academhack

One of the more frequent questions I get asked as an academic is what program do you use to manage all the information/articles you come across. In fact, even academics with more luddite tendencies want a program to manage all of the journal articles or papers that are stored on their computers. For me I [...]

If you are new to the world of Web 2.0 and are looking for a good introduction you might want to check out Mark Marino’s talk. Mark recently did a presentation at USC which covered a range of internet tools that one might consider for teaching and research. The link is to his write up [...]

I just got back from a conference in Portland (Maine not Oregon). Honestly one of the more interesting/produtive academic conferences I have attended (the annual SLSA conference for those who are interested). While the quality of the presentations were high, it struck me that many a presenter could have benefited from a little free application [...]

If you have been thinking about buying Devon, today might be the day. Today, and today only it is half price if you purchase it through macZot. Devon is one of those programs that would make it impossible for me to ever stop using a Mac, a priceless storer, and sorter of information.

To the readers, I apologize greatly for lack of posting, being new faculty has taken up all my time. What little blogging time I have had has been taken up by the blog for Emergent Media and Communications here at UTD. But never fear, I now have an office (which wasn’t the case a couple [...]

Darcia writes to recommend Chatterblocker (Windows or Mac) a piece of software which helps to eliminate background noise. Unlike Noise (my software of choice for this task), Chatterblocker works not by creating white noise, but rather by distoring the current noise (i.e. altering current conversations enough that they cannot be followed.) Because I [...]

SmileonmyMac is offering back to school discounts for educators and students. Normally I wouldn’t mention a software companies sale offers here, but SmileonmyMac has two programs that are useful for academics. The first is Textexpander one of my favorites, and the other is PDFPen which some educators use to grade papers. If you are an [...]

It seems that more and more I find myself wanting to manipulate/work with PDFs. I generally only accept work from students that is in PDF or RTF form, many of the articles I download are formatted as PDFs, even many users manuals are PDFs. So here are some tips/tools for managing PDFs:
Organizing PDFs: [...]

The other day when I wrote a post about free software, Charles left in the comment section a link to a list of programs for academics which he wrote. Charles’s list is even better than the aforementioned wiki, and contains references to audio, reference, RSS readers, . . .well the list goes on and on. [...]

Looking for a Word Processor? Zaine Ridling at Donation Coder has written a thorough review, and by thorough I mean over 15,000 words, covering various word processors. Not only does he review major and minor desktop word processors, but he also has a rundown of online ones. With each Word Processor he presents [...]