Spacedmonkey » charity

Librivox

Jonathan Harris — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:42:08 +0000

These days it is not always easy to find the time to read, specially in Britain, with the longest working hours in Europe. It is not always easy to find the right time or novel to sit back and read for fun. But if you enjoy a good novel but don’t have the time ( or for that fact money) to sit down with a good book, there is an answer. The site is called LibraVox, that has volunteer based service that has tonnes for free audio books to downloaded and used how you like.

How they do it ( quote from LibriVox site)

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (through a podcast, catalog, and bit torrents). We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project, and we operate almost exclusively through Internet communications. We have a flat structure, designed to let people do just what they want to do, but we do have several slightly different types of volunteers:

The site only reads only out of copyright books, from sources like gutenberg, so while looking at the titles on offer, remember there will be no Harry Potter or da vinci code. There are still lots of really cool titles, including some of my personal which are

The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The site has a wonderful catalog system that allows for easy searching, so you can find something that takes your interest. There site also has a Podcast, which is updates weekly, of little shorts and poems. This is a nice site, made by people that give up there time to help others enjoy literature.

Now that everyone seems to have got an IPOD or other mp3 player these days and this is a wonderful idea for helping people access classic stories/novels.

St. George’s Heroes

Jonathan Harris — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:31:58 +0000

Unlike many other countries around the world, England does little to celebrate, it’s patron saint day. This is a great shame, the Irish seem to have the saints day down to a knack with, St. Patrick, celebrated the world over. It could be the one day of the year the English people could be proud of their history and traditions. Doing some research into this topic, I was hearted to find sites like stgeorgesday.com. But when I found a site called Saint George’s heroes, I knew that I had to post on this topic.

The purpose of this site is to find an English men or women that who possess true heroic qualities from selflessness to courage, or who have achieved outstanding triumphs. This person is then given £2,000 as a reward for their heroic acts to use to help with the charitable acts.

When reading this, I thought that it is a wonderful idea. It seems that all these people doing wonderful thing are forgotten, for all the time and effort that they put in. Reading some of the 2006 winners stories, it nice to think that people can use that many for something important.

If you know someone that could be a hero, then it is not to late to fill out a Nomination form before April 23rd. Even if you do not, remember to raise a glass on that day, for the heroes that came before.

Red Ipod

Jonathan Harris — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 01:41:48 +0000

I am sure that many of you are starting to think about Christmas, as the adverts seemed to have already started on TV. Many of you will be thinking about getting yourself a nice shinny new 5.5G IPOD that were released a month or two ago. But have you heard about the Red IPOD Nano?

Choose the iPod nano (PRODUCT) RED Special Edition and Apple will give $10 of its purchase price to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa.

The IPOD is the same price as the other IPODs, at time of writing, £129, from the Apple store. I mean, if you are going to be treating yourself to an IPOD this christmas, you might as well, cut into Apple’s profit to help a good cause. There is more info of the Apple website.