Four Fabulous Apps For a New Android

This time on "Glorious Time Wasters" -- 4 Incredibly Useful Apps for a new Christmas Android device!

Tis the season to be giving -- and getting -- and the best thing to get right now is a new Android device.  They come pretty fully featured, and a lot of them come with pre-loaded software (some of which I'd actually recommend).  But whether yours is a humble device that only connects via a nearby wireless hotspot or whether you've got the latest high-end Android with lots of bandwidth and cellular transmission, there's ten types of applications that EVERYONE really should have.  I'm staying out of some of the more interesting ones (like rootkits and so forth.)  This list is a "really should have this" list for anyone getting (or giving) a new Android device.

...and you KNOW how much fun it is to hop off to Marketplace and show someone how to get goodies, right?  So get them started right with these apps!

#1 -- Google Maps.  Why do I have THAT on the list?  One word -- traffic reports.  In the case of Dallas, it gets its info from TXDOT, so it's not "up to the second" reliable, but it's free.  And it gives you "good enough" warning about problems.

#2 -- Dropbox, the file mover of choice.  Some of us can do it via Bluetooth, but for a lot of people, "Bluetooth" indicates someone with really bad dental hygene (come to think of it, there's times when I'm trying to get Bluetooth devices to talk to each other when I think it would be easier to go in for major dental surgery.)  If you love Bluetooth and it works for you, stay with it.  For the rest of us, there's "Dropbox."  Dropbox is basically free web storage for your files.  You take whatever it is you want, upload it to your Dropbox, and it's now available for every Android device that you've got. It will automatically load anything you put up there to your regular computer.  It's great for backups and less of a hassle than Google can be.



In this day of "you can totally lose track of your life if you lose your phone, computer, blackberry, etc, backups are a gooooood idea!  Listen to the geek, folks.

#3 -- Astro File Manager -- a better file handler than the one that comes on most devices.   There's no real consistent scheme out there -- and some of the ones that come with the Androids are full of Mystery Meat Navigation (do I double tap to move?  Where's that file located?  Why does it pretend I've got 2 SD cards?)    Astro File manager's interface makes sense, and it's fairly intuitive to move files between directories.  It also accesses the top level directories, something that some apps don't let you do.

#4 -- Flashlight and Candle.  Okay, that's two apps rather than one.  But our phones and Androids are becoming extremely versatile devices and there's lots of times when having a small amount of light really helps.  I like Candle Free if I'm just wanting to find my way through the dark house to the bedroom without tripping over the cat.  Flashlight Free is for when... well... ya need that extra light.  We also use Candle Free for birthday parties (yes, you can blow out the candles), and yes my family is in the Entirely Too Geeky To Live In The Real World category.

If you don't have these apps on your devices, you might like them.  If you do, don't forget to suggest them to everyone around you.  You'll look awesomely uber-geeky when you show them how to avoid the shopping traffic when they head out to buy your gift for Christmas.

Android Game Review: Magma Mobile -- Pinball! -- another glorious waste of time!

Android Game Review:  Magma Mobile -- Pinball! -- another glorious waste of time!

Initial review:  Five stars -- trip down Nostalgia Lane
Game category:  Physics games
Game type: Arcade
Recommended device size:  any device
Who'd enjoy it?  For everyone, really.
http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-nix-game-pinball-free-zptm.aspx

I confess that I like Magma Mobile's games -- they're clean, visually appealing, and there's even help screens that explain how to play, something that's rather unusual in many Android games.  But there's a zillion pinball games out there -- so why THIS pinball over others?

It's all about the graphics.

I played Pinball back in the late 1960's and early 1970's, when it was on the cusp of a revolution.  Advances in electronics were just about to hit the pinball world and add digital scoring and digital displays would be added in a few years.  Eight years later, Pac Man and Pong would be regular offerings in the arcades and it was You Versus The Machine.  But in 1970, it was still all about the physics -- just you, a large table, and flipper buttons that you hit madly.  And if you got just the right tap at the right angle, the gods of physics smiled at you and you could get free games.  Particularly if you just happened to "bump" the table at JUST the right time.

Pinball was art.  Pinball was physics.  Pinball was hours of fun for a few quarters.

