Colin Manning

I thought it was a really clever idea. Many people publish content on the internet as PDFs instead of HTML pages. Thanks to schemes such as Google Ads, content publishers can make some money from ads embedded in their HTML pages. Publishers of PDF content could not do likewise until Adobe developed Ads for PDF. Imagine you download a document on how to build your own PC. When you view the document an ad in one of the panels is downloaded from Adobe and displays information about an electronics store near where you live. It's a very clever idea. But Adobe has abandoned this technology as of today. That's a pity because I think it could have worked with a bit of imagination and some elbow grease. Oh well. Not all brilliant ideas make it. Google's plan for world domination is back on schedule.

The recently bought an Elgato digtal TV decoder for my mac. I bought it bundled with a hardware accelerator for video compression. Both products worked very well but were a few things that disappointed me. The digital TV decoder does HDTV only on Intel Macs. I have a G5 with 2 PowerPC chips and buckets of RAM. I expect it would have been able to handle HDTV. But the software didn't even try. The website did say that performance would vary from machine to machine depending on spec, but if it had said flat out that it wouldn't work on my G5, I wouldn't have bought it. The box did actually say this up front. But it was in my living room at that stage. The hardware accelerator worked well but had some frustrating limits. Elgato's EyeTV software stores captured TV in an uncompressed format. The hardware accelerator did an excellent job of converting this to MPEG4. However the dimensions of the compressed video were limited. So even if I captured HDTV the accelerator woul...