Chromebook, continued

Find one thing I miss a lot about my MacBook pro: the easiness to create a PDF out of ... well, anything, especially a web page.

A very good tool (chrome extension) I found is iWeb2x, which reads the current URL and makes a pdf out of it.

There is a deadly and unfortunately unchangeable imperfection to this approach. It cannot handle log-in sessions. For example, if you want to save your Facebook front page, iWeb2x will load that URL (http://www.facebook.com) itself without any log-in info, i.e. session cookies, so you will just get the log in page of Facebook.

Solution: if you need to make a pdf out of a private webpage (one that you can only see after logging in), save the webpage use Ctrl + S to your inferior file system, and go to http://pdfcrowd.com/#convert_by_upload to upload the html file you just saved.

However, pdfcrowd adds a (rather insignificant) logo watermark at the corner. Additionally, Chromebook doesn't save the "entire webpage", which means many images "might be" lost during the save (strangely not losing all images, which could be good news).

I tried many other websites, and although many of them don't add watermarks or even allow you to add your own watermarks, they either require you to give an email address to send the resulting file to or give you a zip file, which Chromebook doesn't handle very well, or just does a poor job in converting (probably because those sites have a poor html parsing tool).

pdfcrowd also makes an extension, called "Save as PDF", which works very much like iWeb2x, and as the website, it adds a small logo watermark at the corner.

If you wants to upload the PDF directly to Google Docs, use "Send to Google Docs". This extension works the same way as the other two, and in fact, it actually uses pdfcrowd's service to create the PDF, and then just directly sends the result to Google Docs. Of course, it also has the pdfcrowd watermark.

Speaking of all the files Chromebook doesn't play, I decide to keep a list of video and audio format that I managed to play on my Chromebook, and of course those that don't.

Working video format:
- Some .mp4 (yes, some .mp4 files don't work...)
- Some .mov

Non-working video format:
- .avi
- .wmv

Working audio format:
- .mp3

Non-working audio format:
- .aac (rumor)
- .wma (rumor)

All lists are continuously updated, of course.

Cheers!

Update July/10/2011
If you are a heavy keyboard user, i.e. use key shortcuts more than mouse click, you may see the Ctrl + Alt + / combo tip I talked about here.

If you use a Mac, you know how bad it is to go from "command" key to "ctrl" key due to their different locations. Well, sad no more! Settings -> System -> Language -> Modifier Keys.

When I first saw this, I was confused why would somebody wants to press "ctrl" to have "alt"'s behaviors. Now I know. "Alt" is in the same position as "Command" in a Mac keyboard, and by altering the behavior, Mac users wouldn't get frustrated when switching between Chromebooks and MacBook. Genius!

Update Oct/21/2011
Finally got my butt around and rooted my chromebook.

Took quite a few tries, but the result of integrating two articles leads to success.

First one: http://goo.gl/f9JFS < this one would be sufficient, unless you are a Mac user, which I am. If using Mac to burn the recovery image to USB, then you need to reference the second link for completing Step one in this link

Second: http://www.google.com/support/chromeos/bin/answer.py?answer=183098 < Only the step 2 in this link is useful

Also, I used a 2GB USB, and it was sufficient, so...