I thought I’d found the answer to all my PDF organization needs when I stumbled across Fluxiom. This online file management/DAM solution offers the ability to upload, tag, and search files from any computer to a hosted account.

I thought that it could be a good centralized solution to DevonThink for those of us on Windows, with the added bonus of being available from any computer. Sort of like a personal Google Books.

When I saw the price, I’ll admit that I winced a bit. Nine euros for the lowest-level plan seemed a little steep. However, the site design is amazing, and the functionality seemed well worth the price.

The About page boasts that Fluxiom provides “Full text search: Fast search inside documents like PDF, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and others.”

However… once I scrolled down to the bottom of the Overview page, I discovered to my dismay that only the Basic (29 euros/month), Pro (89 euros/month), and Deluxe (169 euros/month) plans offer the full-text search feature.

For me, the full-text search within documents was the major selling feature. And 29 euros a month is rather a stretch for any academic budget. The 9 euros I might be able to justify to myself, but 29 is a bit much…

Do any readers have an alternative online PDF organizer they’d like to share? (Or does anyone have any friends at Fluxiom who we could sweet-talk into providing full-text search on the Private-level plan?)

Photo by: multifinality

Helpful Guides for Writing a Dissertation

How to plan a daily schedule for a dissertation?

Dealing with Academic Writer’s Block

Thesis Writer’s Block

How do I write a thesis?

Photo by: bethanyking

The longer you stay in academia, the more conferences that you’ll go to. Some are a chore, wedged into the most inopportune times in the semester– however, that winter conference in Hawaii would make up for it in theory, surely…

Michael Nielsen offers some tips specifically aimed at academic travellers, entitled Optimizing travel 2.0.

Daniel Lemire provides a great list of conference-related advice, including “Why you might not want to go to a conference”, “Where to submit your papers”, and “Things to do during the conference”: Conference Travel Tips.

More generally, OneBag.com and Lifehacker offer some advice on how to pack as lightly as possible (the airline can’t lose your bag if you don’t check it…).

Photo by: oknovokght

Mike over at Getting Things Done in Academia suggests that we should all cultivate our 24-hour buddies.

He’s not advocating incredibly short-term friendships. No, he’s making the case for creating a group of academics (preferably with different specialties) who are willing to read and informally review each other’s papers on with a 24-hour turnaround. It sounds like a great idea to get speedy feedback and light a fire under yourself when necessary.

Cultivating your 24-hour buddies
[ from Getting Things Done in Academia ]

I’ve been looking for a lightweight outliner program to handle my piece-meal thesis work. I discovered Maple, which seems to be what I was looking for, from this list of outliner programs for Windows.

It lets me organize my writing into manageable sections, then easily work on each once I have the sources at hand. Also, I can export the tree as a flat file in doc, txt, html, or rtf.

In my ideal world, it would have support for footnotes or endnotes, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Maple
By Crystal Office Systems
Free 30-day trial, $21.95 US to buy

Send yourself text messages (for free) at prescheduled times. Good for remembering meetings, tasks, and so forth, if you don’t have a PDA.

Oh, Don’t Forget…
[ via Lifehacker ]

Photo by: OldMainstream

The Carnival of GRADual Progress is a monthly roundup of blog posts of interest to grad students. Hosted at a different academic blog every month, the posts range from helpful to simply hilarious.

There are six carnivals so far:
1st Carnival
2nd Carnival
3rd Carnival
4th Carnival
5th Carnival
6th Carnival

Warning: to be approached with extreme caution. Definite time-sucker.

Photo by: idreamofdaylight

When the sky is dark, the days are short, and it’s cold outside, I lack the motivation to get up out of my nice warm bed. In an attempt to get more out of my day, I’ve tracked down some good advice from fellow bloggers:

Waking up early and consistently
[ from Dave Cheong ]

Surefire Way to Wake Up Without the Snooze
[ from Glen Stansberry at LifeDev ]

How I trained myself to get up earlier in the morning
[ from Matthew Stibbe at Bad Language ]

Librivox offers free public domain audiobooks, available for download in MP3 or OGG format. This collaborative project boasts an impressive selection of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and drama. Good for the commute– you can download one of those classics that you always meant to get around to read.

If you’re looking for a bit of early-morning cheer on a chilly winter morning, I’d recommend My Man Jeeves or Right Ho, Jeeves, both by P. G. Wodehouse. If you’re feeling slightly more ambitious, there’s always The Canterbury Tales (War and Peace is still in progress).

Yet another Mac-only app for academics…

Papers is now available in public preview. It has a really lovely user interface (reminiscient of iTunes) and previewing and note-taking ability built right into the program. It was built to house scientific papers and import straight from PubMed.

[ found via announcement at The Efficient Academic ]