PROJECT GUTENBERG
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Project Gutenberg is the foremost online source for public-domain literature, with over 20,000 books available. Even better, titles from the entirely free eBook collection are downloadable to your PC or PDA, and searchable by author or by title.

LIBRIVOX
http://librivox.org/
Audiobooks are ridiculously expensive: The latest “Harry Potter” title lists at $80 on CD. Librivox, however, provides pod fodder for free. The site features a collection of public-domain books read by volunteers-and anyone can volunteer. The audio quality is good (MP3s at 64 or 128 Kbps, as well as OGG Vorbis files). Some narrators are better than others, but almost everything is at least decent, and some performances are quite good. The collection (a bit more than 800 Project Gutenberg works so far) is a bit of a hodgepodge, with everything from Walt Whitman to Edgar Rice Burroughs. You’ll have to wait about a hundred years for The Deathly Hallows, though. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then releases the audio files back onto the net for free. All of the audio is in the public domain, so you may use it for whatever purpose you wish.

Volunteering for LibriVox is easy and does not require any experience with recording or audio engineering or acting or public speaking. All you need is a computer, some free recording software, and your own voice. We accept all volunteers in all languages, with all kinds of accents. You don’t need to audition or send us samples. They’ll accept you no matter what you sound like. Librivox gets most of their texts from Project Gutenberg, and the Internet Archive and ibiblio.org host their audio files. Their annual budget is $0, and for the moment they say they don’t need any money.

PODIOBOOKS
http://www.podiobooks.com/
Listeners to Podiobooks.com can choose to receive the episodes of their books via an RSS feed or by listening to episodes by directly downloading episodes from the site. Some listeners keep the audio files on their computers, some transfer the book to CD, but most transfer the file on to their mp3 player so they can listen no matter where they are. Why are the books on Podiobooks.com free of charge? Many authors do this to get exposure for their work, others do it in the hopes you’ll buy their next work in development. Still others simply do it for the sheer joy of writing. And while it’s not required, you have the option to donate money to the author of your choice. When you consider that audio books run usually 50% more than their hardcover counterparts… we hope you’ll be generous. Authors receive 75% of all the proceeds from the donations from listeners. The smaller portion goes to the maintenance and upkeep of Podiobooks.com.

DAILYLIT
http://www.dailylit.com/
DailyLit sends books in installments via e-mail. DailyLit currently offers over 400 classic public domain titles that can be subscribed to and read in their entirety for free. Popular titles include “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu and “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen Readers can choose how often and at what time they want the e-mails sent to them (e.g. every weekday at 6:30am). Books on DailyLit can be read any place that a reader receives e-mail, including on a PDA, Blackberry, Trio, etc. Each installment of a book can be read in under 5 minutes, and if a reader is done with a particular installment, a reader can receive the next installment immediately in his/her e-mail Inbox. DailyLit has recently added forums where readers can discuss their favorite books and authors.

BOOKMOOCH
http://www.bookmooch.com/
BookMooch is a community for exchanging used books. It lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want.
- Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.
- No cost: there is no cost to join or use this web site: your only cost is mailing your books to others.
- Points for entering books: you receive a tenth-of-a-point for every book you type into our system, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every five you receive.
- World wide: You can request books from other countries, in other languages. You receive 3 points when you send a book out of your country, to help compensate you for the greater mailing cost, but it only costs the moocher 2 points to get the book.
- Wishlist: you can keep a “book wish list” that will automatically arrive to you when you have the points and/or the book becomes available in our catalog.
- Feedback score: each time you receive a book, you can leave feedback with the sender, just like how eBay does it. If you keep your feedback score up, people are most likely to help you out when you ask for a book.

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://librivox.org/
http://www.dailylit.com/
http://www.podiobooks.com/
http://www.bookmooch.com/

On October 26th, Apple released the latest edition of Mac OS X, code named “Leopard.” It runs on Intel and PowerPC based Macs running 867MHz G4 chips or better. You’ll need at least 512MB of RAM, a DVD drive and 9GB of free space on your hard drive to install it.

It’s pretty sweet—let’s take a look at a few new features:

Cover Flow
Cover Flow is just like in iTunes where you can see all your files, folders and volumes with huge icons on a reflective black surface. If you loved it in iTunes, you’ll love it in the Finder. If you didn’t love it in iTunes, well, keep reading, I’m sure Leopard will win you over in other ways.

