TextExpander from Smile Software is a nifty piece of software for Mac OS X and iOS 4.x that allows you to type special abbreviation codes, and then the software, hovering in the background, expands the abbreviation to whatever snippet of text you’ve associated with that particular abbreviation. TextExpander will also correct common typos and misspelled…
In 2007 Joe Kissell, an able an adept technical writer about all things Macintosh with a serious interest in preparing and consuming good food, turned his geekly technical writing skills to documenting the creation of Thanksgiving dinner. Take Control of Thanksgiving, a guide to planning, shopping, and preparing Thanksgiving dinner is the book I wish I’d…
I’ve written about VDM (Verlag Dr. Mueller), an exploitive academic/scholarly mill before. Writer Beware writer advocate and writer Victoria Strauss notes that VDM has a new wrinkle: . . . a company called Bloggingbooks that wants to publish your blog in book form Read Writer Beware’s warning about Bloggingbooks. Run away; you can do this…
I like social networking sites for bibliophiles. I’ve tried most of them. The recent idiocies surrounding Goodreads has had me re-thinking my participation for quite a while. The latest Goodreads faux pas has Goodreads deleting reviews and user’s shelves based on arbitrary criteria about shelf labels referring to authors. There’s a certain irony in that…
It really isn’t that much cheaper to produce an ebook. The binding/printing costs are depending on the book and the binding and the numbers printed somewhere around 1 to 3 bucks a book, for a Robert Jordan Hardcover with foil. The costs up to the point a file is sent to an ebook producer or…
Evernote is giving giving away premium Evernote accounts good through the end of the school year (June 30, 2012), to US college students with a .edu email address. This is a fabulous offer; Evernote lets you take notes, stash .pdfs and Web pages for research and access them from just about any computer, or iOS…