Apps That Will Surely Kickstart Your Collage Social Life

You're now in college. At last, you're free to do anything you want your parents have been restricting you to do when you were in high school. Now, you can have all the liberty to have all the party and booze, like the ones you see in the movies. But most of all, don't forget that college life is also about studying and learning new and worthwhile stuffs, too.

Aside from that, college life can also be confusing and challenging at the same time. It can be difficult, at first, to find your footing in a social way. Thanks to technology, you can easily touch the World Wide Web with your own hands. Here is a collection of apps that will surely kick start your college social life.

Twitter

Don't be the only person in class who isn't updated with the world events. Use Twitter to keep yourself in the loop in both the academic and social aspects of your college life. In today's contemporary classrooms, you may even be asked to participate in class discussions via Twitter.

The app is available for free for iOS and Android devices.

Between

Are you someone whose attempting the long-distance relationship course? Kudos to you because that's not a small task to deal with. Relationship app Between can help you ease the separation anxiety by letting you send messages, voicemails, memos, and photos. A private timeline makes it easy to reminisce about the good old days with your significant other or loved one(s).

Between can be downloaded for free by iOS and Android users.

Skype

Video interviews are not going away any time soon -- so you might as well get a heads up now. Microsoft's Skype is a reliable way to connect with faraway family and friends via text, voice, and of course -- video.

It is available for free on iOS and Android devices.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn and all its nifty features makes connections a breeze -- for better or worse, college is a time of both personal and professional connections.

The LinkedIn app is available for free on the Internet, of course, but you can also get it for free for iOS and Android devices.

Afterlight and Over

These days, anyone with an Instagram account can call themselves an amateur photographer of sorts. But with these two apps, you can even make more beautiful pictures to put on your blog or social media accounts. Afterlight is an app that has lots of shape, formatting, and filters to make your pictures really beautiful. And Over is an amazing app that lets you put text on your pictures. What makes these two photo apps stand out specifically are that they are super sleek and classy, so really nothing that you do to your photos with both of them makes your pictures ten times better looking. Of course, these are more for your average Facebook/Insta use and not for professional photography per say, but anyone of any expertise can use them to make pictures really nice. With these apps, you won't be able to stop editing.

Meetup

Let's face it, when you graduate into the real world, you're not going to have all your friends living within a mile radius for you to hang out, party, or go to football games with. So realistically, if you are new to the place or the city, or even just interning for a couple of months somewhere, it helps to join a group who has similar interests or backgrounds. And that may sound terrifying, or Tinder-esque, but the whole point is to find an entire group of people to hang out with and get to know. So maybe consider taking a buddy with you, or ask around about activities, but give it a try so you'll get used to your new home.

Click here to download Meetup for free.

Websites Will Be Easier to Read With the Help of These Tools

The Internet offers a huge amount of information regarding any topic that can possibly exist, but every website has its own way of showing the people its information. There are lots of websites that show off a clean interface, along with an ad or two on the side, and a few content recommendations. While there are some that will bombard you with tons of ads, videos, recommendations, and so on, making it clutter-some.

There are various tools will help you make websites easier to read and help you focus on the content that really matters to you. Check out these three tools that can you help you clean websites so that it will be easier for you to browse along, as well as read its contents in a clearer perspective.

Readability

The Readability tool is an extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that lets you remove all the clutter including ads, recommendations, dialogs, social buttons, cooments, and almost everything distracting, and extract the actual content. It will only display the website name, the actual text content, photos/videos within the content, and all the links in it. All you need to do is install the extension in your favorite browser, then proceed in opening any article online. Next, click on the Readability extension button located at the upper right hand corner of the browser, and then select the Read Now option. The page will refresh after a delay, and you will notice that all the clutter will disappear.

Furthermore, you have complete control as to how you want the extracted content to look, including the ability to change the content size, day and night mode, and layout. If you suddenly ran out of time, you also have the option to save the article to read later, which you can choose right from the Readability extension button. (You need to sign up for this feature)

The Readability tool is compatible for Android and iOS devices.

