Over the past six years, Face­book has slowly turned into one of the most con­sis­tent pres­ences in West­ern cul­ture. The web­site, or should I say phe­nom­e­non, has in­te­grated it­self into our daily lives, and it re­cently sur­passed Google as the most vis­ited web­page in the world. Hop­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on the site’s pop­u­lar­ity, the ge­niuses be­hind the so­cial net­work part­nered with HTC to de­velop the world’s first “Face­book phone.” The HTC Sta­tus is AT&T’s lat­est at­tempt to cap­i­tal­ize on the grow­ing num­ber of teens and young adults who are cur­rently ad­dicted to on­line so­cial net­works. This An­droid-pow­ered smart phone is the first de­vice to have a ded­i­cated Face­book but­ton. That’s right, there’s a but­ton with the blue and white “Face­book F” on the front of the phone. One press of the Face­book but­ton al­lows you to quickly up­date your sta­tus or post a com­ment to your friend’s wall. An ex­tended press of the but­ton al­lows you to “check-in” and use the phone’s GPS to broad­cast your cur­rent lo­ca­tion to the world. If you press the Face­book but­ton when you’re brows­ing your phone’s pho­tos, you can post that pic­ture to your wall. Ba­si­cally, this but­ton makes shar­ing every­thing about your life on Face­book con­ve­nient… Read more »

COUR­TESY OF SPO­TIFY   The worst part about every Win­ter term for me is my lack of cash. I spend way too much money of EBAs, Key­stone Light and scor­pion bowls from the Ori­ent. I thought about giv­ing up one of my fa­vorite pas­times, but I couldn’t let one go. In­stead, I de­vised a few (legal) ways to save money in my dig­i­tal life. I hope these help you out. **Rent Dig­i­tal Text­books** I used to not buy my text­books be­cause I didn’t want to pay $150-$400 every term. I soon learned that my GPA didn’t like this strat­egy. As soon as I was about to sub­mit, I learned about dig­i­tal text­book rentals. Re­sources such as Amazon.​com and iTunes have bought mass li­censes to text­books and they sell tem­po­rary elec­tronic ver­sions of the books to stu­dents for a set amount of time. Let’s be real, how many times are you going to refer to that Physics 3/4 text­book after you’re done with the class? Dig­i­tal rentals are cheap and con­ve­nient. You sim­ply log into the site, state how long you want the book, then down­load it. The best part is that both Ama­zon and Apple let you down­load the book to portable… Read more »

  Cour­tesy Of Sound­check In order to stay in touch with the lat­est jams, I used to surf dozens of blogs every day. Al­though it was a great way to stay in touch, blog surf­ing is cum­ber­some and often yields more bad songs than good ones. In order to stream­line my time and get the best qual­ity music, I started using SoundCloud.​com, a dy­namic web­site that should be one of top-used book­marks of any music lover. Sound­Cloud is es­sen­tially a gi­gan­tic on­line music swap meet. Reg­is­tered Sound­Cloud users can up­load any sort of song and dis­trib­ute it to the world. Once you cre­ate a free pro­file, you’re able to up­load two hours of audio to the cloud. Once on the cloud, you’re able to let users down­load your tracks or sim­ply just stream them on­line. If you have a lot of music, you can pur­chase more time and up­grade to a pre­mium ac­count. Any reg­is­tered ac­count can down­load or stream an un­lim­ited amount of music. The beauty of Sound­Cloud is that nearly every major artist is on the cloud. If you want to hear an epic setlist from Dirty South or the lat­est track from the Beastie Boys, it’s on… Read more »