Back to School: Look to Dollar Stores for Cheap School Supplies

Dollar stores aren't just good for dolphin figurines--they're great places for school supplies. Image courtesy of Flickr user Dagny Scott. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.The New York Times recently published an article about the rise of dollar stores as major companies. Though the article is somewhat depressing (the reason that they're succeeding is because the economy has so utterly tanked that no one has money for Wal-Mart), it does remind us that dollar stores are frequently conveniently located, cheap places to find the things that you'd otherwise have to pay through the nose for on campus.

The article focuses on people using various dollar stores as a replacement for groceries. Though this is no doubt doable for college students (particularly for boxed pasta, cake mixes, and drinks), it's not the only thing that the dollar store is useful for. It's also a great place to pick up note taking supplies for class.

I--like several members of the staff--digitize any of my paper notes at the end of the semester. As a result, it really doesn't matter to me if my notebooks are super high quality, as they're going to be scanned and recycled in four months. So, there's no reason for me to invest in anything more than the same quality of notebook than I would be buying at the grocery store. (If you want a really high quality notebook, Luke's tutorial is the way to go.) When you're talking about really cheap notebooks, there is no difference between the dollar store kind and the kind that you might buy at CVS, the grocery store, or your local big box retailer.

While my spiral-bound notebooks and composition books would be $3 or $4 at the grocery store, they're just $1 at dollar stores. Because parents are unlikely to have stopped by the dollar store for school supplies for K-12 kids, you may even have a less picked-over selection to look at than you would at a larger retailer. The same goes for cheap pens and pencils, highlighters, index cards, and folders--which are about as in-depth as my school supplies ever go.

In addition, dollar stores are a great resource for anything that you might normally buy at a party supply store. Paper plates, streamers, and cheesy banners--all good for low-key birthday parties or club events--are much cheaper there than they are anywhere else.

Do you have a favorite dollar store item? Let us know in the comments!

Barnes & Noble Offers a Great Back to School Deal with the Nook

Barnes & Noble's Nook is so pretty. Photo courtesy of somegeekintn. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.Nooks are pretty darn awesome (although I prefer my Kindle, but that's a different story), and Barnes and Noble has come up with a back to school deal that is about to make them even more awesome. If you purchase and register a Nook before October 31st, you will receive 12 free classic books, which include A Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, and The Metamorphasis. In addition to these 12 books, you will also get Spark Notes for a dozen books like One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1984, and The Catcher in the Rye. Additional features of this giveaway include study guides (like "50 Survival Tips: How to Win at College") and some Nook Color apps.

If you're considering purchasing an eReader, consider the Nook and this awesome package that comes with it. Total, this package is estimated at being worth over $100. Check out more details about this deal at Barnes & Noble.

[via Engadget and Barnes & Noble]

It's Back to School Week, and We're Giving Away $100

Unload your boxes and get reading! Photo by Trinity University.

It's that time again! Amazon is raking in cash from textbook sales, sobbing parents are dragging boxes through dorm hallways, and the smell of hormones and keg beer fills the air. Yes, it's time to go back to school, and HackCollege has you covered. Be on the lookout all this week for our best tips and tricks to get you through the year ahead. 

#Freshmantips Contest

We're also running a contest for the duration of the week to win $100 cash! Just Tweet your best 140 character tip to make a freshman's life easier, and end the tweet (so it shows up for the world, not just us) with an @ reply to HackCollege and the hashtag #freshmantips. The best one (as judged by our writers) will win some cold hard beer money to start the year off right. Good luck!

OS Tips – Access Mac Menu Bar with your Keyboard

Become one with the keyboard and speed up your workflow - ditch your mouse altogether! Picture by basheertome and licensed under CC BY 2.0.

One of my favorite things about Windows is the Alt key. You can access practically every single menu command in any Windows application with Alt keyboard shortcuts. If you notice the little underlined letters in many Windows menus, that’s the key you press in combination with Alt to access that function. This functionality makes it incredibly easy to navigate through menus and prompts with just your keyboard and significantly speeds up your productivity.

For the longest time, I thought you couldn’t do this on a Mac, and I switched to Windows 7 just for this one feature. While most Mac menu items have pre-assigned keyboard shortcuts, not all of them do as with Windows. However, after poking around on Google for a little bit, I discovered that this functionality does exist in OS X – it’s just a little different.

