Platform(s): Android

Price: Free

Mission: Social-media integrated caller ID on your phone

Disenchanted with boring old caller ID? It’s the 21st century, and you’d expect more than a name and number nowadays. If this sounds like you, the Clog’s here with a solution: Current Caller ID.

When someone calls you, Current Caller ID pulls information about the person based on White Pages, your address book, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and displays it on your screen. Between all these sources, you usually get the person’s name and sometimes a photo as well. Creepy? Sure. Awesome? You bet! In addition to a name and photo, Current Caller ID will show you where the caller’s area code is from and the weather forecast of that area. It will also show you the person’s most recent social media updates.

Current Caller ID also includes some awesome features that show you statistics about your calling and texting habits. You can see a pie chart of the last three months depicting your number of incoming and outgoing texts and calls, as well as the number of your missed calls. The app also generates a bar graph of when you call and text, which it uses to determine the best time to call or text you. Lastly, it displays the three people you contact most and what form of contact you prefer.

Current Caller ID is everything you would expect from Caller ID in the 21st century. It’s free and gives you the perfect context for your conversation.

Contact Daniel Radding at dradding@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter at @Dradd510.

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Platform(s): Chrome

Price: Free

Mission: Make your new tabs pages more beautiful and functional

The default new tab page in Chrome leaves a lot to be desired. If left untouched you’ll either see a list of “apps” (essentially glorified bookmarks) or a 2-by-6 square grid with screen grabs of your most visited websites. It’s somewhat useful and definitely better than nothing, but there could be a much better use of that space.

You see the new tab page multiple times a day, so it’s space that you could fill with useful information rather than just bookmarks or links. The Chrome Web Store is filled with plenty of useful extensions that serve as replacements for the new tab page, transforming it into something beautiful or informative. But even better is the relatively new replacement for the new tab page called New Tab Page (yes, we understand this name is confusing), which combines the two.

For you Android users, New Tab Page tries to bring the experience of Google Now that you may be familiar with. For everyone else, New Tab Page is a beautiful Google-influenced extension. The top of the page is dominated by a gorgeous Google Search bar. Below that is a small 1-by-6 square grid of your recently visited websites. Also included is a left column with the day’s headlines and a right column that shows a box with weather forecasts and then another box filled with your Chrome Web Store apps.

What makes New Tab Page stand out among its competitors is its integrated and professional feel. It looks like its a could be the stock new tab page, not something thrown together by a third party developer.

Because New Tab Page is relatively new, it isn’t as powerful as we would like it to be. It has yet to be customizable, and there should definitely be more social media integration. However, New Tab Page is still a fantastic product and one we hope continues to be developed.

Contact Daniel Radding at dradding@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter at @Dradd510.

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Platform(s): The Internet, iOS

Price: Free

Mission: Instantly generate a calender with class times, due dates, office hours and more for your Berkeley class schedule.

One of the most common struggles for many students at Cal is getting organized. Entering all your assignments, classes and projects into your calender is way too much trouble and takes up five minutes you just don’t have. A new website called Quad — created by former Cal student Sagar Shah — understands this problem and tries to make getting organized as painless as possible.

Signing up for Quad is straightforward and simple — all you need to provide is what classes you’re taking and your bMail address to verify that you’re a Berkeley student. Quad does the rest of the work from there by generating a calender with all the important information you need to know about your classes.

However Quad, while a fantastic idea, is lacking some of the features you would expect of a fully polished product. Quad is really hit-and-miss with what classes it has full information about. It also often asks you to add things if you see stuff missing or correct mistakes. The idea of crowdsourcing the information on Quad is a cool idea, but it means that you can’t rely on it to always be accurate. It also does not currently sync with iCloud or Google Calender, so you can’t integrate it with the calendar you probably already use.

That being said, Quad has some unique features that make it pop. The website allows you to see who else is in your class, so that you can directly message your classmates as well as share resources through Quad.

