Creating PDF for free from any program with printer support

This is a short manual how to replace any commercial and/or closed source PDF distilling product. What you need:

• Adobe Universal Postscript Driver
• PPD Printer Driver (get one from prev link or create one for yourself)
• Ghostscript

Why would you need that?
There were many reasons we decided to replace Adobe Distiller and Acrobat:

• Programmatic control of these programs!
• Incompatibility of different versions of Framemaker/Distiller/Acrobat!!!
• Adobe bugs!!!
  
• Price!
• Page size limits*
  
• Different page sizes in one document*
• Page inserting/removing bugs
• Language/Font problems*

How to print?
First, install the postscript driver (PPD). Change the PPD file for your needs, we changed limits for maximum paper size (maps). The printer should print into file. When printer is installed, you can print from any program with printing support, just choose this printer and the output will be saved as postscript (ps). Converting postscript to PDF is easy with Ghostscript:

gswin32c.exe -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

We suggest to set embedding of fonts into postscript/pdf as ghostscript fonts can be buggy.
The same process can be done very easily even programmatically, just use google/msdn how to set printer to use.

Vista refused to play my DVD movie

Probably the first DVD I bought is encrypted to prevent copying and Vista refuses to play it. Thank you copy protection, thank you Vista, hail to p2p! Stolen movies make no problem, but if you are fair, it makes problems.

Hate Vista and hate copy protection.

Only hope that Luc Besson's idea about movie distribution will come true.

My new old FED 3b camera

Recently wrote about my new camera, but forgot to post a picture of it, so here it is. And I made my first pictures with it on Ilford FP4 Plus, will post them as soon as I manage to scan them somehow. Anyway, this was my first roll of analog film and this camera has no exposure meter so I used the "16@1/iso on bright sunny day" rule. The results are not that bad for the first time :)

And some specs about this rangefinder:

• Produced 1963-1980 (type B) FED, Kharkov, Ukraine
• Film type 135 (35mm)
• Picture size 24 x 36mm
• Weight 25.4oz (719g) with normal lens
• Lens LTM 39mm Industar 61 52mm 1:2.8-16
• Filter size 40.5mm
• Focal range 1m to infinity
• Viewfinder coupled rangefinder
• Exposure meter none
• Shutter double cloth curtain
• Shutter speeds B, 1-1/500
• Diopter correction ring
• Self-timer
• Accessory shoe and PC sync connection