Helping You Make It Out Alive
“Activity Tracker” is a punchclock like gadget for Google. This gadget is great for tracking where your time is going. It’s pretty simple to set up and use, just specify activities, then “punch” in or out. It also has a useful alert feature for those who forget to update their activities.
Google Docs is great for written documents and spreadsheets, but what about the rest of the office suite? Enter Empressr, a web based presentation application. With an interface somewhat similar to PowerPoint, Empressr is a Flash application for the creation and sharing of slide-based presentations. The interface is clean and makes it very easily to add images, text, Flash, charts, and other elements to a slide. Changing the layout of a slide is as easy as clicking the element and dragging. Multiple templates are included as well. Overall a pretty slick presentation application at a good price (Free!) with the added benefit of being web-based
Microsoft Word has a pretty slick AutoSumarize tool. After writing a document, Word on summarize it in one of four ways. This is great for making an abstract of your document, but keep in mind that the summary will most likely need some editing.
Amiko allows you to create an online resume. Basically, Amiko hosts an online version of your resume on their server and provides a link for you to post to online job sites like monster.com. Some of the more notable features are the ability to re-arrange your resume by simply clicking and dragging on items, unlimited photo gallery, and really simple editing of content. Amiko looks like a pretty slick tool for those embarking on their job search adventure.
TutorLinker is an online marketplace for tutors. A user can find a tutor based on geography, subject matter, or pricing. The site has a pretty slick Google maps mashup that allows you to see where tutors are located.
As of right now, there is not a wide distribution of tutors, but as the site grows this will change. Right now the search is limited to location, which is somewhat limiting as well.
All in all, a pretty slick idea. Hopefully the site will take off, and more regions will benefit.
mynoteIT is an online note taking tool for students. A student can log on and take notes on whatever they wish. As with most online text tools, notes can be shared with others, allowing for easy collaboration. One can also easily search through notes for relevant information. mynoteIT also includes a to-do list and calendar.
One really slick feature is the ability to set up ‘class groups.’ As the name implies, these are intended to allow students in the same class to associate with one another. This is great for those wanting to share notes and ideas with classmates.
While the site is pretty slick, it faces the same problems many online note/text/calendar tools face. The majority of students don’t have a laptop with them to take notes during class. More technical majors, such as Computer Science may see a large portion of students taking notes on a computer, but they are still in the minority. As laptops become more prevalent in class, tools like this may take off, but for now they are going to have limited reach.
GPA calculations are a necessary evil for most students. The University of Wisconsin has an easy to use tool for calculating that magic number. Simply enter in your letter grades and the number of hours associated with them, then calculate to your heart’s content. This tool is also great for those “what is this class going to do to my GPA?” situations.
This is a great way to backup a USB flash drive. After adding this batch file to your flash drive, just click the backup option to copy all files to your local hard drive.
Step 1: Create the folder you want to backup to (Mines c:\removablebackup)
Step 2: Create the backup batch file for your USB key. You can do this by inserting the following in a textfile and saving it as backup.bat. An example is provided below:@echo off
echo ——————-
echo Removable Device Automatic Backup
echo ——————-
echo No Rights Reserved, do whatever you want with this.
xcopy “*” “c:\removablebackup\” /Y /E /R
echo Backup Complete!
Pause.Make sure you change the section in bold to reflect your individual backup location.
Step 3: Place the following in a text document, and save it directly to your removable drive as autorun.inf:
[autorun]
action=Backup
open=backup.bat
label=Backup
includeRuntimeComponents=TrueStep 4: Your done! Now whenever you insert your USB key you should see this nifty backup option:
You can also add the /D flag to the xcopy command to only copy new/changed files.
Google notebook functions as an online version of the versatile notebook. It allows you to capture and organize pictures, text, and other web content. You can then organize these them into sections, add your own notes, etc. Browser extensions are available that make adding content to your notebook very easy. As with all Google products, you can leverage the power of Google’s search technology to quickly find any note. Another really neat feature is the collaboration capability. Much like Google Docs, you can open up your notebook to others, allowing them to add and make changes. Finally, you can publish your notebook by making it a public web page. Overall, Google Notebook is a pretty slick tool for capturing disparate web content.
I’ve been known to take pictures of to-do lists with my phone for later reference, but scanR takes the idea even further. After registering with the site, just take a picture of your document and send it to scanR. The picture gets cleaned up and converted to a PDF file for further use. You can also scan whiteboards, great for those archaic drawings your professor throws up. The quality of the scans isn’t real fantastic, but with higher quality camera phones on the way, things can only get better.
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