Portent

Just as everyone probably has a novel in them, I think there are those with a boardgame design. Producing them is not so easy though as you have to design the game, test it, make the game bits, buy in the parts then try and sell it. A mate of mine John Harrington (who I haven’t seen in 10 years) of Fiendish games produced his own games. Lots of Blood, sweat and tears.

This site provides such a service. Actually they seem to do everything (you still have to design and test it), but after that it’s print-on-demand and order fulfillment. Similar in its way to lulu.com which does print-on-demand books. GameCrafter also do a fair bit to market your game via the site and trade shows.

While you are prototyping you can buy game bits from them. Unfortunately at the moment, it’s a US service only; so US customers may be able to buy a game that you produced but you can’t if you live outside of the US! Given that Europe, well Germany is the main source of good boardgames it’s to be hoped GameCrafter will start providing an export service. They take 50% of the price which gives you more of the pie than through traditional retail outlets which they say (and I believe them) is 30%.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

The future of magazine publishing? Just as books are now available as POD – print on demand (any quantity) from the likes of Lulu.com, it seems logical to do the same for magazines and MagCloud is in beta. Magazines are brilliant full color on 80lb paper with saddle-stitched covers; that’s one thing about digital electronic printing equipment. It’s expensive but looks fantastic.

It’s US based and the idea is you sign up as a publisher and send them your magazine for free. To print costs 20c a page and is a flat $1.40/copy (USPS first class mail) for quantities 1-9, or a flat $13 for quantities from 10-100 (per box of 10-100).

Anyone can have printed any magazine. Anyone want to see “Portent the magazine”? Of course we are nearing the point where E-Paper is becoming viable and won’t that change the world- just think how many huggable trees could be saved or at least used as toilet paper instead! So if you want to self-publish here’s one way to do it. Of course it’s probably cheaper for all of your subscribers to order a copy themselves.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

This is really clever. Select one of the Amazon websites (com, uk, Japan or Canada) then a category (books, music or dvd/videos) and a search phrase.

I entered portent and you can see the word in the picture. Move your mouse over and click and it expands- I clicked a picture in the lower half of the “o” in portent (I highlighted this and combined into one image with box and arrow) , so you can see the book covers. As you move over then you get a pop up with book details etc. Now click again and you’re on the chosen site, on the page for that book etc. Quite clever especially as it’s a Japanese site (with text in English) and it has to pull the details and images from the selected Amazon site.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

I’m a bit paranoid about backing up. However today one of my disks failed. 300 GB! Now most was copies but I didn’t have a backup of about 1 GB of photos I’ve taken over the years. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

I’m hoping that my previous PC, whose disk I erased (but not wiped) will have photos up until last year when I got the new one, but thats at least 1 holiday shots lost. Sigh.

Anyway, earlier this year I tried an online service and it went very well until it started to become a bit error prone for no good reasons. I emailed their support and when they did nowt, emailed their MD. If you are reading this, you know who you are M***.com. It was not a happy experience. I tried reinstalling the software and their servers lost 25 GB of backed up data. Tch tch tch…

That put me off online backup (to put it mildly) but I’m now trying Carbonite. It works on just one PC per sub but that means unlimited. Now I don’t want all 800 GB backed up but a small portion would be nice. It started 30 minutes ago and has nearly 200,000 files to munch through. About 15.5 GB. So far it’s done 4% The picture shows it 15 minutes ago. Anyway it’s easy to use, just right click and select files or folders in Windows Explorer so I’ll come back to this and let you know how I get on. First impressions are very favourable and I feel almost happy to fork out about £25 a year. But I’ve got a two week trial so I’ll give it a good run to start with.

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Popularity: 3% [?]