Solutions for Frustrating Cord Problems

Tangled cords make me want to punch things. Photo courtesy of hannah.rosen. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.

I have many pet peeves about dorms. This is actually turns out to be a good thing since I figure out ways to solve my them and write posts about them for you guys. My latest pet peeve that has culminated into me finally finding a solution has been cords and wires. As much as I love having all of my gadgety things nearby, I hate, hate, hate groping around on the floor trying to find the correct cord to go with each device. Where is my iPod cord? Nope, that's my phone charger. Nope, that's my laptop cord. Nope, that's my harddrive cord. Simply put, it's a pain in the ass and I know that I can't be the only out there that has this frustration.

I would love to say that I came up with this idea all by myself, but I actually modified my solution from an organization technique that my brother uses. He gets bulldog clips and clips them on to the edge of his desk and then threads his cords through the metal parts so that they are perfectly and readily available for use. I believe this picture was the source of his inspiration and is essentially what his desk looks like.

I know. It's genius. Anyways, after the cut, check out how I modified this little trick to fit my bedside table.

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Android Users Gain Social Homepage, Study Distraction with *Spark

*Spark proves that a silly product name can still lead to massive success. A screenshot of the *Spark homepage.If you have a smart phone running Android or Symbian, you may want to check out *Spark from HipLogic, which recently launched in beta. The app allows you to transform your phone’s launch screen into a one stop shop for your Twitter feed, Facebook, the weather report, and news headlines.

The aim of the app is to give Android and Symbian users a way to access all the constantly updated data that they’re interested in without having to go to separate apps for each individual service. It has the potential to make non-iPhone smart phones more attractive to potential users, and it plays on Android's multitasking strengths in a way that lets the OS shine.

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If you had to go a week without a computer, could you do it? – Intel Conversations

As part of Intel sponsoring the HackCollege Summit, we produced a few videos talking about the necessities of college students. We will be releasing these videos over the next few weeks. Christine and Kiesha prompt each question and add insights from an "older generation," while Mike, Laura, Luke and Shep participate in the discussions.

Kiesha and Christine tried to challenge us with our fifth and final session of our Intel Conversations. What would we do without access to any computer for a week? Would we be able to survive?

What are the important things in your system? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.

Featured Desk: Newly-Minted Mac Fan's Study Powerhouse

Welcome to Thomas's death star command center. There are enough iDevices in this photo to make even Linux users drool.

This week's featured desk came to us with a complete description from its owner, Thomas Frank, which we'll be republishing here--it's always good to see people talk about their desks in their own words.

My desk has been a work-in-progress for the past year; here is its current iteration. The main limitation to what I can do is the desk itself; it comes with my room and can't be taken out. Taking that fact into consideration, I've put it in what I think is the best position for the hardware I have. I built the small shelf in order to provide room under the two monitors for my keyboard and laptop. When they are both under the shelf, I have a nice open space to put books and papers on. Recently, I switched from being a Mac-hater to a Mac-fan (a change brought about from my frustration with the Zune HD's lack of a to-do app), and thus I own an AT&T Bars-style assortment of iDevices which make my life easier. Surprisingly, I use the main desktop PC mainly for web design, gaming, and movie watching. The Logitech G15 keyboard is nice, but I prefer to type up notes and papers on the Macbook Pro. However, the desktop does win in the cursor department, coupling a Razer Deathadder and the Steelseries 4HD mousepad (which is the best mouse pad ever, and only $20).

Click for more photos and description after the jump.

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What are your dorm room essentials? – Intel Conversations

As part of Intel sponsoring the HackCollege Summit, we produced a few videos talking about the necessities of college students. We will be releasing these videos over the next few weeks. Christine and Kiesha prompt each question and add insights from an "older generation," while Mike, Laura, Luke and Shep participate in the discussions.

For our fourth Intel Conversation, we discuss what some of our dorm room essentials are. What can help you avoid Hourglass Syndrome while away from the computer?

What are the important things in your system? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.

GroupMe Turns Any Phone into a Collaboration Hub

You can use GroupMe to spam all of your friends at once! I remember when Twitter was just catching on during my freshman year, I was a total dweeb and made a Facebook group encouraging my Trinity friends to sign up for the service and share their usernames.  As it turns out, Twitter wasn't the easiest thing to explain to people at the time--this is before all the celebrities took it over and CNN decided to integrate it into every story--so I always shared the same hypothetical example of how to use with my skeptical friends, and wrote it in the description of the Facebook Group.