Microsoft Edge's Reading View

Microsoft Edge comes with a built-in reading view that is fast and reliable. When you visit an online article, Edge will show a "Book" icon in the address bar. Simply clicking on it will remove all the unnecessary clutter and will just show the main site content. Be informed though that this tool doesn't offer any customization options. You will only get an easy-to-read webpage without any options to save or customize its look.

Firefox Reader View

If you happen to be a Firefox user, there's no need for you to use any third-party tool in order to make your life easier whenever you read websites. Firefox comes with a simple Reader View button (an open book icon) that you can find at the address bar, which when clicked will immediately clean the website and will show only the main content that you need. Similar to the Readability tool, you can also change the site's font style, layout, and even the background according to your preference.

You can also save your favorite articles with its saved to Pocket option so that you can easily view it later and to manage your reading lists. What's good about this browser feature is that it quickly makes a website easier to read unlike with Readability, in less than a couple of seconds, that is.

What Should You Do to Improve Your Computer Troubleshooting Skills?

Improving your computer troubleshooting skills so you become more tech savvy is never an overwhelming task given the sheer number of ways anyone can learn to do so, given the right amount of diligence. So if ever you think that learning and improving your computer troubleshooting skills can’t be done online, think again, because that’s basically where you start.

Do your online research

The first and most important step in becoming computer savvy is to learn how to use the search engines to your advantage.  It’s important to learn how to correctly pose a question for search, and how to use Google, Yahoo, or Bing to find your answer. Basically, if there’s something you don’t know about a computer, the first thing is to check out the first few hits of a search to get some information. For example, when someone gets a specific virus or has a specific problem affecting their computer, a quick search will often show how to resolve it. After a few years of using search engines to research different things about computer troubleshooting, you begin to form a solid working knowledge without even trying.

You won’t know unless you practice

Don’t be afraid to try something on a used computer. After all, there is hardly ever an action you can perform on a computer that will permanently break it. That being said, make sure you have back-ups of anything important if you plan to try it on your own computer. Find a used computer on Craigslist for cheap. This provides a great platform for you to practice troubleshooting. If you don’t have a computer you can experiment, you can check out episodes on creating a virtual computer, “How to Use a Virtual Machine” by searching on Google. A virtual machine allows you to mess up anything you want because you can reset it back to any point in time, or just start over.

Read a lot

There are free courses for Windows, Apple, and Linux users on the internet. If you want to get more acquainted with Windows, you can find a ton of tutorials and other learning material on the Microsoft website. The same goes for Apple, which provides more than enough documentation for you to study. If you want to learn about Linux, there’s a full course on edx.org that is partially narrated by the creator of Linux himself. For anything else, there are endless and awesome series of YouTube videos that covers almost any computer topic you can think of in extreme detail. A little bit of time and practice with this material and you’ll gain a pretty comprehensive understanding of computers. And to think all of this is for free.

Students Will Find These Free Apps Highly Useful

Summer don't last long enough for kids, and it can be a stressful time to get everything in order so that students have new clothes, school supplies, dorm stuff, and...back to school apps? According to a 2015 study, 77 percent of students reported that using tablets and smartphones has helped improve their grades, and 62 percent said that tech helps them feel more ready for class.

Below is our compilation of apps that will help you get back to school the right way. And since it's pretty common sense that students don't have much of a budget to work with, you can download all of these apps for free.

Evernote

Free: iOS, Apple Watch, Android, Windows

Evernote is considered as one of the most popular note-taking apps for quite a while. Its clean, uncomplicated interface makes it perfect for students wherein they can take notes, make to-do lists, set reminders, attach files, create agendas and access everything through any device. Evernote doesn't have a storage limit, but free users are limited to an upload limit of 60 MB per month. You also have to activate push notifications to sync all your notes when the app isn't running. The camera feature is highly useful, because it allows you to save any photo, document, Post-it note or business card.

