Take Control E-Books 50% Off Sale Ends Tuesday 10/14/2008

I just received my weekly TidBITS e-mail in my in-box with this announcement. TidBITS is a great newsletter published by TidBITS Publishing Inc. I’ve purchased a few of the Take Control e-books over the years and I’ve listened to many of the authors discuss their e-books on one of my favorite Podcasts: MacVoices with Chuck Joiner.

The company is having a 50% off sale until end of day on 10/14/2008, which is a great value since many of the books are in the $10-15 range to begin with. There are currently 58 Take Control e-books on a wide range of Mac-related subjects, and according to the post by Adam Engst that describes their 5th Anniversary sale, some of the most popular titles to date have been Joe Kissell’s “Take Control of Mac OS X Backups,” and Glenn Fleishman’s books on AirPort networking. I’ve read Adam Engst’s and Glenn Fleishman’s Wireless Networking Starter Kit and consider it an incredibly well-written and researched book (it is a printed book).

Of course, technology changes fast, so publishing books as e-books has helped TidBITS make many titles possible that may not have been possible had they been published in printed form. Plus, the Take Control authors will often update their books and make the updated PDFs available at no charge, which is a great bonus for those who buy the e-books.

You can find out more about the 50% off sale Take Control e-books on the TidBITS site here. The direct link with the coupon code can be found on that page about four lines into the article.

Another Very Good Review of the Canon EOS Rebel XSi

I just logged onto CreativePro.com and came across a new review of the Canon EOS Rebel XSi by Ben Long. One of the most interesting parts of the review is when Long covers the XSi’s live view features, including a photo from an event shot at 1600ISO. The article can be found here.

Ben Long is the author of a number of successful books about digital photography, including Complete Digital Photography, and Getting Stated with Camera Raw. His website, Complete Digital Photography, has a wealth of information about digital photography, Apple Aperture, Photoshop, Photoshop Lightroom, Plug-ins and much more.

Very Cool Free Word Counter and More at ma.tt

I am a huge fan of WordPress. This site, as well as my book’s companion site, inkjettips.com, uses WordPress as the content management system. The founder of the software, Matt Mullenweg has a website called ma.tt, which is filled with a lot of great photos taken by Matt (like this cool jellyfish shot) as well as some nice scripts and useful web apps like this free word counter. I’ve been using Microsoft Word (Under Tools>Word Count) for word counting text for years, but this seems to work as well or better. You can find more tools on this page, like a random number generator, which is great for contests, or for making important decisions.