How to improve your comprehension/vocabulary score for SATs, ACTs and APs

Here's something for fellow students who might be practising for a standardized exam (to the older readers: yes, remember those?). Learning vocab words and lists for standardized exams isn't what most people consider to be an enjoyable task. But I've recently figured out that it can be enjoyable... if you know what to do. People always ask me about how I have such a great vocabulary (ok, not really... but pretend that they did) and this is what I always tell them:

The best ways to improve your vocabulary are...

1. Reading (my english teacher swears by this one - according to her, you'll retain 5% of the vocabulary from anything you read):
I for one hated reading. Especially the "romance" novels that are supposed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Why? Because first off... they make so sense, and second, they take too much time (and did I mention, they never have any pictures in them?!) So often, I just ended up reading the first few chapters, and then never touching the book ever again.

But the truth is, you don't always have to read "the classics" or "the quintessential Socrates series" if they don't make any sense. There are several other, dare I say enjoyable, sources of inspiration that you can plunge into. Especially if you like technology, there are several other things you can read, to improve your vocabulary and improve your comprehension skills. Remember though. If you come across a word that stumps you, you might want to check out what it means (I recommend using one of the dictionaries mentioned in this post) before continuing.

Here are some "good" websites where you might find interesting (if you don't like Harry Potter and all that kind of stuff that is...)

The Onion (America's Finest News Source!) - A great news source. Although, I advise that you take everything you read on that website with a grain of salt.

e-Books online - There are a ton of e-books that you can potentially download (or even read) online. If you get board with one of them, why not just switch to another. It's easy, and who knows, you just might find something interesting.

News Websites (NYTimes, Globe and Mail and even CNet sometimes)- Like The Onion, news websites are a great source of information, provided the english they use is good. However, I would stay away from the depressing kinds of news though... you don't want any nightmares.

Crossword Puzzles - Crosswords are a great way of improving your vocabulary, especially when it comes to big words.

Write! - The best way to learn how to read, is to learn how to write. Try to use big words when you're writing though so that you get a feel for certain "esoteric" words. If you want, you can publish them online (in a blog), and if you have something to say (like I always do) I'm sure you'll build your own group of readers as well. This is good, because you'll be able to get feedback, and also do well on the writing portion of the standardized tests. Although I recommend that you practice writing too, because unless you're taking the MCAT, you'll be using a pen, and not a keyboard.

Vocab Lists - Vocabulary lists are the least preferable method of learning for me. That's because rote memorization almost always never works unless you're a savant. However, if you feel like you need to brush up on a little bit of vocabulary, here are some tips concerning vocab lists:

• Never simply memorize the words. You'll be memorizing them for 5 minutes and then you'll forget it all!
• Instead, what you want to do is put the word in a memorable sentence of some sort, and "use the word". This way, you'll retain the word better, and hopefully you'll be able to recall it when necessary. [Rinse and Repeat!]
  

Bonus: If you're Canadian, you might want to check out some columns by Rex Murphy. Even though he is from Newfoundland he never uses a word that smaller than 9 syllables.

In my opinion, there is no substitute for reading. So incase you're wondering what to do a year before the standardized test, I suggest you start reading first and then try the other tips I've mentioned here!

Good Luck!

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Replace add with art by using a free firefox addon

Are you tired of viewing annoying ads on websites? Yeah me too. I find that just plain text ads (like the kind on this blog) are okay as long as they don't block up too much space or distract you from seeing the "real" websites. But sometimes, a lot of websites just tend to go overboard with the annoying type of ads - banners and animated ads.

For such cases, Firefox has a great add-on called Add-Art that instead of just blocking out the ad replaces it with art! Check out the demo:

Introduction to Add-Art from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

This is one step better than normal extensions such as adblock plus that merely block the advertisements. Plus, sometimes, the creators of a website reserve some space for an ad (through CSS) and so when you visit such websites with Ad-block plus, you'll end up with a white rectangles all over the place. For instance you can see a big white square in the Nytimes.com page below.



Update: Hah, with extensions like Adblock plus, I forgot that this website displays advertisements too! I guess if you don't want to see advertisements on this website or any others, you can get yourself an adblock extension. I for one appreciate the measly revenue I get from Google's advertisements.

