Hardware

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[edit] Cheap PCs

People like Chris O'Shea and Liam Proven have been helpful in the past providing cheap machines for struggling fans and authors.

[John Bray] has a 4YO PC with 900 Mhz Athlon and 768Mb memory, network and sound cards. No graphics card monitor or hard disk.

[edit] CD fanzines

Plokta did a CD version some time back, John Dallman did a photograph Album

[edit] Barcode Scanner

These devices are quite useful for scanning books published in the last twenty/thirty years.

AlexMcLintock has one (approximagte cost 15 quid) which plugs into the serial port of your PC. Other better ones plug into a keyboard socket and pretend to be a keyboard.

usually you need a small amount of code to parse the barcode - do some checksum on it - and convert it to an ISBN if it is a book. AlexMcLintock has such code helpfully provided by PaulMakepeace (who also supplied the barcode scanner. I don't know if he has any more).

You then need to do something with the ISBN - such as use it to query Amazon through its web services interface.

[edit] Video

Please tell us about your video experiences for example

  • recording convention items such as talks or plays
  • producing video for creative works (such as part of a play)
  • producing artshows?

AlexMcLintock: I am particularly interested in Editing Video. I have a couple of comedy sketches which could be largely done with stock footage and dubbed on voices. Am I being naive in looking for free footage for these things? What do I know about Broadcast Quality?

[edit] Video at Conventions

David B Wake knows something about recording items at conventions.


[edit] Free Stock Footage

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