Four Nifty Finds

A Friday Hodgepodge

Happy Thanksgiving! Due to travel and family obligations, I'm taking all of next week off. See you on the 27th!

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Image by Suzy Brooks, via Unsplash, license.

1. I remember using the Sumatra PDF reader on Windows some time back, but it was (or has since become) much more versatile than that, according to the blurb on its site:

PDF, eBook (epub, mobi), comic book (cbz/cbr), DjVu, XPS, CHM, image viewer for Windows. Fast, small, packed with features, customizable, free.

The bulk of my Windows usage is on machines other than my own, so I looked for (and found) a portable version that runs from a pen drive under PortableApps.

2. My usual method for consuming podcasts is to download them at home and transfer them to my phone using Synchthing. I do this primarily so I don't have connectivity issues on the road, but I have found the experience superior to using YouTube directly.

I get to skip ads, and while its easy to return to or reopen my local mp3 player and pick up where I left off, doing the same thing with YouTube is annoying at best. (If you have to close YouTube or it crashes, good luck finding what you were listening to. Wierdly, if you DO find the episode, it knows EXACTLY where you were WITHIN that episode. Nuts.)

YouTube is okay for those times I forget to download, or run out of material while out and about, but I recently found some Android alternatives to YouTube in this thread about one of them (NewPipe) at Hacker News. I like the fact that NewPipe allows downloading from URLs since that's the way I keep track of things I want to listen to (and possibly blog later), anyway.

3. By chance, I found an amazing cooking site for people who are blind or visually-impaired. The Blind Kitchen catalogs and sells an impressive array of cookware, too.

Although my vision is fine, some of these, like a rattling boil alert disk or the double spatula sound like great things to have in any kitchen. This is one site I will revisit when my wife asks me for Christmas gift ideas, or I need to come up with some of my own.

4. With our end-of-year move to New Orleans fast approaching, I was glad to learn that the Internet Archive now hosts a collection of product manuals.

I doubt I'll need one for a pet rock, but I might need this for appliance manuals on the other end of our move.

-- CAV