Author: John Biggs

My Book, Black Hat, In ePub Format And Free To Download

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I wrote a book in 2004 about hackers, spammers, and other nerds and I thought I’d like to share it with the world. It’s currently available on Amazon and B&N and is $9.99 for the print edition and an inexplicable $9.49 in the Kindle edition. It is apparently not available for the Nook.

The book is 9 years old and is nearly out of print. It is about spammers, hackers, and viruses and I wrote it for a general audience like my dad who may or may not be all that technically savvy. It’s not a How-To as much as an exploration of the personalities in hacking.

According to Bookscan I sold 0 copies in the past few months and rather than allow it to molder, I’ve decided to give it away, with some caveats.

MANDATORY STEP: Let me know you downloaded it. Email me at john @ bigwidelogic.com or tweet me at @johnbiggs

OPTIONAL STEPS:
1. Read it. It was pretty good, I was just starting out as a writer, and I thought some of it was fun/funny.
2. Buy it if you liked it. Or at least buy a copy for someone who you think will like it. Heck, even buy a paper copy. You can also buy my current book, Blogger’s Boot Camp.

3. Pass it around and tell others about it.

You guys are smart enough to know that nothing is free. It took me a two years to write this and it took Apress many resources to publish it. Now, however, it’s run its natural life and I’d like to perform this experiment to see how many copies will circulate in order to assess the feasibility of releasing books like this in the future. The publishing industry is changing before our very eyes and I’m worried many of us will be left behind if we don’t change with it.

Anyways, enjoy. Let me know if you want more formats.

EPub Version
Mobi Version

A New Home On The Web For My 3D Printing Rants

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As if I didn’t have enough to do I’ve started experimenting on Medium as a place for some of my musings on 3D printer. My “section,” called The 3D Printer, can be read here and I plan to update it as frequently as humanly possible (which probably means rarely). However, it’s been a fun experiment so far and I’m seeing a trickle of traffic as users pick it up on Twitter and Facebook. I may even publish a serial novel on it…

Juvenalia: POSDT and BigWideLogic

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Not that anyone particularly cares, but I recently dug up some work I did way back in 1991 when I was a Bishop Watterson High School sophomore. As a quiet, friendless nerd (except for my equally quiet, friendless friend Rick), I was fascinated by UNIX and found a book at the library that basically showed you how to write all of the UNIX commands (ls, cd, etc.) under DOS. There was another application, a fake command.com that turned your fonts upside down and all sorts of things, designed to scare people using your computer. I think it was called AprilFools or something. That app included C source code and basically amounted to a command.com replacement, albeit a dopey one.
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