And, a week or so ago, the New York Times published their Summer Reading issue, which this year left my wife and me pretty cold. And so, in the spirit of last week’s call for summer music recommendations, I thought I’d turn to the generous ProfHacker readership: What are you reading, or looking forward to reading, this summer?

I currently have three things going:

• Unscrewed: Salvage and Reuse Motors, Gears, Switches, and More from Your Old Electronics, by Ed Sobey. Hunting for projects to do with the 10yo.
• A Memory of Light, by Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan. As I have been reading this series for more than a decade, I figured I would see out the finale.
• The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper, by Jonathan Wilson. It’s a weird position.

Come to think of it, all three of these books might well be on my 10yo’s list, too–so I need some quality recommendations for grownups! Please share in comments!

Photo by me. / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

However, if I want to create a simple slide deck for a presentation, I find the interface for PowerPoint — as with many Microsoft Office products — to be too distracting, too time-consuming. I know, I know… If I were to use PowerPoint regularly, the interface would probably start to feel “natural” or “intuitive” to me, but the truth is that I only need to use it about once or twice a year. (And, to be fair, my experience of Apple’s Keynote is pretty much the same.)

Many Options for Presentations

We’ve published a great deal about presentations and presentation software here at ProfHacker. Jason has given advice about how to improve Powerpoint-style presentations, for example. And we’ve covered a wide range of styles and software applications, from pecha kucha, to the “1/1/5 rule,” to Prezi, to using Prezi with Omeka, to Bee Docs Timeline, to Markdown and MDpress (example to be found here), to Slideshark, to Flowboard.

Using Haiku Deck

A colleague recently demonstrated how to use Haiku Deck, a free iPad app for creating and showing presentations. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now in the summer class I’m teaching, and so far I (mostly) love it.

Rather than create a detailed, screenshot-rich tutorial myself, I’ll point you to these posts on the official Haiku Deck blog:

1. “Getting Started.”

2. “Edit Mode“

3. “Presentation Mode“

Like any app, this one has its pros and cons.

Pros

Radical simplicity: It’s just about impossible to create a cluttered, confusing slide with this app. You are restricted to two lines of text or a bullet list of no more than 5 items. From within the app you can search Flick for Creative Commons images to use as a fullscreen background for each slide or choose from a short selection of solid background colors.

Ease of use: The interface for creating and playing presentations is also radically simple. As such, it’s a snap to figure out how to use this app. One especially nice feature is how easy it is to search Flickr from within the app.

Presentation flexibility: If you can’t or don’t want to present a Haiku Deck slide deck from your iPad, you may export the presentation in a format compatible with either PowerPoint or Keynote. Alternatively, if you’ve uploaded your presentation to the Haiku Deck server, you may present the web-based version. And finally, from the web-based version of your presentation, you may export to Slideshare.

Cons

iPad-only: If you don’t have an iPad, you can’t create presentations with Haiku Deck. It’s not available for the iPhone, the iPad Touch, any Android devices, MS Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Granted, there are many iPad apps for which the same could be said. However, I know that not all ProfHacker readers have (or want to have) iPads, so this deserves to be mentioned.

Radical simplicity: This pro may also be perceived as a con. If you want to deviate in any way from the default settings for layout and design, you’re out of luck. (I haven’t found this to be a problem, but I can imagine it might be for others.)

Lack of credit for Flickr photos: While there are certainly many photos on Flickr that feature a Creative Commons license allowing you to use them for a presentation, a significant percentage of those photos have a license that requires you to give attribution to the photographer. “Hey, who took that beautiful photo on slide 5?” Sorry, I have no way of knowing that information if all I’m using is Haiku Deck. A future update of this app would do well to build in the ability to automatically grab that metadata and incorporate it somehow into the presentation.

Occasional hiccups: Although my experience has been mostly positive, I’ve had some difficulty with 2 presentations. Yesterday, I couldn’t save to the Haiku Deck server. Now, I make presentations from my iPad, so it’s not a big deal to me if I can’t save to the server. But those users who want to use another tool for presentations would find themselves completely stymied by such a snafu. You can’t even export to PowerPoint/Keynote until you’ve uploaded your presentation to their server. A future update of this app should allow users to back up and export their presentations without first having to upload them to a possibly-unrelable server.

How about you? Have you used Haiku Deck? What’s your take? Alternately, what are your favorite tools for creating and presenting your presentations? Please share in the comments!

