Our third Cool Tools day happened on January 25th, 2011. Thanks to everyone who came out to learn/share about some neat technological tools! If you missed the event, well here’s a summary of what went on (courtesy of our ASIS&T@UBC Secretary, Jessie).

Presenters and their “Cool Tools” (Also available as a PDF)

Catie “Library Value Calculator” & “FreeFoodUbc”
Niagara Falls Public Library Value Calculator

• Calculate the value of your library use
• It doesn’t subtract your fines or other glitches
• You can see the value of your library card

FreeFoodUbc

• “Freefoodubc” Twitter account
• Not interactive, instead just like calendars of where to find free food on campus at any time
• Kept up to date

Bonnie’s – “Web of Trust (WOT)“

• communitive based firefox add-on
• “revenge on malicious websites” and promoting safe websites, etc.
• Uses colour codes (ex. green means ‘safe’)
• Good for warning against sites with viruses/malware etc.
• Informative video available on youtube
• video is called “WOT: Web of Trust demonstration”

Andrew’s – “Readability” & “Readefine”
Readability

• Reformatting text tool
• Designed to find large chunks of text, highlight it, crop it, and bookmark it
• Can have small glitches in cutting out part of text at the beginning or the end of
  the text (because mistaken for advert image etc.)
• Is a Firefox (or Chrome) add on
• Can change how the text displays on your browser

Readefine

• Need Adobe AIR
• Or can use in web browser
• Can do RSS, html, etc.
• Will sync with Google Reader
• Works really well with keyboard
• Can upload files, copy and paste text
• Both tools can be used to change the display of online readings (like news sites, etc.), and are nice for net books

Justin “Quora“

• Alternative search engine
• Need to login
• Since it is a social search “asking questions and getting answers” instead of keywords
  etc.
• Gives guidelines on formatting questions
• It is other users answering queries (not spider bots)
• Place your queries according to topic categories (different users can follow different topics)
• Can ask obscure, difficult to Google questions – and people will offer synthesized answers
• Not very efficient
• New and currently getting a lot of buzz in the tech community
• There are a lot of opinion questions asked, library topics, many things to search and
  follow

Yolanda’s – “linear footage calculator” & “Skim”
linear footage calculator

• Good for archival/preservation purposes (and class assignments!)
• Tool meant for measuring boxes etc.

Skim

• pdf annotator for Mac
• Highlight, make boxes around things, anchor notes, works on a lot of pdfs, can
  take notes and export them out other document

Schuyler “GoodReader” & “Dropbox”
GoodReader

• Free reader for the iphone (also $2.99 in the app store)
• Some issues – trouble getting annotated documents from the phone to the
  computer
• Works well with dropbox!
• For iPad use – good for changing documents into pdfs and then annotating them

Dropbox

• Online cloud based storage system
• Organization tool – keeping all of your files, folders etc. in one place and accessible
  from any computer with internet access
• Efficient back up strategy
• If you get others to sign up from an invite, you then get extra file space
• Starts off with 2GB free – which is plenty for pdfs/school readings

Again, thanks to everyone for showing up, and to the presenters who piped up in the presentation. We’ll be having another Cool Tools day before the semester is done, and we’d love to hear from you.

If you missed our Cool Tools Day in October, well, I’m sorry. Here’s what we talked about (also available as a PDF). Just to show there’s no hard feelings.

Bronwyn’s “iTunes & Audio Podcasts”
Visit iTunes website for free available podcasts including:

• TechNews TodayThis Week in Tech (TWIT)
• MacBOOK weekly
• This week in Google
• Search Engine – net neutrality and copyright
• Spark from CBC radio – lifestyle and tech

Alex’s “Pure Text“
For Windows users:

• Application stevemiller.net/puretext
• Keyboard shortcuts that allow you to maintain font and formatting when copying & pasting text

For Mac users:

• Visit alternativeto.net (similar to the process of using Firefox add-ons)
• Browse site for applications you want to use
• Select application and then click on “Visit Website”
• Download application to your browser

Franklin’s “Data Visualization: Many Eyes“

• Website: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/
• Good place to find data sets
• Good place to share data sets (warning: no way to keep data sets private so careful about uploading data sensitive documents)
• Can do tricks with mapping
• Provides options for visualizing data (example: using tag clouds, word trees, bubble chart, etc.)
• Alternative website: visualizing.org (It is free, but new – so it is still being built)

Will’s “UBC Blogs & UBC Wiki”
UBC Blogs:

• Digital Learning Commons
• All you need is your CWL to make a blog or website
• Social media aspect to blogs are groups, forums, profiles, friends, etc.
• About 6000 people are using the service now
• Built using WordPress
• Supports custom CSS in themes
• Consider it a content management platform (rather than a blog platform)

UBC Wiki:

• Functions on Media Wiki software
• It is not private, anyone can edit
• Based on philosophical ownership, not structural
• Your CWL should last “forever”

Jonathan’s “WilsonWeb”

• Audio capability for reading/hearing articles off of WilsonWeb interface
• Can download audio files as well as text
• Can listen to audio while following along with the html text (words are highlight as they are read)

Trevor’s “OneNote“

• Virtual notebook
• Can organize into binders – notebooks – pages
• Can type anywhere on screen/page (not line-based)
• Can keep all different kinds of documents/files in one page (so that you have all related documents in one place)
• Can link from it
• Takes good snapshots of pages & will include url of html pages (only difficult doing this with pdfs)
• Can keyword search through ALL One Note documents at once
• Autosaves along the way (no save button)
• Create shared notebooks
• Can draw on page
• Saves time in filing
• visitmix website – works with silverlight

Schuyler’s “Search Shortcuts in Google Chrome”

• Edit search engines
• Can set up keyword shortcuts for different sites
• Add to google toolbar add to chrome search
• Example: type “gs” for google scholar
• Might be able to do sim in FireFox
• Another tool is Yubnub
• Can set Yubnub into Chrome search bar and execute yubnub commands directly into your search

Schuyler’s “Dropbox & GoodReader“

• Backup option
• Stored in the cloud
• Can stop using usb keys (all you need is access to the internet)
• Can invite collaborators to your folders
• For iphones, load GoodReader to navigate into your Dropbox account

Frankin’s “Portable apps“

• Website: Portableapps.com
• Legitimate site
• Can store on usb key without having to download applications onto the computer’s hard drive
• Good way of getting around restrictions of downloading