"Imagine I'm going to Whataburger. I could send a "tweet" alerting my friends to this adventure either online or with a text message. Instantly, everyone who opts to receive my mobile alerts will see that I'm going to Whataburger, and can choose to join me. All we need to start this revolution is a minimal level of participation (Twitter will not take over your life like Facebook) from a large number of people." 

As you can imagine, I was a popular guy back then.

Obviously, this isn't really what Twitter's built for, but group texting seemed like a perfect service for college students that didn't, at least to my knowledge, really exist at the time.  Two years later, it seems like the tool I've been waiting for has finally come along in the form of the free service GroupMe.  GroupMe will let you form different groups of phone numbers, and assigns the group a new number.  Now any member of the group can text that number to send a message to every other member.  It's a lot easier than scrolling through your contacts list to find ten different people, especially if you don't have a smooth-scrolling touchscreen smartphone.  If that weren't enough, you can even call the number for an instant conference call.

Read on for some less-than-obvious student uses for GroupMe

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HackCollege Podcast: Episode 4

In this week's episode, Laura, Emily, and Shep discuss changing up your study space for better recall, a Groupon clone for college students, and yet another tablet claiming that it will be your textbook.  If your browser doesn't support the HTML5 player below, just download the .mp3 here.

Show Notes

• Changing Up Your Study Spaces (Lifehacker)
• CampusDibs Student Deals (TechCrunch)
• Kno Tablet and Student Reactions (TabletCrunch)

Want us to talk about something on the next episode? Let us know in the comments!

How to Digitize Your Textbooks

Image courtesy of Flickr user Micheal  Peterson and licensed under CC 2.0eBook readers are quickly becoming the go to method to read print media. Perhaps the most exciting advantage is the ability to carry thousands of books on a thin device. Yes students, this means you could condense a semesters worth of heavy textbooks into a few thousand bytes on your Kindle, Nook or iPad. Textbook publishers are charging forward through this new frontier of media distribution, unfortunately only a small portion of textbooks are available for download today. What do you do if your microbiology text isn’t available in a digital format this fall? 

Option #1: Textbook Scanning Services

There are several online services that will scan a textbook and return a PDF document of its contents. BlueLeaf appears to be the the front-runner in this game, charging $0.06 per page for destructive scanning and $0.09 for non-destructive scanning in addition to a fee per book of $12.95 and $24.95 respectively. To ease the gouging, BlueLeaf will scan your first 50 pages for free. Full color scans are an additional $12, and if you’re gullible enough to have them convert the PDF to a PRC or ePub file it’ll cost you another $12 (this can be accomplished for free with Calibre).

To give you a better idea of pricing, to scan 3 textbooks totaling 1956 pages for this upcoming semester, non destructive scanning in color would cost me $218.

Option #2: Build a Book Scanner

Diybookscanner.org is an awesome project offering community designed blueprints for making your own non-destructive book scanner. Once built, these scanners take pictures of each page of the book you wish to digitize using two tethered cameras. The cost of the hardware is the greatest downfall to this method, although if you want to keep your textbook intact this is the way to go. 

Option #3: Chop & Scan

If you’re comfortable with cutting up a textbook, running the pages through a scanner with an automatic document feeder is by far the cheapest method to digitze a textbook. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Each textbook is bound a little differently, your goal is to dissect the book so that you have several booklets of pages.

Step 2: Cut the booklets along the left margin to obtain single pages. This is easily accomplished with a paper cutter. 

Step 3: Insert the pages into the document feeder of your scanner. Scan the fronts of all the pages and save as a PDF, then flip and scan the backs. 

Step 4: Download and install PDFsam, a free multi-platform PDF tool. Load the front and back PDF files into the Alternate Mix plugin, which will combine the two files and place the pages into the proper order. 

Step 5: Convert the PDF scan of your book into a format your eBook reader can read using Calibre. 

Each method varies in cost and effort required. At the end of the day, the convenience of reading textbooks on your computer at home, eBook reader on campus or smartphone while waiting for the bus is well worth it.