Here’s one that’s been sitting my drafts for a fair while so here is some light of day for it.

Apple has released a new internet device yesterday (relative to when this was written) which has pretty much filled Twitter ever since. You have probably heard of this if you used the internet in the last year or so.

I particularly like the built in iBooks program. I actually own an iBook so I find this slightly confusing, the iBook was a laptop and iBooks is an online ebook store. I really think that having such a big player in the market will really change what we see in the ebook market. I hope it means that we will have the sort of really amazing media features that you can do with computer technology. The New York Times has already shown off an application where you can read their newspaper and have inline video content. I think that’s really very impressive. Apple is not a publishing company, it wants to sell books so that people have a reason to buy their iPad device. Therefore things which are good for selling the iPad will be pushed for. I think that bodes well for user experience and possibly price if not necessarily choice. Also they’re selling them in ePub format and more stores should do that.

There’s been a real internet backlash against it. I think this is probably because it’s been the single biggest tech story of the decade. The “Apple Tablet” was the big non-surprise of the year. People expected it to just about make your tea for you. The main complaint is that it’s just a big iPhone. I think this seems to forget that people really like their iPhones. Saying something is just a bigger pile of happy drugs won’t mean it isn’t awesome.

I think the comments that the name is stupid because it sounds like a feminine hygiene product are just facile. That gives the anti Mac brigade a bad name. When it says pad think “of paper” and “oh, that’s a play on iPod” not “that’s a lady thing” and snigger to yourself. It’s not a good look.

I haven’t used one (of course I haven’t) but I think it goes without saying that it will sell like hot cakes and some market will be affected by it. But I went to the Glasgow Apple store on launch day and I have used one by now – it’s smooth and very impressive. I didn’t get one, I didn’t see the need it would satisfy and I’m not earning enough just now to spend £400 on fun things.

The big news is that they’ve ported iWork to the new device which means that you can actually do pretty honest work on what is primarily a music, book, movie and photo browsing device. I don’t know how much work will be done on it but the potential is there and that’s a good reason to consider buying it. I think that you shouldn’t buy it just to make documents in iWork (especially if you have a laptop already) but that it is a nice to have feature, a little bit like how my phone works as a torch in a pinch.

The Guardian has come out yesterday (relative to when this post was posted) with a scathing review about how it’s so expensive to buy the big model. I’m a big fan of having quite small storage in my mobile devices (2GB seems to work well for my phone and mp3 player) because it’s massively cheaper and there is a genuine limit for how material much you can physically consume in the periods between plugging it back into your computer to charge it up anyway. I think at around £700 for the ultra high end 64GB model with 3G and GPS it’s nice if you have the money but it’s not going to be any better that the small model. I personally don’t see the benefit in getting the 3G upgrade but I can see how it would be useful to a certain group of people (lorry drivers are experimenting using it as a huge satnav for example).

It just seems like a very expensive way to be connected on the move but, then again, it’s a £400-£700 internet appliance so frugality isn’t the overarching principle to begin with.

In a recent comment Michael (of Law Actually) asked if I had thought about tweaking the previous theme. In all honesty I hadn’t considered tweaking the theme at all. I’d sort of sublimated the idea that WordPress.org (the web application) is very customisable but WordPress.com (the hosting service) is very locked down. You can do things like advertise on a self hosted blog that you aren’t allowed to WordPress.com and the files are much more readily available if they are on your server instead of Automattic’s. However I discovered it’s not as locked down as I thought when I went to the Dashboard to have a look around.

I’ve been fiddling with the blog layout recently and I’ve also given it a change of fonts thanks to Typekit. Typekit is an interesting technology which lets you include any font (that Typekit supports) in your web page, regardless of whether or not you, your blog host or your readers have the fonts installed. I would actually sincerely doubt that anyone reading this would have these particular fonts installed – I’m using Calluna for headings and Droid Sans Pro for the body text. These are commercial fonts that you would need to have spent $174 to have (fonts are hard work to make and cost a lot of money). I think it’s a little excessive to have to spend $174 just to read my blog properly. However they are good looking typefaces. The alternative is to use something like Typekit which lets you see the glyphs without needing to install the fonts.

