Summer is about to come to an end. It's around this time of year when everyone starts to buy books, supplies, and computers. I love going through all the new software around this time and trying to set myself up a nice little system. So I figured I'd share some of my newer revelations with you.

Mac

Evernote:

Evernote is best described as an "external memory." Evernote allows you to make notes out of text, pictures, audio, video, pdfs, and, with a premium subscription ($5/month, $40/year), any type of file you want, provided it's smaller than 50 MB. Evernote is pretty much the crux of my productive life. Evernote takes those files and catalogues everything, making it searchable.

Evernote features server side text recognition, taking any pictures or scanned pages you put into Evernote, and making them searchable. For example, last year, my history class was extremely handout heavy, and instead of keeping a giant binder of printed sheets, I could scan these pages and make PDFs, and put those PDFs into Evernote. Evernote scanned the text, and if I needed to look something up for a paper, all I'd have to do is search the topic I was looking for, for example, Napoleon, and every note I'd taken and every handout I'd scanned would be searched for the text "Napoleon." This, in combination with tags and notebooks, two of the main parts of Evernote, can save hours of time looking through notes and textbooks for studying.

Evernote also syncs with the internet. Evernote has clients on Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, WebOS, Windows Mobile, and a web based client. This makes it very easy to keep your notes accessible from wherever you are. If you have a laptop for school and a desktop at home, you can install Evernote on both of them, and your notes are automatically kept synced. When you go to the library, you can use the web based client, or, if you computer admin allows for it, there is a portable version of Evernote that can be installed on a thumbstick and run on any computer. Install Evernote on your phone and you can send pictures of anything you want to remember, say, a business card, and it will be sync'ed to the service, the text will be recognized, and it will download to your desktops automatically.

Finally, with an Evernote premium account, you can keep any files you want on your Evernote account, and keep them all in sync between all your clients. A fantastic use for this is keeping office documents updated between all your computers. And you can open the files from right inside Evernote. So if you're writing a paper, just drop the Microsoft Word document into Evernote, open it from inside, and edit it. When you save, the updated file is automatically sync'ed to the web, and when you open it from your other computer, the updated file is pulled from the server and you can pick up where you left off. Not to mention the Evernote files are far more secure than say, a file saved on a thumbstick. I know many of you have lost important reports the day before they were due because your thumbstick got lost or failed.

Link: Evernote

iCal:

I'll admit; I'm a calendar addict. I not only have no idea what I'm supposed to do when I wake up in the morning without my calendar. The best way to use iCal, in my opinion, is with Google Calendar integration. iCal is built into every Mac from installation. In order to sync you Google Calendar and your iCal calendar, set up Google Calendar (click here) and go to iCal, open Preferences, click Accounts, the little + button, under Account Type select Google, and put in your account information. That will automatically sync your default calendar. Go back to the Account tab under Preferences, click Delegates, and select the rest of your calendars. Ta Da! Now all your calendars are sync'ed between Google and iCal. Now you can take your smartphone and sync that calendar with Google. If you have an Android or WebOS phone, that should be done automatically, and you now have magic 3 way sync. If you have an iPhone, use these instructions. Just a quick note, you can do the same thing in Address Book to sync contacts. It's more or less the same process.

Mail:

Many people say desktop mail clients are a thing of the past. They're not. They're actually far better than webmail. I won't go too in depth here, because it's really easy. Just launch Apple Mail, type in your email address, and it should fetch the proper settings for you. If it doesn't, a simple Google search of "*my mail client* apple mail settings" should give you what you need. This lets you manage multiple email accounts far faster than if you had to check them all individually online. It's pretty great. Also, Apple Mail has support for RSS, a system used by most websites so you can subscribe, and all their new content shows up in your mailbox. This is pretty easy. There's usually an RSS button at the top of your browser that will let you subscribe to the feed.

Growl:

Growl is one of the Mac's most popular pieces of software. Growl is a notification system used by almost every program to show notifications. What Growl is very good for is keeping yourself on track. Constantly checking Facebook? Just download the Growl Facebook add on and now, when something happens on Facebook; *ping!* Now you know. You can check Facebook because something happened. Woot.

Link: Growl

Quicksilver:

Finally, Quicksilver is a fantastic replacement for Spotlight. Not only does Quicksilver search for applications and files, it allows you to dictate their use from right inside the search. I think I can illustrate this best with an example. I want to email a file to a friend. I open Quicksilver, type in the name of the file, say, picture.jpg. I press tab, and type email. It automatically pops up with the Email Attachment add on. I press tab one more time, and type in John, and John Smith, my buddy, pops up. I hit enter, and a new email opens to John Smith with picture.jpg attached. I type in my message and hit send. All with one command. It's pretty much awesome.

Link: Quicksilver

Windows

Evernote:

Evernote works the same way on Windows as on Mac, so you can just follow the same guide that I had above.

Outlook:

While alot of people hate on Outlook, I'm actually pretty fond of it. As far as equivalency to the aforementioned Mac software is concerned, Outlook takes the place of Mail and iCal. Outlook can sync calendars with Google using Google Calendar Sync and can also aggregate your email. The process is fairly similar to Apple Mail, so I'll leave it at that.

Hopefully the same software that's been getting me through school for the past 4 or so years will help you even half as much. If you have anything that you use that I left out, make sure to let me know in the comments!

But the new set neutered red. Not only have the axed one of the absolute necessities for Red Deck Wins, Ball Lightning, but they have also axed one of my necessities, Raging Goblin.

Without the inclusion of these cards, the most common and certainly the most competitive Mono-Red deck in standard has been completely shut down. Now, a new card was printed in the M11 set called Arc Runner, which is definitely meant to replace Ball Lightning, but it is ridiculously weak in comparison. Really, all I want is another fun, burny creature. Is that too much to ask?