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The Abicana webstore
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Equipment for gaming and other hobby items
Welcome to this presentation of hobby products for an affordable prize. By clicking at the banners below, you will enter a specialized online department for each cathegory. There you can learn more about or order the products exhibited on this page, and many other products of the same cathegory.
Further down there is some information about standards used for formats and layout of document texts and web-pages, like the HTML-standard and XML. You also can find some information about internet tricks and tricks you can use when you use search engines.
GOOD STORES FOR HOBBY ITEMS AND GAMING EQUIPMENT
Affordable game equipment - In this store you can find all types of technical equipment for use during gaming, like contollers, wheels, joysticks, cables and faceplates.
Dino Direct - a general store of low priced products - especially hobby and entertainment products for kids and teens- This store has all kind of products, including RC models of cars. Please click at this banner to go into the store and see the whole stock.
Gamers Gate - an enormous store of computer games - Here you can find any computer game. You also have opportunity to pre-order a lot of new alunches of popular top-rated games. There are games for PC and MAc in the cathegories: Action, strategy, RPG, Adventure, simulators, casual, kids.
A great collection of low prized games and software: - In this shop you will find a huge collection of games and software for very nice prizes.
Good
general hobby shops: - Wireless models of aircrafts cars and boats.
Electronic sets, telescopes,
computers and a lot more. Models in all size and prize cathegories, and suitable
for all ages. Electric driven models that are suitable for indoor and outdoor
use, and extreme speedy gas driven models for the advanced modeller.
CHESS SETS, CHESS GAMES AND CHESS COMPUTERS
VIDEO GAME CONSOLES
HEADSETS FOR VIDEO GAMES
VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS
POWER UNITS AND ACCESSORIES FOR VIDEO GAMES
ABOUT STANDARDS FOR CHARACTER AND FORMATS DOCUMENT TEXTS AND WEB-PAGES
About character codes
Before being able to understand document formats used at the Internet, it is necessary to understand the general text formats used by textprocessors, because the documents to be shown on Internet, including format commands to the browser are written as a standard text first. When writing an Internet page one can either use a general text processor or a specialised Internet document processor that shows the text as it will look at the internet.
General text formats include binary codes for charcters, figures and signs that shop up in the document when exhibited on the screen or printed. In addition there are binary codes for the layout or the document, that is such things as carrage return, text size, bold text, cursive and the like.
These formats are standardized by the international standardisation organisation ISO or private concortiums.The old traditional sign set for European languages was ASCHII Through the years there have been many versions of these standards. The ISO-8859-series are newer standards witth variants for different European languages. For dokuments in most European languages, the ISO-8859-1 suits.
The Unicode-series (UTF) is the most comprehensive of the code sets in use, and it is meant to support all signs in all languages, including chinese. UTF-32 represents the signs in a 32 bis format, UTF-16 divides the code in 8 bit parts and this is backward compatible with the ASCHII character set.
Propreritary text processors, like Microsoft Word, in addition to intertational binary codes, also use own format codes. These codes are not basically binary but are composed of character strings that give meaning to the processor. If you edit such a document with a word processer that only understands the international binary codes, these additional codes show up as text.
Most web-browsers will neither understand these additional codes, and therefore will show them as text on the screen.
About markup languages
A web-page is written in a basic international text format as a source code. When writing a source-code you can use any word processor that only uses the international binary code set suited for web-pages. The binary formatted codes in the source will decide the layout of the source text as seen by the programmer when he is writing on the document, but they will be ignored by the web-browser when the page is exhibited on the screen.
In the source-text special codes written as character strings will be set into the page to tell the browser how the layout on the screen shall look. The code-set and the grammer of how these code shall be combined with each other and with the basic text, is called a markup language.
An important feature of markup languages is the definition of codes for hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are points or areas in a document that users can click at to navigate to other parts of the document or into another document in the same or other internet areas.
The currently most commonly used markup language at the Internet and thereby handled by web-browsers, is the HTML. HTML allows however codes that can be interpreted ambiguously or in different ways by different web-browsers. Therefore a stricter standard, the XHTML, has been developed. Currently XHTML is recommended for use when new web-pages are made.