Typography is an interest of mine and it’s a fairly important thing to consider if you are looking at effectively writing for a living, which is basically how I see practising law. According to research humans find it easier to read serif fonts (like Times New Roman etc) on paper and sans serif fonts (like Arial) on screens. Therefore I’ve used a serif font for the headings (which are shorter and larger) and a sans serif for the body text. I generally use the reverse for printed documents. There is method in ‘t.

I’ve mentioned typography on the blog before and have recommended Typography for Lawyers to anyone looking for a detailed and useful introduction (and a bit more) to the subject without actually having to enrol in an art school.

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University is pretty much an industrialised way to exchange essays for potentially higher earnings in the future. There’s really not much more critical to the orthodox university experience than handing your essays in.

I imagine the general way people do this is they open a new document in Microsoft Word before alternately staring at it, typing words into it and checking the word count. They then sort their footnotes and bibliography, run it through TurnItIn or similar and then either print it out or submit it electronically. That way works but there’s so many other ways to do it.

I think Word is an amazing program, it gets a hard time but it basically does everything to text that you, and pretty much anyone else, could ever want to do to text. It’s such a substantial program there are many, many courses and books purely on the various intricacies of it. I do encourage everyone to do these, it helps to know how Word works. It’s so much more than it seems at first glance.

If you want to go beyond just writing all your stuff in Word the workflow you’ll come up with is one of the most individual decisions you’ll make. You’ll probably use a collection of various things.

My favourite tools for writing are:

1. Plain text
2. Text expansion,
3. Templates,
4. Backup and,
5. Word

Plain text

I don’t think I really need Word to write my essays. I type just about everything I write into Mousepad, (even things on blogs in case my browser crashes). It’s a lightweight plain text editor – just like Notepad. You type your words into it and nothing else. The biggest change is that I’ve started to use the Harvard citing model because Mousepad doesn’t support footnotes. I check my spelling with Aspell and check word counts with wc.

Text expansion

Is a surprising feature I never thought I needed. I first came across the concept through Low End Mac, where one of the principal writers has serious joint problems which make typing uncomfortable. He uses text expansion to let him minimise the amount of typing he needs to on health grounds. I use it for various things, I have some commonly typed terms arranged to expand – for example “pomo” becomes “postmodernism”- but the big thing I use it for is dynamic scripts. One of the big ones is that it will change $date into the current date and time which makes it a lot easier to type the date for record keeping purposes. I use Autokey for this. It’s Linux only but it’s the spirtual successor of AutoHotKey which runs on Windows.

Templates

One of the better features of many operating systems is that you can create new documents of various types by right clicking in the file browser. Ubuntu takes this as far as I’ve seen and lets you create a new copy of anything in your ~/Templates/ directory. For example I use a template for blog posts that looks a lot like this:

Start:
Title:
Word count:
Tags:
Category:
Posted:
Link:

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This gives me all the details I need for a blog post in one file and the fingerprint I use to track when/where my posts get scraped because I keep forgetting to put it in. Having it there gives me a checklist to work through. I just do “right click > create document > blog post” and fill in the fields so they’re there for WordPress when I come to post it. I also have another for essays which includes things like the deadline, the question, the word limit and so on. The idea is to make a checklist for things I need to remember.

Backup

Backup is utterly essential, you just can’t afford to lose your work at any point and it’s really easily done. I’ve found that Flashbake is good for both backup and versioning. The creator explains it is,

seamless source control tool for ordinary people. Automated backup is nice unless you have files for which you want to view an incremental history. Source control is great for that history but most tools expect the author to manually commit their changes along the way. A seamless source control solution combines the convenience of automated back up with the power of source version control.

