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Treeware or kindle?

If you like your books as treeware, and you want one of these, visit lulu.com/quack. They will print it on high quality paper and put it in amazing packaging material and ship it to you.

If you have an Amazon Kindle, you can load it with the fiction at amazon.com/-/e/B004TEIP3W where you will also find a picture and biography of yours truly.

Truth

Training manuals, written to the LPI 101 and 102 requirements. These were originally written with the idea of LPI accreditation, but that turns out to cost more money than cash flow permitted. So here they are. Get root. Go wild.

• LPI 101 training manual: PDF, source tar.bz2
• LPI 102 training manual: source tar.bz2

Fiction

If you don't like the truth (non-fiction), you can try the fiction:

• Uncle Tom's Computer Children's computer fiction: Tired of playing ball, Jason and Emily find an old laptop in their garden shed. It has one game on it, and only one game, which they play with youthful creativity. Mom's bank account has something to do with the game, but will she appreciate the surprise that comes her way? They have no idea that they are going to end up being very kind to unsuspecting animals, while innocently causing the breaking of national laws, a few international treaties and some valuable dinnerware.

  This book has been "finished" since 21 May 2011, but now published to Kindle on 24 February 2012 - it's taken that long to make the corrections from proof-reading (Thanks, Mom! For all the commas too). For now it's only on Kindle, since I'm struggling with getting the cover formatted for createspace and/or lulu.

• Program's Progress (it was almost "Byte's Travels"): Computer fantasy: This is just for fun. It was vapourware: a young byte leaves his motherboard and travels across the computer, the room, and even the world. Mandatory reading for bored engineers and their hapless children. So far, he's made it to the edge of the LAN, and I've got an idea where he's going, but it's going to take a while. Actually, now things have changed a little, the working document is at 94 pages or so. The first 80% is done, and it's just the last 80%. This bookie has nice pictures too, so that it will be inaccessible to people using text devices, and the layout will work poorly. No wait! It's done! 117 pages, including one left intentionally blank (sorry, not in Kindle version)! You can download it or buy as treeware at http://lulu.com/quack It's also on Amazon Kindle. With over 74 text explanations of obtuse computer subjects (there are 75), 255 index entries for paper based searching for things you will never look for, and 28 illustrations which could have been done by a five year old, this book is an ideal way to put your children to bed. Children love indexes.
• Partial recall: Science fiction: This is the story of a time machine. Not your conventional time machine that disrupts the physical universe by sending people into the past to change the present and spying on the future. This is more your regular utility time machine for the mundane task of showing what happened last year. It turns out, people missed some stuff, and they would like to know - after the fact. They will pay. There will be lots of them. There will be an army of people operating the machine.
  What changes when you really know what happened last summer? What is the use of a machine that can tell you what happened last week, but can't tell you what is happening right now? However, even with limits, it is possible to turn the universe on its head. You can read the whole book on the lulu.com preview, and then buy it for your mom.
• Storming the Misty Planet: Science fiction vapourware: Working title for what I'm currently busy with (oh wait, I wrote Program's Progress and Uncle Tom's computer first). So far, the hero has made it out of bed, and all the way to work, picking up only one stray. If he ever makes it to the truth or the lack thereof, that will be quite amazing. Last I looked, I was at about 50 pages. The title character has yet to appear, so it's going to be a little while (and I'll need to change the title so that the title character is there). Actually, I redid the plan and discarded everything except the prologue, so I've made even less progress than that. And then I redid the plan again, and now it may never be finished. However, the plan does now make a little more sense.