Writer Cutting Out Traditional Publishers With Amazon Kindle

From the Article:
"Welcome to disruption. 26-year old Amanda Hocking is the best-selling "indie" writer on the Kindle store, meaning she doesn't have a publishing deal, Novelr says.



And she shouldn't. She gets to keep 70% of her book sales -- and she sells around 100,000 copies per month. By comparison, it's usually thought that it takes a few tens of thousands of copies sold in the first week to be a New York Times bestselling writer.



The comparison isn't entirely fair, because Hocking sells her books for $3, and some $.99. But that's the point: by lowering the prices, she can make more on volume, especially impulse buys. Meanwhile e-books cost nothing to print, you don't have to worry about print volumes, shelf space, inventory, etc. And did we mention the writer keeps 70%?"

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/amanda-hocking-2011-2#ixzz1Ff3qQpI9

I love it when people use technology for to their benefit.

More about Anonyomous and HBGary

No, we have not seen the end of this.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/anonymous-vs-hbgary-the-aftermath.ars

Anonymous vs. HBGary

Anonymous is "The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code....But did he?"

Read the article below for more info.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/how-one-security-firm-tracked-anonymousand-paid-a-heavy-price.ars

NXT Wall-E Transform Video

I saw this on thenxtstep.blogspot.com and thought I would share.  Cool Lego NXT Wall-e transforming robot.

Ted Talk: "The oil spill's unseen culprits, victims"

A new Ted Talk about the oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

They Grow Up So Quick!

This year we decided to take down the old wooden swing set and replace it with some garden beds. Lemony found information about square foot gardening, and we (mostly our youngest, zilla, and myself) recycled all the old swing set lumber into garden beds. All this worked out well and now we are harvesting the fruits and vegetables of our labor.

Of course if you have an garden you will have bugs. Lemony found a very large caterpillar eating the tops of the carrots one day. After much debate if we should squish him or not (I thought it was probably just going to eat everything and turn into a tree-destroying moth), our daughter fairyberry came to the rescue with her butterfly book. We think it is an Eastern Black Swallow Tail, and with a little research, found that it was the second easiest caterpillar to raise in captivity. So he was named, housed and fed all the carrot tops and parsley he could eat.

Below is a closeup of the caterpillar, a little blurry through the glass. He was green with black strips and yellow dots.

So we fed the bug and waited. A few days latter it attached to a stick we had placed in the bowl and hung like a J. The next morning the brown, woody looking chrysalis had formed. A little over a week latter my wife came home to find this in the bowl.

Lemony took this picture and released the butterfly in the yard. He flew away over the neighbors house. I have to admit, I am happy no one listened to me and we did not squish the caterpillar.

Update from Lemony: Turns out that Heimlich is a girl.

Happy 4th of July!!

Happy 4th of July!  Have a good holiday and be careful.

Happy 30th PAC MAN!

Google is celebrated Pac Mans birthday with a working javascript of the google logo.

Thats just cool.

Park 2010

Some new pictures from the local 4H farm/park.

Iron Man and Information Security

This is an interesting article about Information Security and the movie Iron Man 2 from CIO.  It does include spoilers so read at you own risk.

Since Stark is the only person who knows what makes Iron Man tick, the world's security rests entirely in his hands. Not surprisingly, the U.S. government wants to reproduce the Iron Man suit for its own militaristic purposes; the debate over private vs. public security forms one of the movie's core conflicts.

Meet the villains: Hacker, security vendor

See the link for the entire article.

Wired Article On Geek Power

This is a good article from Wired;
But behind the inventiveness was something even more marvelous — all real hackers shared a set of values that has turned out to be a credo for the information age. I attempted to codify this unspoken ethos into a series of principles called the hacker ethic. Some of the notions now seem forehead-smackingly obvious but at the time were far from accepted (”You can create art and beauty on a computer”). Others spoke to the meritocratic possibilities of a digital age (”Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position”). Another axiom identified computers as instruments of insurrection, granting power to any individual with a keyboard and sufficient brainpower (”Mistrust authority — promote decentralization”). But the precept I perceived as most central to hacker culture turned out to be the most controversial: “All information should be free.”

Stewart Brand, hacker godfather and Whole Earth Catalog founder, hacked even that statement. It happened at the first Hackers’ Conference, the week my book was published, during a session I moderated on the future of the hacker ethic. “On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable,” he said. “On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” His words neatly encapsulate the tension that has since defined the hacker movement — a sometimes pitched battle between geeky idealism and icy-hearted commerce.
It is worth a read.

Tetris anyone?

This is cool;
There are two things that are universally true about Tetris: that Russian-style theme music is impossible to get out of your head, and everybody loves Tetris. Which is why we had to take a moment to highlight the Tetris-Bot, a simple PC gaming robot patched together from a digital evaluation module (EVM), a web cam and a Lego Mindstorms robot kit.
The cam is positioned in front of the screen, where it gathers visual data that it feeds to the EVM. The EVM -- the brains of the operation -- puts those data inputs through a series of algorithms, providing an output command to the Mindstorm assembly positioned over the keyboard. It's not perfect, but who's ever played a perfect game of Tetris?

The Whole World in My Palm Pre

I got a new toy and I must say after 24 hours I still love it. I got a Palm Pre to replace my Samsung Windows Mobile touch screen. The old phone was ok, I liked the features, but it never performed well. Sounds like Windows doesn’t it? I would like to try an iPhone, but as long as they are only on AT&T, no thanks. So long story short, there was a sale and offering free hotspot functionality, so I couldn’t say no.

So I am in the process of pimpin out my new phone with apps, wallpaper and ringtones. I also ordered the cordless charger and will review it when it gets here. I did make some wall paper for it out of a desktop wall paper and thought I would share. I will review the phone more once I have kicked it around a little more, but the Amazon reviews are a good place to start.
Wall paper below is 320 x 480.

Happy Birthday Katgrrl

Happy Birthday to our eldest.  She helped dissect a shark for her birthday.  It was a spiny dog fish shark.

This Bee A Problem

Honey bees continue to die off;

The 2010 prognosis for honey bees doesn't look good, according to Jeff Pettis, Research Leader at the USDA Bee Lab.


Although hard data won't be available until April, preliminary surveys of our nation's beekeepers suggest that at least as many bee colonies have died off over the winter as they have the last few years -- and possibly even more than in years past -- thanks to Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD.

I last spoke with Pettis in 2007, when I visited his lab as they researched the cause of CCD. Back then, they were pretty optimistic about finding the cause, but three years later answers are still elusive. I spoke to him this week about the state of the investigation.

Jeff Pettis: “We obviously think it’s more complicated than we first believed as in we don’t believe that we’re looking for a single virulent pathogen, although that can’t totally be ruled out. At first we were thinking that we’d find a single causative agent, a virulent pathogen sweeping through the bee population, and that doesn’t appear to be the case.”

I do know that lemony pays alot for honey, and if this keeps up so will the price of honey.

The Feds Want To Be Your Facebook Friend

From the article;

In a quaint presentation, cybercrime prosecutors last year gave fellow Department of Justice officials an introduction to social networking sites and their possible investigative uses. In detailing the possible value of sites like Twitter and Facebook, lawyers John Lynch and Jenny Ellickson--both with the department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section--noted that information gathered could "establish crime or criminal enterprise" and "prove and disprove alibis."

So who are your friends and Twitter followers?