Gweek 115: Year Zero

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In this episode of Gweek we talk about DIY book publishing vs traditional book publishing, music designed to trick your lizard brain, software that turns photos into talking cartoon characters, a board game that teaches preschoolers about computer programming, and more!

This episode's guests:

Dean Putney, Boing Boing’s software developer and Gweek regular, who’s now self-publishing a book of his great-grandfather’s World War I photos thanks to Kickstarter.

Rob Reid, a writer and technology entrepreneur based in California. He wrote Year Zero -- a novel about aliens with a mad passion for human music – and founded the company that built the Rhapsody music service.

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Here's what we talked about in this episode:

Rob's novel, Year Zero is on sale for 99 cents in ebook formats. Get it here on Amazon, or other formats here.

Dean's self published book about his great-grandfather's collection of a World War I photos, Walter Koessler 1914-1918.

Focus@Will. Rob: "An intriguing online audio app that purports to help you … focus. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for me!"

Robot Turtles. A board game to teach pre-schoolers about programming. Made over $600,000 on Kickstarter.

Crazytalk. Mark: "An automatic lip-sync application for Mac and PC that lets your turn photos and images into animated characters that speak what you say. My daughter used it to animate a portrait of Socrates for a classroom project."