This version of Pinball for the Android has the "feel" of some of the older pinball machines that I've played -- they're simple, they're clean, and it relys on the right hit at the right angle and the right velocity.  Some of the others take advantage of the fact that computers are very very fast compared to humans, and the balls seem to move at speeds not entirely consistent with the way the balls felt back in the days when it was just you and gravity.

I also tried Pinball Deluxe, but the screens (tables) weren't quite as charming as Magma Mobile's table.  Maybe it's just me and my Old School ways, but the Magma Mobile game sure brings back fond memories of quiet bars and the music of my friend, Freddy Argir's band. http://www.fredyargir.com/music.html 

Android games: "Alchemy" -- a glorious waste of time

Android Game Review: Alchemy
Android Market link: https://market.android.com/details?id=me.zed_0xff.android.alchemy&hl=en
Android games: "Alchemy" -- a glorious waste of time
Game category: Puzzle game
Game type: Similar to ...alchemy, actually
Initial review: Five stars
Recommended device size: Any
Who'd enjoy it?:   Most ages

Andrey 'Zed' Zaikin's lovely time-wasting Alchemy game is one of the classics of the free game market -- and if you haven't tried it yet, you really should.  It's sort of a twist on the Greek view of the Universe -- that there were four elements that made up everything in the universe.  You start with fire, earth, air, and water and drag them on top of things to make new items.  So, fire plus water equals steam.  That was easy!  You can take elements you've already made (steam) and add it to something else (air) and make something new: a cloud!

But it gets weird after that.  "Ash tray" = ash + glass.  "Grape" = earth + wood.  "wolf" = werewolf + moon.  "Star" = sun + scientist (I like that!)

The final list of elements?  Well, the app maker updates it occasionally, and there's always new combos.  I had this on another device and downloaded it to my new Samsung Galaxy and was very surprised to find out that some combinations were for countries.  The "Kama Sutra" combination also surprised me.

Items with a tiny red dot on the picture are "final products" and can't be combined in other ways.

The first fifty or so are easy... for the rest, there's hints and cheat sheets. 

It's a real classic time-waster!

Android games: "Crystal Portal" -- a glorious waste of time

Android Game Review:  The Mystery of the Crystal Portal
Initial review:  Four stars
Game category:  Puzzle game
Game type: Similar to Paradise
Recommended device size:  Tablets
Who'd enjoy it?:  Teens/adults who like puzzle story games. 
Android Market link: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.g5e.crystalportal&hl=en



I'd tried and got frustrated with other puzzle stories before, so I was a little wary of this one.  There's no real action in these (the art is stunning, however) -- if you're not familiar with this type of game, it's "sort of" like the old "choose your own adventure" book.  The protagonist is a journalist named Nicole Rankwist, who arrives home to find her archaeologist father missing.  Anyone who knows us anthropologist/archaeologist types knows we're a LOT of trouble.  Like all other missing archaeologists, he's just made a discovery that "could change the course of humanity."  But he departed (voluntarily?) for parts unknown, leaving a journal that directs her to go to Japan.


The graphics are delightful -- intricate, colorful, and eye-catching.  Game play is smooth, with a very useful help and hint function (this is a pet peeve of mine -- bad help screens.

The screens unlock after you find the right pieces to group together (a key, a fan, a statue, a frog -- which may not be related to each other or to the container you put them in.)  The game is more or less a "prequel", where you get the first chapter for free.  It's a nice little game, and if you've got a boring jury duty call, this is a perfect little time-passer to take with you while you wait.

The only reason for four stars is that the play isn't random.  Once you've solved the riddle, that's it.  You can go back and re-solve it, but you know how to do it now.

Android Game Review: "Zenonia 3" -- another glorious waste of time!

Android Game Review:  "Zenonia 3" -- another glorious waste of time!

Initial review:  Two stars -- good, but just not my cuppa tea
Game category:  Manga-type
Game type: RPG
Recommended device size:  any device
Who'd enjoy it?:  Teens/adults who like story chain quest games. 

Zenonia-3 is GameEvil's latest release of the RPG Zenonia.  For this episode, you play the role of Chael, the adopted son of the first Zenonia game's protagonist Regret.  This won't make much sense to you unless you've played the first game.  The overall theme is that Chael has to find his way home from a place called Midgard (which looks nothing like the Norse Midgard.)  Chael can be one of four different classes (Sword Knight, Shadow Hunter, Mechanic Launcher and Nature Shaman) for the quest.