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5 reasons I dislike Windows Live Hotmail

I have nothing against Hotmail. Except may be the fact that I’m kinda being forced to send mail to it because everybody else has already started using it. This makes it something bad from a sender’s point of view. Here are a few reasons why I dislike windows live hotmail:

The very first reasons why you should switch is because it offers only 2MB or storage space. Although it does offer mail in HTML, 2MB I think is too low. Don’t believe me? Click on screenshot below to enlarge.

Okay, so it might not be true that hotmail offers 2MB of e-mail storage… they just apparently need to update their description tag on Google (or perhaps it’s Google’s sense of humour?) Because as it turns out, Yahoo and Live.com each have different descriptions of the website.

Nevertheless, here are some more reasons for which I dislike Hotmail with a passion:

1. It only allows 10 MB e-mail attachments! What?!?! Most e-mail providers out there have atleast 20 MB attachment limits. This means that I can send a 20MB attachment (like I often do) to a person using Gmail or Yahoo Mail – but I can’t send it to a person using Hotmail/Windows Live Mail. How annoying is that?
2. No Mac/Linux Mail App Support. – Unfortunately, Windows Live Hotmail and even Hotmail are inaccessible from Mail.app or Entourage or even Thunderbird on a Mac. Why? Because Microsoft wants people to use Windows Live Mail. No seriously. That’s the only reason I can think of for not having some kind of POP/SMTP Structure to allow people with a Mac/Linux OS to use hotmail with an e-mail client of their choice, Yes, I realize that there are ways to run hotmail on a mac with Apple Mail, but they’re too inefficient.
3. Annoying vertical banner advertising that takes up too much space and is just plain annoying. Enough said.
   
4. It’s slower than other webmail applications out there – especially on platforms other than a Windows PC. For some reason whenever I try to open a mail message, it seems like it’s way too tardy to be even considered as good as Hotmail. Plus, using folders is so slow that it’s almost inefficient.
5. Embedded advertisements inside e-mails! Wow, this is just great. First, they stick you with annoying banner ads, and then they even add messages to advertise their services inside e-mails sent from hotmail.

Honestly, if Hotmail would like to compete with other service providers then they’d better improve their standards.

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Ubuntu Audio Does Not Work - Static Sound Instead

Have you ever experienced the static sound on Ubuntu when you should have been hearing something (perhaps the start up sound or something) from your speakers? Well, you might think that your sound card has stopped working or something, but as it turns out.. there's a quick way to get your audio back to normal.

It's not that your sound isn't working... it's just "muted" (although I wonder why it makes the static sound instead of being completely quiet...).

To get your sound back here's what you need to do:

1. Double click on the speaker icon in the menubar
2. Alternatively, you can press Alt+F2 and type in: gnome-volume-control and click 'Run'
   
   

Then on the volume control window, choose the appropriate device where it says "Device:" and just turn your "PCM" volume all the way up... if this slider is all the way at the bottom you'll just get static from the speakers instead of sound.


Hope this helps others out there who experience the same audio "stuttering" problem.

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Greate OneNote like Free Notetaking Application - BasKet Note Pads

I've recently taken up using my laptop as the main source of notes, instead of paper based note systems. As a result, I searching around for a note taking application that would help me take notes quickly and efficiently and then easily review them (the biggest problem with hand written notes is that it's hard to find/read them when you need them) later on whenever I'd need to do so.

However, instead of using 'professional' (and expensive!) software like OneNote from Microsoft, I decided to find an open source alternative that would do just the same. So I wouldn't have to worry about "bad karma" as they say. Although there were several alternatives out there for the Mac and also for Windows, the best alternative in my opinion so far has actually been an application for Linux!


It's called BasKet Note Pads (an application originally developed for the KDE environment, but works fine on Gnome too... so it should work on almost any Linux Distro out there) and it's almost like Microsoft OneNote... but better! Why? Because, it's free... and it's open source too (so that means that it will at least get an update once in a while hopefully..). So far, I've found it to be the best note taking application out there.

In BasKet Note Pads not only can you emulate the beloved one note feature of being able to click anywhere and type in a OneNote document, but you can also assign special categories to each note that you type. For example, you can give the note the tag of a Todo, and once you do this an empty checkbox will appear beside the note. Then once you are done the Todo item, just check the checkbox and BasKet will automatically place a line (strikethrough) through the text indication that the job was done.

