Comic book archives

Apparently there are archives of old comic books floating around the Internet with a file extension of .cbz or .cbr. These can be read with various programs, the most convenient seeming to be Jomic at http://jomic.sourceforge.net/ . You can open up these comic book archives in a laptop at full screen and see something about the same size as a real comic book. Pretty neat.

I unfortunately do not have a source on the Internet to get these archives so if anyone knows of some feel free to send me the address to list here Happy

Skype is alive and well

If you have not checked out the latest Skype updates there are 2 big news worthy items. Number one is that the latest Windows beta of Skype allows you to redirect incoming calls to 1 or more phone numbers when your Skype account is offline. No more fancy Skype phones!

Number 2 is that Ebay has apparently agreed to buy Skype for $2.6 billion dollars! Reported here and here Wow, I did not realize how powerful ebay had become.

Evil hackers from Brazil

Argh, some hackers from Brazil almost got me kicked off my web server since they not only messed up the files but used the account to send SPAM email to people about their Paypal accounts. Argh! Definitely not nice.

Slowly things will get back online. Geesh, what a waste of everyone's time. Hacking I can live with... hoping that they are students and actually learned something, but sending out SPAM just seems stupid. Anyways, analysis is being made to hopefully get more information.

Lightscribe CD labeling

Well, I finally cracked for a lightscribe CD/DVD burner. For those that don't know, lightscribe is a Hewlett Packard technology that allows you to flip the CD and use the CD burners laser's to write an image/ label to the CD. This saves from buying labels, running them through printers, and then possibly destabilizing your CD if the label is not put on correctly.

Well, all I can say is that it is ok. The CD's do look much better than the black/ white labels I was making before. However, a best quality image takes about 30 minutes to write to the CD cover and although they look great in bright to moderate light, a dimly lit place will not do them justice. I've also heard that the DVD's with lightscribe look a little blurry due to an extra layer of plastic on those.

And of course you do need to buy lightscribe supported blank CD/DVDs which are in general twice the price as your normal blank CD/DVD's. So, while they are better than what I was using and I did need something more than writing with a pen on the CD, they may not be for everyone.

Oh, if you do get a lightscribe drive, it is worth checking if there are any firmware updates for the CD drive or lightscribe printing engine updates for the computer. I had some strange banding issues where solid black should have been until I updated the lightscribe printing engine from HP's website.