So many documents an academic comes into contact with are published in PDF and require Adobe Acrobat Reader to open them. But the Acrobat Reader is incredibly slow to load. Version 8 improved things a bit on fast computers but it is still annoying. Enter the free, agile FoxIt reader which just came out with version 2.3 that introduced tabbed browsing (among other innovations).

The US-based Language Log takes issue with the following remark in a column in Times Higher disparaging Wikipedia:

A beta version of a new free tool that integrates with the reference manager Zotero has been introduced. It promises to offer radical improvements to researchers using new technologies.

Vertov » Getting Started

I recorded the first of many weekly Google Tips. This one is about how to customize the display of results.

 

Eee PC is one cheap laptop available in the UK that could be great for education. Now, here's the possibility of another one which at 100 pounds is even more affordable. We'll have to see if it lives up to its promise.

Daisy Whitney in her latest New Media Minute reports on a recent investment craze in online video How-To sites. Whitney focuses on the relatively mundane aspects of how-to: how to kiss, how to cook, etc. but a closer look at the online video space reveals interesting educational opportunities. 

EndNote's main competitor Zotero's main advantage (apart from being free and improving fast) is being able to 'scrape' citations from websites saving us the effort of retyping them. But it can only do that from websites that use a certain standards (such as this site) or that were specifically encoded for Zotero. These now include CiteULike and LibraryThing which have a lot

Now, the good news is that PDFTextOnline can extract text even from very complex documents, and the even better news is that it can do it for free. Unfortunately, it can't get around the curse of PDF that are fixed line ends that make it impossible to properly reuse text without a lot of work. MS Word's autoformat function can help but only with relatively simple documents.

"I blame the educational system" says, like so many, a leading computing pundit, and legend John C. Dvorak in his latest column. This is the core of his argument:

It's Time for Universal Computer Education - Columns by PC Magazine