I have a brother headed off to college in fall, so he’s started thinking about what sort of computer he needs. Over break, we shopped around an Apple Store for an hour or so, comparing screen sizes and specifications. And, resident tech nerd that I am, I asked my brother a few questions about what he uses a computer for in order to get an idea of what he needed. He responded with the usual suspects: writing papers, browsing the web, listening to music and watching movies. In short, he fits the standard user profile.
Reading written work in a web browser is old-fashioned. [No, it isn’t…] Saving an article for later requires storing the link or keeping the tab open, and sharing it requires pasting it into a text or an email. As articles update, we click through different sites and pages sorting out what’s new and what we’ve read, often running up against subscription walls or dead links. In short, it makes you want to just pick up a newspaper at Val.
And so, I present three helpful little tools to make digital reading a bit simpler:
This week I’m going to write about old news. True, I could write about Facebook going public or RIM changing captains or Apple defending its manufacturing practices. I could list off another five tips or recommend a program or remind you all to back up your hard drives. But I’m going to write about old news because it’s about time it stopped being old news.
Music pirates are, like their seagoing namesakes, approaching obsolescence. Back in February, Ars Technica reported that music files account for a marginal 2.9 percent of files managed by common torrent sites. Mojo might linger on college campuses, but we’re just an isolated, compact local network, and requiring users to browse without a global search function — going through peer by peer — works with 1,800, not 18 million.