I’ve set it to save the changes I’ve made to my files every 15 minutes and these backups are copied to my Dropbox account. It’s a bit like the Time Machine backup system in new editions of Mac OS X in that it’s both backup and versioning, and it’s smart enough to check if the file actually has changed before it backs it up. You probably don’t need versioning but it’s the sort of feature that you are not going to regret having if you later find out you need it.

Word

I have a copy of Word 2007 installed on this computer which I run using WINE. I’ve never really got it to work brilliantly well but I don’t need to do very much in Word. After I’ve written the text in Mousepad I copy and paste it into a Word document and convert the Harvard citations into footnotes. I can then submit it like everyone else.

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I own an iPod Nano. This is not to show off about my latest toy, it’s actually one of the very first iPod Nanos from 2005. I keep using it because it still works and it was quite a lot of money at the time. It does sound, photos and it plays Brick. On the other hand it doesn’t have a touchscreen and it doesn’t run Apps. These are things that I’d probably use if my iPod had them but I’m not bothered enough to buy a new one. The one thing that I’m currently disappointed about is that it doesn’t do video.

The original iPod Nano has a tiny 1.5″ screen and really is only supposed to let you see the name of the song that is currently playing. I don’t really want to watch video on the thing. What I do want to do is copy video podcasts to it. I think this is acceptable because in many cases the video podcast is just a podcast which has a video with it. The video element is seeing the speaker talk to a camera or something else which is nice to have but not enough to add extra content.

A podcast is effectively a recorded radio show which you can download. It can have interviews, fiction, non fiction and so on as long as it is recorded and published as a digital file for download. CharonQC does a very regular, good legal podcast – “law casts” naturally – which illustrates the concept very well. A video podcast – tenuously a “vodcast” – is simply a video file rather than an audio file.

Quite a good example is the really good, highly recommended David Mitchell’s Soapbox which can be effectively summarised as the guy from Peep Show complaining about things. They are speeches which are jazzed up by superimposing Mitchell onto a thematically suitable background, for example in “Waste” he is pictured sitting in a bin. Beyond that the real meat of the content is the speech. It’s just that it could work as a audio file too and if it was an audio file I could put it on my iPod and listen to it while I’m out and about.

This simply comes down the issue of choosing your medium when you prepare a presentation. A podcast about learning to paint is something that benefits from having a video whereas an audiobook does not (an audiobook which adds enough visual content to benefit from having video is called a movie). I think most people’s work will fall in the middle of those extremes and the judgement call has to be made. The take home lesson for today is that it’s important to realise that there actually is a judgement call to make.

The broadband revolution, improved processing capacity and the reduced cost of data storage means that the technical difference between making a podcast and making a “vodcast” is now reasonably narrow – downloading a 20MB video file is now only a couple of minutes, will disappear into a terabyte hard drive and will not strain a quad core processor. If you’re in this position, technologically you really may as well point a camera at stool in front of a blank wall and talk into it. I’d encourage you to avoid picking video because you may as well instead of because it’s better for what you’re doing. A good option if you want to have the best of both worlds is simply to do both, strip the video using your favourite video editing software and just post the sound in a separate download.

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(Cormac McCarthy’s venerable typing machine)

This is a heavily worn Lettera 32 – it’s an Olivetti portable typewriter. It’s clearly seen some heavy use. I find it hard to imagine just how much use it’s seen though — about 5 million words across 7 books and numerous smaller works.

I’ve blogged about my own Olympia SG-3 earlier in the year and this is the absolute opposite end of the scale. The portable typewriter is a smaller, lighter, portable option. It’s not at all dissimilar in its intended use to the laptop of today:

(There’s a really good photo showing how a portable typewriter is used in the same way as a laptop on the BBC News site but it’s a getty image and I’m not going to risk embedding it here – BBC link)

That’s the very good thing about the portable typewriter. They really are portable. They are designed specifically to fit into a bag and be light enough to carry around. You could even get cases which allowed you to carry files, accessories, supplies along with the typewriter etc — very much like a laptop bag.

