A New Computer: Laptop or Desktop?

We’ve looked at which planner would be right for us, and what is the best way to take notes. We’ve done our research, now it’s time to start working! And another question a lot of students ask at the start of the year is what kind of computer would be best for them to buy.

What are you going to do with it?

The most important question to determine what’s the right computer for you is: What are you going to do with it? If you’re using your computer mainly for internet related things, like checking your email, browsing the web, blogging, using social networks and using Web 2.0 applications like Google Docs or if you use it mainly for writing articles, papers and collecting and organizing research material (using DEVONthink Pro for instance), you don’t need the most powerful computer out there. And if you’re planning to buy a laptop, a Macbook will be just fine. 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