It is also possible to write or generate a web-page with processors that show you how the page will look in a browser, but these processors also have the option of going directly into the source-code and edit that directly. The best known exampel of these is Microsoft Frontpage.
XML is a very coprehensive markup languge for all kind of dokuments. XML is the modern standard for such languages. XML as such is actually fairly old and it is even a simplified version of an earlier even more comprehensive standard GSML, but only recently has it been possible to program and utilize all features defined by XML.
XML has a very large basic set of markup codes with associated grammer. XML gives the possiblity to define complex templates for documents containing information and complex herarchical document structures, and it gives the possibility to compose documents with in-built processing of the information, especially input and output processing. In addition XML has the possibility of defining new specialized languages with new codes.
SGML and XML based markup languages hold the descriptions of structure and style apart from the content of a document, either in saparate areas in the same file or in specific files. Thereby structure and style specifications can easily be used by several documents only by refering to the needed specifications, and these can easily be modified. SGML AND XML also by this structure make it easy to distribute and share document content and makes it easy for many different systems to handle the same content without misunderstandings and style damage, provided that those systems are programmed to handle documents that adhere to the SGML of XML standard.
The sheets or files containing the SGML structure and style specifications are called OS (Output Specification) and DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language). The original HTML standard was not based on SGML. By now a reformed HTML standard that strictly conforms to the SGML specification is defined, the XHTML. XHTML uses stylesheets called SSL.
SGML and XML give the possibility of defining complex documents structures and structures consisting of a hierarchy or network of linked dokuments, and the posibility of navigation both within a document and between documents linked to each other.
The commonly used markup language, HTML is a small subset of the SGML standard. The XHTML which makes web-pages more suited for automatic processing in an unambiguous way, is constructed according to the stricter XML standard. Currently the recommandation is to use the XHTML specifications when engineering a web-page.
Advanced dokument management system typically use XML or XML-defined languages. When presenting such a document in the internet, it is typically converted to HTML first. Also some web-browser are by now capable of handling and exhibiting web-pages based on XML in a wider sense.
About HTML or Hypertext Markup Language
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, hypertext markup language) is a markup language for formatting web pages with hypertext and other information that can be displayed in a browser.
HTML is used to compose together information in a document, to bind documents and document parts dogether whith hyperlinks that points from one place to another and to controle the appearance of the document in a browser.
Defining any text as headings, paragraphs, lists and so on - and can, in some degree, be used to describe the appearance and semantics of a document.
HTMLs grammatical structure is the HTML DTD that
was created by making use of an allready existing grammatical structure, the
SGML syntax, which is an international standard for text formatting (ISO 8879).
HTML was originally defined in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau and
further developed by the IETF, and is now an international standard (ISO / IEC
15445:2000). Since then HTML specifications have been maintained by the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
HTML used today is of the wersion HTNL 3.2.
There is also a nore recently developed vesrion
XHTML with stricter syntactic rules with the aim of securing aq consistant
display of documents on all types of browsers and mashines.
The concept of hypertext originated from the Middle Ages, when it was developed a system of cross references. Hypertext refers today not surprising to the links, but "hyper" also includes that you can post "links" to files with graphics and images that the browser loads the document as if it were an integral part. In the 1940s, Vannevar Bush wrote the article As We May Think, in which he described a computer-driven hypertext system he called the memex. It was the start. During the 1960s, when computers began to become more common, it was made several attempts to create such a system that was convenient to use. The first time such a system was made, as we know it, was in 1989, when HTML was developed primarily to exchange information at CERN. The system became popular around at other universities, and the rest is history.
Early versions of HTML were defined with looser syntactic rules which made
the learning of the use simple for those who were not accustomed to publishing
on the web. Web readers often made their own assumptions about how code should
be understood and created the image of the website. The trend has certainly been
more in the direction of stricter language syntax, but is still expected to
browsers to produce reader-friendly pages, even if the HTML code they are
written in is far from living the current standards.
XHTML HTML impose the stricter XML rules to make it easier to process and
maintenance and the W3C's successor to the HTML standard. For this reason, many
people see the XHTML as the "latest version" of HTML, but in reality this is a
separate, parallel standard. W3C recommends that you use either XHTML 1.1, XHTML
1.0 or HTML 4.01 when creating web pages.