My big model sits on a desk in my room and stays there until I get someone to help me move it. In return it’s a considerable chunk of springs and gears which can do some amazing things with no more than a cunning use of gears and springs (decimal tabulation anyone?) and is pretty hard to hurt. It’s really up to the user — you wouldn’t say that a laptop is better than a desktop to type documents on. It may have different features but at the expense of portability, for example. If you only need to type notes any typewriter will do that fine.

I can’t possibly afford Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter but I think I’m content with my current typewriter altogether. It’s given me a good few months of reliable, handy service so far and long may it continue.

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He lodged a complaint with the WIPO under the UDRP against a domain name owner he said was violating his trademark (see what I did there). An American individual registered a domain name which linked his name with various criminal acts — however the site didn’t accuse him of doing the acts, they just wanted to know why he won’t come out and publicly deny the serious allegations, a satirical reference to Beck’s own interviewing style — Beck promptly took legal advice and this led to the WIPO hearing. The extra-legal Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy is not perfect, it’s been widely criticised from the very outset for issues of accountability and bias not least in that the initial source of the policy is the World Intellectual Property Organisation and asking the WIPO how you should deal with copyright disputes between trademark owners and domain name owners is a little bit like asking the KKK how you should deal with disputes between white people and black people.

On the other hand, this dispute is quite a reassuring note that in the case of fairly clear situations the process does work. The UDRP deals with trademark violation and this is not a trademark violation so the action can’t succeed and that’s what’s been decided, although on a different ground because the domain name was held to be similar enough to be confusing.

It’s the specific details of the dispute which are quite entertaining. The reason behind the registrant registering the specific domain name he did is because it’s an Internet meme. It’s not the registrant making false allegations of felonies by Glenn Beck, he’s just copying a joke that’s on FARK. The third pillar of the test requires the trademark owner to prove bad faith so this is a huge deal. The thing is that Internet memes are elements from a (primarily American) subculture and it’s impossible to assume that any particular WIPO panel sitting in Geneva will know a lolcat from a rickroll. This means that the respondent’s submission needed to include a potted history of the Internet meme in between naturally quite dry analysis of relevant precedent and procedural (as opposed to legal) argument. It’s inordinately awesome to read about Leroy Jenkins on letter headed paper.

Perhaps most hearteningly of all is the statement released by the registrant after the decision was made – in the statement he gives Beck control of the domain (despite the panel ruling in the registrant’s favour) and says that the only reason he even disputed the point was to defend the American Constitution’s protections of free speech from Beck. It’s a surprisingly powerful and elegant declaration of patriotism for a dispute that came out of an Internet in-joke.

Arstechnica have a good, factually oriented review of the dispute that’s worth a read.

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The Pirate Bay is a great source of material for blog posting. Oddly enough this isn’t about the issue of, you know, their big court case. This is actually about their rather entertaining “Legal Threats” page. The Pirate Bay has (had?) a policy whereby if you found someone had posted a torrent with your copyrighted material on the Pirate Bay tracker / search engine you could write to the Pirate Bay and they… will promptly ignore it. Or they’ll send you a cheeky reply.

They post the letters they get on this page. Generally what they have are copies of emails which are very simply the plain text listings of the emails, generally with lots of lawyerly signatures including the words of “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL” etc. However, one of the documents is interesting because it’s a PDF. The Pirate Bay took this and replied back with a 1 megabyte image in .BMP format which looked a lot like this:

“I can use annoying formats too” they say. But is PDF annoying? I’m not so sure.

With my techie hat on I know that the best form to find text in is simple, human readable plain text, the sort of thing you’d get if you typed it in Notepad. It’s just the words, you can do anything with it, you can copy and paste it into any other program and every computer can interpret it in such a way as to let you see it on any computer you can find. However, with my (law) student hat on I happen to really like the not so humble Portable Document Format.

What is PDF?

It’s probably worth talking about what PDF is by comparing it to the other options for text.

1) Plain text

Examples, created by: Notepad, Text Editor

Pares everything down to the words themselves. There is no option for formatting, fonts, colours, pages, anything. All you do is type a long sheet of contigous text. The great thing is the sheer efficiency of what you produce. The document provides all the substantive content of the fancier formats but without messing with formatting issues.