I find that this is a great app where you can just "write down" all your ideas really quickly and then come back later and arrange them into logical categories to create a computer "mindmap" of sorts. Plus, its great to be able to take notes at a lecture in little bits and pieces and then add them together in their own little notepages to get a whole overview of the lecture topics.

There's other categories as well... like the 'progress meter'. So you can click on the progress meter once you've reached another stage in the assignment... making sure that you're on track with each project. Plus, you can create a main note for a project (with its tag as a project meter) and then drag and drop additional to-do "notes" in the project. BasKet will automatically group the notes as one whole note so you can easily minimize and maximize a project depending on what you want to look at.

If that's not enough, it also has the ability to have funky backgrounds and the ability to grab screenshots (great for doing online research... where you can grab screenshots of products you like from their website and put them in one document and then compare them side by side) and place them right into the document. The only thing it pretty much cannot do right now is take audio notes and link them to the typed notes. However, I feel that it's only going to be a matter of time before they add that feature too.

BasKet note pads is a great free way to add a little organization to your life and a great way to take notes if you are a college/high school students. Although you'll need Linux to run it, I recommend you get linux and give this little app a try. Once you figure out how to do things, I'm sure you'll find it a formidable replacement for OneNote.

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Protecting your computer on a public network

Do you own a laptop? Have you ever used your laptop at a public wi-fi (wireless internet) location to use the free (or paid) wireless internet services? Often, places like Libraries (or at least some libraries here in Toronto), Starbucks, Coffee Shops and even some restaurants offer a wireless internet service which anyone can use if they bring along their laptop or mobile computing devices.

Why should you care about protecting your computer while using pubilc wi-fi netoworks?

Although this is pretty cool, one thing that you must be aware of is that using these networks might not always be the most secure thing to do. Using public internet might mean that you are opening up your computer for lots of snoopers and malignant people to take advantage of your computer. In fact, after a recent visit to the library I noticed that many people (unknowingly I presume) were actually sharing the files on their computer with everybody else in the network. As a result, anyone else on the network was also able to freely access these shared files and folders. What’s more? Some people even stored files (fortunately, being the good citizen that I am, I did not open these files or do anything malicious with them!) in these folders!

What does all this mean?

It means that if you use your computer on a public network, you have to be extra secure.Theoretically, someone could delete files, edit files and even transfer malicious files to the computer to execute code (plus, if you never visited any website or downloaded anything… and you get a Windows UAC prompt, you’re likely to just click Confirm and allow the malicious application that some transferred to your computer to happily go on performing its evil tasks!)! If this doesn’t sound more scary than Conficker, I don’t know what will.

How can you protect yourself?

Protecting your computer while using public networks should be the first thing you do, even before you start using the network. In this post, I’m going to assume that most of you will be using Windows Vista. The settings for Windows XP (you might want to make a google search if you are unsure… most things that I mention here for Vista also apply for XP, but configuring them for XP might be a little different) are similar, but since most laptops now come with Vista, I’ll only cover the Windows Vista and Mac OS X in this article.

The first thing that you should do is turn off all File Sharing.

To do so on Windows Vista:

1. Double click on the “Internet Icon” in the system tray in your taskbar. In the picture below, it’s the icon between the “Battery Icon” and the “Volume Adjustment/Speaker Icon”. Doing so should take you to the “Network and Sharing Center”. If there’s no “Internet Icon” then, you’ll have to open your start menu (or click on the “Windows Orb” and type in “Network and Sharing Center”.
2. In the '”Network and Sharing Center”, under Sharing and Discovery click on arrow beside any topic that has a “Green” light (meaning that the sharing for that area is turned on.. and anybody on the network will be able to see whatever you are sharing). Then, simply select ‘Turn Off’ and click ‘Apply’.
3. Then accept the Windows UAC prompt.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for any other feature for which file sharing might be turned on.

Doing so will make sure that no files/folders, be it the Public folder on your computer or any other folder, is shared on the network.

On a Mac, the process is similar. Click the Apple Button on top left hand corner, choose ‘System Preference’ and go to ‘Sharing’. There, uncheck all checkboxes to make sure that your computer isn’t sharing anything.

