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Tangent Online Closing Up Shop For Good…Unless You Want to Keep It Going

John Joseph Adams — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:29:04 +0000

Dave Truesdale has announced that Tangent Online will be closing up shop for good on March 1, 2009, unless someone wants to take it over. Anyone want to take over the reins?

Testing WordPress App for iPhone

John Joseph Adams — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 04:07:43 +0000

Maybe if I can make this work I’ll blog more often. Probably not but maybe.

Help: Email Forwarding

John Joseph Adams — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 15:14:46 +0000

I’m hoping someone can answer a computer/email question I have that is puzzling me. I’ve been looking into the iPhone app, Readdle, because it will let me read RTF files on my iPhone. It doesn’t integrate with the iPhone, so I can’t just click on an RTF file and open it—but you can upload docs to the Readdle server and/or email attachments to a special email address and it will be added to Readdle. Since I’m reading electronic submissions for Federations, this should work great—I can just setup a Gmail filter to have all Federations submissions forwarded to my special Readdle email address. Easy, right? Sure, except it only works in theory. In practice, nothing gets forwarded to Readdle for some reason. Other filters like this that I’ve setup have worked fine (for instance, forwarding email from one account to another email account). However, I also tried forwarding email to Google Docs using this method and that doesn’t work either. In both cases, if I manually forward the email, it works—but I can’t get the auto-forwarding to work. Anyone know what gives?

Swords Against Deviltry on Tor.com

John Joseph Adams — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:52:47 +0000

In all my copious free time, I’m going to be doing some blogging for Tor.com. My first post is up, in which I introduce myself and talk about audiobooks, specifically focusing on Audible.com’s audio adaptation of Fritz Leiber’s Swords Against Deviltry.

Steampunk + Cryptozoology = Dr. Roundbottom

John Joseph Adams — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:44:56 +0000

Have you been reading the musings of the great philosopher and scientist Dr. Julius T. Roundbottom? I profiled his visionary work for SCI FI Wire today.

Here’s the short version. The website Clockpunk.com publishes new fiction every week, but it’s not just a regular ezine–instead, the site combines web design, photography, and writing all into one creative endeavor. It’s purportedly the journal of a "Dr. Roundbottom" who takes "photonic captures" of strange and unusual creatures and then writes up notes about his adventures. It combines a steampunk aesthetic with an adventurous cryptozoology sensibility.

What it really is, is a one-man show, created, photographed, and designed by SF author Jeremiah Tolbert. He takes real photos then photoshops them to look exotic and strange, thus transforming an ordinary toad into a spear-wielding boggart. The site also has some "choose your own adventure" aspect to it, because readers can post comments in response to the Doctor’s posts, and he will write back in character.

Go check out my interview with Jeremiah over at SCI FI Wire and be sure to check out Roundbottom’s site, clockpunk.com.

Top Ten SF Novels by Women

John Joseph Adams — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:44:37 +0000

In the Guardian, Gwyneth Jones has a Top Ten list of SF novels written by women. It’s an interesting list, though I note that only two of them are from the 21st century. Which is fair enough, considering it’s a Top Ten of all-time sort of list. But seeing the list made me wonder: What would this top ten list look like if we restricted the timeframe to books published in 2000 or later? So let’s hear it: What’s in your top ten? (Keep in mind we’re specifically talking about SF here, not fantasy.)

[Cross-posted to the F&SF blog. Please leave any comments over there.]

The Plausibility of Batman

John Joseph Adams — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:35:55 +0000

Scientific American has a cool (and spoiler-free) article about the plausibility of Batman. It’s presented as a Q&A with the author of Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero. It looks pretty cool–a shame, though, that it’s not coming out til October; they’re going to miss all this free publicity, though maybe The Dark Knight will be just about ready for DVD by then.

Tor’s free ebooks

John Joseph Adams — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:24:03 +0000

By now most of you will have noticed Tor’s shiny new Tor.com website, which is chock full of geeky goodness. What you may not have noticed is that through July 27, you can go download all of the free ebooks that Tor had released via its Watch the Skies promotional newsletter over the course of the last several months. So go download before they’re gone forever!

Resurrecting TabMixPlus for Firefox 3.0.1

John Joseph Adams — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:57:26 +0000

In a comment, Mike Ray asked: “How did you resurrect TabMixPlus? This has been the bane of my online existence since I updated.”

Since this too was the bane of my existence, allow me to share in case any of you can’t wait for the developer to update.

In Firefox, go to Tools > Add-ons.
Uninstall the old version of TabMixPlus.
Reset Firefox.
Download the TabMixPlus dev-build, saving it to your desktop.
Using Firefox, at first I couldn’t figure out how to download an “add-on” without having it automatically install it. There may be some other way of doing this, but the easiest way I figured out was to download the file from Internet Explorer, which will let you just save it to your desktop.
Follow the directions mentioned in this thread by Ohmster. I’ve tweaked them a bit to make them a bit more clear:

Rename file to change the file extension (the three letters at the end, after the dot). Change .xpi to .zip.

If you don’t see the file extensions, goto Start > Settings > Control Panel > Folder Options.
Click on the View tab.
Uncheck Hide extensions for known file types.

Click to open with Winzip. Use the “Classic” interface.
Right click on install.rdf and Open With > Notepad.
Change maxver from 3.0 to 3.*
Save the notepad file. Winzip will ask if you want to update the archive, say yes.
Rename the file extension .zip back to .xpi.
Drag the file on top of Firefox and let go to install it. This will make it work with any version 3 of Firefox.

As someone in on the FF add-ons page said, Firefox without TabMixPlus is not Firefox.

Plague War book trailer

John Joseph Adams — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:52:07 +0000

Jeff Carlson (author of Plague Year and the soon to be released Plague War) has just released a book trailer entitled 4 Minutes Above 10,000 Feet. Jeff says "Shot in the Sierra mountains, this short film can only be described as Alive meets The Blair Witch Project meets the new Andromeda Strain. Scary and fun!"

You can also watch a hi-res version on Jeff’s web site at www.jverse.com.