Today’s Barnes and Noble Daily Find is Before We Met: A Novel by Lucie Whitehouse for $2.99. The Romance Daily Find is Sharing Sam
by Katherine Applegate, $1.99.
The Kobo Daily Deal is The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon for $2.99.
(Note: All prices current at the time of posting and subject to change. Most items marked Daily Deals are good for only the day posted.)
One of Today’s Deals is a BLU Vivo Air LTE Smartphone for $149. The phone is GSM and unlocked and will work on any network. (See the band requirements if you have AT&T to ensure compatibility.) There is also a special deal on various bluetooth speakers today, with prices starting at $14.99.
The Smartphone Lifetime Challenge (ReCode) _ The future of the smartphone market may be driven not by innovation, but by how often we choose to upgrade our devices.
Daily Links are interesting links I discover as I go about my online day. The frequency and number of links posted depend upon the daily news. I also post other, different links of interest on Twitter and on the Google Plus eBook Evangelist Page.
Barnes and Noble’s Nook Daily Find is Winter at the Door by Sarah Graves for $1.99. The Romance Daily Find is The Girls of Mischief Bay by Susan Mallery, also priced at $1.99.
About once a week, I post links to digital-related library news articles and information about digital collections available online. I also post other links of interest about the digital life daily on the Google Plus eBook Evangelist Page.
Last year, I wrote a popular post called Last minute Holiday gifts for the e-book lover that was full of gift suggestions. I just updated that post and I think all of those are still great ideas. Trust me on this – I bought most of the list for myself last year and finally just ordered some touch screen gloves …
I have done quite a few posts on covers (here, here and here). Covers start for as little as $5, depending on the device model. I have to confess that I am a cover fashionista when it comes to electronics. Every device HAS to have a cover and they are ALL different. Personally, I think they make great gifts, either for someone else or yourself. All you need to know is the Kindle model (see my post here).
Here are a few other items that I personally use that I think make great gifts:
I live in a house built in 1921 and even with the remodeling and re-wiring that’s been done over the years, it seems that there are never enough outlets to keep all my gadgets plugged in, especially in my office. I use USB wall chargers like this one from RAVPower for charging items that don’t need to be connected to the computer.
One of my desktops crashed and is going into the repair shop after the holidays. In the meantime, I have been using a Fire HD 6 with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard as a replacement. I got a Microsoft Sculpt Comfort Bluetooth Mouse because my research said that some brands of bluetooth mice had compatibility issues with the tablet. This one works like a dream. Copy and paste on the Fire was always hard for me without the mouse buttons and this solved that problem. Because I wanted a keyboard that was both compatible with IOS and Android and inexpensive, I bought an Anker® Bluetooth Ultra-Slim Keyboard. (only $16) and splurged on a carrying sleeve for it. I also use it to take notes on my phone, which I absolutely love! These are a great gift for someone who finds typing on a small tablet surface difficult.
Voice recognition has come a long way over the last couple of years. Another great accessory for tablets like the Fire HD 6 is a set of earbuds or headphones with a microphone to use with the voice recognition feature. Mine also doubles as a spare for my Dragon NaturallySpeaking software.
One of my favorite new tech accessories is a combination stylus and ballpoint pen. I’ve received a couple of these as gifts and carry them everywhere! They are great to have, especially at the doctor’ s office when I have both my phone and my checkbook out at the same time. It is the perfect bridge between my digital and analog worlds.
While I talked last time about what a great idea I think gift cards from Amazon,Barnes and Noble and iTunes are. Pick the store the person you are buying for shops at and let them have all the fun. My husband and I have several friends who are avid Amazon shoppers who love getting Amazon Prime from us as an annual gift for the holidays.
And finally, ebook lovers love ebooks. How about a gift subscription to a subscription service like Kindle Unlimited or Scribd? Both are available in 3, 6 and 12 month memberships. Time to read all of those books is not included. 🙂
The movie tie-in ebook of Patricia Highsmith’s Carol is Barnes and Nobles Nook Daily Finds. The price is $3.99. B & N also has a limited-time coupon for $10 off purchases of $75 or more. Expires December 19, 2015.
5 Christmas Copyright Myths (Plagiarism Today) – There are a lot of misconceptions about Christmas and Copyright that this article addresses.
Some you may be aware that my husband is a musician. He has an great holiday album of instrumental jazz available. You can listen on Pandora and Spotify or purchase as a download or CD. You can listen to the whole album or find out more about it at SkafishHoliday.com.
Daily Links are interesting links I discover as I go about my online day. The frequency and number of links posted depend upon the daily news. I also post other, different links of interest on Twitter and on the Google Plus eBook Evangelist Page.
Today, Amazon is featuring 31 titles in the Ed McBain classic 87th Precinct mysteries for $1.99 each. (Pictured is book 1, Cop Hater.) I also found Francine Pascal’s beloved Sweet Valley High series – an ebook bundle with volumes 1-12 for only $7.99.
Right at this moment, I would love to writing new posts for this blog. Instead, I am going through each of my WordPress themes and deleting the plugins that get re-installed EVERY TIME that you update the software – most specifically, the Hello Dolly plugin.
In case you have never bother to activate it, all Hello Dolly does is display a random lyric from the song Hello Dolly. Yes, that’s it. But it has traditionally been included with WordPress since earlyin the software’s development.
A lot of blog posts have been written about this over the last few years (Google delete Hello Dolly plugin and see what I mean). One post refereed to Hello Dolly as “some kind of zombie plugin that would rise from the dead every time I updated WordPress.”
While some people have learned to write plugins through studying the Hello Dolly plugin, more people seem to be frustrated with its continual ressurection. In this 2009 poll from Digging into WordPress, 78% of those who responded voted to remove Hello Dolly from WordPress. And yet it is still here.
Hello Dolly was written by Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-founders of WordPress, and that is probably the reason it remains bundled with the software. In fact, this post from Webnovate suggests that we should keep the plugin installed as a thank you to Matt Mullenweg for WordPress itself.
But there are actually some very good arguments for deleting it, along with any other unused plugins:
Plugins use server resources. They also affect your pages’ load times.
Plugins can interact and cause conflicts and unintended side effects.
Plugins require constant updating, even if they are not active.
Plugins can be huge security risks. Sometimes, the risk is from the plugins themselves, sometimes, it is from plugins being out of date. According to WPExplorer, “Out of date plugins are prime targets for those in search of security weaknesses and can also break when newer versions of WordPress and other plugins are released.”
I use security software to track login attempts on my blogs. Every time WordPress updates, there is a surge in bots trying to access sites, hoping to catch a new vulnerability or exploit a flaw brought about by the new software. Given the security risks that are out there, I don’t want any plugins installed that I am not actively using.
And that’s why I think it is time for Hello Dolly to finally stop being bundled with WordPress. It is too big of a security risk for the world we live in. I know the song says, “Dolly’ll never go away again.” But, hopefully, we are not taking that too literally. I’d rather spend my time doing something else….
The daily deals for Tuesday, December 22, 2015:
The eBook Evangelist 