• the 2 copies of a 30-page paper I had to print to turn in
• the ECON310 scans of a book we need to print for class
• or stuff for ANY OTHER CLASS.

350 pages, though it may sound like a lot of wasted paper, is not much in the life of a college student. I’m just glad that I have my own printer, though it pains me to waste MY paper and MY toner.

Way to go, Clemson.

–

Here is a copy of the email I received earlier:

Clemson has adopted a new policy aimed at saving money, reducing wasted paper and making printing in public campus labs more efficient. Uniprint from Pharos Systems has been awarded the contract for software that will allow the university to implement this policy.

The Print Quota Policy, recommended by the Budget Task Force on Information Technology and approved by Administrative Council, will establish a per-page charge for those over the quota in the CCIT-managed student labs, the CCIT-owned plotters, and for departmentally managed student labs.

The issue of excessive printing was repeatedly mentioned when Clemson asked for comments and suggestions about its 2008-2009 budget crisis. That was November 2008 and the university had just announced mandatory furloughs to handle the immediate crisis and formed 11 budget task forces to consider long-term strategic decisions for the future.

Clemson University has seen a steady increase in volume and cost in public labs where it has provided unrestricted printing for many years. During the 2008-09 academic year, print volumes hit the 12 million-page mark in CCIT labs alone, and 2009-10 projections are close to 13 million.

“We found that Clemson is the only ACC school that did not have a print quota in place,” said Janell Bohlmann, director of project and service management in Clemson computing and information technology (CCIT). “We researched implementation at many schools and solicited input from students who served on the task force and from representatives to Student Senate.”

According to Mike Nebesky, Clemson’s procurement director, Pharos’ Uniprint software will help manage the university’s print quota system by tracking the number of pages students print and interfacing with their Tiger 1 cards to debit accounts for the per-page charges due when they exceed the quota.

Quotas for all undergraduate students will be 350 pages per semester. This applies to actual sheets of paper, not printouts, as a two-sided printout counts as one page against the quota. Quotas for all graduate students will be 500 pages per semester. Both undergraduates and graduates will pay 5 cents per page over the quota.

Although DarkAdapted can be used control individual gamma levels to create a custom mix of red, green, and blue, I usually gang the sliders, move change the backlight of the screen to it’s next to lowest setting (not off), and slide the slider group until it is comfortable.

The farther you dim the screen, the more battery life your MacBook will yield. It’s a win-win!

Visit DarkAdapted

While some people see April’s Fool’s Day as a childish way to spend your April 1st playing practical jokes on your peers, the internet has changed everything. The lighthearted have now jumped on the April Fool’s Day bandwagon and use the day to gain laughs and increased site traffic. Google, an innovative company, has previously had jokes such as “Gmail Paper“, and I’m sure that Google’s recent announcement of their name change to “Topeka” is just following suit. I’m not sure I’d go Topeka something, but you can head on over to Topeka and try it yourself.

I keep meticulous records of everything that I do, which includes all files that I accumulate at Clemson. When I’m without my laptop and want to look at a PDF article from a class, I’m at a loss to read it unless it has been posted on BlackBoard (the class management system in use at Clemson). I don’t want to move my entire organized Clemson folder into the Dropbox folder, but unless I do this, how can sync my files? Previously thought impossible, I’ve learned that this word does not exist.

The answer is symbolic links.

Similar to a shortcut, a symbolic link will sync all of the files in the linked folder as if it were in the Dropbox folder itself. This opens up a world of possibilities for syncing, accessing, and sharing files with multiple users across the internet on multiple platforms.

To create a symbolic link in MacOSX, open up Terminal and use the ln command, for example:

ln -s /path/to/folder/name_desired_folder/ ~/Dropbox/desired-folder

If you find that venturing into the Terminal is a bit too hard to make a Symlink, there’s a great tool that streamlines the process called SymbolicLinker, by Nick Zitzmann. This provides a contextual menu (for Leopard and below) or a software service (for Snow Leopard) that allows the user to create symbolic links to files without ever leaving the Finder.

Get Dropbox Now!

In the first days after the iPad’s announcement, some media and many online commenters criticized the name “iPad”, noting its similarity to “pad”, the common name for a sanitary napkin. Shortly after the launch announcement, the hashtag “iTampon” became #1 on Twitter.

The only thing we’ll have to worry about is whether iffy Wifi coverage be called iSpotting…

Others noted that “iPad” sounds like “iPod” in various regional accents, including Bostonian and the Irish accent. That’s not surprising, considering it’s just an oversized iPod.

All things considered, the iMat is definitely a better investment than the iPad. I’ll wait until 2014 for that to come out. Huzzah! Giant Dance Dance Revolution! Ugh iNeed an Advil.

Go to System Preferences => Spotlight, and under the Privacy tab, click the plus button and then choose the user/Library/ directory to be excluded form the search and indexing functions.

Immediately after you’ll notice a remarkable improvement in speed, and that goes for the whole system since lots of apps write temporary files to that directory and Spotlight is always working on indexing those. No mortal need to know the content of those files, anyway, so off ye go!