Pros

1. Very lightweight
2. Easily transferred
3. Easily modified in many different programs running on many different systems
4. Easily adapted into other forms, not burdened by extra code put in for formats etc.

Cons

1. No formatting, at all. Need to use things like *bold* or /italic/ to distinguish formatting
2. No diagrams. It’s possible to do using letters and symbols but no chance for images in the text
3. Can be hard to set out – things like footnoting and tables of contents pretty much need to be set out by hand in the vast majority of plain text editors.
4. Can be very elegant, can be very crude.

2) Rich text

Examples, created by: MS Word, OpenOffice

Pros

1. Most common kind of text – every web page and every Word document are rich text.
2. Allows visible formatting – select text and make it bold, italic etc. Allows fonts
3. Allows image imbedding, depending on the specific format this can be within the file itself (eg, Word documents) or through referencing (eg web pages)
4. Can be very feature rich – templates, automated footnoting, automated table of conents etc are all possible.

Cons

1. Extra features means compatibility suffers. Documents created in MS Word may have compatibility issues when opened in slightly different programs, eg. OpenOffice, Word Perfect, Abiword.
2. Although you can choose various fonts for your documents these fonts will only appear on other people’s computers if they also have the same fonts installed. If they don’t they’ll see a fallback option which you may not have chosen. There are ways around this.
3. Will not look the same on every computer, settings will vary and the resulting document can be affected.

3) Image

Examples, created by: Paint, Photoshop

I might surprise some people by including this option here but I really do think that image formats are a real option (of sorts) for conveying text on a computer. The flexibility that allows the same picture format to contain a picture a funny cat or a world famous old master also allows it to hold the shape of words.

Pros:

1. Document looks exactly as it did on your computer for everyone
2. Very easily shared between users – every modern computer can understand the common picture formats, so no need for specialist software to view it.
3. Very, very good for diagrams. Will look exactly as intended, allows full colour and photorealistic images to included directly with the text.
4. Very flexible layout – not bound by justification or layout tags, can put elements in anywhere on the document

Cons

1. Very big files for email etc (the Pirate Bay image was 1 megabyte for 7 words)
2. Can be hard to edit, and editing it well requires specialist software that’s hard to use
3. Can be hard to add extra pages
4. Not actually text – only an image so can’t be copied and manipulated like a text document

4) Device Independent formats

Examples, created by: Acrobat, Foxit, TeX

Pros

1. Will look the same on every computer (is device independent). Designed to be transferred between computers
2. Allows you to rely on page, line numbers because it is identical to each user
3. Allows direct embedding of images, allows for diagrams to be laid in text exactly where intended by the creator
4. Is still text, so can be copied and pasted as text. Possible to also have original image as well as text, for example if scanning a book, in the same document
5. Can be pretty immutable, so provides quite a good historical reference. (eg, harder to edit a PDF report from Westlaw than an RTF)

Cons

1. Can be “annoying” – that is if you’re browsing the internet and you come across a PDF document your browser will need to load an external reader.
2. Can be expensive. PDF is officially created by Acrobat and that is not cheap. On the other hand DVI,free PDF and so on are open-source and can be produced by many different formats.
3. Can be pretty immutable, it can be difficult to just change something in a PDF document.

Now, if I point you to 4ii) I think I will show you a huge reason to like PDF (and other device independent formats). The reason here is to look at the ability to rely on the page numbers – so that useful summation of a case’s ratio at the bottom of page 4 is at the bottom of page 4, on everyone’s computer.

I can’t really understand why you would email someone a PDF version of a letter instead of writing your message in the email itself. I find that strange but I don’t think that means that the format is annoying. Feel free to use these formats in your own workflow. They’re good.

