Organizing hundreds or thousands of references and keeping up-to-date on the latest research is a real challenge. I have wrestled with a number of citation managers (i.e. EndNote) and Sente 6 is the only one that could do everything I needed. Of-course it takes care of all your citation needs but does far more than that and you’ll see what I mean.

Searching
Saved Searches is one of the greatest features in Sente. It keeps you up-to-date on any research topic, journal releases, or new papers by researchers whose work you are interested in. Everyday Sente will check for you if there is anything new and if there is it will be automatically downloaded into your library. All online reference databases supporting Z39.50 and SRU protocols are supported as well as the U.S. Library of Congress, PubMed, and The Web of Knowledge. Features like these have helped me to focus more on the content rather then spending hours on finding what’s new and organizing it.
Even the manual retrieval of references has been made easier. There is an integrated browser that let’s you retrieve references and their PDF files and all it takes is one click. This so called targeted browsing makes it easy to browse websites or search a database (i.e. PsycINFO) and import reference into your Sente library.

PDF Managment
You can import all your existing PDFs and Sente automatically searches for the citation data. It doesn’t always work and in those cases it makes it easy to just copy and past the title and authors from the PDF. And even when you don’t have PDFs for particular citations, for example I added a lot of citation references of books, Sente allowed me to makes it possible to view the Google Books page where many times I could look inside the books and search within them. And as mentioned earlier, highlighting text and adding notes is all implemented within Sente as well.

Organizing
Tag, create collections, folders and saved searches, these are some of the ways you can organize your library. You can also highlight within PDFs and attach notes and Sente will keep track to what page and passage your notes belong to for later reference. This way you can always see both the actual material and what you have noted down. Smart Collections on the other hand are Sente’s equivalent of iTunes’ Smart Playlists. You can specify what keywords, tags, authors, publication dates, journals, or any other type of reference information you would like to be included in your smart collections.

Synchronization
Sync your entire library and any changes you make across your Desktops computers and Laptops. This way you will never miss a reference or research paper. Even better you can share parts of your library or all of it with collaborators and colleagues. Sharing resources among members of a department, collaborating on projects, or like-minded people is now possible with a few clicks. Enable syncing even if you are only using Sente on one computer because that way you’ll always have a backup of your library stored online, just incase something happens with your computer.

Citation
Citing with Sente 6 will work with Microsoft Word, Pages 09, Mellel, Nisus, and even TextEdit. In addition you can choose from hundreds of available bibliography formats (included APA and MLA) as well as customize and create your own formats.
To see how Sente 6 does all of this you can watch the tutorial videos http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/videos.html and familiarize yourself with some of the most important features.

Feature Requests
Sente does almost everything you would need from a reference manager and does it better then anyone else. Still there is always room for improvement and my two main requests are:

1. Implementation of the new APA 6 bibliography formatting and,
2. real time search that displays relevant results as I type and the exact positions visibly highlighted both within the reference data and the attached PDFs

Price
Sente 6 costs $129.95 for a regular license and it is sold for a discounted rate of $89.95 to students, faculty, and staff members of academic institutions. There is also an undergraduate edition that limits each library to 250 references and costs only $34.95. Plus each license allows you to install Sente on 3 computers concurrently. I know this is not on the cheap side but Sente is a long term investment that will help you to organize and improve your work flow for years to come. I definitely wish I would have known about it while I was in college!

Download
You can grab the 30 day trial and see for yourself what Sente 6 can do for you. (Keep in mind that it requires OSX 10.5.8 or newer.)

I am curious to know what your favorite reference manager is? And since I’m always on the look out for the best, write a comment below if you have found anything better then Sente 6.

Is SuperGenPass for you?
If you want your passwords to be secure and unique as well as easy to keep track of without having to remember them, then SuperGenPass.com will help to make your life much easier. Having one, two or a hand full of passwords for all your web accounts is far from secure and not a good idea while more and more of our activities and lives are moving online. And if you are anything like me, having accounts on more websites than I care to know, then you’ll find SuperGenPass a user friendly way to take care of the passwords for all your account on the web without compromising security. And best of all, it works on all operating systems, whether you are using Windows, OSX, and/or Linux as well as all web browsers including IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. All it takes is one good master password and you are ready go.

My personal experience with SuperGenPass
My personal experience has been nothing but positive. I started out skeptically and at first I cautiously  used it only with some of my less important web accounts. After a few weeks have gone by without a hitch, I was ready to upgrade all my passwords to become more secure. I have now been using it for months and have not encountered any problems. This was not the first time I have tried to manage my passwords but let me just list three problems I have encountered with password managers in the past that are now solved for me with SuperGenPass:

1. They required some software to be installed, which meant I did not have access to my passwords on my friends’ computers, on school computers, or when I was in an internet cafe.
2. The password manager software generally did not work across operating systems, which meant I could not install the software when needed on Windows, OSX, and Linux.
3. When my hard drive crashed I lost many passwords and it was very time consuming to get them back.

SuperGenPass on the other hand does not have any of these problems, which made it painless and easy for me to use it on a regular bases without having to worry about where my passwords are stored, if I can access them, or the fear of loosing them.
(note: To switch to using SuperGenPass you will have to change all your passwords and generate new one with SuperGenPass. My suggestion is to gradually transition as I did myself.)