Glorious time Wasters -- Match Up: People Edition

Match Up -- People Edition

From the Magma Mobile folks who created the nice little "Memory Match" game for the Android operating system comes a new twist on the classic "Match" game  -- the "People edition."  This version of the game uses pictures of people whose biographies you can find on Wikipedia (if that statement sounds a bit dodgy, it's because I don't watch movies or tv much, can't identify most actors or singers (other than the Beatles) or athletes, and have no idea what various entrepreneurs look like).  If you're bad at recognizing faces, this is a good game for you.  Make that a GREAT game.

It's the standard type of game play -- touch the cards to flip them.  Cards that you haven't looked at have a question mark on the back.  This particular version allows you to pick how many cards you want in your grid -- 4 cards (yes, 4), 16, 30, 36, 64, 72, 90, and 100 card versions.   The images are a mix of black and white and color pictures.  This is a good deal for those of us who are very bad at recognizing faces, because you can cue off hairstyles and colors. 

Memory match games are mind-numbing amusement (not a thrill a minute) and at the 64+ card level, a good quick brain workout.  Now if there was only an option for you to insert photos of your relatives or folks you meet in social situations.  That'd be a great review for those Awkward Social Situations we all seem to fall into.

Glorious time wasters -- "Clouds & Sheep" for Android

Android Game Review:  "Clouds and Sheep" -- another glorious waste of time!

Initial review:  Four stars -- amusing but slightly sadistic
Game category:  Vikings type game
Game type: Arcade
Recommended device size:  any device
Who'd enjoy it?  Anyone not troubled by some mildly sadistic acts like sheep tossing.

This is another game from Handy Games and as usual features rather charming graphics and an easy to use interface.   The object is to keep your sheep happy and finish a series of very amusing quests -- like do the sheep toss.   PETA would not approve of the sheep treatment, but they seem to like it.

The designers also allow you to save games so that you could either start at the level you left, restart an earlier version, or begin a new game and take the "best" scores.  One of the biggest tips for this would be "don't have too many sheep."  They breed like... well... sheep, I guess.  It's hard to keep them all occupied.

So there you are, planting flowers to make sheep amorous and planting grass to feed them and handing them refreshing cool drinks or coffee -- and you also get to control the weather.  Piled up clouds make a nice rainstorm -- and combined rainstorms make a nice thundercloud.  "Sheep coffee" costs stars, but a lovely thunderbolt is free and wakes the sheep up just as effectively (so does bouncing them, but the thunderbolt's a lot of fun, frankly.)

A good time-waster, quick to learn, quick to play, easy to set down and pick back up again.

Android Games -- Pretty Pet Tycoon

Sim type games have been around for awhile and seem to be very popular for phones and other small devices.  So, when I checked in the Android market to see which games were popular, and "Pretty Pet Tycoon" came up as a high rated, highly downloaded one.  So I decided to take the Halloween Edition out for a test drive.

The idea for this episode of Pretty Pet Tycoon is that you're helping a cartoon pig (Piglina, who has moved to a farm in the countryside) set up a business that grows and sells fruit -- as well as (if you choose to go there) running a juice bar.  Later levels unlock the candy factory section as well along with a mysterious competitor who seems bent on driving her out of business.

The instructions are... well... hard to find.  I figured it out after a bit, but it took some doing. 

The scene begins with Piglina on her farm and boxes of vegetable seeds coming down a conveyor belt.  You use the touch-and-drag method to pull these plants to a certain box (red or blue... the plant will have a red or a blue box around it.)  Then you tap the planting box and Piglina comes over to tend the crop.  A few seconds later it's ready to be harvested, so you you drag it to the scale and tap the scale icon.  Piglina trots over and boxes it.  You drag it onto the truck and tap the truck.  Piglina starts the truck and it heads off to Pretty Pet Tycoon Town and sells her merchandise.

As the days go on, the seeds come down the conveyor belt faster, and if you don't get them planted quickly enough they will go bad.  If you don't harvest the crops quickly enough, they'll go bad.  If you leave the packages sitting on the scale too long, they'll go bad and she'll lose money.  My early mistake was buying plots of land rather than hiring workers -- as it turns out, workers are only hire-able with "Pet Points"... an in-game currency.  You start out with zero pet points, by the way.





