Recently Barnes and Noble converted their online self-publishing portal from “PubIt” to “NookPress.” This requires everyone that is currently using PubIt to convert their accounts. They did not say how long anyone has to do this conversion, but as I had a release scheduled for this weekend I decided to do the conversion sooner rather then later. (more…)
80AD by Aiki Flinthart is a five book series that as of the time of this writing all five books are being offered for free on Barnes and Noble’s site for the Nook and on Amazon.com for the Kindle. The series is a typical coming of age story that centers around Phoenix and Jade. They are two fourteen year old children that come from dysfunctional family homes and independently both decided to escape their reality for a while by playing a brand new video game. (more…)
I purchased my iPhone 4s back in October 2012 and bought an Otter Box Defender for it at the same time as I was worried about the glass nature of the phone. The Otter Box was huge, bulky and offered no protection from anything other than shock. The bulk of the case made it harder to get my phone in and out of my pocket, and actually increased my chances of dropping the phone. After a couple weeks with the case, I returned it and bought a Lifeproof case to replace it. (more…)
If you have a Grindmaster OPOD, Bunn MyCafe, Senseo, or any other machine that uses “coffee pods” to brew coffee, then this article is for you. It is really simple to make your own pods at home from any kinds of grinds you want. This video I made a couple years ago shows you how: (more…)
I ordered these K-Cups with the sole purpose of reducing my per cup cost. Understand I drink $60+ of coffee every month so every bit of savings that I can find I run after. I purchased Cyclone and Fuhgeddaboudit as I am a fan of dark roasts in the Keurig. Cyclone’s description stated it was the same as Dark Magic, which is one of the better K-Cups. This gave me very high hopes for it. With Amazon Subscribe and Save, the cost per cup came to 42 cents which is a 15-20% savings over what I normally pay. (more…)
If you opt to use this service, then I suggest you use TrueCrypt or other strong encryption to protect your files from, Google. The reason is in their terms there are a couple of statements in their terms that could be very worrisome depending what you store there. I will use my own use case as an example. I am a writer, that is I write novels and I sell them for a profit. In order to do this I spend a lot of time in MS Word typing and I would like to use a service like Google Drive as an offsite backup for these MS Word files. So keeping that use case in mind let’s look at the terms of Google Drive. (more…)
The Corruptible by Mark Mynheir is a good old-fashioned detective story told in the typical first person point of view. Mynheir does a great job of talking to the reader and telling the story without it feeling like a school time story hour. The first person character does not shift throughout the entire novel, so the reader only ever knows as much as the main character does, and often less, which helps keep up the level of suspense. (more…)
Recently I decided to leave my dedicate server that I have had for many years with Layeredtech. I had purchased the server off of their clearance rack, and at the time I bought it, it was a great deal. I was paying less than $70/month for dedicated hardware and 10mbit connection to tier 1 bandwidth. As with all good things, it did not last. Over the years, they raised the price and soon I was paying nearly $200 a month for hardware that was way out of date and having issues. They told me at one point my machine was too old so they would not promise it would stay up and would not guarantee any level of service. When I tried to upgrade my box, they dragged their feet until the hard drive finally died in my machine. (more…)
Several years ago we hired a pet sitter to watch our 60-pound dog for a few weeks while we were on vacation. We had used this pet sitter in the past with great success but for some reason this time she did a horrible job. In fact from what the neighbors tell us, she did not show up for many days at a time. During that time our dog obviously had gone to the bathroom (yes both kinds) multiple times in the same general area or our carpet. She tried to cover it up by cleaning up with spray cleaners and towels, but it left a stain that stunk for a long time. We had originally tried the non-automatic Bissel cleaner on it, and that helped reduce the smell, but the spot remained. After many tries we gave up on the spot and assumed we would have to replace the carpet when we could afford it. Now, I must say this again, that was several years ago. The stain has resisted many years of wear and tear, and every spray cleaner on the market. (more…)
I owned the Google Nexus One for almost two years, and currently own an Asus Transformer, which means I have used every major version of Android since 2.0, including Ice Cream Sandwich. Both the Nexus and Transformer lack any third party overlay so both yield a pure Android experience. Back in October 2011, I sold my Nexus One and purchased an iPhone 4s. This experience allows me to fairly answer the question, which is better iOS or Android? (more…)