Technique - how HTML works
HTML is exchanged between computers through a set of computer instructions called Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP. HTTP can be compared with social rules (what to say when) the same way that HTML can be compared with a language (how we say what we say).
HTTP is actually the communication protocols used to fetch document from one program on one mashine to another program on the same or another mashine in the network.
The structure of a HTML document
A HTML document consists of a number of elements, delimited by tags, with
different meanings. By "tagging" information you want to publish, you get an
HTML document that can be posted on the Internet (a website) and read by a web
browser, which interprets the various elements. The document is then formatted
according to the item's importance. The items can also help eg. search engines
to understand which part of the document title, what's quotes, etc.
The minimum requirements for what an HTML document must contain are:
<html>
<head>
<title> </ title>
</ head>
<body>
</ body>
</ html>
An item will open with a start tag, <element>, and closed with a closing tag, </
item>. One does not have to close all the elements, when most browsers
understand where most are closed anyway. However, it is strongly recommended by
the W3C to close the elements, as it makes efforts to interpret the document
easier for both people and programs. XHTML standard says that you must close all
elements. An element can have different attributes that describe some properties
of it. In many of the elements is possible with attributes to set the background,
color, etc., but since the HTML standard in the first place did not take into
account visual expression, has developed a new language for this, called
Cascading Style Sheets, which allows for more flexible visual expression.
The anchor tag
This tag is the most central tag in a HTML document. It tells the computer to fetch another document load that and display that. It has the following structure:
<a herf="url" target="x">text</a>
url - this is the internet address of the web-site and page or the internal address of a document.
x tells if the current page shall be replaced with the teched page - blank or loaded as a page in addition - top.
text - this is the text the browser shall display when presenting the link.
An internet address, or url, has the form http://www.name.ext/side.htm
ext - this is the area code that the website belongs to. com - is a uaual value.
Common HTML tags
h1 (Header 1) - The heading on the document
h2 - h6 (Header 2 - Header 6) - Subheads (specify below sections)
table (Table) - Creates a table
ul (Unordered List) - Point List
ol (Ordered List) - Numbered list
br (Break) - Line break
div (Division) - A section of the document
p (Paragraph) - A section, appears as a rule with a blank line above and below
strong (Strong) - Indicates important text, usually shown in bold
b (Bold) - Provides bold, but no viktighetshentydning
em (Emphasis) - Indicates emphasized text, usually shown in italics
in (Italic) - Provides italic text
a (Anchor) - A link to another resource on the Internet (website, email,
newsgroups, etc.)
form (Form) - Used to insert form elements, input boxes, buttons, checkboxes and
the like.
How all the elements shown can be determined with CSS if desired.
SOME INTERNET TRICKS
How to find what you want when searching on intenet with google, MSN, Yahoo or other search engines.
Have you experienced searching for some information, or some specific products on the internet, and only getting tons of listings from great commercial actors, or only long lists of nosense pages?
The problem can to some extend be overcome by using specific tricks when searching.
One of the tricks is to use the right number of search keywords. Using only one keyword will give an immense list mostly containing only uninteresting pages, and mostly commercial ones. Using very many will often narrow the search so strictly that very little shows up, and those few will typiclly also be the websides of some great commercial actors.
Another reason for not getting what you want, is to use only general keywords or only very specific ones. If you use only very general keywords, you will get long uninterseting lists of hits. If you use very specific ones, you likely get very few hits, and all of these tend to be the web-sites of some big commercial actor.
You must try to find keywords of the right specificity. You can begin by searching fairly general. If the keyword chosen give only unuseful hits, then narrow the search by making the keywords gradully more specific.
A good strategy for searching is to begin with two or three words. One or two of the words shall be fairly general, the others more specific. Then variate the specific word/words until you get an interesting list. A last you you can add one more specific word to bring the list down even more.
Let us take an example. You need to buy some special shoes because of a somewhat special foot shape. The general keyword will clearly be buy shoes, but what about the next? You can try - orthopedic -. That will give you 400,000 hits.
Then you can try to add some more specific term than only - orthopaedic-. The thing you want is shoes with a broader heel that usual. Then try to add the search string "broad heel" Now you have got a list of 7740 hits, and the list looks pretty interesting.
