LOL is texting shorthand for Laughing Out Loud; OMG is a common abbreviation for Oh My God or Oh My Gosh. You see them all the time in phone messages and social networking.

It’s ironic that the founder of the website “JuicyCampus.com, “(a site since taken down), has now written a book warning of the dangers of social networking. The book is aimed at high school and college students but has good lessons for anyone.

Some of the consequences of online behavior: A junior at UCLA dropped out of school and received death threats after his YouTube post described Asians at the library. A freshman at Rutgers is facing criminal charges after his roommate reacted to a video by jumping off a bridge.

The book motivated us to purchase a couple of new domain names, BobSchwabach.com and JoySchwabach.com, both of which steer you to our main website. The author says most people should own a website in their name, just to prevent someone else from getting it.

A Prime membership costs $79 a year, but we obviously thought it was worth it. If you’re a Prime member, click “See all categories” from the store menu on your Kindle, and then click the category “Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.” They’ve got some good ones. “The Hunger Games,” a favorite of our nephews, is near the top of the popularity list. Joy downloaded the number one choice: “Perfect on Paper: The (Mis)Adventures of Waverly Bryson.”

You can also lend your own Kindle books to another Kindle owner for a two-week period, whether you’re a Prime member or not. Update:  Of the 50 books we own, only one is lendable.

It’s called “The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt” and is a full-color novel in the form of a scrapbook set in the roaring ‘20s. It starts with the author at age 17. She goes to Vassar, picks up shocking habits like learning to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and takes on the world.

It struck us as an extremely clever way to turn a scrapbook into a novel or a wonderfully expanded family history. “Frankie Pratt” is great inspiration for anyone who wants to turn a digital scrapbook into a novel. We liked it a lot. What made it so engaging was that it was not simply a collection of photos of people at various ages, and what the old house looked like, but had pictures of the school, neighborhoods, old advertising posters, plays and a sheet music page here and there of songs from the period. You can get tons of these with a few searches on the Internet.

Lots of people save scrapbooks and you can turn them into a simple photo book on any photo website, like Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly and Snapfish. But to go beyond that and make it really engaging, add pictures that are far from usual. Let your imagination run wild. The best site we found for making a kind of scrapbook novel is PhotoCreations.Michaels.com, from the well-known chain of crafts stores. They have some free designs and clip art, but to get access to 12,000 more designs costs $10 a month. There are lots of sources of free clip art; check out Microsoft Word and use a free screen capture program such as the snipping tool in Windows 7.

At the Michaels site it was fairly easy to drop in photos from files, either from your own computer or pictures you found on the web. You can add text messages that look like they were done on an old typewriter, in that old style “Courier” type font. Bring in ads, postcards, ticket stubs, catalog pages, candy wrappers and magazine art that you find on the web. .If you want to use images of personal papers, like old bills or school report cards, use a scanner. They’re cheap now; we got a Canon for less than $100.

“The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt,” by Caroline Preston; HarperCollins publishing, $17 at Amazon.com. Very clever.

Jobs says it was the “Blue Box” that inspired his life of invention. The Blue Box was a device that reproduced the tones AT&T used to connect phones worldwide. When Jobs found a list of the tones in an AT&T technical journal at the Stanford library, he and Steve Wozniak created their own box and used it to call the Pope. They didn’t actually get the Pope because they were laughing too hard just before he came on the line.

Bob’s experience with the Blue Box brought down Ramparts Magazine. Like Jobs, he had read about the box and got his hands on the AT&T technical journal. Bob wrote a “how to” article for Ramparts on making free phone calls worldwide. AT&T got a court order to confiscate every issue of the magazine before it went on the stands. With that enormous loss of revenue, the magazine never recovered.

“Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview” is a joint effort of technology writer Robert Cringley and Landmark theater co-owner Mark Cuban. Cringely made Triumph of the Nerds, a successful PBS miniseries. A highlight of the show was Cringely’s interview with  Jobs in which he sorely criticized Microsoft for making bad products. You can see that interview in this film, but it’s a lot more than that.

“Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview” screens at the Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema Wednesday and Thursday, November 16 and 17 at 2828 N. Clark St. in Chicago,  7:15 pm and 9:00pm. For a list of  theater locations nationwide, visit stevejobsthelostinterview.com/

Amazon’s new $199 “Kindle Fire” may surpass the phenomenal sales of Apple’s iPad.

In the first five days it has been available for pre-order, 250,000 were sold. Apple sold 300,000 iPads on opening day, but that included pre-orders and live sales. If Amazon continues like this, the Fire will probably burn past the iPad.

Should you get one? Unlike the iPad 2, the Fire doesn’t have a microphone or camera, but its simplified interface makes it easy to switch from movies to games to books to photos. And no matter how many downloads you have, Amazon will store them for free if they originally came from Amazon. They have 18 million items: movies, TV shows, songs, magazines and books. Ten thousand movies can be downloaded for free if you pay $79 a year for a “prime” membership; which also gives you free two-day shipping on other Amazon orders. We took the deal because of the free shipping.

By the way: We recently saw a comparative price chart in the October 1, 2011 issue of the Economist magazine and Amazon’s prices were lower than Walmart and almost all other large retailers. The exceptions were Costco and Dollar General. Interesting stuff.

