Brackets! - HackCollege Season 3, Episode 6

Chris and Kelly are back from spring break this week as they cover filing taxes as a student and how to hack your NCAA March Madness brackets.

Topics this week:

• YouTube launches a special EDU channel.
• Brown exposes the identity of all of the students filing for financial aid.
• Blackboard releases their iPhone application.
• Chris interviews Eileen Brown from H&R Block on how students should file their taxes.
• Kelly shows you how to hack your NCAA brackets with BracketScience.

Butler: Catering to your every need.

Butler is probably my favorite free productivity application for Mac OS X. It is completely customizeable and has a plethora of different features that are extremely helpful. It allows you to place any icons, search bars and a whole bunch of other nonsense on your menu bar and gives you access to hot corners just like expose. 

The hot corners will give way to pretty much anything you think of. The Macworld review can be seen here, using menus. This is also my choice but with each corner having two separate points, you could have up to eight hotspots that go to bookmarks, searches, or bring up menus for your homework or pron. The best part about that is isn't sensitive like expose because it makes you click the hot corner so the there isn't any unwanted processes on your computer. 

The docklet is another cool feature in Butler, but it's kind of small. Most of us are used to being able to resize everything. It can give you instant access to anything on your computer. 

It has awesome customization with iTunes. Having the pause and skip button in the menu bar is a blessing. It's just another way I don't have to go back to the actual application to turn my music off. The floater that comes up to tell you what going down offers up a good amount of info too. It tell you the basics of the song, the rating as well as the volume. This is more than Sizzling Keys or Bowtie can offer. 

If you can bring the bundle the websites you reading into an aggregator like Google Reader or Bloglines set that as an hotcorner while coupling this with Facebook, Twitter and your school email, you'll have all your social media and internet covered in about twenty minutes. This could leave you staring at the screen wondering what to do with yourself cause you don't have an excuse not to do your work. Now you can do your work!

Live from SXSW!

Chris and Kelly were live in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. Check out the show and the giveaways! Special Thanks to:

• Radar.net
• Pantech

Your Greatest Asset in College

Photo Courtesy: Flickr User bsliFriendliness helps in life outside of college, but it definitely has a special place inside of it. Whether you start your first semester, or coming back for a new semester; being friendly will help you in more ways than one. 

It's a lot easier to tell someone who you are friends with to turn the music down, at three in the morning, when you have a test at 8 a.m. the next day, rather than someone whom you have a mutual hatred with. Now, you can't be friends with everyone but you can at least try. Any conflict can be handled much easier this way. 

Outside of the dorms, friendliness can lead to better grades. If you can start making friends in you major then, it will be easier to create study groups as well as work on group projects because you'll probably be seeing the same faces again depending on the size of your school. Now, the first day of classes is definitely awks to the max but here are some tips for you to bridge starting relationships with classmates:

1. Sit next to someone you don't know... and talk to them. 

It's kind of a no-brainer but if you get to class first  chances are you'll have at least one desk or table between the next person, providing you're late.  If you are outgoing like this then you could ask if they want to study with you. When you skip a class because it was your 21st birthday, it'll help if you have friends in your class to get notes from. 

2. Take major classes together. 

The more you study with one person, the more they learn how you learn. If you take numerous classes with them then you can depend on them more and vice versa. The long hours you spend in the library might be fun because you'd be doing it with someone you enjoy spending time with. 

3. Be Dependable.

People don't like it when they're studying with someone and they don't bring anything to the table. Having people to depend on when it comes to studying also means they depend on you. Put in the same amount of work as you would have if you'd been studying by yourself. 

Finally, be friendly to the people who work at the University. Chances are you'll see the same people working at the food counters, lunch trucks and coffee shops for the duration of your time there. If you're friendly to them then they'll definitely reciprocate. This goes for custodial staff as well. They do an awesome job and are usually pretty cool once you get to know them. 

