readers

Individuals, small business owners, and others who need to use PDFs often find themselves between a rock and a hard place; the PDF tools they need are just too expensive. Fortunately, more and more freeware alternatives are putting good, basic PDF utilities in the hands of such users before they're forced to pay big bucks for big-box programs. Altarsoft's PDF Reader is a fine example. It's not a full-fledged PDF solution; it doesn't create PDFs, for instance, but it does display and edit them. It's not flashy; it's just a free tool for viewing … Read more

The Nook business ain't what it used to be.

Barnes & Noble announced yesterday that it expects a higher loss from its Nook business for fiscal 2013, which ends in April. The company didn't reveal specific numbers, but its EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) showed a loss of $262 million for fiscal 2012.

B&N expects overall annual sales from the entire Nook Media business to be less than $3 billion. The Nook business itself includes the tablet, an e-book reader, accessories, and digital content such as books and movies. The Nook Media business … Read more

A zero-day security flaw in Adobe Reader and Acrobat is being exploited through a series of targeted attacks against vulnerable computers, Adobe Systems said yesterday.

In a security bulletin, Adobe confirmed that the vulnerabilities could cause Reader and Acrobat to crash, potentially opening the door for an attacker to gain control of the system.

"Adobe is aware of reports that these vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks designed to trick Windows users into clicking on a malicious PDF file delivered in an email message," the company revealed in the bulletin.

Adobe said it's … Read more

Sometime over the weekend users of Google's RSS feed reader started issuing complaints on the Google Reader forum: "my feeds don't mark as read," "reader subscription and folders mysteriously reverted back to old settings," "feeds keep refreshing," and "my subscriptions keep disappearing."

Apparently, a number of users experienced sporadic service with their accounts, while others remained unaffected.

Google did not respond to user comments until this morning when it said it was looking into the problems. The delay in response caused panic in some users. One desperate person took to … Read more

If you have a state-of-the-art high-end system, or a tricked out iPod speaker, we'd love to see it. Take an interesting picture of your headphones, Bluetooth speaker, turntable, home theater, or whatever you have. If you built your own speakers or amp, that's right up my alley!

Send JPEGs (not huge files) to theaudiophiliac (at) hotmail (dot) com. Of course, anyone submitting should be comfortable with the photos being publicly posted online "forever after." Please include your name (first name and first initial of your last name). And if you're up for it, tell us … Read more

There are many ways to check your Facebook notifications throughout the day. You might use push notifications from your mobile app or perhaps you simply go to Facebook's Web site and see if you have any new notifications.

Another way to check Facebook notifications is to use an RSS reader, like Google Reader. If you're already in Google Reader for most of the day checking your news updates, adding your Facebook notifications might make sense. Here's how:

Step 1: Go to https://www.facebook.com/notifications and make sure you're logged in to your Facebook account.… Read more

Tablets are great and all, but if you're mostly into reading, it's hard to beat an e-reader. Eye-friendly screens, ultra-light designs, amazing battery life -- the perks go on and on.

And let's not forget price. Amazon's entry-level Kindle is now down to $69. But here's an even more wallet-friendly option: Best Buy has the Kobo Mini e-reader for $59.99 shipped (plus sales tax). That's for the white model; the black one literally sold out while I was writing this post.

So that's only a $10 difference, right? And when you factor … Read more

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So glad Cadillac got the ATS to market largely as expected. This company has been trying to do a small car that doesn't strike a false note for decades. The ATS may be my favorite Cadillac because, thanks to its market segment, it has the least amount of all that Caddy gilding that has always spelled Tommy Bahama to me -- which is not a compliment.

We've been getting some great ideas from you for Car Tech 101 segments, … Read more

PDF Reader for Windows 7 is a fast, lightweight freeware reader that can display and print PDFs as well as convert them into a wide range of other formats. It's designed to integrate with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 as the default PDF viewer, but it's also backward-compatible with Vista, XP, Windows 2000, and some server releases. It doesn't create PDFs; for that job, you'll still need a full-featured PDF software program, such as the one the developer also offers as a paid upgrade. We tried the freeware PDF Reader for Windows 7 … Read more