Use Friends Lists for a Better Facebook Experience

It's much easier than filtering out the data by hand! Image courtesy of the Smithsonian. In the public domain.

It's easy to get frustrated with Facebook. However, for college students, quitting it entirely can be difficult: it upsets your friends, removes the parts of the service that are useful, and makes it difficult to share things you create online with a large number of people. A mass friend cull, even if it's what you want, is time-consuming--cutting 500 friends down to 100 takes time. Plus, only having a few friends can raise social red flags that are frustrating to deal with, and people get their feelings hurt if they notice. However, using Facebook's friend list feature can make the service more useful, more fun, and less frustrating: a win as far as we're concerned.

The friend list creation feature can be accessed through the "featured friends" tab of the account settings (most easily accessed by clicking the "edit friends" icon in the friend list subheader on your profile). There's an option to create a new list--click it, and your friends should show up. Because creating a friend list is opt-in rather than opt-out, it goes pretty quickly to whittle yourself down to the 100 people you're interested in from the entirety of your friends.

You can filter your homepage by friend group by going to the "Most Recent" view rather than the featured news feed. Pull up the list that you created, and you'll have access to updates from people you care about. Change your main Facebook bookmark to that URL (the group's most recent news has a static URL), and you're good to go.

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Turn Barcodes into Bibliographies with Quick Cite

Students who take on challenges beyond the classroom make for great stories, and great job candidates. This past November, a group of 7 University of Waterloo students challenged themselves to build 7 applications over 7 days. While skipping class, the 7cubed team put together an impressive collection of programs, from an augmented reality game to a geolocation aware message broadcast platform. One application in particular tickled our college hacking fancy. Quick Cite is an iOS and Android application that simplifies the painful process of writing citations for print books. 

 

Upon launching the app for the first time, you simply enter your email address, then proceed to snap a picture the book you wish to cite's barcode. Instantly, an email is sent to your inbox with a formatted citation. Quick, simple and most importantly, practical.

 

Quick Cite is available in the Apple App Store and the Android Marketplace for $0.99.

 

Give Quick Cite a go, it'll certainly make your next paper just a little bit less painful to write. 

A Few Tips For Dating a Nerd

I think we all do.In honor of Valentine's Day, I thought it would be appropriate to share this old post I wrote awhile ago for our friends at College Candy. It's written for a female audience, but the tips are pretty applicable to girl nerds and guy nerds alike. Enjoy!

If you haven’t dated a nerd yet in college, you should really give it a spin. We’re generally intelligent, motivated to treat you like a princess, and can fix your computer to boot. That said, we do have our fair share of surprising quirks that you should be prepared for. As a happy boyfriend of one year and editor of a blog that supports digitizing textbooks and carrying around portable computer monitors, I feel uniquely qualified to offer up a few tips to break in your new favorite nerd.

1. Try to understand when he whips it out in public.

His laptop, I mean. Or smartphone, if you’re lucky. Either way, most nerds I’ve come across share the common physiological need to access the answer to any lingering question, at all times. Deciding what to get for dinner, and don’t know what bulgogi is? Before you even lift your eyes from the menu your boyfriend will probably have his internet-connected device of choice out on the table to look it up for you. While I’m inclined to say that this behavior enhances conversation by providing valuable information, I realize that many would disagree. If the gadgets coming out a little too often, don’t be afraid to lay down the law and declare an internet-free zone.

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Making Valentine's Slightly Less Nauseating

Do these make you want to vomit? Yeah, me too. Photo courtesy of daveparker. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.Valentine's Day. The holiday that somehow morphed from celebrating a martyred saint to decorating everything in sight with red and pink, chocolate, roses, hearts, butt-naked cupids, and those horrible sweet heart-shaped candies that taste like chalk.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, especially for college students. We've got way too much going on in our lives to bother with some stupid Hallmark holiday tradition. However, there is something positive that Valentine's can offer us. In the midst of all of the chaos of work, it can serve as a day to just take a break from projects, papers, and other school related things and to just have a day of relaxing and togetherness, whether it's with your boyfriend or girfriend or with your best friends. Valentine's Day doesn't have to be something huge or elaborate. It should just be a day for small reminders of why you're with your significant other. There are some inexpensive ways to celebrate the 14th and to make the most of this obnoxiously pink-heart-infested holiday.

