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Materials:

• Some 1×2 boards (you can pre-sanded ones for about $2 a piece)
• A panel of “tile board,” which you can get from Home Depot or whatever for about 10 bucks.
• some 3″ drywall screws
• some 1 1/2″ drywall screws
• wood glue

Tools:

• Drill with a screwdriver bit
• handsaw (may need it, may not; see below)
• tablesaw or circular saw to cut the tileboard (may need it, may not; see below)

Construction:

1. Decide on the dimensions you want, and figure how many 1×2’s you need (see the diagram above for the general plan).  You may need to be flexible here, depending on the sized of tile board panel you’re able to procure.
2. Get the materials.  If you ask nice, a lot of times the store will cut the tile board for you, or they may have a 2′ x 4′  piece available.  You can probably get them to cut the 1 x 2’s for you, as well.
3. Once you get the materials home, cut anything that still needs cuttin’.
4. Fasten everything together with the appropriate-sized drywall screws (The diagram shows where they go).  I added glue, but you don’t really need it.  Once the frame is done, glue the top on. Done!

As I’ve written before, I love the free citation manager Zotero.   And the group and sharing features that just dropped as part of v2.0b7, while still a little buggy, are taking the awesomeness up another level.

But one thing about Zotero has always really annoyed me: the horizantally-split screen.  I never feel like I have enough vertical context for either my Zotero library or the web page I’m viewing.   Meanwhile, I’ve got a whole ‘nother monitor just sitting there empty. Some other folks have complained about this too, suggesting a sidebar view for Zotero.

Today, though, I realized that there’s a really obvious solution: just open up a new Firefox window (ctrl+n), put it on my other monitor, and display Zotero full-screen there.  Dual-monitor workflow bliss.

So how is it that presentation tool Prezi is suddenly the toast of the town?  The quick sell looks like this:

“Prezi allows anyone who can sketch an idea on a napkin to create and perform stunning non-linear presentations with relations, zooming into details, and adjusting to the time left without the need to skip slides.”

I love how the first phrase suggests that there’s this great mass of napkin-sketching geniuses out there who can’t get their ideas out (until now!).  I mean, I like mind maps, but turning one into an outline is pretty easy.   So the presentations are “non-linear.”  Does that mean the audience can interact with them, zooming in on sub-points of interest?  If it does, let me show you this thing called “hyperlinks.”   And is skipping slides really this tremendous problem?

When it comes down to it, the real selling point of Prezi is just the “stunning” presentation.  Now, perhaps I’m jaded, but “zoom-in/zoom-out” leaves me unstunned.  More importantly, though, this seems a textbook example of chartjunk: a “really great” visual effect that serves only to obscure or distract from real information.  I think (hope) it’ll have the lasting appeal of Powerpoint’s racecar-noise-with-flying-in-bullet-point.

Perhaps I’m missing something (feel free to correct me in the comments) or just being curmudgeonly, but I think Prezi is vastly overhyped.  Powerpoint is bad enough.  Also: I like how the Prezi logo, by mixing case, suggests that the product may in fact be called “Pretzl.”  Ok, now that’s definitely being curmudgeonly.

One difficulty I (and others) have had with Zotero, though, is in generating reports for a group of articles. Particularly, there’s no way to customize the categories you display in the report. This can be a real problem if you’re trying to share your sources with a co-author; at best, there’s a lot of unneeded metadata cluttering up the document (at worst, your email says you’ve been working on this for weeks, while your articles’ Date Added data tells a different tale…).

Now, I’m told this will be corrected in a later version of Zotero. However, I turned to PHP and a bit o’ regular expression magic to do it now. It turned out to be a good learning project, and I’ve been pleased to see that a few hundred other people (if Google Analytics is to be believed) have gotten some use out of it, too. The tool’s listed in the Zotero documentation, and–by far the most important of all–I got a free Zotero t-shirt out of the deal, which is now my favoritist garment ever.

I’ve also gotten quite a few feature requests from folks, including a request to help localize the script for German (you can find that German-language version here). Since my PHP skills have broadened in the last several months (I’m all the way to “novice” now!), I figured it was time to do an update. So, here is Zotero Report Customizer 2.0. New features include javascript form validation, a bunch of new categories, and the option to specify your own categories to delete if I don’t list ‘em. The script is also a ton easier to modify if you want to customize it to a different language, and can be set up to work in multiple languages at once. (I added a little German support for an example).

Have fun, and if you think of anything else you’d like in this, just let me know.

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

If you spend time doing research, you’re probably familiar with EndNote or RefWorks; this is the same idea, but with a couple advantages:

1. It’s integrated into your browser. You can download a citation on a web page to Zotero with one click.
2. It lets you write and store notes in the same database as your citations.
3. It’s free (as in both speech and beer).

It’s got a lot of other goodies, too: you can drag-and-drop citations into Word, OpenOffice, or an email; sort with tags and filters; full-text search as-you-type; and store and index pdf’s, web pages, and documents. The video below gives a three-minute overview:

Zotero has attracted some very positive attention. It’s funded by the Andrew W. Mellon and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations, and according to the website it’s also being recommended by libraries at institutions like Harvard, Cornell, Georgia Tech, and dozens more. Surprisingly, though, a lot of my colleagues have never heard of it. If my experience is any indication, that’s going to change.

I’ve been using Zotero for over a year now, and I can say it never fails to impress. Some of the things I love:

• If I want to store a copy of a PDF from a site, I just click and drag it to the correct Zotero entry. No stupid save dialogs.
• Organizing with tags, filters, and saved searches is way more flexible and powerful than nested folders.
• I hate wanting to cite something and not remembering what article it’s from. Indexed full-text search to the rescue. Love it.
• I hate typing. I love dragging several dozen references from Zotero to Openoffice and seeing them pop up as APA formatted citations.
• Having every thing I need–PDF, notes, citation–in one place for each article really speeds my workflow.
• And of course, I can’t even guess how much time one-click citation downloading has saved me over the last several hundreds of citations.

I could go on and on, but I’ll try to stop before(?) I become Mr. Obnoxious Open-Source Advocate Man.

And of course, there are some areas that could be improved. First, there are ways to make Zotero portable, so you can access you collections on different computers. There are ways…but there are not easy ways. The plan is for a central online space in which users can store collections; that would be a great solution, but it hasn’t happened yet. On the whole, Zotero is remarkably polished; there are, though, a few little annoyances here and there. If you generate a report for a collection, for instance, you can’t customize the fields (although see my Zotero report customizer here). Zotero is tied firmly to the Firefox browser; for some folks this is a distinct problem, regardless of how much we Fx users may love the ‘fox.

On the whole, though, I love Zotero. If you do research–especially if you’re not yet using a reference manager, you should give Zotero a look. I think it’s an open-source project that’s ready for the big time.