Quad is a an awesome proof of concept but is far from a finished product. We definitely recommend exploring it if you have some time on your hands. Hopefully, the developers will continue to work on it before fall classes start because it has the potential to be a product every student would want to use.

Contact Daniel Radding at dradding@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter at @Dradd510.

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An easy way to avoid this problem is to bring your power splitter or strip. Yes, we know that sounds incredibly dorky, but you do already go to Cal, and it’s worth it if it means keeping your laptop alive. It’s an easy way to guarantee yourself a power outlet and possibly be a hero at the same time by providing extra power outlets to all.

However, we do know there could be some problems with this idea. People could accuse you of stealing the power strip when you leave, so be sure to put your name on it. You’ll also want to make sure the person who let you use the outlet in the first place gets his spot back when you leave, because it’s the right thing to do.

Now, if you’re in Haas or feeling capitalistic, you might see this as a business venture: I could rent out each outlet on my power strip. Please don’t. Yes, I know it’s simple supply and demand, but don’t. We all will think you’re a dick if you do this. Just be a good member of the community, and share with your fellow students.

You probably have an extra strip or splitter lying around your room, and if you don’t, they run for less than $10 — or you could check one out for free from Moffitt. It’s something you’ll be grateful to have if you’re stuck in Moffitt with a dying laptop.

Image source: Ton Raftery under Creative Commons

Contace Daniel Radding at dradding@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter at @Dradd510

The post How to: guarantee yourself a power outlet in Moffitt during dead week appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Platform(s): Chrome, Firefox, Safari

Price: Free

Mission: See your social media contacts in Gmail

This week’s app is one of those apps that takes five seconds to set up, but once you have it you’ll wonder why its not built into Gmail in the first place. It’s called Rapportive, and it’s a free extension for Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

What makes Rapportive awesome is how simple the concept is behind it. Rapportive checks for social media accounts associated with the sender’s email address including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. When you open a email, Rapportive replaces the ads found on the right-hand side with a vertical box filled with information about the sender of the email you’re currently reading.

Additionally you can link many of your social media accounts to Rapportive to see extra information about the sender on social networks where you’re connected. This allows you to do things like comment on Facebook posts or retweet someone right from Gmail.

Another neat feature built in is that you can add notes about the person that only you can see. It’s a perfect chance to remind yourself why you love or hate a person or if you owe that person something or vice versa.

The main caveat to Rapportive is that it only works with Gmail. Rapportive is also compatible with bMail because Berkeley’s email service is really just Gmail with a bMail branded skin. Now if you haven’t switched from CalMail to bMail at this point, you should be ashamed. bMail is awesome, but then again maybe you have a reason.

If you have Gmail or bMail, there isn’t a reason not to use Rapportive. It simply makes your email experience fuller and takes nothing away.

You can contact Daniel Radding at Dradding@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter at @Dradd510.

The post Thursday app of the week: Rapportive appeared first on The Daily Californian.

CourseSmart technology has created a system that tracks your progress using digital textbooks or e-books. It has the capabilities to log the time that you spend on each page, when and how many times you access a book and whether you highlight or take notes on specific parts of a section. And the best part for the professors is that all of this data can be consolidated into a single number — an engagement index. Effectively, they can know if you’ve fallen asleep while studying if you stay on a page for hours, if you’re a stereotypical procrastinator who waits until the night before to open the figurative cover or even if you’ve subtly been scrawling obscenities about them with the note-taking feature. It’s been deemed as a sort of “Big Brother” by a dean who employs it in her school. Yeah, that’s how creepy it has the potential to be.

There are many flaws with this technology. Some of us have the enviable superpower of never having to open a book and passing the class — so would we be penalized for having a low index score if we can still ace an exam? Would a professor be more biased when grading your paper if he or she knew you hadn’t opened the book — even if you had somehow managed to compose a masterful work worthy of publication?

