Miscellaneous Musings

[Evan Parker]

I actually have an old Dell PII laptop that lives in my garage next to
my air compressor, bought for like 100 bucks a few years ago.  I gave it
wireless, and it is used for all the car/motorcycle manuals and websites
from online.  It's absolutely covered in oil and grease, and couldn't be
happier.  The brightness just gets a bit low when working in the winter
below 40 degrees.  This is an amazing solution, way better than having
your manual flip to the wrong page, or have your diagrams get torn out.

-----Original Message-----
From: quattro-bounces at audifans.com [mailto:quattro-bounces at audifans.com]
On Behalf Of Huw Powell
Sent: Sunday, May 21, 2006 9:43 PM
To: Alex Kowalski
Cc: quattro at audifans.com
Subject: Re: Miscellaneous Musings


> One other "Miscellaneous Musing"
> 
> The Audfans archives are an incredible wellspring of material, but I'm
also
> wondering whether anyone has ever persuaded people like Huw Powell,
Scott
> Mockry, etc., to take the contents of their websites and turn them
into a
> downloadable PDF?  Ditto the Knowledge Base here at Audifans.  As
wonderful
> as the Internet is, I still don't have a monitor in the engine
compartment
> of my car, and I'd really like to have a PDF version of these valuable
> works.  If Scott and Huw and ... could get together, I'd pay for the
> material.
> 
> What I want when I work on my cars now is to have a printed version of
Huw's
> pages, a printed version of everything Scott has on his website, a
printed
> version of the Audi KB relating to my car, and the Bentley.

Thanks for the compliment... but...

Since the odds of my taking all the material on my site and converting 
it to a fully "printer-friendly" format, due to the amount of work 
involved in doing it all, and my lack of a way to find out which files 
would be used more (ie, should be converted first), a few ad hoc options

occur to me that require no work on my part...

1.  The simplest, since you usually know what you are going to work on, 
is if you find a useful file on the site, simply print out a copy of it.

  If the html/browser interface is such that it would print "ugly" ( 
notice that images can get cut in half at page breaks, etc.) or 
wastefully, simply copy the content, briefly reformat it in the word 
processor of your choice and print it out.  As you do this over time, 
you can keep the printouts in a nicely organized binder.

2.  The next one is to remember that used computers are really cheap 
these days.  Get a laptop or a desktop, set up a good place for it in 
your garage, and move whatever files you need to it via the means of 
your choice.

3.  The sophisticated version of #2 is to also set up a network 
connection at that garage workstation, and Voila! you'll have an 
internet capable monitor in or near the engine compartment of your
car...


-- 
Huw Powell

http://www.humanspeakers.com/audi

http://www.humanthoughts.org/
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