Fiverr

The book I read to research this post was How To Profit From Fiverr With Your Skills by Rolan Bag-Oa which is an excellent book which I downloaded for free from kindle. I was quite drawn to this book because it's an unusual and interesting subject and although it's quite short I have heard quite a lot about the fiverr. Basically the idea behind the site is you offer to do a job or request that someone do $5. $1 of that goes to the website but for example if you are a computer programmer and are selective about what jobs you do there is no reason you can't do several jobs in an hour and make a nice bit of money. One idea behind fiverr is that you are doing the jobs so you can get some references not really for the money but later on you can charge more as you get a customer base. There is a lot of different types of computer programmers and with the popularity of Content Management Sites like Wordpress & Drupal you can often get a nice little like installing a plug in or theme into someone's site and get paid. Other jobs you may come across are things like voice over work, writing a short piece, proofreading, trying a new product and of course lots of others. One of the great things about fiverr is the variety of categories on offer and it's easy to register either via the facebook page or an online form on their website. They call the jobs you do on fiverr, gigs.

Arduino

The book I read to research this post was Arduino For Dummies by John Nussey which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The Arduino is a little like the Raspberry Pi and there are 2 major components that combine to make it. There is a circuit board and components which varies according to what you are trying to build. There is a kind of standard as to what is an arduino component but many companies manufacture these kits and separate components. There is also a programming language and there are many scripts that can be downloaded from the internet often for free and are copied to your arduino product via your computer. There is a massive variety of arduino kits and of course you can design and build your own. Also the Arduino programming language has been much simplified and improved upon since it was first introduced. If you do decide to learn and use the programming language try and find scripts that you can adapt rather than writing a program from scratch. You will save yourself a lot of work. One Japanese company has even developed an arduino kit geiger counter that can be bought for around £110.00 and that was specifically developed for the incident in Japan when there was a tsunami that caused flooding that threatened to cause a disaster at a nuclear power station. With this particular kit you really need to know what you are doing constructing it as it is very Labelsdifficult to build and contains a high voltage. Another kit is an mp3 player that rips music via your computer and plays them back in mp3 format. It's also compatible with a lot of different formats and will work equally well with a Apple Macintosh, Windows or Linux computer. This book contains lots of projects to get you started and has instructions with quite a lot. 

Doing Business In China

The book I read to research this post was Doing Business In China by Jihong Sanderson which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Obviously this book is about expanding your business into the Chinese market. Apparently the CEO of Oracle said once that the biggest mistake you can make about doing business in China is ignoring that potential market. It's the 3rd biggest market for luxury goods in the world and many Chinese people are quite affluent. An interesting fact is more Chinese people are learning English that the entire total of native English speakers in the world. To do business in China they have a system based on there social system rather than their legal framework like in the West. Also there is quite a lot of notifying departments before starting a business but there is less need for things like planning permission. Also the Chinese are very proud of their heritage and achievements so if you turn down a chance to visit somewhere even if you have seen it before they are likely to be offended. I enjoyed reading and learnt a lot from this book although it's only around 80 pages.

Magnetism

The book I read to research this post was Magnetism A Very Short Introduction by Stephen J Blundell which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. I think is intended as an introduction to magnetism but does go in a lot of detail and I enjoyed reading it. Magnetism was discovered a thousand years ago in China when it was discovered that a rock called magnetite was naturally magnetic and it was used in compasses. At first it was thought it pointed to celestial north but later it was discovered it points to a magnetic north pole north of Canada. The Earth is like a huge but weak magnet complete with its own electric field. An experiment many school children do in school is sprinkle iron fillings around a magnet and it shows the magnetic field of the magnet. Magnet is connected to electricity for example if you wrap wire around the right kind of metal you can turn it into an electro magnet which only works when electricity is passed through it. All magnets have a north and south pole but it is thought that with the research at the Hadron Collider that single pole magnets are expected to be found. This is a kind of huge underground cylindrical tunnel where charged particles are sent around at high speed and experiments on the basic composition of matter are done. 

Grass Roots Leaders

The book I read to research this post was Grass Roots Leaders by Tony Buzan et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Apparently when this book they planned on doing an updated edition of one of their previous books but there have been so many discoveries in things like how the brain works and things like how to learn something that they realized they had to write a completely different book. This book does look at speed reading, mind mapping and the best ways to learn but it's a business book so most of it is about things like empowering employees. An important concept in business is giving employees a problem and letting them solve it which is often referred as empowering them. There is a case study in the book about Holiday Inn Arena who couldn't compete with the luxury rooms and their rooms were normally quite small. They got around this by describing their rooms as cosy in brochures and made sure the staff were very friendly and solved any problems that came up. They tried people really enjoyed staying at their hotels. This is something that often comes up in business that something that you might think is a disadvantage can be turned into an advantage by looking at it from a different angle and looking at what your company can excel in. 

