Artificial intelligence is poised to change the writing world as we know it. It has already revolutionized countless industries in the form of automation, and is poised to impact the creative industries in the near future. Some of the more developed tools are designed to predict the structure of a piece of writing, and others are created to assist the writer in their creative endeavours. Although AI writing software still has a long way to go, it is already good enough to be a starting point for many writers.

In a world where we have to trust people and institutions to keep our finances safe and deliver the food we eat, blockchain technology is revolutionary. Blockchain technology is built on a distributed ledger that is both transparent and immutable. It was originally designed to track digital currency like Bitcoin among other uses. But today, it has evolved to help facilitate secure online business transactions by eliminating the need for a central third party.

After a gap of almost three years, I recently decided to relaunch my six year old self-hosted wordpress blog TechnoDuet. It was high time to take advantage of the modern static site generator tools along with the availability of some really awesome free static-site hosting services. Improved performance, ease of maintenance, scalibility, no security concerns due to database and plugins, simplicity of writing blog posts in markdown, version control for content, option of free reliable hosting with custom domain, and the convenience of continuous automatic deployment are some of the advantages that compelled me to migrate and convert my wordpress blog to a static site.

We all make mistakes. If it is in a series of long entries of mathematical calculations, it is simply a big pain in the neck. Wouldn’t it be great if we can simply correct the one wrong entry and all our calculations become correct? That is why Digits is great; a superb calculator app that records all your entries in what it calls a tape and allow you to edit/correct any number of wrong entries.

Steve Jobs captured the essence of time succinctly when he said” the most precious resource we all have is time “. At the same time it is also the most wasted resource. It simply slips out of our fumbling consciousness leaving us wondering ” How did it get so late so soon?” - great line from Dr. Seuss. To answer this question, help is close at hand in the form of Pomodoro Time, a powerful personal productivity app for iPhone, iPad touch and iPad from Xwavesoft.

Talking about scientific and technical databases/ repositories, no one can afford to miss OSTI. Office Of Scientific And Technical Information (www.osti.gov) A real giant. Dedicated and committed to America’s science and technology future in the realms of energy security, environmental stewardship, nuclear security and safety, and overall leadership in science, technology, creativity and innovation, the site is run by the U.S. Department Of Energy (DOE). It strives to provide comprehensive access to the results of the DOE research and development investments.

Presentations play a central role in almost all areas of group communications. With a generous blend of images, presentations are generally more show than tell. Many a times we need to give presentations at places with incompatible infra structures ( sockets, cables, voltage standards, soft interfaces, etc.). At these times, equipped with just a browser and Internet, online presentations become our saviors. Online presentation software, besides overcoming compatibility issues, has a number of advantages such as sharing, collaborating, 24⁄7 availability, global presence, device agnosticism, etc.

Academic search engines play a very important role in discovering academic resources, scholarly works, journal articles, etc. Below is a guide/ survey of some of the outstanding, free academic search engines. A few of them are inclusive of academic repositories and databases as well. 1. African Journals Online Run by a non profit organization in South Africa in partnership with a large number of African journals, it is probably the world’s largest collection of peer-reviewed, African-published scholarly journals.

Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step; journey of a thousand learnings begins with a single click. The big question is how to find that single click? The answer is right below; click any of the links and begin your journey of a thousand learnings. They are free. They are academic. They are multidisciplinary. Details here Bon Voyage! African Journals Online. (www.ajol.info) BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine.

It has been more than a year since I wrote about Noteshelf- a paperless note taking app for the iPad. Sometime back I received an email from Julia, a Noteshelf team member, enlightening me about some of the new features of this app. Well, being a passionate user, my experience with Noteshelf had always been so immersive that I needed this wake up call to come back to the real world and take note of the sea change.