Mindful Ink     Life, Living and Productivity

Well, it’s that time of the week again. Long week? Me too.

Sorry about the site troubles yesterday, by the way. Never learned what really went down but it all seems fine now. My hosting provider is usually quite solid, but these things happen occasionally.

Best of the Week:

• Your Academic Homepage
  
• On Reading
  
• 13 Free Music Options
  
• Keeping Track of References

Links of the Week:

• eMusic to offer DRM-Free Audiobooks | Download Squad - this looks very promising. eBooks that are cheaper and without restrictive DRM!
• OpenOffice 2.3 Released - Some improvements and fixes
• Jisho - Japanese to English Translator for the Mac | TUAW - looks very promising for your Asian studies majors out there (and a number of business students, as well!)
• The New Yorks Time Web Edition Now Free! | UneasySilence - The entire paper of record now available online.
• Presentation Tools | AcademHack
• Learn a Foreign Language With Mango | Lifehacker.com - May want to revisit this myself. Mango
• How to Memorize Anything | HackCollege - I’ve seen a lot of memorization techniques loosely like this, it looks promising!
• Writing Essays - Don’t Fool Yourselves | UniversityBlog
• Leela Turns 20, Dances Away Her Weekend, Gives Up Sleep, Falls Deathly Ill and Initiates a Love Affair with Nyquil | Study Hacks - So true, and so funny. I used to have a roommate who would drink a bottle of Nyquil when he got a migraine and just sleep it off for a few days. “Once Nyquil Enters the Scene, Things Can Only Go Downhill…” Truer words have never been spoken.

Fascinating New Things:

Intermz - Intermz’ creator Ted was kind enough to give me a heads up about this upcoming new service. The goal is to teach you something new by associating it with your existing knowledge. Check out the site and see the video to get a better idea of it. This appears to be very promising!

SocialBib is essentially a book trading system so students get their books for only the modest cost of shipping. For those more esoteric book lists this may not be the thing, but for those Chem and Calculus books ever so common (and expensive) this looks like the perfect answer!

The site is free to use and sign-up for. You simply list the books you have to give and the books you need, and SocialBib works out the details. It even has a Facebook application! I really wish such services were available when I was taking gen-ed courses.

SocialBib