I played this one to level 8, but found that I could only hire one worker for Piglina with the money she had.  There is the option to buy enough Pet Points for workers and automatic machines with Paypal, but I really don't care for games that rope you into paying for extras.  The quick pace of the gameplay wasn't enough to hold my interest -- frankly, it was a bit too much like some jobs I've had.

For people who've played this style of game (Soda Shop, Waitress, Hair Salon), this one will have a lot of charm.  The graphics are clean, and visuals are decent on an Android phone.

As for me, I deleted it and went back to "Dragon, Fly!"  I've almost mastered swooping now.

Glorious Time-wasters --"Fly, Dragon!" Android Game

(Review of free game, "Fly, Dragon" found in Android Marketplace)

Initial review:  Five stars!  Fun!

Game category:  Angry Birds type game
Game type: Arcade
Recommended device size:  any device
Who'd enjoy it?  Anyone.  Good for distracting kids, whiling away time in the dentist office, de-stressing after a nasty morning, etc.

This one's got a really cute premise -- you're a baby dragon who can't fly yet but CAN glide... and you're hopping out of the nest to have an adventure, gliding through the sky.  You have a ten second head start before Mom notices you're gone and comes to take you home.  Along the way you can pick up speed boosting potions, invisibility potions (to sneak past her) and so forth.  Game levels add complexity to the setup.

You start out by sliding downhill -- the trick is to let your finger represent gravity -- so you touch the screen when dragonlet is headed downward, but lift the finger off just before dragonlet gets to the ground.  Don't touch the screen when dragonlet is headed upwards -- unless there's a line of potions over the hilltop that you can collect on the way down.  If you get the right kind of glide (a 'swoosh') three times in a row, the dragonlet will breathe fire.  But Mom's right behind you (there's a distance indicator on the lower left that shows how far back she is) and if you slow down too much, Mom's gonna get you and take you back to the nest.

It's an easy game to learn (so it's good to share with the kids) -- and the scenery changes to different "lands" as you get farther away from Mom.  Different levels have different challenges that you can accept... or you can just have silly fun letting your dragonlet fly all over the place.  The screen is colorful and uncluttered (so it's easy to handle, even on a small screen)

It's ad-supported, so expect ads on the bottom of the screen -- but it's free!

A partial Aqua Pets Fish and food list

I'm still trying to work out the algorithm on what fish are being fed and how much they drop.  I've had two pearls drop, but not on a reliable basis where you could say "feed this fish this particular food and 20% of the time you get a pearl."  There's a lot of fish in Aqua Pets to work through, and I'm trying several foods each day, which means it's kind of slow to get a real list.  I'm not keeping everything (I generally get rid of shrimp and crabs) -- tonight I'm trying out an "organic morsels" tank.

I'm not sure if Bionic Panda's actually figuring a weighted "rareness" factor on the food because it seems as if rare fish and common fish drop similar amounts of coinage. 

Here's the list so far of what food the Aqua Pets animals that I've fished up prefer:

Special food the key to getting pearls?

I had my carnivore tank set up yesterday and was feeding them chicken nuggets.  They returned 110 coins plus one pearl.  Most of them were rare or uncommon (Isosceles Squid, Ribbon Seal, Baby Harp Seal, Caribbean Reef Squid, European Squid, Excited Golden Lionfish, Red Lionfish, and a Piranha) and they all flashed happily when fed -- and then hid offscreen.  I'd like some smaller carnivores but am not sure the common ones will drop pearls as often as the uncommons and rares do.

I haven't counted to see if they all drop the same number of coins.

Today's tank is the (Legendary) Night Sky Angler, Baby Harp Seal, Candy Angler (apparently all Anglers eat chicken nuggets), Isosceles Squid, Caribbean Reef Squid, European Squid, Golden Lionfish, Ribbon Seal, and a Piranha.  We'll see what they drop.

Many of the fish don't seem to want a specific food.   They'll be happy with basic foods -- I haven't compared gold drop rates yet.

I tried fishing with the Rainbow Pellets, but am not sure they were any better than the Glowing Red Pellets.

