academhack

First, an exciting piece of news for all of those who like free stuff and RSS: NetNewsWire (high-powered RSS client for Mac) and FeedDemon (a PC version) are now free. That’s right free as in free beer, which is doubly good because RSS helps you get free speech as well.
Second, I recently did an interview [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Just yesterday I was talking with a fellow academic, who frustrated by Endnotes was wondering what other options exist for managing references. My no think response was Zotero. Which caused me to think about doing another plug for Zotero here on Academhack, but fortunately for me, another scholar has already done this work. Scott McLemee [...]

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: [...]

Increasingly I find students success, and ability to be media literate, is tied to their ability to use the internet. The problem with this is that reading through a browser posses a different set of problems then reading in print. I imagine something like this occurred in the technological change from scrolls to [...]

Supposing you have time, here are some things of note.
Find a tutor: Lifehacker post on a service that helps you find a tutor, or if you are a tutor find a student. As of now the service only works Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Just as instructive though is the discussion about the [...]

I was talking with a faculty member the other day who was complaining about being sent a .pdf, as he was unable to “edit” it in any way, he wanted the more friendly Microsoft Word document. (If you don’t know what a .pdf is click here, most of the “professional” documents you get are in [...]

I am working on a couple of longer things for the near future (tools for syllabus, some Devon notes, and writing a dissertation), but in the short span here are some useful links from around the web.
Two links on the Apple Mailing list. The first is a short review of information management software. The [...]