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Filed under: Text, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

Speed reading with Zap Reader and Spreeder

Spreeder lets you read text at full speedI've been an on again off again speed reader for some time. Every couple of years I find myself in the book store going through the discount bin and finding, buying, and reading yet another speed reading book. I'm addicted to the idea of speed reading, even if the art itself somewhat escapes me.

Spreeder and Zap Reader are two tools designed to help you improve your speed reading ability on the web. The basic idea behind each tool is that you copy content from the web (an article from the New York Times, for example) into the tool on the website. Then you click the play button and "read" the article one word at a time. Controls let you adjust the speed at which each word is shown to you so that you can read faster or slower.

Both of these tools work well for speed readers because they let you work through an article more quickly by resting your eyes at the same place on the screen as the application churns through the content for you. And, since speed reading is really the art of recognizing words and phrases instead of just letters, the focus on a single word acts as a kind of flash card system to help you memorize both small and large words quickly.

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With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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