Laptops

The book I read to research this post was Laptops For Dummies by Dan Gookin which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This book tells you all about the history of laptops and has quite a lot of general information about them. One thing I particularly liked was their is a section on free utility software. I think everyone knows about avast & AVG antivirus & spybot antispyware but what about hijack this which is anti hijacking software which prevents someone taking over your computer and making a certain website your start page. It also has quite about features like hibernation and how to set them up on your laptop not to mention getting on the internet and wireless networking. The first computer which could be called a portable in the sense that it could be transported although it only ran on the mains was the Osbourne 1 in 1983 and sold around 10,000 units a month. It had a small monochrome monitor and would just about fit under an airline seat. The first IBM compatible portable was the Compaq which was slightly more portable although you needed to be very strong to carry it far. The first proper portable computer was the Radio Shack 100 which was a reasonable size but still only had a small monochrome monitor. These computers sold well and proved there was a potential market for laptops.

Enterprise Server Infrastructure

The book I read to research this post was Designing And Implementing An Enterprise Infrastructure by Steve Suehring which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book which is aimed at administrators of large computer networks is an exam guide to the exam of the same which is part of the Microsoft series of certifications. A lot of this book is about installing Windows Server 2012 on your network and the steps you need to take like planning involved in doing this. There are quite a lot of new features in Server 2012. There are several options connected to automating the installation process on several connected servers. Of course you must make sure you have the right licensing for the number of servers and clients on your network. A lot of networks have a remediation server where maybe customers can access part of your network. It's important to prevent these people having direct access to your main network as some may have security issues like not enough updates or even viruses on their computers. This book is quite interesting as has self test quizzes at the end of each chapter. It may be a little complex for inexperienced computer users. If you are upgrading your operating system on your network Server 2012 will upgrade from Server 2003 or later. 

Corporate Strategy

The book I read to research this post was Exploring Corporate Strategy by Gerry Johnson et al which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This book which is the 2nd edition was published in 1988 and much of the information in the book is probably a bit out of date not to mention corporate strategy has changed since but it's still an interesting book. Much of corporate strategy is about the demographics of your average customer and how your business responds to market conditions. Often has a company has to respond to competition from other companies it has to either downsize considerably or expand to meet the extra demand. If your competition expands and takes more of the market you risk being edged out. A mistake a lot of big companies make is buying a company that is in an unrelated field. This can waste resources especially if they don't how the new companies works within its marketplace. It can be they buy a company in a field in a related field but the company appeals to a different. Also often a successful company will go public on the stock exchange to get funds for expansion but the people in charge may find they are losing at least partial control of the company. In Britain there was a small baby boom in the 90's but on the whole the population is ageing benefiting companies with an aging demographic of average customer. A company that appeals to younger people for example may find they must downsize or look to other markets. If a company only sells to certain markets they risk reaching a saturation point where further expansion is limited. A problem with the book is that the examples it has are obviously from years ago but it is well written and I enjoyed reading it. 

Raspberry Pi

The book I read to research this post was Raspberry Pi For Dummies by Sean McManus et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The Raspberry Pi which harkens back to the days when you bought a computer in kit form and had to assemble it is quite an exciting concept. I think in Britain it retails for £30 & for the money is really good value. In this is an example of someone who built a mainframe computer by connecting up 64 Raspberry Pi's and found a way of attaching them using lego blocks. A mainframe normally would cost millions of pounds and here is a way of building one for thousands or even hundreds. There are two versions of the Pi a version A with 256 MB of memory & 1 USB connector & a version B with 512 MB & 2 USB connectors. The 2nd version is the current one they make. It's the first dedicated linux computer and mostly uses a version called wheezy which you can download from the internet for free but must put on a compatible SD card that doubles as your storage on the Pi. There is also a compatible operating system called Raspberrybmc that turns your pi into a dedicated media centre with the right hardware of course that is an alternative to wheezy. The Pi uses Python for programming but there is also a visually based game design program you can download called scratch. There is a website at http://raspberry.mit.edu where you can download lots of applications for the Pi or submit your own. Being linux of course it's all open source or free. Many people build there own arcade machines using the Pi of which there are several projects in the book. Being linux you can also use software like libreoffice and gimp to do serious computing and you can connect a USB keyboard & a HDMI monitor among other things.