But we suppose every evil has its advantages. Professors — especially the ones who require you to buy books they’ve personally written — will finally be able to see how effective (or ineffective) these books are to the class. A potential benefit — well, it could swing either way from a student’s perspective — would be that professors have the ability to gauge the difficulty of their classes and adjust their teaching style and content. A broader issue would be whether this would mandate the use of e-books throughout classes. Some students have claimed that e-books are not conducive to their learning, as they are a mouse click away from the infinitely more entertaining options of Facebook and Netflix. More importantly for the well-being of the average student’s wallet, mandating e-books would probably decrease the spending output for textbooks, as even the least tech-savvy people have mastered the two-finger flick of Control-C (or Command-C for all you fancy Mac users), enabling them to share the data.

A common inspiration for this was whether students are “really learning if (they) only open the book the night before the test.” Well, the response to that, Mr. Guardia — the utterer of that nonsense — is a resounding “damn right,” which you would have known if you looked at our test scores. Fortunately, this new technology hasn’t been adopted by Cal administration yet, and hopefully it never will be. Students have always found ways to circumvent their educators’ flawed attempts to control their home lives, and this is no different.

Class dismissed.

Contact Uday at umehta@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter at @mehtakid.

The post Professors given ability to track our reading and studying habits appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Platform(s): iOS, OSX

Price: $1.99

Mission: Keep organized as the stress piles up

With Dead Week and finals creeping up on us, midterms still happening and papers due, it’s safe to say that many of us are stressed. We have too much to do and too little time. It’s easy to get overwhelmed quickly and forget to turn in an assignment or post a response to bSpace. A great way to relieve some stress and help stay organized is to make a to-do list. There are lots of different to-do apps out there — and yes, some people still use an old-fashioned pen and paper — but our favorite is an app called Clear.

What makes Clear stand out is its intuitive simplicity and beauty. Clear is a gesture-based app that just makes sense and is effortless to use. Just “pull down” to make a new task. Swipe to the right on a task when you’ve completed it, or swipe left to delete it. To move tasks up or down the list, simply drag and drop. Tasks on the top of your list are dark red and progressively get lighter, toward yellow, to emphasize priority. If you need more than one list, you can easily make one. Pinching a list allows you to see a all of your to-do activities, which you can manipulate just like tasks. It’s straightforward, functional and beautiful to boot.

If $1.99 is too steep for your college budget, Any.DO is a great alternative that also happens to work with Android. If a to-do list app is simply too fancy, but you want a digital list, you could make a text file called todo.txt and put it on your desktop. In the end, a to-do list should help relieve stress and help you focus. Clear is a great app for this, but the most important thing is that it works for you.

Contact Daniel Radding at Dradding@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @Dradd510.

The post Thursday app of the week: Clear appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The project was led by School of Information professor John Chuang. The researchers developed a means of confirming identity through the use of brain activity into a commercial EEG (electroencephalogram). This device is a $100 headset with a single electrode pick up that reaches around your forehead to sense your brainwaves. With this device, a biometric brainwave login is transmitted as a password or “passthought” through a Bluetooth link to a PC where identification is authenticated.

The process of creating a log-in ID through brain biometrics is simple. Participants of the project were asked to undergo seven different tasks. Three of these consisted of basic bodily functions such as breathing, imagining their finger moving up and down and listening to an audio tone. The remaining four focused on creating a unique individual secret that allows for user specific identification. These encompass singing a song of their choice or focusing on a particular thought for 10 seconds. Once all of the data is gathered from the participant, a biometric login is created through discerning a pattern in brain activity.

Despite the process’ efficiency in cost and method, it isn’t perfectly ready for the world just yet. Apparently, there is still a whopping 1 percent error rate (these scientist-types are such perfectionists). Also, the EEG headset isn’t the most fashionable thing around either. If this were to become a thing now, it probably wouldn’t fly with the Berkeley fashion aficionados just yet, unless having a large plastic headset around your head can be considered the newest fad in vintage city fashion. But hey, we at the Clog are all for fashion suicide if it means activating devices with our brains!

