Friday, July 10, 2009 by Kelly Sutton Does your school Photoshop diversity into their pamphlets? We all know this practice has been going for a while at schools with photographers that just can't plan ahead...
11 Photos Where Black People Were Awkwardly Photoshopped In or Out [via 11 Points]
When it's too tough to have a diverse campus, let Photoshop do the work!
Thursday, July 9, 2009 by Chris Lesinski 
Improving your Wi-Fi signal is not this complicated. There's all sorts of stuff you can do to your Wi-Fi router's software to improve its signal strength. I think that's a pain in the ass. Let's do it in less than a minute and without any keyboard-touching.
Radio waves fall down and laterally. That means getting your router as high as possible: on a piece of furniture or the highest floor possible. If you're not trying to reach an upper floor at all, hang the router high and upsidedown.
Put it in a central location.
Give your router some breathing room from the wall -- at least a foot if possible. Large furniture, appliances (especially microwaves) and even your own computer will also stand in the way.
Anything metal will reflect your signal -- even if it's very thin. So, the small metal sheet in a mirror is going to screw with things. But you can use this to your advantage. Try using trial-and-error with a compact disc or some tin foil to bounce the signal back into your domain.
[Image credit: purecanesugar / CC BY-SA 2.0]
Wednesday, July 8, 2009 by Kelly Sutton ;)
We packed the house.So we just wrapped up the HackCollege party in LA this last weekend. To say it was a success would be an understatement. So the question is: how did some broke, delinquent college students manage to throw a party with an open bar? The answer: HP helped us out.
In the face of losing market share to Apple, HP is starting to pull out all of the stops. You’ve got to hand it to them: they trusted us to throw a party and make them look good. That’s not too hard when you’re given carte blanche to do whatever your want and a good product to do it with. DJ? Check. Open bar? Yes, please. Dead-simple VJing software on the dv2? Sounds good to me. All of this made this past weekend one of the best weekends of my life.
So rather than give a straight review of the laptop, I will start with some quotes made by normal students at the party. We had everyone enter their info to spam contact them at a later date so every person at the party got at least a few seconds to interact with the laptop.
“This has Blu-ray? Awesome”Call me uncultured, but I usually don’t watch that many movies so laptop with a Blu-ray drive doesn’t do much for me. I learned that I am in the minority. The dv2 comes with a USB Blu-ray drive which is incredibly sensible. To quote Chris, “I don’t need an optical drive with me all of the time.” This helps the dv2 stay light while still having the luxury of 1080p movies. The HDMI out worked perfectly for powering the screen the VJing software was projecting on.
As part of the gimmick at the party, we installed some cool VJing software (ArKaos GrandVJ) on one of the dv2’s we had. We invited everyone at the party to try their hand mixing video live, which is much easier than it sounds.
It was a hit. Whether mixing videos of the late King of Pop’s hits or mashing up some favorite YouTube clips, many people there gave it a shot. There was actually a line to try it at a party. Please record this in written history: HackCollege made people at a party want to stand in line to use a computer. It was like an Apple store, but with free booze.
The dv2 handled most video clips without worry. It slowed down a little bit on some of the HD clips we ingested into GrandVJ. I guess I can’t blame it, mixing HD video with transparency and effects is no light task.
I’m not sure exactly what happened, but HP kind of crapped the bed on this one. Or maybe it’s the disconnect between its look and behavior. It has a Robocop-cool metal sheen, but it feels sticky. Using it is a chore. Turning up the tracking speed might have helped.
;)
Choosing a winner of the laptop we gave away.We can’t keep these laptops. It would be cool but also shady of us to “review” a laptop that was given to us. Besides, we’d rather give them out.
I thought I was going to see tears when we announced the winner. It hit me that getting a laptop for free is kind of a big deal. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a good one. The general consensus was that this was a formidable opponent to the go-to Apple MacBook. HP could finally be making some inroads with the dv2.
So thanks again to HP for giving me one of the best weekends of my life and helping us put on an awesome party. I would mark this in the books as a success.
And regardless of whether we work with HP in the future or not, HackCollege will be coming to your town soon. Start practicing your shotgunning technique.
Special thanks again to The KiD for DJing the party. (He got people dancing. Yes, dancing. With laptops.)
