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PDFs are an extremely common format for documents due to the fact that they’re so versatile. A PDF can be viewed on a large variety of platforms while still maintaining all of its formatting.

Adobe Reader is the obvious PDF reader, but Adobe products tend to be extremely slow and bloated, taking forever to open a simple PDF.

Lately, I’ve been giving Foxit Reader a try. Foxit is significantly faster and more compact than Adobe Reader, yet it still has all of the useful functionality of Adobe, and some cool ones of its own (I’m especially liking the annotation feature, where you can make comments onto a PDF file).

Foxit is definitely a great piece of software to have in college, since PDFs are used quite often by many college professors.

To download Foxit, see Foxit Software’s website.

Crouching in Left 4 Dead is surprising essential. While crouching, you aim better, allowing you to pick off zombies at a distance better than you otherwise would be able to. When large amounts of zombies are coming, crouching allows you to hit them quicker and avoid getting hit yourself.

One thing that really irked me about crouching was that you couldn’t set the key to toggle crouch — you had to hold it to crouch down. If you’re going to be crouching just a few seconds, that’s not a big deal, but crouching for a long time happens as well, and being able to tap a key to enter/exit crouch would be pretty handy.

Luckily, much like making Zoey and Louis scream in Left 4 Dead, setting crouch to toggle on a key is as simple as a quick console command. Here’s how to do it: Keep reading »

The famous Control level is playable in multiplayer now

For fans of the classic N64 first-person shooter GoldenEye, a modern version of it has been released!

If you have any games using Valve’s “Source” engine, then you can play GoldenEye Source, a modern version of it.

For the main page of the game, check here. You can see more screenshots and other info about the game there.

The online play is pretty fun, although a bit frustrating. I’m used to games with crosshairs in the middle of the screen, so trying to aim without any crosshairs can be a bit tough. However, it’s easy enough to hold a button to aim your gun.

A lot of the original GoldenEye maps aren’t meant for that many people, but they hold up pretty well. The game plans to feature all of the original one-player levels as maps. The online play is definitely more fast-paced than the N64 counterpart, and with the added advantage that you don’t have to worry about screenwatchers.

Seeing as the game is basically free — provided you have a Source game — it’s definitely worth at least trying out. I doubt it will ever catch on as the next big thing,  but it’s great for the nostalgia.

For a while, I searched high and low to find a good FireFox extension for handling RSS. What I ideally wanted was something that could queue up unread items and inform me via the status bar and a notification pop-up. I have an extension for my Gmail account that does this, and a matching one for RSS would have been perfect.

Everything I found seemed to have a little bit more or less than what I wanted — I just couldn’t find something that seemed to work right.

A sample Google Reader interface

So after searching thoroughly, I realized that the best solution came from the same company that seems to do most everything right — yes, I’m talking about Google.

Google Reader can combine all of your RSS subscriptions in a nice, easy-to-read interface, and the FireFox extension Google Reader Watcher can display your unread items in the  status bar, popping up notifications upon new posts. The addon is pretty simple but very customizable, giving you a good amount of control over how your feeds are handled.

Google Reader Watcher and Gmail Notifier side by side in the status bar

Finally, all my woes are solved! I can now keep much better track of what I have (or haven’t) read, and now I can be updated when new posts are made.

Before I was occasionally missing out on posts by blogs I like to read, and I was getting pretty frustrated finding ones that I’d missed.

This may be helpful to a few of you who might be looking for a good way to integrate RSS into your browser. If you use any other method, please tell me!

With all of the Left 4 Dead I’ve been playing lately, I’ve been caught up in the online world of the game. Campaign and versus are both a lot of fun.

One thing I noticed was how, occasionally in a game, whoever was playing Louis or Zoey would constantly voice spam a yell/scream, as if the character was being attacked. And it was hilarious, Louis has a hilarious and desperate yell, and Zoey has a bloodcurdling scream. The beginning of this video offers a decent sample of Louis:

I was curious how to do the same, and so I hunted around for a while to find the answer. It’s a very simple process:

Enable the console

1. Open the Settings for Left 4 Dead.
2. Click on “Keyboard Mouse”
3. Set the console to be enabled.

Bind the key

1. Open the console by hitting the “`” key on the keyboard (the one above tab)
2. Type in the following, replacing “p” with whatever key you want to be associated with the sound: bind p “vocalize playerdeath”
3. Hit “Submit”

That’s all there is to it! Just hit whatever key you assigned it to to hear your character yell. This, of course, works for all four of the characters, though Zoey and Louis are the most entertaining by far. I recommend using it in moderation — not everybody finds it funny, and you may be kicked for voice spamming if you scream too much.

[tags]left 4 dead, video games, computer games[/tag]

If you’re using Windows Vista, you may have noticed that the amount of free space on your hard drive seems to steadily decline, even if you haven’t really been adding anything to fill it up.

When I first noticed this, I couldn’t figure out where all of my free space had gone. After doing some searching around online, I found out that the problem mostly was caused by excess System Restore points. After fixing this, I freed up over 20 gigabytes of space on my hard drive!

System Restore is a built-in feature of Windows that allows you to “roll-back” your system to the way it used to be on a certain date. This is useful if you ever install a program that causes your computer to have a meltdown or if you make some other internal change that causes mayhem.

However, if your computer has been running fine for a while and you haven’t had any problems, you really don’t need all of those excess system restore points taking up your precious hard drive space. Here’s how to delete them:

Keep reading »

There go my grades.

Yesterday I bought Left 4 Dead, the new zombie survival game. Already, I’m hooked.

In Left 4 Dead, you and three other people fight off hordes of zombies as you charge through the levels. The thrill of the game comes from the online play, where you can use microphones and really take on zombies. A game like this has been my dream for years, and I’m glad to finally have a chance at it.

New, Left 4 Dead sells for about $50, but you can buy four copies on Steam for $150. If you can find three other people to split the cost with, it amounts to about $38, which is cheaper.

This is a game worth getting.

Putting videos on your iPod from YouTube used to be a painful process

One of the best upgrades the iPod ever received was the ability to playback videos. Even though the screen is small, long videos are surprisingly easy to watch on the small screen.

Long movies are great for long trips, but short movies are always fun to have on your iPod as well, whether for showing your friends or just for your own amusement. YouTube (and other video sites) provides a never-ending supply of entertaining short videos.

But downloading videos from YouTube is tough, and iPods are picky about the types of files they’ll play back. These combine to make it a tricky process to bring videos from your Internet browser to your iPod screen. Many programs offer the ability to transfer and convert files simply, but most of them are excessively-complicated, cost money, and/or don’t work very well.

Luckily, there’s a simple two-step solution that’s free, effective, and simple: Keep reading »