How to use RSS and RSS readers

We’ve featured several posts that demonstrate what you can do with RSS:

• In “Keeping Up Online,” Jason provides a beginner-friendly introduction to RSS.

• Lincoln has explained how to keep up with academic journals using RSS feeds.

• Mark showed us how to hack a library catalog with RSS and SMS.

• As I’ve pointed out, you can use RSS to keep up with your favorite online services.

• From Jason, we’ve learned that you can turn any page into a feed with “RSS scraping.”

Okay, if you’re persuaded that RSS is useful, then you might need an RSS reader. Here are some discussions of how to pick one that’s right for you:

• Back in 2010, Julie asked people to share what RSS readers they use, and

• Just last week Jason asked the same question, given that the very popular GoogleReader is shutting down.

How to send an RSS feed into your email inbox

For many users, unless they’ve set up a dedicated reader, RSS feeds aren’t of much use. Some people, as the reader’s query that inspired this post makes clear, prefer to receive their information updates via e-mail. Fortunately, this is not too hard to accomplish. Here’s a step-by-step guide, using the ProfHacker RSS feed as an example:

Step 1: If you don’t already have one, sign up for a free account at the web service IFTT, also known as “If This Then That”. I wrote an introduction to IFTT soon after it first appeared.) All you need to enter is a username of your choice, an email address, and a password:

Step 2: Once logged in to your account, point your web browser to this page, where I’ve created a “recipe” (what IFTT calls specific, user-created actions) for you to use. You should see a page that looks like this:

If all you want to do is receive each new ProfHacker post by email, then click the blue “Use Recipe” button. You’re done!

If, however, you’d like to choose a different RSS feed, or customize the way the emails appear when they arrive in your inbox, then read on:

Step 3: Click on that triangle to the right of the flag, and you should see two dialogue boxes.

The first one already has the ProfHacker RSS feed entered. (If you’d like to use this recipe with a different RSS feed, this is the place for you to make that change.)

The second dialogue window allows you to customize the subject line, if you like, or the body of the email you receive for each post that is published via RSS. Just click on the big blue plus sign to make any changes you like.

Step 5: Watch those emails start rolling in. Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge) of what my inbox looks like when the ProfHacker RSS feed is delivered by email:

How about you? What are your favorite RSS hacks? Alternatively, what are your favorite IFTTT recipes? Please share in the comments!

Why I Chose the Fitbit Flex

I’ve been interested in personal fitness trackers for some time and had looked at the available options. I nearly bought a Nike FuelBand two years ago, but its activity tracking was tied to the Nike Plus site which I’m not interested in, and it doesn’t track sleep. The Jawbone UP tracks sleep and activity, but was only compatible with iOS devices when I evaluated it. (An Android app was released in March of this year, though it’s still not an option for me, as the app is not compatible with my Android phone or tablet.)

I know a lot of people who use and like other Fitbit trackers (including fellow ProfHackers Adeline and Anastasia), but I really wanted a device that I could wear on my wrist. During a typical day, I change clothes several times (for dog walking, teaching, yoga class, etc) and could easily forget a clip-on device in my pocket. So when Fitbit announced they were developing a wristband, I knew this was the tracker I wanted to try.

What the Flex Does

The Fitbit Flex wristband tracks the number and speed of steps you take throughout the day and when you set it to sleep mode, it monitors your wakefulness and movement during sleep. The Flex synchronizes this data with your Fitbit account via Bluetooth. A wireless Bluetooth USB adapter is included with the device so you can synchronize using any computer and the Flex synchronizes in the background for Bluetooth 4.0 phones, including recent Samsung Galaxy and iOS devices.

From the mobile apps or the website, you can log:

• additional details about your activities, including those that the wristband doesn’t adequately measure, like yoga or weight lifting

• additional periods of sleep if you forgot to set it to sleep mode

• foods eaten (with calorie and nutritional info from the Fitbit database)

• amount of water consumed

• body measurements, including weight, measurements, heart rate, blood pressure, glucose

• a journal of your mood and other health factors

For many of these logs, the online app gives more options than the mobile app does. Graphs of your activity and other logged items are displayed in a graphical dashboard. More sophisticated reports and analysis are available with a premium account (which I don’t yet have, but will probably sign up for).