1: <a name=”1″><a href=”#f1″>[1]</a></a>
2: <a name=”f1″><a href=”#1″>[1]</a></a>

These two lines of awkwardly nested code will provide you with clicky footnotes in HTML pages. It works fine for WordPress posts. It is pretty straight forward HTML but since it appears not to be an automated function in WordPress it needs done manually. I assume this would work in all blogging platforms as it just uses HTML, the markup webpages are written in. You need to be using the HTML view of the WordPress post screen to apply this, otherwise it will convert the greater and less than symbols etc into text rather than code and it will show up in your post instead of links. It’s how I did it in the previous post here and here.

I don’t believe anyone should copy and paste anything into their website/blog/program/terminal/contract/etc without knowing what it does so: The code works in four parts.

The first section of 1, <a name=”1″>, defines the content falling in between it and the </a> as an anchor called “1″. The second section of 1, <a href=”#f1″>, defines the content falling between it and the next </a> as a link to the part of the page defined as f1. This is applied to the superscript number in your body text – so in my previous post: “…at all times<strong>[1]</strong> a vindication…” Clicking this number will take you to the bottom of the post.

The first section of 2, < a name=”f1″>, defines the content falling in between it and then </a> as an anchor called f1. The second section of 2, <a href=”#1>, defines the content falling between it and the next </a> as a link to the part of the page defined as 1. This is applied to the superscript number in your footnotes – so in my previous post: “…<strong>[1]</strong> The arrests” Clicking this number will take your back to its reference number in the body text.

You need to rename each part of the footnote. In this example I’ve used 1 for the reference in the body text and f1 to refer to the footnote. I would increment this to 2 and f2 for the next footnote. I would rename this entirely for the next post, however, because it gets confusing to have links which effectively point to other posts on the main page of your blog. In this case if you put a letter in front of 1 and f1 to create “a1″ and “af1″, in the next post you could use “b1″ and “bf1″ and the two could coincide in full on your main page with no problems.

Feel free to email or comment for clarification. I’m not a technical writer for a reason.

Mac Observer has published an article on the tips and details for students wanting to deal with the hassle and benefits of bringing a laptop to university. I think he makes some good points, although the advice certainly doesn’t depend on the brand of the laptop.

Transport

Transport is the biggest concern for students who stay at home and commute to university. Those living in dorms get away with, generally, less travel but with the concerns of possible theft.

I think the best way to transport a laptop at uni is a lot like how you’d do it with a bike. You want to immobilise it to stop it swinging about as you move and stressing the components.

Another good tip is to get a case which you can slide the laptop straight into – so a top opening, padded, laptop compartment in your bag is pretty brilliant. I use a padded neoprene slip case which fits in my backpack like a document wallet. It works and it protects my computer for less than a new bag but at the cost of being slower to unpack and pack when I want to use it, for example in lectures and tutorials. This needs to be added to the time needed for the laptop to be ready for you to use – starting up and loading programs. In this regard good and reliable sleep/suspend modes are a great asset.

Weight

Weight is an important issue but I think it can be overstated. Even for those who will never play prop on the university rugby team it is unlikely that any laptop you decide to pack in your bag will be cripplingly heavy. Today’s laptops are considerably lighter an d smaller than those of yesteryear. At the very worst you may find your bag works as weight training and you build some muscle. Obviously avoid a huge laptop because besides being weighty it will also be unwieldy. Most laptops are still portable enough for university without spending more for an ultraportable model. I think Mac Observer’s suggested MacBook Air is a lot of money to spent avoiding 680g of extra weight and the difference between that and a regular MacBook could probably be spent better elsewhere. Obviously if, on reading this, you realise that your MacBook Air is unsuitable for your university backpack please get in touch with the Scots Law Student MacBook Air Re-homing project because I haven’t got one. You will most likely find the extra weight pretty unnoticeable, especially when you add a single textbook or bottle of water (always an idea to have in your bag) and neutralise that hard bought weight saving.

Security

The security tips are a good move – if you have a couple of thousand. pounds (potentially) worth of computer equipment in a desirable and inherently portable product it is necessary to consider the risk that someone might take it.

