Category: Book Reviews

At about 5pm today, UPS dropped off a box. Inside was this note:
Enclosed please find copies of your book, which have been translated into RUSSIAN. We hope you are pleased with the translation.
Best Regards,
International Rights Department
And 5 copies of my book, Easy Digital Home Movies, translated to Russian.
They even converted my name to Cyrillic characters (bottom right on the cover, above Que). I honestly wouldn’t know whether I should be pleased or not, since I can’t read Russian, so I’ll have to assume the translators know what they’re doing. The thing I found most curious is that basic application commands in Windows Movie Maker are still in English.

UnixMages.com is a clever spin on learning how to function at the command line, told as if you were an apprenticed mage learning the “spells” that make the various *nix operating systems bow to your will. Some of the best stuff from the ongoing resource is compiled into a free PDF or alternatively available in bound format for a fee. While the style is slightly unconventional, something about the methodology lends itself to learning the basics of using Linux/Unix/BSD, without the dry nature of typical offerings on the subject.

A library of eBooks created by readers for readers. MemoWare offers tons of conent for TomeRaider, Palm Reader, MobiPocket, Plucker, and several other eBook formats. Users submit their own content, to be shared with others, subjected to a peer rating system that helps to determine each title’s quality. Many of the non-fiction submissions are crib sheet style notes on a given subject, making it easy to remember important facts, while fictional works range from short stories and poems to novel-length works. While many of the items offered here are worth exactly what you pay for them, there are enough gems in the collection to warrant frequent trips back to MemoWare’s content library.

In filling my Zen Micro with stuff to listen to for my recent trip to Iowa, I rediscovered Books On MP3, offering a collection of mp3 versions of several Mark Twain short stories, along with The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, The Monkey’s Paw, and Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. All the free stuff is encoded at 64 kbps 44kHz, which is more than acceptable for spoken word. The narrator, John Born, doesn’t have my favorite reading voice, but he won’t put you to sleep either. The Monkey’s Paw is performed by the Blue Ridge Audio Players and is a must-have addition to any audio book collection. Of course the site would like you to purchase other audio books after trying out these freebies, but there are no strings to grabbing the free offerings.

This out-of-print gem is available from its creators for free to anyone willing to download the PDF. As the name implies, this is not a balanced view of UNIX, it is a blatant slap in the face of everything the operating system stands for. While the pages are hosted on a Microsoft research server, the book was not commissioned by MS, nor is it officially endorsed as the MS bible. There’s even an anti-foreward retort by Dennis Ritchie, UNIX co-creator and developer of the C programming language. A compelling piece of technology history, the UNIX-HATERS Handbook is a must download for every geek.