Mac Law Students » Not Mac-Specific

A High School Student Reviews a Smartpen, the Livescribe Echo

Dennis Bishop — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:31:02 +0000

This is probably a better review than I could offer for the new Livescribe smartpen. It has gotten to the point that when my peers see me using my smartpen, they either clam up or ask me to stop using it.

David Pogue: A High School Student Reviews a Smartpen, the Livescribe Echo

And as an aside, is anyone using a smartpen or other recording device in class? Please comment below.

EFF Wins New Legal Protections for Video Artists, Cell Phone Jailbreakers, and Unlockers

Dennis Bishop — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:02:05 +0000

San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won three critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anticircumvention provisions today, carving out new legal protections for consumers who modify their cell phones and artists who remix videos — people who, until now, could have been sued for their non-infringing or fair use activities.

More here: http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/07/26

Livescribe Echo Gets Some Interesting New Upgrades

Dennis Bishop — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:43:07 +0000

Lazy summer days make for some lazy blogging (or re-blogging). Gizmodo reports on the new features of the Livescribe Echo Smartpen:

“Echo lets you put pen to pad to draw on your computer (Mac or PC) via USB port, records audio, and can even sync that audio with your note-taking. The 60-plus selection of Livescribe apps range from the American Heritage Desk Dictionary to a poker game, and a new feature called Launch Line lets you launch an app by underlining an associated word and tapping the line. You can also create custom notebooks, just as you would an iTunes playlist.”

and the really good stuff…

“Livescribe also announced a few enhancements coming this fall, including Connect—software that lets you send notes and audio from your smartpen to email addresses, websites, and other applications—Paper Tablet collaboration software, and Pencast Player, which lets you access your pencasts on iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch.”

Here’s a quick ad/demo if you’ve never seen Livescribe products in action.

The Echo smartpen from Livescribe

Read the full article and press release here.

Hello World!

Dennis Bishop — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:29:19 +0000

Thank you, Erik for shaping MLS into an invaluable resource for law students who face the bleak prospect of supporting themselves in the Windows-centric world of law school. Not only is MLS a cry in the wilderness for the unsupported, it also provides proof-positive of an active, growing group of Mac users in law schools.

In my own work at the University of Oregon School of Law, I refer to MLS constantly to demonstrate to faculty, administrators and students that law schools across the country are beginning to accept Macs as a viable platform. This information has paid off for my school. Currently, two-thirds of our students use Macs and I expect this number to grow. As a result of these increasing number of Macs, we enjoy lower support costs and more importantly, less disruption of our students’ work due to malware and security problems. Simply put, we have found that Macs are cheaper to support and more reliable than other laptops.

One of my goals for writing for MLS is to reach out to law school IT staff and offer strategies for better supporting Macs. I’m also interested in exploring the role of various electronic devices such as digital readers (iPad, Kindle, etc.), recording devices (Livescribe Pulse Pen, etc.), and other do-dads that might lead to better academic performance. Finally, I am interested in offering support for hacking devices to add functionality (jailbreaking, hackintoshing, etc.) This article provides a reasonable overview of my philosophy surrounding hacking electronic devices: http://bit.ly/d4MIGz

I look forward to this new venture and welcome all comments and suggestions in making MLS better.

A Casebrief Search Engine

Timothy Lee, Jr — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:09:23 +0000

As classes finish up and another academic year comes to an end, I wanted to share a resource I have been using throughout this semester: A Casebrief Search Engine.

Whether you like to book brief, paper brief or not brief, sometimes it’s nice to be able to reference casebriefs online. I started out using Google and entering case names. The challenge: too many irrelevant results. So I decided to use Google custom search to create a search site that would only index sites that provide casebriefs. While you won’t find every brief, hopefully you’ll find most!

Enjoy, and good luck on finals!

If you know of other sites that should be added, leave them in the comments and we’ll add them ASAP.