How has being friendly helped your college experience? Comment below or email me at mike@hackcollege.com

Organize Your PDF Files with Papers

In my first semester of college, the documents folder on my computer grew from a measly 300MB to its current size of 9.03 GB. The culprit? The thousands of lecture slides and journal articles in PDF format that students are bombarded with only a regular basis. Sure, it’s easy to file them away in the appropriate class folder on your computer, but what happens a month or a year later when you try to find that key quote for essay among a myriad PDFs. I introduce to you, Papers.Photo property of Flickr user Max_au

Papers is a Mac only PDF manager that will change the way you work. It allows you to catalogue, tag and search within your PDFs. Papers lets you search for and download articles from a dozen of the most popular online  repositories. If you are science student, especially one who is conducting research, this is heaven. Papers will let you organize your articles by author and will search the repositories for any articles written by the same author. You can also group your PDFs by collections, allowing you to organize files from for a specific class or project in a group. Papers supports PDF annotation and provides space to jot down notes along side the paper you are reading. Papers’ UI is beautiful, it has a logical workflow and is quick and stable. There is an iPhone/iPod Touch companion to papers that allows you sync articles with your Mac, as well as take take notes and search PubMed. Papers is relatively expensive at $45.00, and $9.99 for the iPhone app. However, I do suggest giving the 30 day trial a shot, you may find it to be an indispensable tool. 

Have you been faced with similar file management issues in college? Post your solutions in the comments section.

How-to: File Taxes as a Student

Tax day (April 15) is approaching fast for American sutdnets. Every year around this time, I wonder: what the hell am I doing? Usually a small check to some person with suffixed acronyms takes care of my problems. Thankfully this year, GoCollege has put together a great guide on filing taxes as a student.

Check it out: College Student’s Guide to Taxes

Austin, Get Your Party On

Our sweet flyer

So I'm really excited. This Thursday in Austin, HackCollege will be throwing its first party ever. It's been a dream of all of ours to be able to do things like this. Thanks to our friends and loyal sponsor Radar.net, HC will have its first party this Thursday at Cuatros in Austin.

If this goes well, who knows? Maybe we'll drop out and just throw parties.

The Deets:

What: Radar.net presents the HackCollege SXSW Party [Facebook Event]

Where: Cuatros, 24th and San Gabriel [Google Map]

When: 7pm - 10pm (or later?)

Why: To Make Party

How: Giving away a SXSW Gold Pass, 2 Pantech Matrix Pro phones, HackCollege mugs, Radar swag and free beer for the first 250 guests. The party is all ages.

So if you're in Austin for SXSW or attend UT, come out this Thursday. Put your party shirt on.

Hack a Rave

Image Courtesy: assembly.orgRaves are awesome, and it's not just because it's an excuse to drop acid (disclaimer: I don't drop acid.) but because you can use these hacks to make them even more awesome. Most of them deal with lights and stuff so you'll need to have some tools before hand. This hack is definitely more usable if you live in an apartment with more room than a traditional dorm room. 

Light up Vodka

Instructables member ermak777 has put together a video detailing how to make your alcohol glow. This is a simple hack that literally involves taping and twisting wires around an LED bulb to make it glow. The end product is pretty sweet. If you can put just one of these behind the bar it's going to look how do you say: "Off the chain."

LED Light Sabers

Now, light sabers are good for any occasion but they are especially useful in the dark corridors of a house holding a rave.  This can be as cool as it is functional. Thanks to Instructables member Bongmaster there is a step by step process that is a little sophisticated but it is explained rather well. This is also a reusable alternative to glow sticks.  If you want to reuse a glow stick you can just put it in the freezer and it'll maintain the glow it had when you put it in there.

Other Requirements and Extras

Of course you will have to have a black light. You can purchase a black light at places like Party City or something. On the subject of the black light, if you are hosting, encourage you guests to wear white because that'll play nice with it.

Some places on line have glow in the dark hair gel if you want to go all out an give each guest a dab. This could definitely make your part more picturesque. The page also includes some body paint, just in case things get a little crazy.

On the music front, Daft Punk while splicing in some Girl Talk would be pretty decent. Unfortunately bumping Come On Get Higher isn't exactly rave material. The Roots are pretty psychadelic sometimes so if you are going for a more of sixties rave than that techno rave that'll work too along with any psychadelic rock fromt the sixties.

Have any other rave tips for fellow readers? Comment below or email me at mike [at] hackcollege [dot] com.