Books and documents

Used and free textbooks online save money

Look to your wallet, young graduate! These days you need to incorporate the cost of textbooks when planning college finances. No longer can you buy your books with help from the “Ramen noodle diet”. Today’s textbook prices call for more extreme solutions, like the “sell blood plasma savings plan”. Granted, textbooks can’t be cheap because […]

Dictating to Dragon NaturallySpeaking with a voice recorder

Aliya writes and Andy answers: I really appreciated your article on Dragon NaturallySpeaking and IBM ViaVoice. I am debating on writing articles using voice recognition, and am contemplating on picking up a Rio Carbon 5g to dictate articles and book chapters, ideas, thoughts, etc., so that I can actually publish something. Great, but the Rio digital […]

Clearing up Microsoft Office licensing confusion

Orion asks: I would like to install the Office Small Business suite on my laptop and my desktop. Is this legal? I recently purchased this software. No problem. Straight from Microsoft: “You can install one copy of Office Small Business Edition 2003 on your main computer and another on your laptop computer for your exclusive, […]

Collectorz book collection software review

From Adams to Zelazny, I have a lot of books. If all my books were recycled, I wouldn’t be saving trees, but entire ecosystems. That’s my lifestyle: I’m a pack rat who loves to read. I have a pretty good idea of perhaps fifty percent of my book collection’s contents. The rest are either literature […]

Do you like science fiction or fantasy books? Don’t miss out.

Looking way back into the early 1980s, I remember the wonderful “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series by Douglas Adams as one of my first exposures to the world of science fiction. The books were hilarious and easy to read, and just happened to take place in a science-fictiony universe. From there, I moved on […]

Review of “Wildside” by Steven Gould

Synopsis What would you do if you had access to a gate to an alternate world? To what extent could that gate be used and abused? You’d have some wonderful (and literal) escapist literature. You’d have Wildside, by Steven Gould. Featured Technology It’s great when the writer has taken the time to really think about […]

Recovering data from corrupted files in OpenOffice documents

So you’ve been using OpenOffice.org and you have a corrupted file in programs like Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math or Writer. You might see scary error messages like these: Read-Error. Format Error discovered in the file in sub-document styles.xml at 2,2568(row,col) The file ‘file.odt’ is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened. Should OpenOffice.org repair the file? […]

Print On Demand (POD): What is it? What are the problems and benefits?

POD is a printing technology where you pay a company, give them a document, and that company prints and binds the document into a book. There are advantages and disadvantages to this process. Due to the amount of money you’ll be spending and the affect it may have on your future writing career, pay close […]

Free PDF creation tools

So you want to create PDF documents easily, simply and cheaply, and you don’t want to purchase Adobe Acrobat (the definitive but expensive PDF-creation software). There are many free or cheap quality solutions for PDF creation. CutePDF CutePDF is essentially a printer driver that you install on your computer. No adware or spyware. No pop-ups […]

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