You're just one checkbox away from Mac keyboard nirvana!Go to System Preferences and click on Keyboard, then Keyboard Shortcuts, and then Keyboard & Text Input. Make sure to check off the box for “Move focus to the Menu Bar” – this enables the shortcut. While the default option is Ctrl-F2, I changed it to Ctrl-` because I use my function keys to control brightness and sound. From there, hitting that key combo sends you straight to the Apple menu from any application. Two things to watch out for: 1) If you accidentally hit Ctrl-F1, that disables all Keyboard and Text Input shortcuts, so hit it again then try the menu bar shortcut. 2) Sometimes, the assigned shortcut simply doesn’t work for whatever reason. Try holding down shift in combination with your shortcut and it should work again.

To navigate the menu bar with your keyboard, you can either type out where you want to go – B for bookmarks in Chrome for example – or use your arrow keys to move over there. From there, you hit the down arrow key to open up the menu, and then you can use the same navigation system to access whichever command you’d like. The only thing you have to watch out for is two similarly-named menu bar items – instead of typing out “Save As” to get past “Save”, just use the arrow keys.

In no time at all, you’ll abandon multi-touch gestures altogether as you reach an advanced level of keyboard wizardry! In all seriousness though, navigating menus with your keyboard is much faster than using the mouse and very handy.

Has this helped speed up your workflow? Have you encountered any problems? Let us know in the comments!

App of the Week - Find New Places to Eat Based on Your Favorite Restaurants With Alfred

Think of Alfred as a personal concierge that lives on your iOS device!On this Saturday's App of the Week, we're going mobile and looking at an iPhone app called Alfred. Smartphones should make our lives easier and more productive, but far too often, they just waste our time and make them far more complicated. Fortunately, Alfred avoids that trap and takes full advantage of your always-on mobile Internet connection to keep your taste buds happy! Ever go out with friends and can't decide where to eat? Or maybe you're in a new area and have no idea what's good? If you find yourself in either of these situations, Alfred is just the app for you.

Platform Availability: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.0 or later. Sorry Android users!

Cost: Like so many of the best things in life, Alfred is absolutely free!

What it is: Think of it as a better version of Urbanspoon. Rather than randomly choosing from a set of restaurants after you filter a lot out based on your input criteria, Alfred helps you pick new places to eat based on places you already like. 

Alfred has a great and intuitive interface that makes finding what you want a breeze.What it Does: After firing it up for the first time, just answer the questions it presents you about your favorite places to eat or get drinks. The more time you invest into letting the app know which places you like, the more refined its suggestions will be. When you go into the Teach tab, there will be a progress bar letting you know how "smart" Alfred is; just add your favorite restaurants whenever you have a free moment or try a great new place, as the process can get kind of tedious if you do it all at once. When you want to find a new place to eat, it's very easy to do so from the intuitive main menu. Just like Urbanspoon, Alfred will spit out recommendations based on Yelp reviews and descriptions, so keep that in mind if you've got something against Yelp.

Features: Facebook Integration - Let your friends know where you're eating and see if they have any recommendations while you're on the go. Harness he power of social media to further satisfy your taste buds!

Manual Filtering - Normally, Alfred just gives you recommendations based on a category (like lunch, dinner, etc.). If you have more specific criteria for finding your dining options like price or distance, it's easy to refine Alfred's search algorithm and narrow your choices down to exactly what you want to see.

The Competition: Yelp - Free - iOS 3.0 or later, Android 1.5 or later

Urbanspoon - Free - iOS 3.0 or later, Android 2.0.1 or later

Honestly, there's no other app out there that can do what Alfred does. Yelp is more about user reviews than actual recommendations. While the aforementioned Urbanspoon comes somewhat close, it certainly doesn't take what you've liked in the past into account.

Summary: Tons of apps can guide you on where to eat, but none of them can say that they take your favorite restaurants into account like Alfred can. It's certainly not perfect - after all these are just recommendations on places it thinks you'll like. Sometimes, it can be rather foolish and even recommend you to places you've already designated as favorites! But most of the time, it does what it's designed to and guides you to great new restaurants that you'll like, if not love. Most importantly, it's free, so give it a shot if what it does sounds even remotely interesting to you.

