A few weeks ago, the good folks at LifeHacker ran a post on a new Linux distro called UberStudent. Readers can learn more about UberStudent and the philosophy behind it at their site (the tour is worth a look).

Given that UberStudent is specifically designed for academic work (calling itself "Linux for Learners") and is, in their words, "Built from Freedom and Strength to Promote Computer Fluency," I couldn't resist taking it for a spin. It does sound very ProfHackerish, after all.

So I downloaded the live CD and went to work installing it on my MacBook. (I installed it in a dual-boot system using these instructions from LifeHacker and ignoring the Windows bits, but all of the screenshots in this post were taken of an installation running in VirtualBox.)

The installation process

Installing UberStudent was simple and straightforward. It involved: (1) Downloading and burning the .iso ima...

Many of us may not (currently) need to think about the longterm scholarly implications of social media. Instead, we might find ourselves plagued by a simpler problem: Where's that tweet I posted six months ago? Or that picture of my kid that I accidentally deleted from my phone before syncing? Or the livetweeting/rubberneck tweeting from that conference I attended a couple of months back. Anyone who uses social me...

Stever Robbins, aka the Get-It-Done Guy, is the creator of a series of popular productivity podcasts, the host of productive "action days" for his online community, and now the author of a new book Get-It-Done Guy's 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More.

One of Robbins's distinctive qualities as a productivity expert is his engaging sense of humor and straightforward approach to solving problems. Rather than fill his pages with lengthy theories or case studies about why we procrastinate or fail to set clear goals, Robbins assumes that as human beings we are all prone to make similar kinds of mistakes, and quickly moves on to offering solutions.

His book is, as you would expect from the title, organized into 9 chapters:

1. Live on Purpose
2. Stop Procrastinating
3. Conquer Technology
4. Beat Distractions to Cultivate Focus
5. Stay Organized
6. Stop Wasting Time
7. Optimize
8. Build Stronger...

What if there was a book that explained how to write end comments on student papers or exams; why peer review processes often avoid, rather than facilitate, sound judgment; how to encourage meaningful group work; and why academic events feature so much ritual flattery? Clifford Nass's The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships doesn't restrict itself to academe—indeed, it claims to offer social rules for almost any situation—but it has a wealth of provocative experiments that any professor might want to reflect upon.

Clifford Nass is the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University; his home department is communications, but he has numerous courtesy appointments, and, crucially, is the founder of the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. He has helped many companies design interactive elements—including, as he recounts here, ...

Two favorite ProfHacker applications are Things, which manages to-do items, and Evernote (see also here), which keeps track of everything else. And both have handy smartphone & iPad applications that extend the services' functionality in a variety of ways. Having separate apps for to-do lists and notes makes sense, but it can also be a little confusing--how, exactly, did I classify that bit of information? Did I put the book's call number in Things or in Evernote? (Hardly an earthshattering conundrum, of course, but everything really is a pebble.

Awesome Note (by BRID) is an iPhone app that addresses this problem. It offers easy ways to take and organize notes, to convert them into to-do lists, and then to process them to done. (It does everything you'd expect an iPhone notes app to do: you can incorporate photos and maps into notes, and can send things via SMS or e-mail.) You can...

When Google's App Inventor beta was announced several weeks ago, I knew this was something we'd want to write about here at ProfHacker. Since Google describes App Inventor as a tool that can be used by non-developers, I asked to be the one to take this post. "Non-developer" describes me quite well. I can write a little HTML, and I can follow basic directions to add a line to a PHP file, but that's the extent of my coding skills. I figured that made me a good guinea pig — is App Inventor really as easy to use as the video on their About page suggests?

Since the rest of the team was agreeable, I immediately signed up for an account, and waited a few weeks to for Google to get back to me. Once I had an active account, I started poking around a bit.

Fortunately, Google maintains a page with links to tutorials and documentation, so it wasn't hard to figure out where to go. Being a newbie, I...

About a month ago, I got hold of a Nook. I was interested in an e-reader primarily for reading journal articles as PDFs. In the interest of saving trees (and wear and tear on my back) I much prefer electronic copies of journal articles to dead tree versions. The problem is, at the end of a day of onscreen reading at a computer, eye strain is really bad (sometimes to the point of seeing squiggly little lines of light). An ereader, I thought, would be much better for my eyes. I was right; I now find myself dealing with significantly less eyestrain after a day of reading.

About the same time that I was considering the Nook, Barnes and Noble started advertising an piece of software that became available August 2nd: NOOKStudy. It looked interesting. Unlike the standard B&N eReader application (for Mac, at least), NOOKStudy supports highlighting and notetaking, and will sync those highlights a...

Whiteboard HD, by Avici, is an app that does exactly what its name promises: It captures the experience of writing on a whiteboard--even better, the results are legible! The app can also be used to create flowcharts.

Whiteboard HD offers flexible and precise drawing tools, and the ability to import images and diagrams from iPhoto. It supports freehand drawing, but it also gives you the ability to manipulate text and standard flowchart-type objects with the iPad's multitouch interface.Here's a sample screenshot:

You can also do quicker, ad hoc images:

(I actually use Whiteboard HD this way all the time, sketching out drills and formations for my Little League and U-10 soccer teams. (Um, at home—I'm not demented enough to break it out for this purpose at practice. The only time I've ever taken the iPad to practice was to show Landon Donovan's goal [YouTube] to the soccer...

More or less every night for the last seven years, I've sung "The Star-Spangled Banner" to our kid as he drifts off to sleep. He looks forward to it, and sings along about half the time. It's a sweet, patriotic moment—except for all the times I blank on the words.

It's not that I hate America, or somehow don't really know the lyrics: I've sung the anthem more than 2500 times over the past seven years—it's engraved in my mind. Every six months or so, though, I lose all recollection of three or fourlines for several nights in a row. (Like these poor souls [YouTube], except with less talent.) After about three nights, the lyrics come back, and everything's back to normal.

While I haven't started forgetting names yet—yet—this lyrical blackout has always felt like an harbinger of middle age, or of absentminded professordom, and so it was with great interest that I picked up Barbara...

Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, can be powerful platforms for discovering new, interesting, and relevant information from people with whom you share interests. (If you're not yet on Twitter, wait: There's a "how to use Twitter productively" post coming up at ProfHacker in a few weeks.) In addition to simple status updates, which can obviously turn into conversations, Twitter makes it easy to share links with your friends and followers. (For a provocative example of how this link-sharing acts as a kind of collective realtime editorial screening process, see Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Now.)

The problem with Twitter is one of scale. I mutually follow around 900 folks, because I write online for three sites, each of which have their own communities (this one, GeekDad, and Blog of a Bookslut. You should follow me, too.) Even if I were on Twitter all the time, which I'm not,...