How does it work?
The SuperGenPass bookmarklet (JavaScipt code saved as a bookmark) generates all passwords through very complex mathematical calculations from the website domain (i.e.: google.com) and your master password. SuperGenPass only uses the primary domain (i.e.: google.com) to generate your passwords and it ignores sub domains (i.e.: docs.google.com). Any change of your master password or the domain would create a completely different password.

A pleasant side effect of this is that you are protected from providing phishing sites with your actual passwords since their URL only look similar (i.e.: g00gle.com). As a result SuperGenPass will generate a password that is different from your real password and you will only submit this false password to the phishing site.

Each password is a combination of upper and lower case letters from A to Z as well as numbers from 0 to 9. You can choose your password length to be anywhere between 4 to 24 character. Plus your master password cannot be reverse engineered from any of your generated passwords.

It is also important to know that all passwords are generated on your computer and the SuperGenPass bookmarklet never transmits any information over the internet. In fact, for it to work, it does not require an internet connection but then again without internet you can’t log into your internet account either. You can always get the bookmarklet from the SuperGenPass website (http://supergenpass.com). You can also save the website on your computer and generate a new bookmarklet any time or you can save the JavaScript code of the bookmarklet.

If you have any more questions head over to SuperGenPass’s How It Works FAQ page.

Step by Step Guide: How to Use SuperGenPass
Go to http://supergenpass.com & build your SuperGenPass bookmarklet.
(note: Once again I want to point out that the SuperGenPass bookmarklet never transmits any information over the internet, neither during the creation or while you are using it.)

Step 1: Choose your web browser
note: The Firefox choice works with most browsers such as Chrome, Safari, & Opera

Step 2: Set your security level & depending on your choice enter your master password
note: For your personal computers I recommend the second choice because it alerts you if you mistyped your master password. For public computers always use the first choice for extra security.

Step 3: Set your preferred password length
note: Don’t go below 10. Also keep in mind that some websites have a maximum password length.

Step 4: Click on “Build Bookmarklet”

Step 5: Now you have your generated bookmarklet

Step 6: Drag the generated bookmarklet into your bookmark toolbar

Step 7: Go to one of the websites where you have an account & as always enter your username

IMPORTANT: Keep in mind you will have to first change your passwords for each site with SuperGenPass. All you need to do is to go to one of your accounts and go to the change password section. Then follow steps 8 to 10 of this guide. You then have a new secure password and every time you want to log in you can now use SuperGenPass. Don’t worry you don’t have to change all your passwords at once. You can give yourself time and gradually transition.

Step 8: Click on the SuperGenPass bookmarklet

Step 9: Type your master password into the SuperGenPass bookmarklet & press enter or click submit

Step 10: Now you just have to double click into the password field and SuperGenPass will insert your generated password and you are ready to log in

Feel free to comment about how you like using SuperGenPass and what you thought of this article or if you have some suggestions or questions.

But, as with many new startups, as they have found out it is hard to be the best. The occasional hick-up with the site has been a reflection of their struggle to meet the unexpected spikes of users. They are simply, yet another victim of their own success. The good news it that the issues seem to be resolved with the added hardware and bandwidth they have promised for the increased demand.

So, you might ask, what differentiates Speckly from other torrent search engines? As other torrent search engines Speckly compiles their result list from the major torrent tracker sites (i.e.: mininova.org, thepiratebay.org, …). The difference lies with how they display these results. One file, as you may know, can and more than often exists on a number of torrent tracker site. So in order to unclutter the results and avoid duplicates, Speckly compiles from the various torrent tracker sites one fused result per file. In other words you will only see one item for a file that exists on different trackers.

In addition, all the seeder and leecher numbers from all torrent trackers of a given file are added up. This way you will merely see a single total of both the seeders and leechers of a file to help reflect the popularity of the file across all torrent tracker sites. This way it is quick and easy to see which file for a particular search is the most popular. Other than that they tell you the file size, file type, and let you narrow your search by a number of media types.

Go to www.speckly.com and give it a try but I hope you come back and share your opinion with us.

So the PirateBay.org, the torrent search and tracker site, is now hosting their own free blog hosting service at BayWords.com. You might wonder why they would do this? Well, it is all done in the name of free speech. There have been many bloggers who have been barred from expressing their right to free speech by blog hosting sites. It is for this very reason the PirateBay has created their free image hosting site with BayImg.com. Both have been created and maintained to ensure that free speech has a home on the Internet. (They do state that they abide by Swedish law.)

BayWords.com is a modified Multi User WordPress.org blog. I created a test blog at http://optimalfunctioning.baywords.com. The upside is that it was easy to setup, it is a free service, it has some nice themes, and possibly greater freedom of speech than other alternatives. On the other hand the downside is that they will be showing a limited amount of advertising, you only receive 100MB of storage, and it took way too long for the website to respond to the changes I was trying to make. In comparison WordPress.com is much quicker and I haven’t had any problems with their service. Time will tell if and how BayWords will be improving their service.