There are lots of inexpensive tools on the Interwebs that are really useful. I like finding them.

Quick post:

So I changed the name of this blog to “Tech Tools for the Young, Professional & Broke” from “Techy Tools for the Young, Professional & Broke”.  I feel this has a better ring to it :-)  After this, I spent about 5 hours trying to get my title bar title (the page title you see in your browser tab and at the top of your browser window) to match this new title.  I changed the title in the “General” section in the Settings tab in my WordPress dashboard.

I scoured the web for help with this and I scoured the html in my theme for the reason why the blog no longer referenced the title I placed in my blog settings to create the title bar blog name.

The culprit: I am using the “All in One SEO” plugin, which allows me to add customized/additional information about my blog for search engine crawlers to pick up and add to their search results.  I had the old blog title entered in this plugin, and this plugin overrides certain parts of my blog’s html, including the title bar display information.

This is probably unsurprising, but I’m a big Star Trek fan.  As many have pointed out before, a big reason for the enormous popularity of the franchise is its devotion to the idea that technology will solve many of humanity’s problems.  I know its extremely naive, but I just can’t help but buy into Star Trek’s utopian future.  This is why I love Clark Boyd’s PRI’s The World: Technology Podcast. This (usually) weekly podcast is filled with stories from PRI’s The World (many of which reported by Boyd himself) about how technology positively affects the world as a whole, regardless or income or social standing.

Its terrific coverage of the Twitter #iranelection continued long after the major news sources stopped caring.  Its coverage of Internet censorship in China and the ingenious ways Chinese citizens fight back has also been great.  And then there are the surprisingly engrossing stories about new products being created to serve the bottom of the pyramid market.  A few of my MBA classes have touched upon this concept, and this podcast gives proof that there is money to be made from developing products for large numbers of low-income people.  Check out the podcasts about the Eco-Cooker, bamboo bicycles, and the WE CARE Solar Suitcase.

It’s August, which of course means an explosion of news articles about how expensive textbooks are and what poor college students are doing these days to keep these costs down.  Where people buy their textbooks and how they actually read them is becoming more and more varied and confusing, making bookselling the latest perfectly good business model to be demolished by the Internet.

Here are the interesting textbook-buying trends that I’ve been paying attention to lately:

• Buying Used Textbooks – This is certainly not new and is now a standard way for students to get their textbooks each semester.  And as Internet search becomes more sophisticated it is becoming even easier.  There are tons of sites to buy used textbooks, but I found you can’t go wrong with amazon.com, bigwords.com, half.com, textbookx.com, textbooks.com, or good ‘ol craigslist.org.
• Textbooks from other countries! – I recently received a tip about nbcindia.com from a classmate of mine.  The books are priced in rupees and the book you receive is reportedly a black and white soft cover copy of your textbook.  But they are really cheap.  This site recommends (among other things) checking out the foreign versions of American websites, like www.amazon.co.uk, to find cheaper versions of the textbook you want.  This blog post mentions two great sites for finding the international versions of textbooks: abebooks.com and textbooksrus.com.