You can connect your Fitbit account to a variety of other tracking tools and apps, such as MapMyRun or SparkPeople. Fitbit also has its own social features, including badges for reaching certain milestones, message boards, and the sharing of your statistics with friends.

The Flex Experience

The Flex comes with two sizes of a lightweight soft plastic wristband, the synchronization dongle and a USB charging adapter. The tracker must be removed from the wristband to charge its battery. The app alerts you when your battery gets low, about every five days or so. I’ve found synchronization of my data with my Fitbit account to be very easy, using either Bluetooth via my Samsung tablet and or with the Fitbit dongle attached to my computer.

After about an hour, I completely forgot that I was wearing the wristband, as it is comfortable and doesn’t snag on things or get in my way. (Fitbit recommends wearing it on your non-dominant hand for more accurate measurements.) By default, the tracker is set to a daily goal of 10,000 steps, but you can change the number or set it to a distance goal instead through the website. During the day, you can tap on the wristband to see your progress towards that goal, displayed as a sequence of 1-5 lighted dots. When you reach that step goal, the wristband lights up and vibrates briefly.

Personal Tracking, Personally Speaking

As I’ve suggested before, logging information about something, whether it’s time, diet, or physical activity, automatically raises your awareness. The Flex is not a substitute for a heart rate monitor or GPS runner’s watch, both of which I’ve used for specific training goals. Rather, the Flex is great for assessing and perhaps increasing your level of physical activity throughout the day. Many researchers point to the health benefits of integrating activity into your daily life, and the Flex helps you see how much difference parking futher away from the office or taking an extra walk in the evening can make.

I already work out regularly and take active breaks throughout my day, but even so I’ve found the Flex has encouraged me to be even more active, which helps counteract the sedentary nature of academic work. I’ve been using a standing desk for about 18 months (like fellow ProfHackers Ryan, Konrad, and Lincoln), and often walk in place while I’m working. Since wearing the Flex, I’m more likely to walk a bit more during light-attention activities. (And I’ve even begun eyeing a TreadDesk, though my current setup is working well for now.) It’s very motivating to see how small bits of activity throughout the day really add up.

I haven’t used any of the social features of the Flex, so I can’t report on that. I also don’t use it to track my diet, as its food entries are always linked to calorie counts. I prefer using a free-form journal space to log food when I need to. I do like using just one app to keep track of body measurements, blood pressure, etc along with activity, where I used to use several different ones.

I was particularly interested in the sleep tracking aspects of the Fitbit Flex. I am a polyphasic sleeper by nature and I was very curious to know more about the quality and quantity of my sleep. The Flex is comfortable to wear while sleeping (I don’t notice it at all) and the data I’m collecting confirms that I have better sleep quality when I follow my natural sleep patterns. I can also examine how my sleep patterns correlate with other aspects of my work or exercise schedule.

Overall, I’m very happy with the kind of information the Fitbit Flex offers me about my activity and sleep behavior. It’s non-intrusive and easy to use, and although some of the data may not be as detailed as one could collect with a heart rate monitor, for instance, I wouldn’t be comfortable wearing my HRM all day, which requires a chest strap. I’ll continue to use the HRM for specific workouts, and wear the Flex throughout my day for general data collection and motivation.

Do you use a personal fitness tracker? Let us know in the comments!

[my CC licensed images of my Flex.]

Getting into the writing habit

Trying to kick-start a summer writing habit? Check out Billie’s Writers’ Boot Camp: Summer Writing Edition 2012. Better yet, check out the whole Writers’ Boot Camp series.

Collaborating

Readers looking to do some collaborative writing (and who are looking for something other than Google Drive) might want to peruse Konrad’s Wish List for a Powerful Collaborative Writing Platform, and check out his review of Draft.

Tools

Whether writing solo or in collaboration with others, it’s important to have tools that work well for you. In addition to the standard word processors, there are several other options that may be suitable, depending on your needs:

• Ryan’s covered Scrivener, which is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It can be very useful for long-form writing—especially when working with small segments that may need rearranging.

• Those who need to produce text that can easily be converted from one format to another might want to peruse Lincoln’s introduction to Markdown and Mark’s Writing in Markdown with Gonzo.

• Finally, Lincoln provides a list of the advantages he sees in using a text editor for composing, rather than a word processing application.

How’s your writing going this summer? If you have any motivational tips or favorite tools to share, let us know in the comments!

Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Pete O’Shea.

In this Weekend Reading, I catch ProfHacker readers who may have missed the debate up on the MOOC debacle. This Reading focuses on some of the most significant posts and articles that I’ve come across. The Reading is not meant to be comprehensive, but to give an overview to the major issues within the debates.

• “The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform.” Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) has been a significant critique of the MOOC movement. In this comprehensive essay he gives some background to the original history of MOOCs in terms of an original class by George Siemens and Stephen Downes where a class of 25 students was opened up to 1,500 online participants, and which “was part of a long-running engagement with connectivist principles of education.” Unlike this original vision of the MOOC, however, Bady argues that “If the MOOC began in the classroom as an experimental pedagogy, it has swiftly morphed into a process driven from the top down, imposed on faculty by university administrators, or even imposed on administrators by university boards of trustees and regents.”

• “What Can MOOCs Teach Us About Learning?” On her HASTAC blog, Cathy Davidson talks about what she finds hopeful about the future of MOOCs: “We are taking baby steps with the medium right now, and, fortunately, a lot of dedicated, earnest, serious thinkers are asking what MOOCs can teach us about learning so that these first steps will help us taking gigantic, important leaps in the future.   We are collecting the data, keystroke by keystroke, that will help us understand more and more about what modes of learning work in what situation and for whom.  We will soon know more about what motivates students to stay in a course, what makes them drop (the MOOC drop out rate tends to be very high), what motivates them to learn in the first place?  What motivates them to form peer discussion groups, online or off, around course content?  How many go from an introductory course to a deeper one–and why?  In other words, the quantity of data and the increasing sophistication with which we, aided by the machine, can read and analyze and parse and visualize data, means that we are learning more about the minutia of learning now than we have ever known before.    If we get over the hype of the MOOC at this moment, if we can think about this as an initial foray into a major breakthrough in knowing how we know, in metacognition, great new forms of interactive learning are possible.”

• “An Open Letter from the Philosophy Department at San Jose State to Michael Sandel” Sandel is a Harvard professor who created a MOOC SJSU faculty were encouraged to use in their curriculum. In response, the Philosophy program writes: “In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience, we believe that having a scholar teach and engage with his or her own students is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students.”

• “Coursera’s Contractual Elitism.” This Inside Higher Ed article reports that Coursera has admitted to being “contractually obligated to turn away the vast majority of American universities”: “The Silicon Valley-based company said to be revolutionizing higher education says in a contract obtained by Inside Higher Ed that it will “only” offer classes from elite institutions – the members of the Association of American Universities or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America – unless Coursera’s advisory board agrees to waive the requirement.”

• “Coursera Jumps the Shark.” In which Coursera admits that MOOCs are not a sustainable business model, and it will plan to instead compete with Learning Management Systems such as Blackboard: “Remember when Coursera – the world’s largest purveyor of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – was going to disrupt higher education, and put hundreds if not thousands of public institutions out of business? I know it’s hard to cast your mind back all of eighteen months, but try. Actually don’t.  Because it’s all over. Yesterday, Coursera did a weird strategy about-face by announcing that, rather than competing with public colleges, it’s going to start competing with Blackboard instead.”

• “MOOC HQ” A curated page of links on MOOCs by Hilary Culbertson of HASTAC. “Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been making waves ever since Sebastrian Thrun and Peter Norvig’s course on AI enrolled 165,000 students in 2011. Key questions include: How does the massive scale of these classes impact the pedagogy? What is the place of a MOOC in a traditional higher education curriculum What kinds of learning can MOOCs supplement or replace? What makes a MOOC innovative (in other words, how do we leverage the MOOC form to innovate rather than perpetuate pedagogical practices)? How do we address the problems raised by MOOCs, such as unprecedented incompletion rates? (And — perhaps most importantly — are these problems really problems?) As the discussion around MOOCs evolves alongside the MOOCs themselves, the HASTAC community remains deeply engaged. This collection is designed to highlight posts on www.hastac.org about MOOCs, online learning, and digital pedagogy.”

MOOC Alternatives

• Hybrid Pedagogy’s MOOC MOOC (@hybridped), a self-generated, learner-focused MOOC about MOOCs, in which anyone can participate. MOOC MOOC starts TOMORROW (June 15^th) at 12am EST and ends on the same day at 11.59pm EST. 24 hours of MOOCs about MOOCs: “MOOCification is really a kind of pillaging. You take what works about MOOCs, the best pedagogy they open up, apply it to more traditional classes, and then politely (or not so politely) spit out the rest.”

