Free books!

For quite sometime now I have been receiving free (and very inexpensive) e-books from BookBub

BookBub: Free and Bargain Kindle Books, Nook Books, and more

I can read them anywhere on my SmartPhone or any computer. Love it!

Pricing Considerations

Nice article on how to price goods and services: Why Margin Matters

PDFEscape

Sometimes one just gets lucky. I was looking for a quick and easy way to fill-in a few fields in a PDF form. Adobe Reader could not handle the form properly (go figure!). A quick search resulted in this great find:

PDFescape - Free PDF Editor & Free PDF Form Filler - Your Free Online PDF Reader, Editor, Form Filler, Form Designer, Solution

It was easy to use yet powerful and free. Can't go wrong with that combination. I had the form filled in and saved back to my hard drive in seconds. Give them a try!

Quitting Your Day-time Job

Here is a good article about someone that transitioned into running his own business:

How I (Finally) Quit My Day Job To Run My Computer Business

5+ Great Ways to Re-Purpose Old PCs

5 Great Ways to Re-Purpose Old PCs for Customers

In addition to the items listed in this article, our Linux Users Group has installed a version of GNU/Linux on older machines and then donated them to several organizations, such as SisterCare and various community recreational centers that otherwise would not have access to computers. Donations from members and the community have provided dozens of good computers that needed only a free OS.

Another idea worth considering is to advertise any unwanted equipment at freecycle.org. People will gladly come and get these computers from you if given a chance.

Cisco's "Cloud" Move is a bad idea

Cisco locks customers out of their own routers, only lets them back in if they agree to being spied upon and monetized - Boing Boing

Since when did it become acceptable for corporations to hijack equipment and force things down a customer's throat? Oh, wait … ever since Microsoft forced Windows down the throats of OEM manufacturers and made itself the defacto operating system for desktop computers; that's about the right time when this whole thing got started. Many others have followed (Apple is one example) and have gotten away with it for far too long.

But Cisco's latest move is pure terrorism on its clients. Many of us will not stand for it. Routers are not all that expensive (in the $50-$80 range) and there are several manufacturers to choose from, companies that hopefully will not follow Cisco's example and try to kidnap customers into agreements that are damaging to the Internet as a whole.

On this Fourth of July, we should follow William Wallace's (form the movie Braveheart) and shout at the top of of our lungs: FREEDOM!!!

Another computer visionary lost

Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011: Computer scientist, Unix co-creator, C programming language designer – Boing Boing

Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie is reported to have died at his home this past weekend, after a long battle against an unspecified illness. No further details are available at the time of this blog post.