Kno Me provides students and professors with analytics to track progress and improve study habits.

Digital textbook reader and marketplace Kno wants you to get smarter, and today it released an update that creates robust flashcards and adds study-habit analytics.

"In digital learning, things should be in context, so instead of going out to the Web the facts should come to you," said Kno CEO and co-founder Osman Rashid in an interview last week at the 2012 Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. The analytics are available in a dashboard called Kno Me, which tracks a student's studying habits within the Kno app. This includes the time spent in a given textbook, notes taken, and quiz results. Importantly, says Rashid, Kno Me will include allow students to compare their habits to others, and allow professors to see how students are engaging with a given text.

Kno currently offers more than 100,000 textbooks for sale, each with a 15-day free trial. Currently available from any Web browser or its iPad app, Kno has plans to release an Android app within the month, said Rashid. As is to be expected in the book marketplace, Kno uses DRM to lock down its texts. Interestingly, though, it uses the open DRM standard called Marlin.

Kno Flashcards from ... [Read more]

Windows 8 is still just a promise, except for a few folks with developer's builds. If you want to try out the fabled Metro interface on your computer, there's now a solution. The metro7 app changes the Windows 7 interface to make it look and feel like Metro. Here's how to use it:

1. Download and install the app here.
2. Start it up. You should see a tiled interface, though it is separate from your desktop.
3. Click the arrow in the upper right to set your options, pin programs or Web sites to the tile screen, and more. Experiment! The built-in apps are minimal, but you can get more or add any apps or bookmarks you like.

   Step 3: Settings.

4. You can drag tiles to rearrange them, or drag down to the bottom to trash them.

   Step 4: Move tiles.

The app comes loaded with caveats. It's not from Microsoft, so it's all reverse-engineered, which means that the final product is likely to be fairly different. It's also in beta, and while I only experienced one bug (it crashed when I tried to back out of a Facebook screen), it's not perfect. Still, it delivers on its promise, and it's definitely fun to play around with the interface we're all likely to be using in a year or so!

Thanks to MakeUseOf for the link!

Tour Lojack for Laptops (photos)

Your security app gives you the longitude and latitude of your stolen tech, but is it wise to confront a tech thief on your own? And how do you get your neighborhood cops to care about your stolen $300 phone?

The publisher of Lojack for Laptops and its new Android counterpart, Theft Recovery, says that it provides more than device tracking. Canada-based Absolute Software claims that its 17 years of experience in the field and connections to local law enforcement agencies make it the best option for device recovery, too.

"Consumer vigilantism and tech are now enabling consumers to be crime-fighters," Mark Grace, Absolute's VP of consumer business, said in an interview last week at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "But having access to a Google Maps location does not mean that you're prepared to go knocking on doors."

Take, for instance, the case of a California man who ... [Read more]

Editing photos to get the most out of them can be brutal if you don't have the right tools. Depending on what you want to do, those tools can be quite pricey.

There are cheaper alternatives, as we have covered in the past, but Analog still left a lot to be desired in way of additional options and flexibility. Thankfully Snapseed, a popular iOS photo-editing app, is now available on OS X and it isn't terribly expensive.

To edit a photo, you can either drag and drop one onto the apps icon in your dock, or you can go to File > Open.

Click to enlarge

Once you have imported the photo, you will see two columns of thumbnails for enhancements or adjustments you can perform on each photo. Clicking on a thumbnail will bring up a specific set of settings for that effect.

Clicking on the respective adjustment will apply the special effect. You can then adjust the applied effect using the global adjust sliders below the thumbnails.

You can even narrow down or limit adjustments t... [Read more]

I still have bookmarks from the 20th century on my primary computer, and the odds are you've got quite a few more saved links on your desktop or laptop than on your phone. If you want to access them remotely, you can now sync bookmarks between the Chrome browser and your Android devices using a great app called ChromeMarks Lite. Here's how to use it: 

1. Before you do anything else, you need to set up bookmark syncing in Chrome. It's easy--Nicole Cozma shows you how right here. 
2. Install the ChromeMarks Lite app from the Android Market. 
3. Swipe through the tutorial, if you like, or close it at the bottom of the screen. You should see a largely blank screen. 
4. Press "sync" to begin. The first time you sync, you will need to give the app permission to access your bookmarks and then press "sync" again. It may take a while, depending on how many bookmarks you're hoarding. 

   Step 4: Sync bookmarks.

   (Credit: Screenshot by Rob Lightner)
5. You should soon see a list of folders that is easy to navigate. Just click through and launch any page by clicking on its bookmark. 

   Step 5: Use bookmarks.

   (Credit: Screenshot by Rob... [Read more]

We've all been there: helping a relative with a computer problem they can't figure out, and suddenly they run into an error.

Now comes the fun part! You can attempt to have them explain the error box. Sometimes it feels as though you should type a random string of characters into Google and hope it's the right error code--the success rate will probably be similar.

Enter GetWindowText. This handy tool lets anyone select text from any Windows dialog prompt and place it into an area where it can then be copied to the clipboard for using elsewhere. Read on to learn how to use it.

(Credit: Screenshot by Nicole Cozma)

Step 1: Download GetWindowTextGetWindowText. The program requires no installation, so just extract the program to a convenient location on your computer.

(Credit: Screenshot by Nicole Cozma)

Step 2: When you have an error or dialog window you need copied, run the program by clicking on the its icon in whatever directory you extracted it to.

(Credit: Screenshot by Nicole Cozma)

Step 3: Click and hold the button underneath the label GetWindowText.

(Credit: Screenshot by Nicole Cozma)

Step 4: While still holding the left mouse button, position your pointer so th... [Read more]