Fish Food For Fish

 Sometimes I think it'd be simpler and more exciting if they just ATE each other.  You know; toss a couple of those I-can't-believe-I-caught-another-one Chalk Basselets in with a few of the Seals and Sharks and let them have at it.  In any case, I'm experimenting with the fish food bits to see what's the best bang for the buck.

I did get my very first pearl from feeding fish yesterday, but it was on a tank of miscellaneous fish that I was feeding "Organic Pellets" to... and I have no clue which fish it was, either.  None of them flashed with excitement about the "Organic Pellets."  As I recall, the tank was one of those miscellaneous "I'm just fishing it up, what the heck" tanks.


Meanwhile, a partial list of Aqua Pets fish that adore "Chicken Nuggets"

The Aquapets Fish Foods List

So after the last screeches and howls of outrage about the game (I think they're valid ones), I uninstalled it and then reinstalled it to start from level zero.  This time I'm figuring out some of the "extra things" that would make it even better as a beginner.  One of them is figuring out what in the heck to feed which fish.  They will accept the basic food, but the goal is to find out what food they really like.  When you feed them, they "blink" to a shadowy gray color for a moment.

You can spend a lot of coins trying to figure out what to feed your Aqua Pets fish so that they'll give you a present of coins the next morning.  Sadly, the number of coins they give you doesn't seem to be related to how common or uncommon the fish is.  Bigger fish give more coins than little ones... but the downside is that three size 1 fish give about the same amount as one size 3 fish.

Best strategy is to go with one category of fish (carnivores, freshwater, etc) per tank and use slightly larger fish.  It's fun to watch the little ones scooch up into a feeding frenzy, but the advantage of going with larger fish is that it's easy to make sure you've fed everything in your tank.  And they won't give you coins unless they've been fed.

Hands down, the easiest thing to focus on when you're at levels 1-6 is to keep all the freshwater fish you get (caught with the original fishing rod.)  I've made a list of the ones I caught with "black bugs" and "orange bugs" and as long as you keep fishing with the wooden rod, you'll fish up enough of these to make a tank.

A list of fish for your first "money tank": 

Grumpy customers!

Although the comments about the latest incarnation of Aqua Pets are really nice and chirpy on Facebook, the comments in the Android Marketplace (where Bionic Panda can NOT have them removed) are scathing.  After playing for awhile, I've decided that although I'm keeping the game, I do agree with some key points:

* they should have gone with both free and paid versions
* they should have done like Angry Birds and gone into merchandising
* the "bonus" feature for catches isn't working well (ten catches in a row and you get a 'secret bonus.'  Most of the time, my catches with ANY bait and a 'secret bonus' are a common fish that I've caught a dozen times or more.
* the "energy" feature is a real pain.

The October 18th (version 1.2.03)update was nothing to write home about.  In the words of the Aqua Pets Facebook support staff, they:

1) Added a new notification icon to the main screen for messages
2) Updated the Aqua Pets icon on the app and start screen
3) Minor bug fixes

Uhm... yay?

BUT... I've tried some of the other fishing games (Tap Fish, which bored me to death) and they weren't as much fun.  So I'm running the game up to level 25 or so (or until I run out of pearls) and am tinkering with the strategy on "how to make it more fun without actually spending anything."

Problematic Pearls

Supposedly some of those happy fish you feed in your fish tank will drop pearls -- and posts from people who had versions of Aqua Pets BEFORE June 2011 showed that they were getting pearl rewards from happy fish in their tanks.  This changed recently and now legendary fish can only be caught with bait that you spend pearls on.  I blew most of my pearls on "glowing red pellets" and it seemed as though the number of fish that got away was higher than usual. 

Bionic Panda's list of achievements for which you can earn pearls in Aqua Pets is short, and many of them cost far more pearls than you get in return.  I'm about 100 fish short of the 'sell a thousand fish' -- which will get you five pearls -- but the newly installed 'energy meter' keeps me from blowing all my coins and doing it in one afternoon.  While part of me thinks it's a good idea, part of me is frustrated.  I want those pearls to buy bait.

And no, I'm not into directly buying them.  That really leaves me with only two other options.

There's a Fine Manual! And I read it!

Geeks tend to leap into things without actually reading the manual because... well... it takes longer to read about the thing than it does to figure it out, if you're a "hands on" kind of geek.  With Aqua Pets on Facebook rather coyly hinting about pellets and poles, an option that I only skimmed in the "help" section suddenly caught my eye.

