In recent years, the tech-savvy 18-to-24 crowd has discovering audiobooks via digital downloads – a potential threat to the traditional audiobook industry, though CD audiobooks remain the backbone of the industry, partly because of massive sales to libraries. An estimated 10,000 audiobook titles appeared last year (compared with 316,480 traditional print titles), and sales totaled…
Oxford University says, As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write ‘a, b and c’ not ‘a, b, and c’. But when a comma would assist in the meaning of the sentence or helps to resolve ambiguity, it can be used – especially where one of the items in the list…
According to the Google Enterprise blog, Starting next week, new schools that migrate to Google Apps for Education will see 25GB mailboxes. Existing customers will see their mailboxes grow over the course of the next few weeks. Although this is a nice move from Google, especially for schools migrating from large Exchange or Lotus Notes…
Our wonderful IT folks have set up a push-the-button-and-it-just-works conversion from MS Outlook to GMail. My only real concern is that this gives me yet another GMail account where I might lose something… is there a way to cross-link GMail accounts? Time to Google for an answer. Update: As part of the transfer process, I…
But that’s not all. This vocative form has an extra flexibility that enables you to transform a word in another case into a vocative as well. Let’s take the example above, but change “Paris Hilton” into the vocative form: “@AlexisPetridis, I enjoyed your hilarious review of the @ParisHilton album.” Here, the original meaning is preserved,…
It’s annoying that the New York Times apparently disables my browser’s copy text function. Here is a screenshot instead. On NYTimes.com, Now You See It, Now You Don’t – NYTimes.com.
[W]hen you read, it’s your brain that’s generating all that data. That’s hard work. Your brain makes all the props and sets, does the voices and renders all those fancy digital effects. When you read, you’re truly collaborating with the author — it’s not a passive experience; it’s an active one that binds you to…
A collaborative, open-source writing guide. The writing sprint is over, and Web Writing Style Guide Version 1.0 is now available. While written for undergraduate writing students, Web Writing Style Guide could be useful to anyone wanting to learn how to write for the web. Topics in this lengthy guide include–but are not limited to– strategies…
After finishing my work for the school year, I have been spending lots of my free time developing my 3D design skills with Blender 3D. The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.58. This is the second stable release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years…
Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc’s publishing foray. —Spam clogging Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing – The Globe and Mail.
It must have sounded like a great idea to someone at News Corp (NSDQ: NWS) at the time: “Hey, I know how we can sell more subscriptions through the New York Post iPad App! Let’s block access through iPad Safari and make them go to the app instead.” What they should have heard: “Hey, let’s…
Enterprise and Shuttle Salt and Pepper Shakers – The Official Star Trek Store.
The fact of the matter is that the entire PR industry is like a weed growing out of control. Current estimates have PR people now outnumbering journalists 3 to 1. Think about that for a second. And one of the industries in which this infectious growth is most apparent is the tech industry, where it’s boom…
Editing is the most important part of my job as an author. Before I gave up my day job to write full-time I was myself an editor, first at Penguin, then at Headline, which is partly why I’m so passionate about the process. And yet I cannot tell you how much I hate it. It…
Since its release, Call of Duty has stood as the exemplar of historical reality as a backdrop to a video game, with each of its following releases living up to this standard. Gamers are given the choice of playing through a number of different campaigns based on country, with each tailored to reflect the worldview,…
My plan is to publish on this blog an electronic edition of a libretto about once a month in formats you can read online, on your smart phone, or on most ebook readers. In some cases I’ll also be able to provide digitized images of piano/vocal scores for at least a few songs. Additionally, for…
I sense a made-for-TV-movie in the works. In an embarrassing about-face, federal prosecutors yesterday abruptly dropped criminal charges against an Indiana man who they accused of bugging his ex-wife’s automobile. The FBI last Friday arrested David Voelkert, 38, largely on the basis of messages the South Bend man recently exchanged with a purported 17-year-old Facebook friend…
The growing list of student bloggers who have found their way into good ‘pro’ jobs also includes Hannah Waldram, who founded the Bournville Village blog, ended up taking to professional local blogging as the Cardiff ‘beatblogger‘ for The Guardian’s now mothballed Local project before becoming a community coordinator for the same newspaper, and Dave Lee,…
…the whole resembles a lightly frothed kafka tale digitised as a text-adventure game thus anticipating later experiments in “interactive fiction” while also functioning as a satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life which was always after all the genius of perec to marry a…
Perhaps on a different browser there is mouseover text, but on my iPad, I have no idea what these do. A helpful label would be, you know, helpful. Ars Technica Mystery Meat Icons.