Step 2: Use a firewall to prevent any direct connections from other computers

Often, although you might disable any sharing of files, other computers might still be able to connect to your computer through any other ports (think of them like ‘doors’) that might be open. So naturally, the best and easiest way to protect yourself, although not the most ‘sure fire’ way, is to turn on a firewall that will try and block most of the attempts to access your computer. If you don’t yet have a firewall, you might want to consider getting a free firewall if your computer is not running too slow (although if it is running a bit on the slower side, you might want to check out this article to speed up your windows computer).

At the very least, turn on Windows Firewall, which will prevent incoming connections (or others) from accessing your computer.

Step 3: Use an anti-virus program and keep your computer updated

Well, there isn’t much you can do after you’ve secured all the entry ways into your computer, so the only other ways to make sure that nothing else malicious is already on your computer and there are no ‘security’ holes in your computer are to run Anti-Virus software and keep your computer updated.

As for the Virus software, you don’t always have to turn on heuristics for it to keep on searching your computer all the time and making it really slow. Like I mention in my article to make your computer a bit faster, just turn on it’s basic settings and let it perform a scan once in a while when you are not using your computer. However, if you do across a suspicious (and when I mean suspicious I mean really suspicious…. like a birthday greeting card from your friend) just manually scan it.

Also, don’t forget to let Windows install the Microsoft updates when it bugs you do.. you don’t always have to do it right when it starts bugging you to.. but it’s a good idea to do it when you have the time.

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Best Free Downloadable Firewalls for Windows Computers

With the advent of the internet, it’s really easy for anyone to connect to the internet and access other computers (i.e. servers) across the globe. However, this also means that other computers across the globe can actually access YOUR computer in a similar fashion. By doing so these evil, evil men can actually take control of your computer, insert malicious files that will track your password/credit card number and/or use your computer to do something evil.

How do you protect yourself from other malicious programs or people from accessing your computer? With a Firewall of course! But like most things in the computer software world, Firewalls often come at a price. Although this price might be minimal (around $20 – 30 on average, some times you might have to renew it every year), considering the safety it provides, it might still be worth it to get a free firewall that will be able to do almost the same thing.

Here are a few things that you might want to try out. Keep in mind though that sometimes having a firewall might actually be more annoying, since it will often ask you whether or now you’d like to connect to a server or website. However, in the long run it might save you the trouble of reinstalling your computer or calling up your credit card company to report a fraud. Also, it might slow down the speed of your computer as it constantly monitors your incoming/outgoing connections from every application that connects to the Internet. But given the speed of average computers the speed should be “negligible” or at the most unnoticeable.

Additionally, you might at least want to turn on your Windows Firewall (although this will only prevent incoming connections and not prevent any outgoing connections) if you don’t plan to use a third-party firewall. If you do use a third party firewall, you should disable Windows Firewall.

Some free firewalls, in order of preference

Comodo Firewall – Comodo make a lot of great products that I like, and their firewall is one of them. For the most part it is unobtrusive, but does a good job of notifying you of any incoming/outgoing connections that it thinks are ‘suspicious’. Plus, it has an easy to use interface that doesn’t look like anything from “the Matrix”. If you’re looking for a simple free firewall that does it job quite well, Comodo should probably be your first or second choice. Also, do note that when you download the firewall, it actually might download their firewall AND their antivirus suite. So you you already have an antivirus suite, and you’re okay with it, you should only install their firewall.

Free Zone Alarm – The free version of the Zone Alarm Firewall is not as powerful (or so they say) as it’s paid big brother, but I still thing that it does a fairly ok job of making sure that no internet packet goes unnoticed. It also has a pretty simple interface to use, so if you aren’t an experienced Firewall user, you might prefer to have something like this.

Sunbelt Kerio Firewall  – If you’re using Windows XP (but it also works for Vista now apparently, although I haven’t tested it out) then this firewall is still one of the best ones out there. It does the job of every other firewall out there, and also provides some of its premium features (like ad-blocking) for a period of 30 days. If you don’t want to buy it (you probably don’t need to… unless you’d like to support their software), then after 30 days, it’ll just function in the normal firewall mode.

Tall Emu Firewall – Again, this is a fairly good free product, but doesn’t have all the pro features such as ‘Keylogger detection’ and so on. But obviously, you don’t need these features if you have a little common sense (i.e. if you are getting an incoming connection from some random computer on the internet, you probably shouldn’t allow it to access your system files).

Of course, there are several other Free Firewalls out there, but I’ve never used or heard of any other good ones. So, if you feel like you know about something else that might be worth while… do share!

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