And here’s the first post of the series…

Class Central: This one’s for fellow CS majors and software engineers; a summary of all the upcoming Stanford online course offerings. I can vouch for the excellent quality of Prof. Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning class, and some of the other ones look interesting too.

How to Copy Music from Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to Your Computer: Lifehacker’s useful guide with links to free tools for OS X, Windows, and Linux. No jailbreaking required.

Airfarewatchdog’s Flight Fare Alerts: Get notified automatically when the flight fares for specific routes that you choose fall below the norm. Useful when your travel plans are somewhat flexible.

CreditKarma Free Credit Score: This is one of those rare non-scammy sites that gives you your credit score for free from TransUnion. Note that this is different from the more commonly used FICO score, but it should give you a pretty good idea of where you stand regardless. Now includes free daily monitoring too.

And this last one’s a bonus; not something I found this week, but absolutely worth a mention…

F.lux:  this handy little utility for OS X, Windows, and Linux makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. I’ve been using it for a few months, and it’s become indispensable — the white glare from my screens is blinding at night when I turn this off. Try it. Your eyes will thank you.

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I come across a lot of interesting content on the web on a near-daily basis, but it all ends up getting scattered across my Google Reader “starred” items list, email inbox, bookmark folders, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. I’d like to start curating some of these interesting links into consolidated lists, mostly so that I can find them easily when I want to. At the same time, I think it might be nice to make these lists public so that friends, family, and random strangers who have interests similar to mine can subscribe to them.

So, starting this weekend, I’m going to introduce the “LinkedList” series to this site — a collection of weekly posts that will include a list of links that I enjoyed during that week. Hope you like them too!

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As I was skimming through my feeds in Google Reader today, I paused to read this piece in the New York Times about the Indian government’s plan to force internet companies like Google, Facebook, and others to pre-screen and censor content posted by users on their websites. It’s ironic (and sad) that such a story would appear in a section of the Times called “Notes on the World’s Largest Democracy.”

What’s more unfortunate is that this appears to be a growing trend across the world — China is well-known for its “Golden Shield Project” (more appropriately known as the Great Firewall of China); Pakistan was in the news recently for its attempt to censor the contents of text messages; the SOPA bill introduced into the U.S. Congress made waves all over the web last month. The list goes on.

The internet and social media have made it possible for information to spread freely and rapidly, and corrupt politicians all over the world are terrified of the power that this puts in the hands of the people. Kapil Sibal, the acting telecommunications minister in India, openly claims that a Facebook page criticizing the Congress President, Sonia Gandhi, is “unacceptable,” and that Facebook should be responsible for actively monitoring and blocking such content. Besides the obvious technical challenges involved in achieving something like this without expensive manual human intervention, the whole idea of preventing people from posting their thoughts on public forums is just plain wrong.

Kudos to Google, Facebook, et al for sticking to their guns, protecting their users, and doing the right thing.

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When I was younger, I used to hear the word “idiot box” being used to refer to the television quite often. I haven’t heard the term recently, but I think it’s more applicable today than it’s ever been.

As the years have gone by, there’s been an explosion of television shows and channels, and we’re now at a point where it literally takes several minutes to scroll from one end of the “channel guide” to the other. But in this insatiable quest for quantity, I feel like television networks have forgotten the meaning of quality content. Go ahead; turn on your television right now, and think about how many of those 1000+ shows are actually worth your time. Yeah, I thought so.

On one hand, we’ve been hit by the “reality television” plague, with shows that would make any reasonably intelligent human being want to cry. And then, we’ve got the so-called “news” networks, most of which are fear and propaganda machines that get fixated on and drum up the same inane topics for days, weeks, months…

I had enough.

So last week, I cut the cord. When our “triple play” package discount ended, and I realized that we hadn’t turned on the television for nearly a month, I knew it was time. People I spoke to who had already done so affirmed that they didn’t regret it one bit.

Now don’t get me wrong — in the vast ocean of mediocrity, I still think there’s a handful of really good stuff; the needles in the haystack, so to speak. But there’s no reason to fork over obscene amounts of money to your cable company every month in order to get that content. The seeds of change are already being sown — it’s now possible to (legally) watch a lot of this content online, on-demand, via services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, iTunes, and even some of the networks’ own websites. And devices like the Xbox, PS3, Apple TV, Roku, etc. make it dead simple to watch this content on your big screen TV from the comfort of your couch. The only missing piece right now is reliable/legal access to live sports content.

A combination of on-demand, a-la-carte access to shows that viewers care about, along with, perhaps, subscription packages for sports events would be an ideal future for television programming, in my opinion. The sooner the networks get on board the better it’s going to be for everyone.

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