This past week Asus released a new mid-range 10″ Android tablet called the Asus MeMo Pad Smart 10. The name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but as far as specs to price ratio it looks like it could be a solid 10″ tablet for someone who doesn’t want to spend over $300. There’s only [...]           |
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Asus Downgrading Newer Tablets Instead of Upgrading Them
Podcast: New and Featured Content for March
| This month's collection development podcast focuses on multimedia content, spotlighting a variety of audio and video titles that are newly available or coming soon to Content Reserve. Tune in to OverDrive's Learning Center to find out about acclaimed movies by Music Box Films, genre-bending "audio movies" by AudioComics, language-learning courses by Mango Languages and Univerb Publishing House, audiobook classics from Cherry Hill Publishing, and New Age albums from Paradise Music.
Devoted readers, never fear: This month's podcast also features a broad range of newly added and upcoming eBooks, including content for young readers, health-conscious foodies, romance and suspense fans, time-crunched employees, and more.
As always, our podcast also rounds up this month's sales to make sure you never miss a great deal.
Access the March collection highlights podcast on OverDrive's Learning Center.
Carrie Smith is a Technical Writer at OverDrive.
 |
March 5, 1904: Tesla’s Having a Ball
| Physicist Nikola Tesla attempts to explain the phenomenon of "ball lightning." |
Win a pre-production camera board!
| We’ve sent the first camera boards to production, and we’re expecting to be able to start selling them some time in April. And we’ve now got several pre-production cameras in the office that we’re testing and tweaking and tuning so the software will be absolutely tickety-boo when you come to buy one. Gordon is in charge of things camera, and he’s got ten boards to give away. There is, however, a catch. The reason we’re giving these cameras away is that we want you to help us to do extra-hard testing. We want the people we send these boards to to do something computationally difficult and imaginative with them, so that the cameras are pushed hard in the sort of bonkers scheme that we’ve seen so many of you come up with here before with your Pis, and so that we can learn how they perform (and make adjustments if necessary). The community here always seems to come up with applications for the stuff we do that we wouldn’t have thought of in a million years; we thought we should take advantage of that. So we want you to apply for a camera, letting us know what you’re planning to do with it (and if you don’t do the thing you promise, we’ll send Clive around on his motorbike to rough you up). We want you to try to get the camera doing something imaginative. Think about playing around with facial recognition; or hooking two of them up together and modging the images together to create some 3d output; or getting the camera to recognise when something enters the frame that shouldn’t be there and doing something to the image as a result. We are not looking for entries from people who just want to take pictures, however pretty they are. (Dave Akerman: we’ve got one bagged up for you anyway, because the stuff you’re taking pictures of is cool enough to earn an exemption here. Everybody else, see Dave’s latest Pi in Space here. He’s put it in a tiny TARDIS.) So if you have a magnificent, imaginative, computationally interesting thing you’d like to do with a Raspberry Pi camera board, email iwantacamera@raspberrypi.org. In your mail you’ll need to explain exactly what you plan to do; and Gordon, who is old-school, is likely to take your application all the more seriously if you can point to other stuff you’ve done in the past (with or without cameras), GitHub code or other examples of your fierce prowess. (He suggested I ask for your CVs, but I think we’ll draw the line there.) We will also need your postal address. The competition is open worldwide until March 12. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
|
Monday, March 4, 2013
March 4, 1877: The Microphone Sounds Much Better
| Emile Berliner invents a new kind of microphone. It assures the future of the telephone, but not fame for Berliner. |
Tolino Shine eReader with HD Screen, Android, and Frontlight Hits Germany
The Tolino Shine is a new ebook reader that is going to be available in Germany starting March 7th. The Tolino Shine was born through a partnership with Bertelsmann and Deutsche Telekom and Germany’s leading bookstore chains—Thalia, Weltbild, and Hugendubel. The device will sell for €99 (about $129 USD) from 1500 partner retail stores and [...]      |
The MagPi, issue 10
| There’s a new MagPi out: download it for free over at www.themagpi.com. This month’s edition has a great mix of hardware and software projects. You can read from the cover what’s on offer: my absolute favourite for this issue is this month’s Scratch Patch, where you’ll be using Scratch to draw Julia Sets. There’s a competition to win a Pi, too: this one is not blue, but it’s still pretty nifty. Get downloading! |
Blue Pi!
| To celebrate our first anniversary, RS Components, one of our two main manufacturing distributors, are releasing a limited edition of 1000 blue Raspberry Pis. These Pis are very cute: there’s something really handsome about that blue. They come with a certificate of authenticity signed by Eben and a matching blue case from One Nine Design in Wales; and blue, as drinkers of Slush Puppy should be aware, is the canonical colour of raspberry flavouring. (Do not eat this Pi.) There’s a catch. You won’t be able to buy these Pis. The majority of them are being donated to charitable causes involving kids and education. But some are also being held back as competition prizes, and you can win one yourself. For four weeks from today, everyone who tweets #bluepi to @RSElectronics along with a suggestion for uses for a blue Pi, or with a great Pi design idea, will be entered into a competition to win one. (Please tweet your entries to @RSElectronics – don’t leave your entry here in the comments, because it won’t be counted.) Every week, the top ten entries will be selected by a panel from RS and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and those ten winners will be sent a blue Pi. Easy! There will be another competition when these four weeks are up – RS will be running Blue Pi events until June. Terms and conditions are available at RS’s website.
|
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Video of a Waterproof eBook Reader – A Modified Nook Touch
Now here’s an interesting concept that will catch the eye of anyone who likes to read in the bathtub, hot tub, or other watery location that is normally a hazard to any book or ereading gadget. I just came across a video on YouTube that shows a functioning ebook reader that is completely submerged under [...]      |
Read an E-Book Week Runs From March 3rd to March 9th
Tomorrow the annual Read an E-Book Week kicks off where publishers and authors offer thousands of free and discounted ebooks to help promote digital reading around the globe. Read an E-Book Week is supported by a number of publishers and authors that want to expand the reach and visibility of ebooks, making this time of [...]      |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)