This is particularly important for students living in dorms and halls because losing a computer is both a loss of corporeal movable property but also a significant loss of information, work and time.

Think Geek sells, for a lot of money, a wall mounted laptop safe which lets you bolt the laptop, secure inside a metal case, to the firmament of the building itself. I have no doubt this would be an pretty effective anti theft measure.

For people less worried about the threat of theft a cable lock is probably all you’ll need. These bike chain like devices attach to the rectangular slot on most laptops and then loop around a sturdy piece of furniture. This will protect you from people up to the point of lifting furniture / cutting the chain. If these methods both fail you could follow the example of an American law student who simply fought off his robber with a warcry of “not my case outlines!”

I think their encryption tips – encrypted disc images in particular – are worth noting but personally don’t use it myself. I don’t feel I have all that much in the way of files that need protection, I have an encrypted password database and that does me instead.

Insurance

If your laptop is still stolen the best option is to make sure your computer has been insured – you may lose your computer but you report it as stolen (as it may well be), and then replace it on, ideally, your parent’s home contents insurance and you offer to pay the excess. I wouldn’t be a law student if I didn’t point the need to check that your belongings are indeed protected under the policy while you are away at university.

Backup

If your computer is stolen you’ll probably lose a lot of your work. I keep a lot of notebooks, files and boxes of notes but I still have a considerable amount of work on my computer that I would desperately not want to lose. This differs from trying to keep possession of your computer, but is just as important.

Backup doesn’t need to be difficult. Mac Observer points its readers to the Time Machine feature on recent versions this provides versioning backup for all of your files with very little configuration. All that needs is a suitable Mac and a big external hard drive. Apple offer their own Time Machine wireless wireless hubs which are obviously wireless and convenient but any external hard drive will work and with Misco.co.uk offering a 1 terrabyte one for £67.8 – or under 7p a gigabyte (I have used just about 2 GB in my entire university career) so they are becoming very reasonably priced.

Backups don’t need ts be particularly fancy, just as as long as they are regular. Copying your home directory (Mac/Linux) or My Documents folder (Windows) onto a portable hard drive, assuming it’s done regularly, can be just as effective as buying a professional, automated product to do it for you.

A good backup protects your data from accidents that destroy your computer like battery fires etc and even robbery assuming if it isn’t taken along with the computer.

These tips apply to the lowliest netbook to the shiniest boutique gaming laptop, from the sveltest ultraportable to the chunkiest mediacentre. Get a good bag so you can carry it healthily. Get a security setup, make sure losing it isn’t irretrievable and be able to continue with your studies without, it even temporarily. This is particularly important around assessment time.

Of all the websites I could recommend here this will not be the immediately most useful one but I think it’s definitely worth having a look at. www.typographyforlawyers.com is both an example of just how big a country the US is and also a very useful resource on how to set out readable text. I am not a lawyer, but my official day job still involves putting words on and therefore typographyforlawyers.com is useful for me. It’s not designed to teach you how to draft a contract or how to write a letter but it is designed to teach you to set it out attractively and to optimise for readability. It is written by a man who changed careers from typographer to lawyer (and, to demonstrate the number of people in America he is not the only person to have done this) who presents both sides of the argument neatly. He also provides guidance based on the practice guidance of American courts. It would be interesting to know the guidance from our own courts compares.

Given the amount of work that the average student would naturally pour into their words it makes sense to then learn a little about how to present it in an attractive and professional way. You don’t particularly need a huge investment of time – you can certainly put more time in if you feel inclined – but the site itself is a quick read which is logically arranged into a sensible introduction and beginning, intermediate and advanced sections.

The main lesson that I took from the site was that you need to treat printed text differently to onscreen text – I think because of the markedly higher resolution involved. That means that some fonts, for example the ones included with an operating system, are optimised for screen use as opposed to print use and this is not ideal. A more important lesson to take from it is that typography is an effective way to make a document more persuasive and more intelligible. It is not able to make a document’s content better than it is but it can make it clearer and give it a touch of style at the same time.