Kindletodo Puts a To-Do List on Your Kindle

It looks like this on a Kindle, except more book-like and pretentious.

There's a lot to be excited about for Kindle owners these days. Whether you're excited about the new hardware on the way, or using free 3G data while studying abroad, the Kindle's a great buy for a number of students. For students without a smartphone though, it could afford to pick up a few extra features. Luckily, Kindletodo is a web app that adds a to-do list, calendar, and notepad to any Kindle. 

Simply visit kindletodo.com on the Kindle's rudimentary browser to get started. The rest is pretty self-explanatory. You can add and check off to-do items, access a simple calendar (though it doesn't handle events, so it's utility is essentially nonexistent), and type away on a notepad if you're struck with a moment of inspiration.

Obviously, this won't be a life changer for many of us, but if you don't have a smartphone, and tend to carry your Kindle around, it could certainly come in handy.

[Via Lifehacker]

Schedule Your Homework Six Weeks in Advance for Ease of Mind

You don't want this. No one wants this. Image courtesy of Flickr user Samat Jain. Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0.

Here at HackCollege, we love a good discussion about planners. However, even if you're a nose-to-the-grindstone planner user, things can sneak up on you, particularly this time of year. I have several friends who, because they do their planning in week-long chunks, have inadvertently wound up cramming for midterms or writing papers over their fall break. It's not that they were wrong--they were just thinking in an inconvenient time frame.

If you've found yourself having difficulty seeing the trajectory of your semester because you can't look ahead at your workload, this hack is for you. Pick a convenient Sunday and write down on your planner all of the non-class things you will be doing for more than a few hours this semester. Think visits from your parents, school breaks, or a formal for your Greek organization--times when you don't want to be doing homework. Then, go through all of your syllabi, writing down what homework you'll be doing on each night for the next six weeks.

Move things around so that--by reading ahead--you can avoid having to do homework during the time when you'll be busy. You can also even out your nightly homework loads so that you don't have nothing to do one day and 400 pages of reading the next. It takes twenty minutes, but by the end of this process you'll know when your tough weeks will be, when you're free to travel or chill out, and when you need to start studying for exams. Best of all, you won't be stuck studying when you won't be able to. Make a note of when you stopped scheduling your homework, and start the process again once you're at that point.

Though not strictly GTD, this follows some of the same ideas--by writing out weeks of homework at a time, you autopilot it. That's one less thing to think about and stress you out, and it means that you can just do what you need to do, secure in the knowledge that you're not forgetting anything.

Readfa.st Lets You Tear Through Articles at Double Speed

It wasn't long ago that I found a service called Spreeder that promised to double text skimming speed by eliminating your subvocalization, or inner reading voice. It seemed like a pretty underground idea at the time, so I'm both surprised and thrilled to see a legitimate-seeming startup attempt to perfect the idea.

Readfa.st takes the idea of Spreeder, but improves on it with a paginated interface that gives you the sense of moving through a page of text, rather than watching word after word whiz by your face with no sense of how much has passed, or when new paragraphs begin. Readfa.st basically greys out an entire page of text except for a string of five or six words that you focus on. As it snakes through the paragraphs, you'll find that you can follow along at much faster speeds than you might expect. In my experience with both, I feel I retain more of the information with readfa.st's approach. 

The service starts you off with a simple exercise to determine your baseline reading speed, and you can take more once you're done to refine your tastes. Once you get into the service, you'll find the usual assortment of badges and sharing features, a news feed and friends list to find content, and a handy bookmarklet to import web articles. 

Unfortunately, it seems the bookmarklet is the only way to import an article at this time, but hopefully they'll allow file uploads or copy/pasted text in the future for some added flexibility. UPDATE: Copy/Paste functionality is available here. My bad.

Still though, if you're anything like me and spend far too much time reading web articles each day, readfa.st could shave a valuable few minutes off your routine.  

[Via CollegeCandy]

Transform a Wii Into the Ultimate Dorm-Friendly Entertainment Machine (Part 2)

This is a Wii emulating a Commodore 64. Your argument is invalid. Photo by Andrew Mason and licensed under CC BY-2.0

Note - if you missed Monday's Part 1 guide to unlocking your Wii's potential, you'll need to catch up here for this post to make any sense.

By now you've had a few days to unlock your Wii and install the Homebrew Channel and Homebrew Browser, so now it's time to stop working and start having fun! So start by firing up the Homebrew Browser and I'll show you what to download.

Read on to find out how to play DVDs, video files, and old-school video games on your newly-unlocked Wii.

Click to read more ...

Transform a Wii Into the Ultimate Dorm-Friendly Entertainment Machine (Part 1)

The Wii is great for foolish-looking gaming, but with a little work it can be a great all-around entertainment machine. Photo by JoshBerglund19 and licensed under CC BY 2.0 The Nintendo Wii is a fun, cheap choice for a video game system, but it isn't usually thought of as a media powerhouse. But with a few fairly simple hacks, it can be the hub of all of your entertainment needs. 

