– “DIY Satellite Platforms,” by Sandy Antunes; $8. It may sound strange but you can build your own satellite. Hold the weight down to one kilogram (2.2 pounds) and you can think about launching it. CubeSatKit.com sells kits for doing this and charges about $40,000 if you want to actually put it into orbit. InterOrbital.com uses a tubular design and plans to charge $8,000 per launch. Other countries and private companies also sell launch services. (You don’t neccesarily have to launch your satellite; that’s just for serious types.)

– “Making Android Accesories With IOIO,” by Simon Monk; $7. This is not about making apps for Android phones but about making devices that can be controlled by an Android phone. Got that? Good. The devices not only receive instructions by phone, but can transmit back to the phone.

– “Environmental Monitoring With Arduino,” by Emily Gertz and Patrick Di Justo; $8. Make your own Geiger counter, examine water purity and create other environmental monitors, using the Italian open-design Arduino board.

– “Getting Started With Netduino,” by Chris Walker; $20. This is the most expensive of the four slim volumes and teaches you how to use the Netduino, a specialized version of the Arduino board. Uses Microsoft.net to remotely control motors and other devices.

If you’re a techie, this book could launch a new business in home automation. The author starts by telling us of his parents’ simple joy with their Mr. Coffee machine back in the 1970s. They could lie in bed knowing a cup of coffee was waiting for them, brewed at just the time they set. It combined an alarm clock with a coffeemaker. Things have moved along since then.

Even if you don’t want to start a small business, you might want this book to coordinate a house full of gadgets. Chances are, no commercial solution will tailor things exactly as you like them. The author shows how to merge sensors with circuitry that emails you an alert when they’re triggered. Arduino programming and familiarity with the Android operating system is desirable. but don’t panic if you don’t know about it; millions have figured out how to use it.

If you’ve been around long enough to remember the world before Windows, you’ll remember the “command line” in DOS. Command lines are wonderful. They’re lightning fast, and that early world of computing can be had again in Linux. You can do things almost instantly with just a few key strokes in Linux.

Google + is the Google equivalent of Facebook. It has far fewer users but is growing fast. It wasn’t fast enough to keep us hooked, however; we stopped using it regularly a few months after realizing that nearly all of our friends stayed on Facebook

One reason you might want to try it out, besides the fact that it’s free, is the group video chats called “hangouts.” Why pay extra for Skype Premium, which starts at $5 a month, when you can get the same power for free on Google +? Each hangout can have up to 10 members at one time. All you need is a webcam, which most laptops have built in, and an Internet connection. Businesses might want to use hangouts for customer training, meetings, sales strategies and job interviews.

Actually, we knew that “Amazon Prime” members can borrow books instead of buying them, but we didn’t realize how big the selection had become. A “Prime” membership costs $79 a year and includes free two-day shipping on all Amazon purchases, along with free video streaming to laptops or other gadgets. And then there’s the lending library. It has 50,000 titles available right now, including 100 current and former New York Times bestsellers.

One of our nieces got a Kindle for Christmas and so we showed her how to borrow “The Hunger Games,” by Suzanne Collins. In her household, her dad is the Prime member, so he had to borrow the book first and then lend it to her. Only 49,999 titles to go.

In other “Prime” news, Amazon recently signed up more TV networks. Prime members can now get free shows from MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, TV Land, Spike, and other channels, in addition to the ones available before: PBS, FOX, CBS, ABC, Sony, Warner Brothers, etc. We figure that eventually you’ll be able to get every kind of TV show through Amazon Prime or Netflix or some similar service. The prices will be a steal, compared to cable TV. For example, Joy just discovered she can watch the popular British series “Downton Abbey” on Netflix.

There are more than 350 functions built into the Excel spreadsheet, and several experts have gotten together here to explain how to use them. Spreadsheets were originally written for accounting but they quickly expanded to enable users to do statistical analysis and probabilities. Their primary use remains the “What-if?” scenario. What if we changed some things like price, size, availability, etc. How would the business change? The answers usually come back in seconds. Believe it or not, experienced spreadsheet users say they’re fun.

Readers can search several years’ worth of On Computers columns at oncomp.com. There are new postings every day. Bob and Joy can be contacted by email at bobschwab@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.

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.