A few days ago I had to check out lots of PDFs and I never liked the Adobe Reader that much. I also have a dis­like for the Foxit Reader and while the Nitro PDF Reader has its uses it’s not exactly small, it’s still beta, and if you don’t like the rib­bon user infer­face you won’t be happy with it. I dis­carded Suma­tra PDF because of it’s very, very min­i­mal­is­tic user inter­face and Cool PDF Reader because I got a few error mes­sages with dif­fer­ent PDFs.

Per­fect PDF Reader 6 was too big as was the excel­lent PDF-​​XChange Viewer. By now I was ready to go with the PDF-​​XChange Viewer despite its size but then I stum­bled over a PDF reader called STDU Viewer. It’s small, it’s blaz­ingly fast, it opened every PDF I threw at it, and it fea­tures tabs. Absolutely fan­tas­tic! Exactly what I was look­ing for! I would rec­om­mend this viewer to ever­body look­ing for a small but effi­cient PDF reader.

Win­dows doesn’t always work “prop­erly” or in a way you would expect it to work. One of this minor annoy­ances is the mouse wheel. For instance, you’d expect that mov­ing the mouse wheel will scroll the win­dow directly beneath the mouse cur­sor and not the one with the input focus. For­tu­nately, there are a few freely avail­able tools that are able to fix this issue.

There are Kat­Mouse, Wiz­Mouse and Wheel Here. While I like Kat­Mouse the most, the other two pro­grams offer the same basic func­tion­al­ity. Kat­Mouse just goes a few steps fur­ther and adds a few more inter­est­ing options. Just try them out to decide for your­self. If you want to pay for your daily soft­ware fix, take a look at MouseEasy. Ah, I almost for­got the X-​​Mouse fea­tures you can acti­vate with the Pow­er­toys. I don’t really like X-​​Mouse because it acti­vates a win­dow but hey, that’s your choice.

Recently, a few Mail User Agents (MUA) – com­monly referred to as email client – have been updated, mainly Thun­der­bird, Sylpheed, Claws Mail, and eM Client. Dur­ing the next days (pos­si­bly weeks) I will take a look at them and their fea­ture sets to decide whether switch­ing from Thun­der­bird to another con­tender has its advan­tages or not. Last time I did some­thing sim­i­lar, I decided to go with Thunderbird.

I’m not going to write a review for every email client I’ve picked for closer exam­i­na­tion, nor will I cre­ate a check list. My plan is to install them all and then just use them. I want to see how they dif­fer in their fea­ture imple­men­ta­tions and how intu­itive their user inter­face is. Because I want to remain open-​​minded about any­thing, I decided against a check list.

Do you have some sug­ges­tions or want to tell me how you chose your email client? Don’t hes­i­tate to leave your opin­ion and enlighten me.

Obvi­ously, the 8001050F PSN error fixed itself when the inter­nal clock date changed from Feb­ru­ary 29th to March 1st UTC. If the time dis­played on the XMB is still incor­rect, you can fix it by adjust­ing time set­tings man­u­ally or via the inter­net. I just took a quick look at it before going to work and I could sign in to the PlaySta­tion Net­work with­out expe­ri­enc­ing any error mes­sage. I’ll have to check whether I’ve lost any data but I don’t think so because I really couldn’t do anything.

If you started a game while this hap­pened your local tro­phy col­lec­tion may be blank. Just get a new tro­phy and your local list should be refreshed and alright. If it doesn’t work, you’ll have to wait until Sony makes an offi­cial state­ment regard­ing this issue. Have fun once again.

Just a few hours ago I said that you couldn’t fix the error 801050F on your own. Looks like I was wrong. Some guy claims that you only have to open your PS3, dis­con­nect the bat­tery for a few min­utes, stick it back in and you’re fine. Sounds very nice if you’re adven­tur­ous and don’t care about open­ing your PS3 sys­tem. I don’t know for cer­tain but I’m pretty sure you’ll lose your war­ranty so it is safer to wait for Sony’s fix to arrive. If you absolutely can’t wait, that seems to be the way to go!

By the way, if you try to fol­low the link only to see a mes­sage about the board being down for the moment, try Google’s cache. When the site has loaded, press the Escape but­ton or click the Stop but­ton in your browser’s toolbar.

The PS3 error code 8001050F is wreak­ing havoc on the Playsta­tion Net­work. Appar­ently, this prob­lem is caused by a bug in the clock func­tion­al­ity and affects mod­els other than the new slim PS3 (120/​250 GB mod­els). Accord­ing to some reports in a num­ber of forums some “fat” PS3s have worked ok.

If you are affected, date and time set­tings have been re-​​set to Jan­u­ary 1st, 2000.  This pre­vents you from sign­ing in to PSN with the error mes­sage “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlaySta­tion Net­work (8001050F)”. Your tro­phies will also not dis­play cor­rectly or fail to sync.

You can’t fix it. Sony prob­a­bly stores some form of date in UTC for­mat, then mod­i­fy­ing it accord­ing to your time­zone to get what­ever you see on your on-​​screen clock. If it won’t fix itself, we’ll need a firmware update which we will prob­a­bly have to install man­u­ally from USB stick (I don’t really think so but always expect the worst). Chang­ing the sys­tem date man­u­ally won’t change any­thing at all.

What did Sony have to say about the issue? Not much but they do advise us to “not use the PS3 sys­tem, as doing so may result in errors in some func­tion­al­ity, such as record­ing obtained tro­phies, and not being able to restore cer­tain data”.

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