Dropbox Mobile

Free: iOS, Android, Windows

As a student, you save, send, and lose a lot of files -- usually in the depths of your inbox. The free Dropbox Mobile app lets you store and share up to 2 GB of documents, photos, and videos in one secure location. It's easy to add notes to files you want to share, too, which is ideal especially when your group project seems to be taking forever. Recently, Dropbox partnered with Microsoft so that users can edit Microsoft Office files straight from their mobile phones and save them to their Dropbox accounts.

You may also want to consider Dropbox Paper, a collaboration platform that allows multiple people to edit the same document.

WolframAlpha

$2.99; iOS, Android, Windows

Meet your know-it-all bestfriend, which also happens to help Apple's Siri. Dubbed as the "Star Trek computer," WolframAlpha holds more than 10 trillion pieces of data and 50,000 equations. The app, which costs $2.99, uses these information to compute answers and generate reports on topics ranging from trigonometry and astronomy, to genealogy and mythology. It provides you with graphs, step-by-step explanations, and formula details.

EasyBib

Free: iOS, Android>

EasyBib takes over one of the most time-consuming parts of writing a research paper -- the bibliography. This app helps you format your list of references in more than 7,000 citation styles, including the most common APA and MLA formats. Just type in the name of the book and EasyBib will give you several options to choose from and then makes a citation for you. The app has a website that does the job just as well, but with the app you can take a picture of a book's bar code and then generate a citation for it.

My Study Life

Free: iOS, Android, Windows

The My Study Life is a free app that replaces any paper planner by keeping track of your workload across multiple platforms and devices. Manage your classes with week and day timetables, keep track of your tasks and upcoming exams in the cloud, and receive notifications to keep you updated with your exams and class schedules. The calendar is very easy to read, thanks to its clean interface and the ability to color code your classes.

Now you'll enjoy school more with My Study Life!

Tiny Scanner

Free: iOS, Android

Tiny Scanner is an app that is perfect in making sure your handwritten class notes are at least legible enough to send to a classmate. The app uses the camera on your phone or tablet to scan documents and export them into PDFs that you can email or save to your camera roll. You can also crop and color-correct your images before you export them into PDFs.

Is It Important To Learn Basic Computer Skills Before Starting a Business?

Of course it is, and this is a resounding, “Yes.” Basic computer skills or computer literacy refers to the ability to use computer programs in an effective manner in order to improve any small business. Basic computer skills have become increasingly important as even small businesses have started to depend upon computerized technology to get the work done. Computer skills can mean that you can perform tasks that others may not be able to, and you are familiar with and able to work with programs that businesses use. You will have a better chance of being successful in business if you are able to navigate computers and use common or specialized computer programs. Thus, here are some of the reasons why learning basic computer skills before starting a business may spell the difference between breaking out or just breaking even.

It’s More Profitable

The ability to use more common programs such as Microsoft Word or Excel or even specialized programs can mean that you have the computer skills to greatly start up and eventually improve the business. You could make more money because you get the work done faster. Basic computer literacy can be easily learned by taking short-course classes in school or college or get training from seasonal workshops in your city or from a tech company.

Improved Work Performance

Knowing basic computer skills allows you to get work done in a more organized, efficient and timely manner, especially if you run a business that requires you to use a computer on a frequent or regular basis. Computers feature programs such spreadsheet, word-processing or presentation programs that help you to organize your thoughts. If you work with a database in your business, you won’t be able to complete important tasks without computer knowledge. Even if you have a manual labor business such as in construction or food service, you may need to use a computer to conduct research on industry or company trends, regulations or news; run a cash register or complete training before starting work.

Communication

Knowledge of how to access the Internet and basic computer skills opens up many different possibilities for you to communicate with employees and customers. Within the workplace, you can use instant messaging programs, social media websites or e-mail to communicate about work and tasks. Computer skills means that you can communicate with customers using multimedia, such as sound or video presentations, as well as answering their queries. If you have a business that requires you to travel, it is important for you to know for you to communicate with employees and customers from another location, as well as being able to remotely access data in your office even from a distance.