The photos were done by our friends over at What Dance Party?! They kick also ass.
What do you want to see at the next HackCollege party? Let us know in the comments!
;)
Tapped.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009 by Mike Bertolino 
Image Courtesy: The Next WebA lot has been talked about Google's new operating system over the last twelve hours since the Google Blog broke the news. If this OS is widely adopted, then it will change some things about being a student. Chrome will be developed from the web up saying, "the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web." For students nowadays everything revolves around the internet. From social sites to music to even word processing. As the blog post says, "we live on the web" and there isn't a better example of that than the college student.
The first version of the Chrome OS will be targeted at the thriving market of netbooks. The plan for the operating system is keep the user interface minimal as to maximize the screen real estate. This could be a good buy for students looking for a new machine at the start of 2010 school year. The lightweight OS should keep your memory and CPU usage down so you don't have to bulk up your netbook with extra ram and a faster processor. Plus, Google says that the OS will have you booted up and on the web in a matter of seconds.
Developers will be able to make applications for the operating system like they would make any other web application. The applications they make can be used in the Google Chrome OS and in the browser being used in the other operating system. This definitely broadens the user base for web developers. So all you computer science majors out there, start writing code now and you could the owner of your own Chrome OS application raking those Benji-greens.
What does everyone think about the Chrome OS? Will it succeed? Comment below to voice your opinion!
Monday, July 6, 2009 by Kelly Sutton 
I'm super-excited to announce today that Chris and I have an appearance in You 2.0: A Documentary on Lifehacking. The documentary has been more than a year in the making by a recent Florida State graduate, Joey Daoud. I had the pleasure of meeting Joey as he was on his whirlwind through San Francisco getting this film together.
What makes this really cool is that Chris and I are alongside the big guys: David Allen (inventor of GTD), Tim Ferriss (author of the 4-Hour Workweek) and many others. It's like having a crappy house in a nice neighborhood; your house is worth more by association. We are super excited to have a part in this documentary.
So head over to the site and pick up a copy of the film. It will be 2 hours of solid gold (hey, we're in it!) and you'll be supporting a recent graduate.
Saturday, July 4, 2009 by Chris Lesinski Happy 4th of July! Don't do anything we wouldn't do!
Friday, July 3, 2009 by Kelly Sutton Arizona State Sued for Using the Kindle (via eSchoolNews)
Because the Amazon Kindle is not easily accessible by the blind, the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind sued Arizona State earlier this week. I may sound a little harsh, but what prohobits the sight-impaired to using old-fashioned technology that I still know and love hate?
BYU Unbans YouTube (via the Chronicle)
For the past three years, the students of BYU have had nothing to do during the weeknights. No Keyboard Cat. No Afro Ninja. No nothing. Citing "increased educational opportunity," the Latter Day Saints university did a complete 180 this week.
Friday, July 3, 2009 by Mike Bertolino Live Notes from Future of Facebook Privacy Conference Call (With Screenshots) (via InsideFacebook)
InsideFacebook has put the whole conference call on their site. This details how the new privacy options are going to work. Facebook wants you to open up your information to the world, or Facebook wants the public information to create personalized ads just for you. Oh, what tangled web they have woven.
Twitter’s Popular Facebook App Has Been Broken Or Exploited For Days. (via TechCrunch)
Facebook has been getting a lot of flack for how their news feed has evolved to strangly resemble the Twitter timeline. Well, it looks like the flames have been stoked a little bit by a third party who has created an app that is currently blocking new users from adding the Twitter application to facebook. Users added the app before "Session Test" was put in to play are still able to use the connection but errors seem to pop up after they change their username or password on Twitter.
Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out
(via Wired)
There is something to the employees from Google going to Facebook. They are at war. It is an ideological war. Google's constant use of algoritms and dedication to technicality has left designers, like Douglass Bowmann to leave the site. Facebook strategy is to let the hive mind control the web by having searches and problems fixed by contacting people instead of typing something in and "Feeling Lucky".
Facebook Purity Removes Eye-Gouging Quiz Updates (via Lifehacker)
This is a Greasmonkey user script you can install in Firefox that takes away all those annoying quizzes your friends are taking because they can't find jobs.