Eat Your Hearts Out

Food is the key to every good relationship. So this Valentine's mix food into your plans. Most people think that a dinner date on Valentine's has to be some big expensive, lavish. Not true. It could be the pizzaria down the road or even just the local Chili's. It honestly doesn't matter. The important thing is that you're spending quality time together. In fact, sometimes the more informal you are, the more fun you can have. Last Valentine's, my boyfriend and I had a pizza "picnic" on the floor of his dorm room. 

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Create a Master Resume for Easy, Targeted Applications

Your resume should be brief, but probably not t-shirt-sized. Image courtesy of Flickr user Social is Better. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.College students are in an awkward position when it comes to resumes. Because most of us aren't yet settled in a career path, it's difficult to come up with one document that will have relevant data for all of our applications for internships, jobs, and grad school. Some programs don't care about your club involvement on campus, while on-campus positions will be thrilled to know you're a club president; many internships want a mix of on- and off-campus involvement.

The easy solution for those of us who don't want to create an XML Resume is creating a master resume in our word processor of choice. It can be as long as you want. Create a document, formatted however you like, with everything you've done since graduating high school. Include jobs, internships, club affiliations, and personal projects. Name the document something that will alert you that this isn't the document you want to send--mine's named "Obnoxiously Complete Traditional Resume.odt." This is the resume that you will keep updated as you win awards, take on new positions, and complete research projects.

Then, next time that you need to submit your resume to an internship, research opportunity, or secret spy mission, pull up your master resume and cut out all of the positions, awards, and achievements that are irrelevant to what you're applying for.

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No, Hacking College Does Not Mean Blowing off Learning

Hacking your way through college does not mean you'll miss out on your education. In fact, you may learn even more. Image courtesy of Flickr user Nazareth College and licensed under CC by 2.0.

Readers of this site get their projects done faster, don't worry about losing work from an unsaved paper, and love to make their class notes searchable and organized.  Yes, the advantages of embracing the life hacking culture as a student are numerous. However, whenever I've tried to describe the concept to others, I'm often greeted by a common refrain.

"Doesn't taking shortcuts through college mean you'll miss out on learning?"

This perception is woefully outdated and off-base, and you should never be discouraged if you hear it yourself, because here's the dirty secret: learning is not college, and college is not learning. 

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How To Prevent Dorm Room Clutter in 60 Seconds

Got 60 seconds? Then you can avoid clutter like this. Photo courtesy of eflon. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.As small as dorm rooms are, for some reason it seems that they seem to get way messier than they should. Perhaps it's because we're too busy with keeping up with readings and assignments and making times for our friends. Or maybe it's just because it's far easier to just let our clothes have a permanent resting spot at the foot of our beds or let our books sprawl out across the room. Some of us our neat freaks. Some of us just don't have that particular gift.

If you find yourself thinking that you're far too busy to keep your room completely organized all the time, try taking some advice from an article that was posted by Psychology Today. The article gives you ten tips to help keeping your space clean from clutter without having you dedicate a huge chunk of time.

Some of the tips that I thought were the best were:

Follow the "one-minute rule"

This rule basically says that if you find yourself with a spare minute, use that minute to do just a simple task that won't take more than a minute. Examples are taking out the trash, hanging up your coat or jackets, or putting your shoes away in your closet. Just doing one of those simple things will help the state of your room.

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Smell Good, Save Money, Look Crisp: Hack Your Laundry

Drying laundry on the quad is a hack for only the most experienced student. Image courtesy of Flickr user Jackie Kever. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.Clothes: you probably wear them, and eventually you gotta clean them. But, with a few simple laundry hacks, cleaning up your wearables can be quicker, cheaper, and less wrinkled—giving you more time to focus on wearing your clothes rather than maintaining them.

First off, before tossing something into the laundry, consider whether it needs to go in. Excess washing can damage the fabric of your clothing, and if you live in a place where you pay for laundry, it gets expensive. For heavier fabrics (particularly jeans) that may smell but which aren't actually dirty, there is a cheap and easy solution to kill odor without Febreeze or the laundry machine: the freezer. As weird as it sounds, popping a pair of jeans in the freezer over night will kill any lingering odor and leave them smelling like pretty much nothing (unless something in your fridge is spoiled). This works even in tiny built-in minifridge freezers—the important thing is to get the jeans pretty cold for a length of time. Your roommate may give you a weird look, but this hack really does work.

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