Huge Online Resource for Education Tools

Today I read on academHacK about this, they call it a “Ridiculously Useful Resource”. It’s the Centre for Learning and Performance Technology’s Directory of Learning Tools. And it’s quite a list! From blogging tools to presentation tools and mind mapping and brainstorming tools. With a note if the described tool is free, a download or a hosted service and if it’s open source.

As a Mac user I have to say I don’t see all my favorite Mac applications in the list, although it contains over 2300 tools. But especially if you’re looking for a hosted service and have a good overview of it’s competitors, this is a great directory to check out. They also have a list with their Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008 selected by 159 ‘learning professionals’. It’s worth taking a look at.

Gain Freedom by Disabling Your Network Connection

Recently I discovered Freedom for Mac OS X. This application disables all wireless and ethernet networking on your computer for up to three hours at a time. When you open the application it asks you ‘how many minutes of freedom’ you would like.

Set the amount, hit ‘OK’ and it you will not be able to use your internet or your wireless network anymore. Afterwards your connections will be re-enabled. You can quit Freedom before the time you set, but this does not get you back on the internet. You will have to restart your computer to for that.

Why would we want to do something like that? Is it so hard to keep yourself focused on your task at hand? Yes, for some people it is! What could be so distracting then? There are more than a few things that can keep you away from what you should be doing. Read more

Speed Up Your Writing: Typing Utilities Compared

Sometimes you stumble upon a piece of software that’s just wonderful, and you wish you knew it before. Software that really enhances the computer interface. The most important piece of software in that category is Quicksilver (also read my recent post about Quicksilver).
Another thing I discovered about a year ago was a tool that finishes your sentences. It’s like a fully customizable version of predictive text input for your computer.

What do those little tools do? They help you type. By setting up a list of sentences you use a lot and connecting those sentences to an abbreviation that is easy to remember, you create ’shortcuts’ for your text. This is great when you get a lot of email and a lot of people are asking you the same thing over and over again. You can also use it for URL’s email addresses, and signatures.
While writing code or inserting html tags this can also save you a lot of time, as you can imagine. Read more

Buy Discounted Software Before You Graduate

Many software developers have special prices for students and teachers. You can sometimes get up to 50% discount on the normal retail price. Looking back I realize how much software I bought after I graduated. Luckily the institute where I studies is now my part-time employer, so I can still use the educational prices when I buy a piece of software. But when you are not in this situation and you know you have to buy software for your professional career, don’t wait until you graduate!

During your studies (especially with technical studies), you are sometimes asked to do a project or make an assignment using a specific piece of software. And specialist software tends to be expensive. At school this is no problem as long as they provide you with a computer that has all the necessary tools installed.
You can also work with open source equivalents of course but these are not always available or as powerful and reliable as you often wish they would be. Read more

How Quicksilver Streamlined My Computing Experience

Quicksilver is definitely my favorite add-on to Mac OS X. Since I discovered it’s power only a bit more than a year ago, I can’t think of using my Mac without it. But it took me a while to convert to it. What’s so great about this quite mysterious application?

No Love At First Sight
Once, somebody told me about this program called Quicksilver and how wonderful it was, so I downloaded it (it’s free!), installed it and tried to use it. I’m saying ‘tried’ because it really wasn’t a great success. Now looking back I think I just didn’t get it. You might say “What’s there to get, it’s just an application launcher, right?”, and I think that’s exactly what caused my struggle with it. I thought it was ‘just an application launcher’ but it seemed so complex to me, especially to set up in the way I wanted it. For just an application launcher there were too many preferences I didn’t get the first time I looked at it, and so I didn’t really take the time to dive in it any deeper. So Quicksilver didn’t get a lot of love from me the first time, I judged as being way too strange and obscure and I threw it in the trash, confused and disappointed. Read more

Switched To WordPress

From this post Streamlined Mind will be running on WordPress. After only three and a half posts I decided that RapidWeaver wasn’t capable of handling my blogging requests well. There were some issues regarding RSS feeds and summarizing posts that apparently could not be addressed, and it lacks simple comments functionality.

As this website is all about streamlining your work-flow, it should of course be running on a platform that is liked by the author, and when set up, will not need any tweaking to make it work every time a post is added. I do still like RapidWeaver. I discovered its power and ease of use only this year, and I think it’s a great application for creating simple and easy-to-manage websites very fast. It’s just not (yet) powerful enough for blogging. So switching to WordPress right away seemed to be the best decision, without having to migrate too many posts. So here we go again!

Free Software For Students

Say a student asks me for advice about buying a new computer. He or she wants to have something powerful and portable and, very important, not too expensive. Lately I always find myself recommending the Macbook. It used to be the iMac, but the Apple laptops are so affordable these days and seriously capable. But what about the software? Isn’t mac software expensive? Well, it can be, but if you do a little research you will find out that there is a lot available, for free!

In this months edition of Wired Magazine I read a great story by Chris Andersen on how companies like Google offer so many great services for free. This doesn’t mean they are not making any money. They’re either making money on a different product they offer, or are investing in what might earn them money in a later state, like their GOOG-411 service. Read more