scan

School is back in session, meaning students have folders full of syllabi, schedules, and other paperwork you're likely to reference as the semester goes on. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to carry all of it around with you all the time, without overloading your backpack?

Thanks to a handful of iOS apps, you can scan whatever paper documents you might need easy access to and store them on your iPhone, in the cloud, or on your computer with just a few taps.

I've found five apps that will help you quickly scan and organize documents. … Read more

If you're prone to lying about your age, steer clear of structural magnetic resonance imaging. When used to scan your brain, no matter how good (or bad) you may look, a new imaging technique that uses MRI won't lie. In fact, it probably knows your age to the exact year.

"We have uncovered a 'developmental clock' of sorts within the brain -- a biological signature of maturation that captures age differences quite well, regardless of other kinds of differences that exist across individuals," Timothy Brown of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine says in a news release.… Read more

Any kind of data file can be corrupted, but your MP3s are especially vulnerable to damage and corruption since there's a lot of them, they tend to hang around for years, and all kinds of programs handle them. MP3 Checker is a simple, free tool that scans your MP3s for any kind of corruption, as long as it's data corruption; it can't tell good music from bad, only good files from bad. With drag-and-drop and file quarantining, it's fast, easy to use, and safe.

MP3 Checker is a simple tool with an appropriately simple interface: a … Read more

Amazon just announced a pretty big update to its Cloud Player service. The enhancements include scan and match, increased storage, and the free upgrading of lesser audio tracks to 256 Kbps.

With the new service, gone are the days of 5GB of free storage. You can now store all of your Amazon purchased music, along with 250 songs purchased elsewhere for free. Or, you can pay the $25 fee for 250,000 songs worth of storage per year.

The scan-and-match service will scan your computer's hard drive for music, and then match your music catalog with Amazon's catalog. … Read more

Chances are you have a stack of photo albums collecting dust in a closet somewhere. Maybe they make for a fun coffee table chat, but if you want to share your memories with friends and family online, or simply create a backup of your photos, where do you start?

There are several ways to go about digitizing your printed photo collection. Depending on how many photos you have and how DIY-eager you are, your choice will vary.

1. For the highest quality, use a scanner To ensure minimal loss in original photo quality, use a flatbed scanner. This might be … Read more

Rock the Vote is credited with creating the first telephone voter registration system. Now it has introduced the first shirt-activated voter registration system.

The Scan to Vote T-shirt is part of a larger campaign aimed at signing up 1.5 million new voters before election day rolls around this fall. The shirts are available for $28 through Threads 4 Thought.

Scan the QR code printed on the shirt and you end up at the Scan to Vote Web site and can walk through the process of registering to vote online.… Read more

Scanbox, created by Australian design company Limemouse, works as a miniature studio in a box perfect for scanning documents (up to A4 size), receipts, 3D objects, or even a page from a book.

At first glance, the $15 Scanbox may appear like some sort of strange geometric shape, but the peculiar design optimizes lighting conditions for the perfect shot. It only takes a few moments to set up the device, as the user simply aligns a few high-strength magnets built into the box.

A stencil of a smartphone with a square hole sits on top so that the user knows exactly where to place the camera lens every time. When the photo shoot ends, the Scanbox folds back up into a flat shape for easy transportation. … Read more

WiseCleaner's Wise Disk Cleaner Professional is now free to all home users, so we took a look at it to see how it fared against the large and growing field of freeware system cleaners. We found it easy to use but thorough, with expert options (and frequent warnings to keep novices from trying them) though most users will find Wise Disk Cleaner's default settings perfectly safe.

Wise Disk Cleaner's interface leans toward the "clean and simple" end of the system utility style chart, with none of the huge fonts and overbearing logos found in some … Read more

The free and paid versions of Lookout Mobile Security (download) have added two new features today that work together to protect you against malicious apps, especially those installed by side-loading or from third-party marketplaces.

While Lookout scans apps installed from Google Play by default, it now asks you if you want it to scan apps from other sources with Install Monitoring. This is for people who have changed their Android settings to allow non-marketplace apps on their phones. Side-loading is when you download an app to your phone and manually tap on the APK to install it. You can also … Read more