The store actually gives you the approximate percentages of catches on your bait purchases. (d'oh!)


Spotted worms catch rare creatures 5% of the time (and uncommon creatures at least 20% of the time.
Orange worms catch them 3% of the time
Green bugs catch them 1.5% of the time
Yellow bugs catch uncommon creatures more than black bugs do (no surprise)

On the high end, blue glowing pellets catch rare creatures 20% of the time and legendary creatures 10% of the time.
Red glowing pellets catch rares 25% of the time and legendary creatures 20% of the time -- at a cost of 3 pearls per ten.
Rainbow pellets, which cost 4 pearls, catch rares 30% of the time and legendary creatures 30% of the time.


Helpful hints are also found in the fish food area

Aqua Pets for Android -- tips and tricks

There's not a lot of games that I'm tempted to play these days -- I'm an avid World of Warcraft player and I do enjoy playing the Sudoko puzzles, so I'm not really sure why I picked up Bionic Panda's "Aqua Pets" game for my Android tablet, other than it was free and the little logo was cute.  I loved it and played it in the bath tub or whenever there was "down time."  It was just perfect for that -- you could stop it at any time and come back to the same spot.

Then I dropped my Android tablet (AIEE!) and had to go buy a new one (because, of course, nobody fixes screens) and by the time I got back to the Android Marketplace, Aqua Pets was gone.  So you can imagine my delight when I found Aqua Pets back on the Android Marketplace last week.

The in-game currency had changed and other things were added.  When I went looking for tips, I found there were none.  So here's a list of some of the tips that I picked up from the Facebook page and other pages.  Right now my character is level 13, and I'll be posting results from various experiments like testing fish food and bait and rods.

SOME BASIC TIPS -- fish tanks

•  Feeding the fish does result in happy fish that will reward you 24 hours later.  Different fish, however, like different food.  Although you supposedly can get pearls when you feed the fish, so far, all I've gotten are coins (3 to 12 gold coins.  So the coins DO make up for the cost of the fish food plus a little... but not much.)
• You can feed your aquarium fish all day on the food you purchase.  Some of them swim faster than others and will eat the food before the others do.
• If you feed the fish food that they DON'T like, they won't eat it.  No happy fish the next day, so no coins from them.
• Don't be afraid to sell the Aqua Pets you catch (including rare and legendary pets) unless you're saving them to create a special tank.
• Feed your fish when you're connected to the Internet (because the rewards will be calculated on their servers.  No internet access = no record of feeding.)

SOME BASIC TIPS -- fishing

• Some items can only be caught with certain poles and baits
• The ice cube fish can be caught by using a snowflake rod and pellets.  More about that when I reach that level.
• Orange bugs and spotted worms (according to the Bionic Panda team) are probably the best "bang for the buck" NON-free bait.
• You need pellets to catch most of the legendary creatures.
• Fresh water fish can be caught with the wooden rod.
• You can catch common, uncommon and rare fish with regular bait.
• You can catch the panda with bamboo
•  mechanical fish like the Metal Bits

PEARLS (a bone of contention)
According to the Bionic Panda Facebook staff, there are three ways to get free pearls in Aqua Pets:

1) a random fish may give you a pearl as a reward for feeding them the prior day
2) reaching an achievement - like sharing your tank (total over 100 pearls available)
3) trying the free offers - located by clicking on the pearl
 
SHARING TANKS
I'm a little reluctant to share games on Facebook (mainly because I don't want to see game updates from friends.)
Bionic Panda's tips for posting your tank on Facebook:

1) Try to post your fish tank on Facebook while you are connected over a wireless connection.
2) Be sure you are logged in to Facebook before you post

Aqua Pets -- fishing for rares and uncommons

For any game out there, there's always some geek who just has to try out all the options and figure out what's the best strategy.  That'd be me.  I'm one of those.  Since I've just restarted Aqua Pets, I'm working through the early levels (now at level 18) to see which combos are best.

Catching Fish -- some strategies

By the way, although there are rumors of "cheats" for the game, the pages I get directed to seem to be full of ads.  There's no list of hints or cheats for Aqua Pets running around in the wild.  On the other hand, it's a pretty straight-forward game for the Android, based on a random calculator -- it can be difficult to beat random number generators.

