A Syncing Solution for Macs

Image via doubleTwist Press siteMore and more college students are buying Macs to handle their college computing needs. While Macs are nice, everyone knows they lack the freedom to sync non-Apple devices with them. Now, Motorola and RIM and Google have come out with great smartphones and Sony with a great portable gaming device.  All of the aforementioned gadgets have multimedia capabilities that can't use the music, videos and photos on Macs because they aren't supported. doubleTwist tries to correct that nonsense with a piece of software that can sync Android, Blackberry, Kindle as well as a host of others that can be found here.

doubleTwist has teamed up with Amazon MP3, bringing a music store to the application. This makes it easier to take advantage of the cheaper albums (sometimes as low as $5.00) with out having to do a lot of extra legwork to have it in a music library.

Unfortunately there is no support for eBooks in the Amazon store so it isn't a one-stop-shop in that regard. The Kindle does support audio, so putting recorded lectures and textbooks in the same place.

Guest Post: Ramenbox.com Review

Introducing... the Ramenbox. Photo by Blake Sutton.

This guest post comes from my younger brother, Blake Sutton. He's currently a sophomore at Notre Dame studying biochemistry or something. I don't like ramen so I forced him to write this review.

Going to school in the Midwest has few advantages. When you move in during the summer everything is humid and sticky. During the winter, snow gets dumped on you. The nearest Asian supermarket is in Chicago. It is nearly impossible to get decent ramen around here, something I miss from the West Coast.

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The Princeton Review Ranks "Best Value" Colleges - Save Money with Expensive Schools

I'm not usually the Matt Lauer type, but this video about The Princeton Review's "Best Value" Colleges makes two good points:

1. You have to apply for aid. No excuses. I don't care how big the trust fun is. If you have friends who don't apply for aid, slap them and then tell them that you'll fill out the forms in exchange for 20% of the proceeds. (You can't really do that. It's just to prove a point. But, I guess you already slapped your friend, which might prove the point also. Maybe we're over-proving here. I don't know.) The FAFSA is also important to getting work-study, which you'll want no matter how much you can afford to make it rain.
2. Look for "good value" colleges, not "cheap" ones. Transferring to a cheaper school won't solve your budgetary woes! What's The Princeton Review mean by "good value"? It means that more expensive schools can actually cost you less than "cheap" ones. Spendy colleges tend to re-distribute tuition from rich people into the Financial Aid office -- and do other such friendly acts for its less-fortunate students. It's kind of messed up, but that's how it goes.

See the full list of the top 10 value public colleges and the top 10 value private colleges.

Guest Post: Using Evernote to Manage Your Digital Notes

After Tuesday’s post about the importance of digititizing your handwritten notes, Russel, an engineering student at the University of British Columbia (Yay, another Canadian!) sent me a note outlining his workflow which incorporates Evernote. I must say, the ability to search  handwritten notes is pretty slick. Enough from me, here’s Russel with a guest post. Be sure to check out his website, skimap.org. 

Evernote, is a highly versatile note application that syncs with the cloud and runs natively on Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. In addition, there is a slick web client for other operating systems. The app definitely takes a while to integrate into your life, but the end results are well worth the effort. Over the last year, I have slowly integrated Evernote into my school life to much success. In this short tutorial, I will help you discover the huge benefits of using Evernote as a notetaking system. 

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Read This: The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures

This might be one of the most interesting blog posts I have read in a few months. Like seriously, you guys. Any Facebook or Twitter or Social Network X profile picture is always the result of days of deliberation. What kind of message do I want to send with this picture? Do I look attractive in this picture? Am I even attractive in the first place? All of these questions come rushing every time we click "Edit Profile Picture". Thankfully, the OkCupid blog has put up a post statistically analyzing different profile picture types. The results are fascinating.

In looking closely at the astonishingly wide variety of ways our users have chosen to represent themselves, we discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong. For interested readers, I explain our measurement process, and how we collected our data, at the end of the post. All my bar charts are zeroed on the average picture. Now to the data.

What follows is some of the most eye-opening blog postage you will read today. As it turns out, guys do better if they show off their six packs. The author is smart to point out discrepancies in the data (like not everyone has a six pack). Also, most of this is conducted under the assumption that more is better when it comes to meetings or friend requests or whatever OkCupid uses. There is one part where Christian dives into the data of conversations that resulted from different types of pictures. Fascinating stuff.

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures [OkTrends, The Official Blog of OkCupid.com]

What do you think? How much time do you spend deciding your next profile photo? Let's get a discussion going in the comments.

Read This: How to Manage a College Education

We've worked a little bit with blog-network-now-social-network Brazen Careerist in the past. They are great folks over there doing great things. Their founder, Penelope Trunk, just published a great post on her blog about paying for a liberal arts education.

The idea of paying for a liberal arts education is over. It is elitist and a rip off and the Internet has democratized access to information and communication skills to the point that paying $30K a year to get them is insane.

While I fall into the category of paying a lot of money to go to a mid-tier school, I definitely agree with her. As we've seen and as you probably know, maintaining a blog is probably a much better job opportunity generator than using the correct font on your cover letter. Check it out:

How to manage a college education [Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist]

What do you think? Is the high price tag of a BA worth it these days? Leave a comment!

Guest Post: How to Make the Most of Skype Language Exchange

Nobody's callin' on the phone, 'cept the pope maybe in Rome. Photo by flickr user re-ality.

HackCollege alumna Rosario Doriott wrote a few posts on learning languages by connecting with other speakers around the globe, and today's guest post refines on those ideas. Today's post is by Harry Ness, a senior at Georgetown University and the guy behind The Simplicity Scholar (which is also a book). If you would like to write a guest post, shoot us an email at dear@hackcollege.com.

Everyone knows that the only way to learn a language is to practice speaking it... a lot. Most students, however, have few opportunities to do this, so oral communication is always their biggest weakness.

HackCollege already discussed the utility of Skype as a foreign language instructor, but finding a good online language partner and practicing with him or her regularly is not easy. In this post, I'll lay out a simple but effective system for optimizing the online language exchange experience.

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iBookstore Lets You Scan and Compare Online Textbook Prices from Your iPhone

So, how 'bout this?: textbook comparison shopping in your pocket. iBookstore is an iPhone app that'll let you scan in a book's barcode right there in the store and then see rough prices for it online.

Now, when you're in the bookstore, you can know for sure that you're getting ripped off. That's actually kind of my problem with it. Duh -- we know that it's cheaper to buy textbooks online than in a bookstore. Unless you're at a garage sale or some other strange book-buying situation, there's no need to check. I can tell you right now, without even looking, that all of your textbooks will be cheaper online.

Actually -- here's how you could use iBookstore in an actual college bookstore: 

1. Enter bookstore. 
2. Approach line of people buying books. 
3. Scan students' books before they checkout.
4. Tell them exactly how much of an idiot they are for buying a book in the bookstore. 

The other problem is that the ISBN scanner doesn't work all the time. At least, it only worked on one of four different textbooks I tried in multiple lighting situations. Even if it worked 100%, most book stores slather on a huge proprietary barcode sticker on their used books, which covers the old one. (I doubt it's to prevent such scanning, but I suspect it's for some other evil purpose.)

If you have those problems, you can still enter the title/author manually, but that's way less badass, especially when you're harassing a whole line of angry book-buyers.