The internet has made it very easy to get access to music. You can stop by the innumerable music blogs, online radio stations, etc. for your daily fix. Plus, you can transfer music to your mp3 player or hard drive so that you can take your music with you. The internet has also raised an ugly monster in the form of DRM or digital rights management. Users who want to support the record industry often ...

When I want to view a particular video online, I usually try YouTube since that’s where I’m most likely to find what I’m looking for. However, there are times when the video is not available there and I have to search other sites like Dailymotion, Myspace, Aol, etc. It can be very cumbersome to go to each video site, type in your search query, and then sort through the results. You can simplify the entire ...

My Terminus speech is now online here: A Few Things Writers Can Learn from "Harry Potter"Also, I was talking with someone at Terminus about good books on writing, and I realized these are my four all-time favorites:The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. This will teach you how to write a clean, strong sentence and paragraph, and once you master those building blocks, you can build essays,

As far as file-sharing protocols go, BitTorrent has emerged as one of the leading P2P technologies being used. μTorrent is one of the most popular BitTorrent apps around, largely because of its small size and ease of use. While μTorrent used to be an independent client, it has since been taken over by BitTorrent Inc. which has partnerships with almost all the major movie networks. μTorrent has recently been found to contain a very serious ...

Ever since BitTorrent first appeared on the scene, it has become one of the most popular file-sharing methods around. BitTorrent is fast because each file is split into very small chunks and can be downloaded from complete and partially downloaded files. This protocol is especially popular for new releases. The service has its pros and cons. While piracy is rampant, let’s not forget that there are a lot of free, legally available torrent files as ...

Some of you will remember my post a little while back about favorite music players. For most people on Linux, Amarok rules hands down. In fact, Amarok has gained a reputation as ‘the player’ and made a lot of Windows users sit up and take notice, myself included. The developers at Amarok have been working hard over the months to put forth a new version of the software. The result is Amarok 2.0. The new ...

Academic Commons, the site which seeks to to form a community of faculty, academic technologists, librarians, administrators, and other academic professionals who will help create a comprehensive web resource focused on liberal arts education has changed its face. It’s now very easy to add content to this community driven site and to see the latest additions. Nicely done! - Cheryl R. Richardson

In today’s Guardian Book Blog John Sutherland bemoans the decline in space given to book reviews by major newspapers. He’s certainly right that it is happening, and there are related issues such as Publishers Weekly slashing the rates it pays reviewers. But the funny thing is that I’m actually reading more book reviews in British newspapers (or at least their web sites) than ever before, because they are finally starting to review the books I ...

The Beta version of Firefox 3 is already out and it has a whole bunch of new and improved features for you to play with. However, as of now, most Firefox extensions have not been updated by their developers. This means you cannot take your favorite add-ons for a spin in the Beta version. I was checking out Lifehacker and a user called Bugmenot21 has posted a way to use your old extensions in Firefox ...