Publish! Publish! Publish!

I think down deep in my heart I'm always wanted to be a published author, writing that "super exhilarating, can't put it down" spy novel or some deep thinking manuscript that everybody must read.  Well this morning while I was looking around Twitter I came across a book publishing site called LuLu.  This site helps you to put together your idea for a publication, put it into a format that can be distributed and then provide a distribution path for that publication.  Whether you have created your epic spy novel, delicious cookbook, eye popping calendar or photo book, whatever your idea, they can help you to produce itm print it and distribute it.

This is also great for making short run for technical books for your company, catalogs, or brochures.  They can produce hard back books or paperback, perfect bound, saddle stitch or spiral bound books.  They can be in full color or just black and white.  Or they can just be electronic, to be distributed through the Internet.

It's free do sign up, and until you use their service for publication you can work on the development of your publication and then pull the trigger when you're ready.  They provide a site for you to manage your projects, and help you to manage the selling your masterpiece.  This includes using their online shopping cart system to collect the funds for your sold works.  This is all pretty neat stuff and I have a couple of projects in mind already.

Links: http://www.lulu.com/

Wiimote repurposed for multi-point interactive white

Jude just came back from the WIU vendor show in one of the interesting things that he came back with was a demonstration of using the Wiimote as a multipoint interactive whiteboard.  The link I will give you is from engadget and has it pretty neat video showing how works.  I think I'd love to have one of these right at my desk and have it pointing onto my desk surface.

"While certainly there's been no shortage of Wiimote hacks, the number of genuinely useful ones has been considerably more limited. It looks like you can now add one more to that list, however, as Johnny Chung Lee (he of the Wiimote finger-tracking hack) has now upped the usefulness even further with a makeshift multi-point interactive whiteboard. There's a bit more involved with this one than just a Wiimote, however -- namely, an IR-emitting pen (or two), which the Wiimote tracks while relaying all the necessary information back to a PC. That, as the video after the break shows, allows you to turn any surface into a multi-point whiteboard with the use of a projector, or turn any LCD screen into a touchscreen, of sorts. Best of all, Johnny has kindly provided the necessary software free of charge, so hit up the read link below if you want to give it a shot."

wiimote projector whiteboard

Johnny Chung Lee Project - Wii Johnny is a Graduate PhD student at CMU and has several other projects that he has posted to this site using the Wiimote for other tracking experiments. The 3-D is pretty neat as well. He has a blog at: http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/  called procrastineering. Enjoy!

Spam 101

Brian Fine has put together an article that will help us understand a little better about how to protect ourselves from all that nasty SPAM! Here is a little excerpt from the article or you can click here to read the entire article. 

By now anyone who regularly uses email is familiar with the idea of spam. To be considered spam a message has to be both unsolicited and bulk. Unsolicited means that the recipient has in no way requested or subscribed to the messages. Bulk means that the message is sent out to a large (hundreds to millions) of recipients.

Spam messages cost money. First there is a cost in resources: bandwidth to deliver the message, and server memory and space to process it. Second there is a cost in man-hours, as the recipient has to “sort” through the spam on the chance that an actual email is there.

What can we do about it?

Brian Fine - In House Technical Staff