• FemTechNet’s DOCC, or “Distributed Online Collaborative Course,” an attempt to redesign MOOCs according to feminist principles: “In the following, Alex Juhasz and Anne Balsamo discuss FemTechNet, the network they have activated to produce the first distributed online collaborative course (DOCC) that demonstrates not only innovative thinking about emergent technologies, but also addresses — as its central topic — the long histories of feminist engagements with technology and cultural innovation.” Also see the DOCC information page on the FemTechNet website.

Image Credit: Hybrid Pedagogy

What are your thoughts on MOOCs? What other articles would you recommend? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

From that point of view, it is perhaps a bit off-topic to include Kingdom Rush Frontiers as a a “digital distraction.” The original Kingdom Rush didn’t so much divert your attention briefly to help you pass the time as plunge you into a k-hole of intensely focused tapping as you build towers and deploy reinforcements in to prevent monsters and demons from overrunning the kingdom.

Fundamentally, Kingdom Rush is a tower defense game. What’s fun about Kingdom Rush is that choices and timing matter. You can build four different types of towers: mage guilds, barracks, artillery, and archer towers, each of which has a variety of specialized options. You can also periodically rain fire from the heavens or summon peasants freedom-loving men and women to your aid. The original combined simple goals (“keep the monsters from reaching their goal”) with a variety of engaging levels and with just enough tactics to stay fresh.

That was the old game–which, if you haven’t played, is absolutely worth it. The new game, Kingdom Rush Frontiers keeps the same basic structure–the same four generic tower types, but gives them new dress and slight variations on the powers. Here’s the trailer:

If you enjoyed the original, you will definitely waste hours and hours have a great time with Kingdom Rush Frontiers. You move from shipwreck-strewn beaches to deserts, jungles, underground caverns, and more. You face alien predators, shamans, pirates, lizard creatures, dragons, and angry gorillas, and you fight them with, among other things, mechanized walkers that deploy heat-seeking missiles. Is fun. In addition to the fresh towers, powers, monsters, and locales, there are some entertaining easter eggs sprinkled throughout. (You haven’t lived until a Tusken Raider shoots an enemy for you from a desert wasteland.)

Kingdom Rush Frontiers is $4.99 for the iPad version, $2.99 on the iPhone. Be sure to take breaks for food and sleep, though!

Do you have a game or other digital distraction you’re enjoying at the moment? Let us know in comments!

Photo is a screenshot of Kingdom Rush Frontiers.

Last month, on episode 43 of the CMD+Space podcast, Myke Hurley and Merlin Mann (who we love) briefly mentioned what they characterized as the flaws or irrelevance of tenure in a modern world. It’s outdated, it distracts from teaching, and so on. It was mostly rooted in a pretty tenuous anecdote from Merlin’s undergrad days, about a teacher who in effect seemed to be threatening to hold her department hostage by refusing to teach intro classes. I’m not going to beat up on the anecdote too much, because he admits he didn’t really have all the facts. But Myke and Merlin were in agreement that tenure’s a weird, irrelevant thing, and professors should basically give it up and just teach.

Not five days later, on episode 120 of his regular Back to Work podcast with Dan Benjamin, Merlin took up the topic of “safety nets,” asking listeners to imagine how their lives might change (or not) if they came into enough money to set themselves up for life. Curiously–and although he plugged his appearance on CMD+Space, Merlin did *not* return to the topic of tenure, which is arguably the ultimate safety net.

Part of the problem is that people (unfairly) imagine tenure as a hammock rather than a safety net. I think people lose track of it because the amount of money involved is so trivial relative to, say, winning Powerball or having Yahoo buy a startup you were instrumental in helping to launch. But tenure does imply a certain kind of job security that ought to be similarly freeing.

But it’s not. Lots of people report securing tenure as somewhat anticlimactic. To an extent, this is a consequence of the fact that you can usually–not always, but usually–figure out how the decision is going to go fairly early on in the process. But that’s only part of it. There’s another part that also thinks, “is this all there is?”