Anyway, who knows what the future will bring for this kind of technology. Maybe it will be incorporated into all Bluetooth headsets to log in to smart phones or computers? Or maybe it will become a standard issue device given to all students for use toward all campus student services? The future holds many limitless possibilities that are as exciting as they are awesome. Regardless, it looks like this sci-fi dream of ours just might come true!

Contact Matt Espineli at mespineli@dailycal.org.

The post UC Berkeley researchers develop technology to access passwords with mind appeared first on The Daily Californian.

In 1995, Anderson took one of his grad student’s suggestions to heart when he proposed combining the power of personal computers to do some work in the name of science. His grad student was thinking more of finding aliens, but Anderson was thinking more along the lines of pulsar and black hole discovery.

Combining the power of computers across the globe to work toward one common goal? It’s almost too romantic of a notion. But it could work. So Anderson quit the startup company he was working for at the time and developed the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. When people signed up for BOINC, they were essentially volunteering the processing power of their computers that they weren’t using for whatever project the network needed it for. With all this extra power, there was no telling what could be accomplished. And this was in the 1990s.

Boasting more than a million participants in its earlier years, BOINC now only has about 400,000 personal computers running on the software. That’s where your Android phone comes in. Anderson, attempting to revitalize BOINC, is adapting the program to run on smartphones and tablets. Technology has advanced significantly since the ’90s, and now almost all our little gadgets have enough power to to be useful to BOINC. And when combined with the millions of other Android devices in the world … we could be finding black holes left and right.

Now, we think we know what you’re thinking. I don’t have any extra power to give away from my phone. I have enough trouble keeping it charged for the day! But lo and behold, Anderson is cognizant of our culture’s hyper-dependency on smartphones and promises to only use your phone’s processing power when it’s charging or connected to a Wi-Fi network.

We haven’t forgotten about you Apple buffs, either. It’s not that Anderson doesn’t want to utilize the power of your iPhone or iPad, but the code of BOINC’s app needs to access the processing heart of your mobile device, and that isn’t really Apple’s cup of tea. Despite the (extremely) high volume of people who use iPhones, Anderson thinks that the power he’ll (hopefully) gain from Android mobile devices will be more than sufficient.

So, for all you Android users out there, keep your eyes peeled for a new BOINC app that’ll let you sign up your device to do some analysis for Einstein@Home, a project dedicated to discovering cool stuff like black holes. Maybe they’ll name one after you! Probably not.

Contact Sabrina Werts at swerts@dailycal.org.

The post Can your phone help find a black hole? appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Research from Canadian psychologists at McGill University has suggested that music can actually be used as an effective and legitimate alternative to medical drugs. The study indicates that neurochemical benefits of music can physically help manage mood, reduce stress, create social connections and boost your immune system. Their research found that 15 studies showed people’s stress hormone — cortisol — actually dropped after they listened to relaxing music. Currently, the use of tunes in a medical setting has been limited to calming patients before surgery or during dental procedures. Going further, the researchers state that music-based treatments can be considered a better alternative to medical drugs, citing their benefits as being “noninvasive, having minimal or no side effects, are inexpensive, convenient, and completely ‘natural.’”

Peculiarly, the study also suggests that forming drumming circles can boost immunity, which in turn reverses age-related declines in health. Well, if this is at all true, then the Clog suggests busting out some bongos now and getting together with your friends to drop some mad beats. That or maybe join the campus Taiko drum group.

Ultimately, the researchers state that the study still doesn’t have the most resounding irrefutable proof just yet. However, they suggest that the current evidence provides enough “preliminary support for the claim that neurochemical changes mediate the influence of music on health.” So at least the use of music as a beneficial medical drug is making steps in the right direction. Regardless, the effects seem pretty positive.

Anyway, when the going gets tough with stress and illness resulting from life, massive studies, midterms and a crap-ton of essays, remember that music can always do the trick in a pinch. If what this research says is true, then music might as well be the most well-conceived natural medical drug on the planet. So plug in those headphones, and start feeling the healing!

Contact Matt Espineli

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