Vertical PowerBook as an ebook reader

Computers & Mobile

By Phillip Torrone

Phillip Torrone

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August 14th, 2006 10

Here’s a clever way to read PDFs in portrait mode using a Powerbook – you rotate the PDF, run in full screen and put the Powerbook on its side – [via] – Link.

10 thoughts on “Vertical PowerBook as an ebook reader”

schwal says:

August 14th, 2006 at 3:07 am

i would love to point out tablet users have been doing this for years. my little tc1000 is about the best portable digital reading device ever concieved.

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tuckerch says:

August 14th, 2006 at 7:55 am

And of course, one must use the “Whack-A-Mac” hack to go to the next or previous page!

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nap70 says:

August 14th, 2006 at 11:35 am

I have a windows laptop. Can i still do this hack?

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kz_ says:

August 14th, 2006 at 4:33 pm

Just be very careful… some laptops use fluid heat pipe designs to evacuate heat from the CPU and GPU. With some of these units (particularly Toshiba laptops, from my experience), when placed on one of the ends, the pad on the CPU is starved of fluid and the heat pipe fails to function, which can make things get rather toasty.

Whenever you’re putting a laptop into an odd position, it’s always good to start up a thermal display program for your hardware, load the CPU and GPU with some sort of intensive program, and move it around and keep it in various positions to determine if any result in abnormal cooling behavior.

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paulsw says:

August 14th, 2006 at 11:43 pm

There is a MacOS comic book reader that has a ‘Powerbook mode’ that rotates the images and re-binds the keys so you can do this trick. Can’t remember which one though, FFView maybe?

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