It turns out that this has everything to do with safety nets. Merlin’s point on the show is that people usually imagine that their lives will be utterly transformed–but only in good ways. (Our record deal hits, and we’ll be bigger than Elvis!) Not only do you get a whole host of new problems that you probably never considered, but you’ll also get to bring all the baggage that you had before your safety net arrived. To cite an example on the show, after Elvis became the King, he was still just a mama’s boy from Tupelo, Mississippi.

In the Back to Work episode, Merlin argues that we think about transformation all wrong. Instead of thinking, “well, I work like this now, but when I get my movie check, I’ll be totally different,” we need to plan and act now to prepare for the as-yet-unarrived happy event. It’s unlikely, he points out, that you’re likely to go from having a normal job to, say, painting or writing all day, and to have that be a rewarding experience, unless you already are the sort of person who paints or writes.

There’s a similar problem about tenure. It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “Well, I’ll do this for now, but when I get tenure, *then* I’ll do something awesome.” One problem with that is, as a noted philosopher has observed, “We are what we repeatedly do.” Spending six years as an assistant professor working one way, and then expecting things to be a different way, is a recipe for unhappiness.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick wrote about one aspect of this a couple of years ago:

That kind of mentoring is our duty, but one that too few of us are fulfilling. Too many young digital humanists find themselves cautioned away from the very work that got them hired by well-meaning senior colleagues, who now tell them that wacky digital projects are fine on the side, or once the work necessary for tenure is complete.

In giving that advice, we run the risk of breaking the innovative spirit that we’ve hoped to bring to our departments. And where that spirit isn’t broken, untenured digital scholars run the risk of burnout from having to produce twice as much—traditional scholarship and digital projects—as their counterparts do.

You can’t count on becoming later the academic you want to be. You need to start laying the groundwork now, so that when you have tenure you are poised naturally to build on your success and to pay forward the mentoring debts you incurred along the way. It’s probably true that some projects are of such a scale that it’s hard to imagine undertaking them as a grad student, postdoc, or assistant professor–but even there you can always start now. Ambition needs to be exercised regularly.

And while I’ve framed this in terms of research, the same holds true for teaching. Junior faculty are often advised to teach just well enough to be promoted, but no better. This is defensible advice, certainly, but it also makes it harder than you’d think to improve your teaching post-tenure. Not only does it require fresh effort, but it requires you to unlearn everything you’ve spent six years telling yourself about your institution’s priorities. So not only are you out of practice at improving your teaching, but at some level you’re probably also convinced–quite possibly correctly–that your university doesn’t care.

The less said about service & governance the better. If you are largely screened from service work as a junior faculty member, then you are likely to assume it’s not important or to resent it as an imposition after tenure.

Having a tenure-track job is a position of remarkable privilege in the modern university, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Using some of that privilege to bring the future into existence *now*, rather than waiting for it to be arrive on its own, can be a forceful way to turn that privilege to good account. As always, Merlin has some helpful strategies for thinking through these issues, though they’re not really in an academic context, so give the episode a listen.

Photo “safety net” by Flickr user iamchad / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

The primary feature of the new inbox is the automatic filtering of messages into tabs: primary, social (for notifications from your social networks), promotions (ads), and updates (for mailing lists). The updated apps for iOS and Android function similarly.

I’ve been using the new features for several days now, and I’ve been reasonably impressed so far. The categorization has been accurate, and the labels and filters I’d set up previously have continued to work well.

Though I still prefer to use Postbox when working at my own computer, I’ve appreciated using the web interface when using someone else’s, and I’ve definitely found the mobile version of the new inbox to e very helpful in sorting through my email quickly.

What about you? If you’ve given GMail’s new inbox organization a try, let us know what you think of it in the comments.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by crazyneighborlady]

A few ground rules to start us off:

• By now, everyone probably has an opinion about the Daft Punk record, so we can skip that.
• Similarly, it seems likely that The National’s Trouble Will Find Me and Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City are adequately hyped.
• I think I agree with Al Madrigal about “Thrift Shop.”

iTunes asserts that my most-played recently-acquired stuff is from two records: The SoSoGlos’s Blowout (see “Son of an American” on Letterman), The Joy Formidable’s Wolf’s Law (try “Cholla”). Plus, it almost goes without saying, the Game of Thrones song by The Hold Steady. I also mostly like the new Jason Isbell record.

What about you? What are you listening to in these early summer days? Let us know in comments!

(Next week: summer books!)

Photo “The Hold Steady at Hartford’s Arch Street Tavern” by me. / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0