Have you had any bad experiences with Alfred? Are there any other restaurant recommendation apps that you like? Let us know in the comments!

Friday Fun: What We Have to Look Forward To

[Via Buttersafe]

Watch, Read, Make: Vintage Myths, Vintage Books, and Academic Success

Welcome back to Watch, Read, Make, your guide to neat things to start off your weekend. This week, we've got drunken Dante, a recipe for school success, and a way to organize your no-doubt many notebooks. Vive le weekend!

Watch: The above (incredibly NSFW) video is a retelling of Dante's Inferno. It comes from Better Myths, where a shirtless, angry man creates what is essentially a series of the best Cliff Notes ever. The retellings of the myths are hysterical, and the mythologies they cover are wide-ranging (you can get anything from Beowulf to obscure Mayan legends, along with Shakespeare). If you want to kill six hours, this is a fabulous way to do it. It's like a delightful, drunken English lecture!

Read: Breaking the Glass Ceiling: A Back To School Manifesto, up on CollegeInfoGeek, is something to read if you've ever sworn to yourself that this is going to be your 4.0 semester. It's about how the K-12 school system, leading into college, encourages students to do just well enough for a good grade, rather than attempting to excel. Though we encourage students to avoid investing more effort than needed into things that really don't matter (and that will be true for some of your schoolwork) that is in part so that you can--as the article puts it--bust through the glass ceiling and really excel at the things that matter to you. Go forth, read the article, and kick ass!

Make: This DIY vintage book tech travel caddy is delightful. The tutorial shows you how to turn a vintage book into a folder to hold tech chargers and a notebook. The original is intended for travelers (so you don't have to dig headphones out of the bottom of your carry-on), but it would work just as well for students trying to keep things organized in a crammed-full backpack. I can see it being particularly useful as a way to keep your agenda from getting smushed in the bottom of a backpack, replacing the notebook used in the original. Used books can usually be found for cheap at near-to-campus used bookstores or when librarians are culling your university's collection. If you wind up making it, let us know!

How To Eat Ramen so You don't look like a poor college student all the time

Ramen. The ultimate college food staple. Photo courtesy of heyjoewhereyougoinwiththatguninyour hand. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.Whether you're a little bitty freshman or a big bad senior, as a college student, you know that an unhealthily large portion of your diet is usually made up of ramen noodles. Usually, this begins to taper off as you become older and learn how to cook for yourself, but Ramen is so easy to fix and it just offers a nice little meal whenever you reallly need it late at night.

However, eating ramen noodles does have its downsides. For one, it's not very filling. Secondly, you look kind of ridiculous when you have several meals in a row that are all ramen. So in order to cure those ramen blues, here are some great ramen recipes that you can cook with your favorite noodles to add some variety and something that will actually stick to your ribs to fill you up.

• Ramen Salads - What? A way to eat ramen noodles that is healthy? What is this? Well, there are actually a variety of ways that you can mix noodles and salads that are both delicious and healthy. A very common and tasty one, especially in the hot summer months, is a cabbage salad, a recipe for which can be found here. It can make a great side dish, or if you just add some beans or diced chicken for protein, you've got yourself a meal. For more ramen salad recipes, check out this site.
• Easy-To-Make Pad Thai - If you'd like a more authentic way to eat your ramen noodles, try out this delicious and easy recipe that is vegetarian friendly. Add some soy sauce, seseme oil, and you're good to go.
• Ramen Pizza - No, this isn't madness (nor is it Sparta), because here is an official recipe of ramen pizza from Top Ramen. This page also includes some other tasty ramen meal alternatives, but I'm pretty much sold on the pizza thing.
• Ramen and Egg - This is perhaps my boyfriend's favorite ramen recipe of all time just because it's so easy to make. After you make a cook a package of regular ramen noodles, strain them, and put them back in the pot, crack an egg into the pot. Mix it around for several minutes until the egg is no longer liquidy. The heat of the hot noodles will actually cook the egg as you stir it. This adds flavor and protein (which will fill you up). After you've done that, add in your favorite seasonings (he opts for garlic salt and soy sauce, which is delish), and you've got yourself a great new way to eat ramen.

 What are your favorite ways to eat ramen? Let us know in the comments!

[via Wisebread]