I’ve recently been doing some work for a car dealer who has created an ebook and website. I edited the book and have put together the website. The ebook really is very well presented.
Along the way I’ve also learned a bit about how to go about buying and selling cars. It’s actually good useful stuff.
Daren has also created a couple of videos showing off his handy work.
You can find his website here: Become a Car Dealer
And you can see his videos on his YouTube Channel.
I was asked the other day about making a PDF automatically start up when a CD or USB stick is inserted into the computer.
When you want to make something autorun, you need to create a file called autorun.inf and pop it onto CD. The usual scenario is that the autorun will call a program that is also on the disk. That’s fine and dandy if that’s what you want to do.
However, if you want to open a document, like a PDF, it gets a little trickier: you have to type in the path to the executable for Adobe Acrobat using shellexecute.
shellexecute=[filepath\]filename[param1, [param2]...]
The trouble with this is that the path may differ depending on how you’ve set up Adobe, plus, Adobe have a habit of changing the folder with each new version. So even if it works on your computer, it will probably break on someone else’s.
All’s not lost though. There are some document formats that you can call directly from autorun: *.txt & *.htm files:
[AutoRun] shellexecute="readme.txt" UseAutoPlay=1
In this example, the readme.txt file will open automatically in your default text editor. Change the file to readme.htm and the readme.htm file will open in your default web browser.
What do you put in the html file then? Glad you asked. What you want to be able to do is show your PDF document in the web browser. The simplest way of doing this is to use an iframe. So the body section of your html file will look something like this:
<body> <iframe src="mypdf.pdf" style="width:100%;height:100%"></iframe> </body>
Put these three files on your usb stick (autorun.inf; readme.htm; mypdf.pdf) and your PDF will open in your web browser automatically.
There used to be a time when we lived in one-car households and with just one TV set – for those younger than 40: really it’s true, we really did live like that.
Then the 80s came, and that all changed.
