just take a gander at all the free software listed in the article. Personally, I have tried Blacklight before and I found it to be easy and a fast rootkit detector. I must say that I did not detect any rootkit on my system, but if you are someone who happened to have bought a sony audio cd in the last couple of years, you might need these apps.

Blogex 1.1.0 beta for Maxthon

So I've been giving Maxthon another shot to be my primary browser since it's as extendable and fast as Firefox (spare me the "it's just a shell for IE" comments, I know).  Since Firefox 2 has been giving me trouble since the first time I isntalled it, I needed to walk this path of slef-discovery and self-realization, while stumbling through high adventure and romance as I go along the way.

Here's my capsule review of Blogex:  Blogex is a plug-in for Maxthon that allows you to post to your blog from the browser.  In essence, it's just like Performancing for Firefox although it's for IE.  Much like Performancing, it's easy to use, but it's faster because it's Maxthon and it doesn't eat much of your RAM.  The only problem I encountered with Blogex is some formatting quirks here and there which were barely noticeable and I just can't seem to edit my previous postings.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong and I'll tell you if I'm able to in the future. 

In a nutshell - it's functional, fast, and free.  What more can you ask for? 

Edit: I was able to edit this post.

Maxthon revisited

So I'm experimenting with Maxthon again using this wonderful plugin called Blogex.  I'm posting this using Blogex and I like the plugin so far - it's responsive and fast.  Now, if only maxthon wasn't dependent on IE6.  If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.  Anyway, I'll report any findings if I can.

Launchy revisited - some hacks and tricks

I talked about Launchy a few months ago. Launchy is an open source keystroke application launcher much like the ones you can do on the Mac, but this one is windows only. Well I found some hacks, tips and tricks for Launchy down at Lifehacker. Check out how you can maximize this app to your needs.

The great Google reader

I've always been looking for a better web alternative for offline RSS readers. I've had the WizRSS extension on my Firefox for the longest time now but I needed something more robust. A few years ago I've also tried Newsgator - I loved it but it was dog slow in my dial-up setup. Enter Google Reader, an Ajaxy google branded feeds aggregator that is suitable for my needs.

I was Initially apprehensive about using another Ajax style site for my feeds because these kind of sites just don't play along well with dial-up, but Google reader is amazingly responsive even on my slow connection. Granted that it takes a while to load feeds with a lot of new stories, but once it loads it's finish and you can read away on your news.

Trying out Performancing

I'm so excited that Performancing is now compatible with the new Blogger. I've been watching this Firefox extension for some time and I'm happy to try it out with this new blog post. If this appears on the blog then it's a success.

The best thing about this app is that it uses Firefox. No need to open any other application. And since it opens in the browser, it's easier to blog about things you see while surfing.

Let me just click post now.

Some bittorrent thoughts

The first Bittorrent client I used exclusively was Bitcomet. This client is the fastest that I've ever used, however, Bitcomet got into some controversy with a lot of trackers that prompted these torrent sites to ban them.

That's where I tried to experiment with Utorrent, a compact client that used to be pretty fast. Unfortunately, advance version of Utorrent made it a bane to use on dial-up, somehow it got slower when downloading certain torrents.

I immediately switched to Azureus, thereafter. It downloaded torrents fast enough for me, but there's something about Azureus that did not suit me well. It could be because of its huge memory usage, and along with Firefox, it just slows my PC down.

So now I just made a complete 360 degree turn and ended up with Bitcomet again. Not that I'm complaining. I think that some trackers still bans Bitcomet, but so far I have not found a torrent a can't download with this client.

Zoundry beta - is a good blog editor

Jeez, Qumana was such a nice software until the 3.0 version. It just sucks now, though I'm willing to switch back again if they improve the old versions to support Blogger beta.

I've been checking out another blog editor called Zoundry. My last 2 posts were done using Zoundry and I couldn't be any happier. It's pretty fast and quick for a beta, and it hasn't crashed on me yet.

Anyway, check out this blog editor. It will definitely save you time. You can download a Blogger beta compatible version here.