The new "luck meter" and pole/bait combos have caused a bit of confusion, particularly since some of the baits are VERY expensive (4 pearls, for instance, for rainbow pellets.)  Pearls are hard to come by unless you buy them directly from Bionic Panda or start sharing your tank.  I did buy a packet of glowing blue pellets and tested it out.  The catch rate of rare/legendary/uncommon fish was high -- about 70%.  However, unless those fishes in my tank start dropping pearls, I don't foresee a lot of buying bait with pearls.
 .  
 Currently, I have one legendary fish (the Loose Triggerfish), which was NOT caught on the expensive bait and 19 rare fish (I caught more than that, but I've sold duplicates.)

Kindle's subscription model -- will it work?

Early this month, Amazon announced a new service for Kindle -- a free "digest edition" of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine.  It's an ambitious gamble, because science fiction is a growing market (thanks to all the movies out there) and the printing/publishing empire is changing so drastically that it's hard to predict what the shape of the industry will look like in ten years.

Subscription services seem to be the "thing" of the future.


The question is, "will it work?"  We're getting information-jammed, with news and ebooks (including material that wouldn't even make it into fanzines) from all sides.  In addition, with the economic situation we are working longer and harder and have less leisure time.  While subscriptions might temporarily save publishers, the big question is how stable is this in the long term?

Everyone who succumbed to a National Geographic subscription raise your hands.

Right.  And how long did you keep it?

Right.  (some still have it, many don't)

It gets kicked around a lot -- but I think the "take away" lesson for writers or comic book artists is that if it's possible, look into RSS feed syndication that would allow your fans to be able to have stories and art delivered to their mailbox (and nuked quietly if they decide to not read it.)

What to do with an inactive blog

Highly Recommended:
Best 5 Brilliant Things You Can Do with an Inactive Blog

This showed up on my Twitter feed and caught my interest because, like so many others, I have a couple of inactive blogs.  I had always thought of them as sort of a waste of time and was considering option 5 (delete the blog) on this list, but I'm beginning to rethink this position.

I'm also beginning to rethink my position on removing this blog.

� Google Plus One 1 Button Tutorial for Your Blog - Erica Says

 For all of you folks (that'd be me) who are new to Google Plus and wondering just how to deal with the thing, here's a quick and easy reference.
� Google Plus One 1 Button Tutorial for Your Blog - Erica Says

� How to Create a Favicon for your Site - Erica Says

� How to Create a Favicon for your Site - Erica Says

This should be noted for Friends In business and possibly the blog as well.

Setting up an Amazon store

"Get an Amazon Store."  That was some advice I'd gotten when I said, "I'm an artist and writer and I'm trying to make a living online."  The trouble is, that advice came from one of those "internet marketing experts."

Man, the store setup was a pain, and because I don't lurk over on Amazon (except when I want to buy something) it turned out to be much more bewildering than I thought it might be.  I'd like it to be set up with my free (and cheap) ebooks (the reprints of the Coyote ashcans... those things are good advertising but I can't see charging folks for them in ebook format) and links to the books where I have been published all in one neat package.  And maybe some of my favorites for recommendations.

This was a mess.  Will get it in SOME sort of shape before Fencon.  I swears I will.
http://astore.amazon.com/friendsinbizblog-20

Do Follow Blog List | DoFollow Blogs

Blog exchanges are one idea suggested for authors who want to widen their audience, and blog commenting is also recommended.  An interesting idea that I came across was to comment in "do follow blogs."  These are blogs that allow posting in comments and allow posting links to your site as part of your name --AND-- when the search engine hits this site, it is permitted to "backtrack" the commenters to their home page.

What this does is sort of "spreads the word" and makes your book (or art) and your name easier to find.  The advice ALSO said to set YOUR blog to "do follow."

I see both good and bad ideas running here. On the good side, this may increase your visitors. On the bad side, many of them are spammers and they're just coming to ad links to their sites and make themselves look important.

There are lists out there of "do follow" blogs, but some investigation showed that many of them look like sales sites and not true blogs and are likely to get taken down as spam sites.  I think some sort of middle ground here is needed -- and the answer might lie in the "blog roll."  Of course, the problem then is getting onto someone's blogroll.  But that's something for another time.

Do Follow Blog List | DoFollow Blogs