– “Teardowns: Learn How Electronics Work by Taking Them Apart,” by Bryan Bergeron; $25. The title strikes right to the point here, and the author tells you how things work, from smoke alarms to electric guitars, and provides pictures of the insides. Once you know how something works, you can think about ways to improve it or even make it obsolete.

– “Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics,” by Stan Gibilisco; $35. This is like a text book, with a quiz at the end of each chapter. It’s well done, and includes some useful algebraic formulas. Basic stuff you should know.

– “Robot Builder’s Bonanza, fourth edition.” By Gordon McComb; $30. Build your own electronic sensors, make a spider robot out of electric guitar strings.

– “Arduino, a Quick Start Guide,” by Mark Schmidt; $35 and “Programming and Customizing the PICAXE Microcontroller,” by David Lincoln; $50. Both these books teach the reader how to program the two most popular circuit boards for controlling electro-mechanical devices.

– “15 Dangerously Mad Projects for the Evil Genius,” by Simon Monk; $25. The latest in the long-running Evil Genius series. What intrigued us here was how to make a magnetic coil gun. Projectile velocity is dismal; work on it.

– “Make, #27,” a regular magazine published by O’Reilly Books, $15 per issue. Covers many subjects but this one features turning a Roomba carpet cleaner into a roving spy robot.

Last but far from least each issue of the monthly magazines Popular Science and Popular Mechanics have instructions for building electro-mechanical projects. These are not toys! Want to build your own electron microscope?

“Using LinkedIn” by Patrice-Anne Rutledge, $20 from quepublishing.com, has some great tips. For example, to find old friends from college, click “add connection” and then click “classmates.” Put in the years you were there and what you studied. When Joy did this for the University of Southern California, over a thousand names showed up. Each name has an “invite” link, in case you want to add them to your network.

The book has videos, podcasts, and screencast tutorials to guide you through the LinkedIn service. Learn how to use the service to find a job. If you have a blog, learn how to link it to your LinkedIn profile . Some say LinkedIn will one day be as big as Facebook, because it follows you throughout your career. Here’s how to make the most of it.

A storehouse of three million free titles from the Google digital library may tempt us to get the new iRiver EBook reader. Target is selling it for $140.

The reader is called “Story HD” and it looks very much like the Amazon Kindle. The HD designation means High Definition, and the screen images are considerably sharper than other e-readers. Besides the free titles, there are about 150,000 paid ones.  Bob likes it that the page turning buttons are not on the side, where he’s likely to push them accidently just picking it up.

The Story HD is the same price as Barnes and Noble’s “Nook” e-reader as wells as the ad-free version of Amazon’s “Kindle.” You can view MS Word documents just as they are, and bring in PDF files that are actually readable. The Amazon Kindle makes them too tiny. A short-coming is you have to be in range of a WiFi signal to download a new book, newspaper, magazine or blog. The Kindle’s $189 version comes with free 3G service, the wireless service used by cell phones, which lets us download a new item from almost anywhere, even riding by on a train.

If you don’t want to carry your textbooks around, or scan them into digital files yourself, Kno.com is a good way to go. They’ve digitized 100,000 textbooks and you can get them for 30 to 50 percent off the regular price. Read them on your computer or use their iPad app.

The iPad app has a nice Facebook feature: You can post your thoughts directly to your Facebook wall without leaving the page you’re on. It also has a “Journal” feature: Highlight text and it goes right into the Journal. Tap the Journal to see all your highlights. And not least of all, place your thoughts in a sticky note off to one side of the text. A new 3D feature lets you rotate, zoom and spin molecules and other objects.

We bought “Playwriting for Dummies” for $10. Kno has a 15-day return policy, but it’s a good idea to check Amazon for the title first. The prices were the same every time we checked, but Amazon lets you preview the book, something Kno doesn’t. Amazon, by the way, has a new “Cloud Reader,” so you can read digital books in your web browser without downloading a program first.

CourseSmart.com also has digitized textbooks. They didn’t have the playwriting book we found at Kno, or “Memoirs of Jane Austen” and other books that aren’t really textbooks per se, but they do have standard works, like “Biology, 10th Edition.” Their website claims they’re the leader for textbooks.

In fact, his approach to starting a new company is the best part of the book. In 2009, he notes, most people said that the 100,000 apps in Apple’s iTunes store were already too many. But Burris noticed that real estate was an under-served category. There were a few apps for local agents, but no foreclosure app. And yet, there were a lot of Google searches on the word “foreclosures.” So he called local universities and asked for names of their top software engineering students, offering one of them a percentage of the profits and a small sum to design “Complete Foreclosures.”

Here was the clever part. Using his guiding principle of “go opposite,” the app is free but real estate agents pay $25 a month for an exclusive listing of the properties in a particular zip code. One agent bought 30 zip codes for his listings, though the average is six.

Beyond the business stuff, “Flash Foresight” is a romp through tech history. In 1979, a five megabyte hard drive cost $1500, or $300 per megabyte. Today’s hard drives bring that cost down to thousandths of a cent per megabyte. And by the way, pay no attention to the conventional wisdom. In 1996, TIME magazine reported that the once vaunted Apple Computer Company was near death. Today it’s bigger than Microsoft and within a whisper of being the largest company in America.