If you don't have a game system yet for your dorm room, you won't have much trouble picking up a used Wii for under $100 on eBay, but a new system (in black!) bundled with Mario Kart can be had now for under $150, so that might be the way to go. You'll also be needing a small SD card; 2GB should be plenty. For certain applications you'll also want a Gamecube controller for navigation. There's no reason you should spend more than $160 or so on this project. 

Disclaimer - This walkthrough involves hacking a Wii and installing unauthorized software. Though I've never had any issues, it's possible that you could end up with a bricked Wii. Attempt at your own risk.

If you want to unlock you Wii's full potential, read on.

Click to read more ...

20 Things Students Want to Tell Teachers and Staff

Students discuss education's biggest shortcomings at NBC News Education NationNeed a laptop? We've teamed up with Intel to bring you the HackCollege Laptop Chooser. If you share the Laptop Chooser, you'll be entered to win a Intel Core i5-powered Samsung Series 9 Notebook!

If you need something to read this Friday morning, check out MindShift's recap of the final panel of this week's Education Nation conference in New York. 

The panel featured several students, and Nnamdi Asomugha from the NFL for some reason, discussing things they want their instructors to know. Some of the suggestions seem a little whiny (You need to love a student before you can teach a student), and not all were college-specific, but several in there will probably strike a chord with HackCollege readers. Some of my favorites are below, but you should click through to see the whole list.

1. I have to critically think in college, but your tests don’t teach me that.

14. We appreciate when you connect with us in our worlds such as the teacher who provided us with extra help using Xbox and Skype. Author's note: if you've ever experienced a teacher helping you over Xbox Live, please let us know how that works in the comments, because I'm at a loss.

18. You need to use tools in the classroom that we use in the real world like Facebook, email, and other tools we use to connect and communicate.

What would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments.

Kindles Are Going to Be More Common on Campus than Cheap Beer

Left: The new $79 Kindle. Right: The Kindle Fire. You'll be seeing a lot of both on campus next semester.

Let it be known that September 28, 2011 was the day that that tablets and e-readers were introduced to the mainstream student market.

E-Ink Kindles

Amazon today announced three new models of its E-Ink based Kindle, including an entry-level model for just $79. For just $20 more, you can pick up a touch screen model, and you can add free 3G to that for a $50 premium. Three Kindle models, from $79-$149, and they are all going to sell like mad.

For those kinds of prices, the device would probably pay for itself over a four year college career through relatively-inexpensive ebook pricing, at least for students who have to buy a lot of novels for classes. There's really no excuse not to get an ereader now.

Kindle Fire

The real star of the show though is the Kindle Fire, Amazon's new 7" touchscreen tablet. It's $200. This will be the first tablet not made by Apple to be widely successful.

It's an Android tablet, but much like the Nook Color (which seems so quaint now), you wouldn't know it. The interface is heavily skinned, and users won't even be able to shop on the Android App Market. Instead, you'll have one-click access to Amazon's App Market and its massive music, video, and book catalogs. Unfortunatley, for the video marketplace you'll really need to get a $79 Amazon Prime subscription ($39 for students), as the discounted free six month student demo accounts don't include video.

The browser is very clever, processing web pages on Amazon's servers, and sending compressed data to the Kindle to improve load times. It's reminiscent of the mobile Opera browser, and it'll be interesting to see how it functions in practice.

I've played around with 7" tablets before, including the original Galaxy Tab and the the RIM Playbook (which has very similar hardware to the Fire), and I've come to realize that for the core competencies of a tablet, a 10" screen is the way to go. For consuming videos, web pages, and images, and especially for PDF class readings, there is a distinct advantage to the larger screen on an iPad.

That said, the Fire's $200 price tag allows it to be a Trojan Horse for college students. Millions of students will return to school in January having received this for Christmas, and I really think it has the potential to make tablet computing a mainstream activity on college campuses. Once students become accustomed to incorporating a tablet into their workflow, they can gradually upgrade to more-expensive 10" iPads or Android tablets. 

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that any of these devices will be available until November, but preorders will be opening today.

Will you be getting your hands on the new Amazon hotness? Let us know in the comments.

[Via This is My Next and Gizmodo]

InternMatch Matches Employers with Student Interns

Though professors and career service offices at your school can help you get matched up with an internship, it'd be nice to have the tools to search on your own as well. Luckily, InternMatch is quickly becoming the go-to source for students in the job market. 

InternMatch hopes to eventually replace the student job fair, and they might be well on their way. Companies looking for new interns can list their positions on the site, and get a full refund if they don't find a suitable candidate in 60 days. Students can easily find suitable positions sorted by city and skill set, and in my limited experience with the site, there definitely seem to be more job listings than I found just a few months ago.

The site has been around for a little while, but things are really getting exciting. First, they just secured a hefty $500,000 round of funding, which should help them continue to lure new businesses. If you'd like to learn more about certain companies, the site also recently launched "Community Pages" that put the spotlight directly on internship programs, rather than generic business details. 

The site only recently stretched its presence to the west east coast, but now the entire continental US is covered, so there's no reason not to try out a quick search if you're an American student. As an added bonus, InternMatch will soon be giving you 50 free Moo Card business cards (if you're unfamiliar, they're very nice) when you create an account. This promotion will begin in the next few weeks, but I don't have the exact date, so keep checking. Happy job hunting!