This list is perhaps good enough, but you can still make it even better. The shoes you search for shall be used much outdoor, perhaps hiking shoes will be the right choise. Then you add the word -hiking -. Now you have a good list of 4470 relevant hits.
If you want the shops you search for to be situated in a specific country or area, you can also add the name of that area to the list. If you for example add - Texas - to the list, you have got it down to 2610 sites.
4610 hits seems still too much, but most search engines use to list the most relevant first, and therefore most sites of interest for you will probably be in the first 100 or so sites listed.
You can effectively restrict the list to those very most relevant by setting two words into quotes. This means that the words must stand together at the sites presented.
The search string - buy shoes orthopedic "broad heel" - gives only 28 highly relevant sites.
It is also useful to use words that professional people in the fields you are interested in use when they perform their jobs. Professional people ofte use either more general or more specific words than those used in dayly life. For example: If you are interested in laws regarding traffic and roads, then it is often useless to use the word "car". The more general word "vehicle" are better, or more specific term "motorized vehicle".
Modern search engines have pretty powerful picture search. Sometimes it is useful to search with the picture search even though you are not primarily interested in pictures. Then you can see on the pictures comming up if the web-sites contain information about the things you are interested in.
If you are interested in how to accomplish some task, the keywords like "how to", "resceipt", or "guidelines" are good to use. If the subject is a higly profesional one, the the term "procedure" or "algorithm" can be useful.
The term "history of" is often very useful to get the information you want, also when you are not interested in the history of something, because most professional sites contain a history section. This is particularly thue about technological sites and medical sites.
Most search engines have an option to lock out pages containing specified keywords. These can succesfully be used to clean up the search list.
The internet is polluted with millions of commercial pornographic sites of no value. Wether a pornografic site can be valuable or not, depend upon the view of the individual person. Most of them are however only garbage without any erotic or artistic value for any person of any taste. When you search for example for sites about olympic gymnastics, you are not interested in tons of hits about blondines with immense boobs exhibiting themselves up in a gymnastic hall.
Also when you are genuinly interested in finding pornogrphic sites, such criteria can succesfully be used to clean up the hit list. If you are interested in blondines, then use words like "brunette", "boy", "men", as criteria for locking out sites.
Such sites can succesfully be hold outside by using words like tits, boobs, blondine, busty and the like as exclution criteria.
It can also be usefull locking out those get-ritch-in-no-time sites. By using exclusion criteria like "be ritch", "get ritch", "free cash" and the like.
How to tweak WINMX settings. in High Speed connections
Click on bandwidth button.
Set download bandwidth to 10000000 bytes per second
Set upload bandwidth to 50000000 bytes per second
Ensure ticks are in the boxes.
Then set your throttle cycle to 50m/s, this should be good if you have a good PC with big memory, if not or you have problems reset it back to 250m/s
Throttle controls how much of the computers resources it will use. If you want to do something else while using WinMx, then set your throttle higher and if you are going to leaveit over night then set it lower.
Use the settings and watch your speed increase dramaticaly especially if the other user has set them the same.
I have gone from an average of 4.5k/s to 30k/s using these settings when other users have them also.
How to block people that are sharing nothing
Some people seem to think our network is a kind of a store a they just pick what they want without sharing anything!
(and other considere our net as a schoolyard where one "trade"... Childish!)
You can help everybody getting rid of them by boycotting them that way:
You "browse" each uploading user.
** If he/she shares more than, say, a hundred files (and NOT in the WinMx directory only,
putting them elsewhere and unshared when entirely downloaded !!!), OK.
NB: a hundred is not a lot but 1- we don't all have a large HDD and some files are big 2- when you begin...!If not:
You can send a message to him/her to ask why there is no real share,
or not at all, for they can have forgotten to do so: give them a chance!
The first time, I didn't understand that I had to choose the shared files types,
so I shared nothing, unwillingly. Somebody told it to me in a message.
If no answer and/or still no shared file, you can exclude the selfish beast:
(Thanks to dwhite who gave the modus operandi on the WinMx net)
To block somebody from downloading, add the name to your HOTLIST
(right-click the name then "Add to hotlist") then to your IGNORE list.
You won't receive any messages nor will they enter your queue, during that session at least.
On the contrary, you can help people who share a lot by starting the tranfere when they are in your queue,
or give a higher bandwith