Quick Look
Quick Look allows you to “open your files without opening your files.” Okay, let’s face it, sometimes you don’t want to launch an application just to see if the file you’ve found is the file you want. Quick Look lets you do that—even in Time Machine and in the Trash!!! We can finally look at those odd files in the Trash and find out why we turfed them without dragging them back out. It’s pretty handy for files in the Finder too; movies, PDFs, Keynote presentations all viewable with Quick Look

Stacks
Stacks is kind of a cosmetic change to the Finder. The Finder now, by default, stores all of your Safari and Mail downloads to a Downloads folder in your User folder. This Downloads folder is accessible from the Dock and displays as a “stack.” You can add any folder to the Dock and when you click it, it will either fan out your files or display them as a grid for you to select from.

Spaces
Spaces present you with multiple desktop environments. What this means is you can choose to organize which application windows display on your screen together by organizing them into spaces. You can have Mail and Safari in one space… Photoshop and Illustrator in another… and by hitting F8 you can move windows between spaces.

Screen Sharing
As part of you Sharing System Preferences, you can now choose to share your screen across your network. Just like the way we have always been able to share files with computers on our networks, we can now see what’s going on on those other Macs, change settings, etc. This is so cool, it’s scary.

Back to My Mac
As if it weren’t enough to control Macs on your network, if you have a .Mac account, you can now connect to your Mac at home as if it were a local Mac with file sharing turned on.

Mail Stationery
Leopard allows you to choose from a nice selection of pre-made email templates that allow you to spruce up your correspondence with pictures and other graphics all form the compose mail window.

Notes and To Dos
Mail now allows you to write notes to yourself and set to do items that interact with iCal.

Data Detection
Emails, to do items and notes are now scanned by Mail for phone numbers, addresses, dates, etc. so that you can easily convert a client’s request for a meeting into an appointment in iCal or convert the signature line of an email into an Address Book contact.

iChat Backdrops
One of the “ooh…ahh…” features of Leopard is this fun one—iChat Backdrops. With an iSight camera on your Mac, you can video chat with friends while superimposing yourself on pictures and short videos. Make people think your in Paris with the built in looped video Apple has provided. Or, if you are actually in Paris, superimpose yourself on a picture of a messy bed with tissues and cold medications on it and fool your boss into thinking your home sick with a cold!! Just make sure the real background doesn’t move or the jig is up!

iChat Theater and Screen Sharing
This is like iChat Backdrops only a bit more practical. iChat Theater and Screen Sharing allow you to do Keynote presentations right over iChat and Screen Sharing allows the same functionality of network screen sharing with Macs over the internet!

Safari Web Clip
If you dig Dashboard but can’t find Widgets for your favorite websites, Web Clips is for you! Now you can make your own Widget to follow The Lab’s video blogs, or The Lab’s Flickr stream or even Stickam cams!

Parental Controls
This is where Mom and Dad get to go all “Big Brother” You can control how much time your kids spend on the computer, how late they can stay up playing World of Warcraft, where they go on the internet, who the email or chat with—everything.

Time Machine
I saved my favorite for last—I am a backup fanatic, and this makes me very happy. While it isn’t going to make a complete bootable backup of your Mac like Super Duper!, it does keep hourly incremental backups of your files that are easily accessible via the sexy Time Machine interface and through the Finder itself—no more “blob” backups!! It’s a little less exciting for notebook users who don’t carry external drives around with them to keep Time Machine updated. But for desktop Mac users, Time Machine provides a simple, built-in backup solution that you will thank yourself for activating down the road somewhere. Hard drives fail, people screw up; make sure you have a backup!!

Leopard has over 300 new features—some small, some huge—this has been just an overview of a few of my favorites. Grab a Mac and get a copy of Leopard today!!

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
www.apple.com/macosx

PRODUCTS SHOWN
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
$129 for Single User
$199 for Family Pack

Swann DVR4-Pro-Net Combo Kit
www.swannsecurity.com
$999
There are a lot of home products designed to make you feel more secure, but a lot of them are designed to protect one room (a hidden camera) or one product (anti-theft software or hardware for your computer or laptop). Well, if you want a gadget that makes you feel lik you’re living in a secured compound, Swann’s DVR4 Pro-Net Combo Kit may be just the thing, with four cameras that see in light or in the dark, a digital video recorder that can record all four cameras for days at a stretch before it runs out of space, and a tiny little monitor to view it all on. It’s not a bad bundle for $999 but there are some limitations: notably, all of the cameras are hardwired and powered, so you’ll need to run cable (60 feet per camera is included in the box) and find enough power outlets to accommodate all of the cameras. You CAN plug the power adapters all in at a central location and run power through the cable, or you can plug them in at the remote location. If you’re willing to string cables and drill holes, though, you can keep an eye on what’s going on around the house—either inside or out. One nice benefit: the connectors are pretty much all standard, so you can plug in your own cameras or use your own monitor, if you prefer.

Shiny
- monitors four cameras
- records all four cameras
- pretty good picture quality
- works in the dark
Dull
- high initial investment
- setup takes time
- menu system complicated
- not wireless