As the second week of school comes to a close (this is your official reminder to drop that class you were thinking about dropping!), we can officially say that the spring semester has begun. I don’t typically go around preaching lifestyle mantras, but if there was ever a time to work smarter and not harder, it’s probably during an era of deep political uncertainty and turmoil amid a pandemic that has isolated millions and drained the motivation of students all across the globe.
Unfortunately, there is no chrome extension to bring us back from the brink of societal collapse — to my knowledge — but there are a few every college student should have on hand to make the school year just a little bit easier.
So, your professor finally assigned a relevant and engaging article for your weekly reading instead of an obviously photocopied PDF written in a size-10 font, flipped the wrong way and masquerading as 20 pages when it’s actually 40. Make the most of it with Beanote, an extension that lets you highlight, take notes and annotate any webpage, with a dashboard to manage them all and export options to go with it.
Remember back in 2012 when we’d all go watch 3D movies, steal the glasses and pop out the lenses to look “hipster”? The 2021 equivalent of that is using blue-light glasses, except they’re more stylish and much better at preventing chronic headaches. For my fellow glasses-wearers out there, spare yourself the eye-strain and forgone sleep with Screen Shader, a customizable feature that allows you to tint your screen to reduce those issues and better regulate your brain’s day/night cycle.
If you’re still on the prowl for a summer internship, you need Huntr, an interface that lets you collect, track and manage job applications from the web and keep them all in one place. You can organize applications according to their status, whether they’re still on your wishlist or you’re waiting on an interview, and the extension makes it easy to pin any job posting back to your main board. It’s so intuitive and simple to use that it almost makes the never-ending sting of rejection less painful. Almost.
Tired: reading this article or any other tedious required reading with your eyes.
Wired: having this article read to you by Erix, an Australian English voice offered — among several others — on Speechify, a natural-sounding reading assistant that lets you listen to any text on the World Wide Web with the click of a button.
[The best romance movies to hate-watch this February]
If you’re my eleventh-grade English teacher, stop reading. Okay, now that she’s gone … I have never manually cited something in my life and neither should you. We live in the 21st century. Modern technology exists. And if I have to live through the inevitable Silicon Valley-induced, The Social Dilemma-type dystopia we’re barreling toward in the coming decades, I at least deserve to have my URLs indented for me. Cite This For Me does just that and more by cutting out the middleman and automatically generating website citations in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard style.
When your bedroom is your office and your classroom, the line between personal and professional basically doesn’t exist anymore. At this point, we’re multitaskers first and human beings second. Tab Resize makes that all even easier. Although most PCs and Macs have dual screen options, Tab Resize lets you pick from a variety of layouts, using as many windows as you’d like.
Metastream Remote
You’re probably familiar with Teleparty (previously known as Netflix Party), which allows you to synchronize media from streaming platforms such as Hulu, Disney+ and Netflix to hold long-distance movie nights with friends and casual-acquaintances-from-that-one-club-bonding-night alike. But if you’re looking for an option to connect on less … legitimate streaming services, or any website at all, Metastream is one of the most seamless and effective extensions to use.
[30 years later, ‘Coming to America’ remains one of Eddie Murphy’s most memorable films]
