The web is a large place and it is hard to read all of the articles you would like to.  It’s hard to keep up with everything… every facebook post, every news story, every cool new gadget, every how-to… That is one of the goals of this website.  We do not aim to flood your inbox with nonsense and waste your time with stuff 90% of people don’t need to know.  We don’t all really need to know every new graphics card and every new conversation that the “1%ers” are having.  We all don’t need to stay up to date that Google  is no longer the parent company of Nest and other purchased companies.  Instead, they are now under the umbrella of the newly formed Alphabet.  While sometimes this information can be helpful or good, it can also eat up your precious time.

Another company shares our goal of making you take up less of your time getting the updates that matter to you.  Squirt is the tiny little bookmarklet that allows you to speed read the web.  To explain how this works, I want to start with a story.  I remember a time when my Mom was studying for her college courses.  I was young enough to be naive to the importance of this but old enough to understand what she was trying to accomplish.  She had many struggles during this time and I remember vividly a conversation we had.  I remember discussing stress and asking how she kept up with it all.  She said that in a course she took, the professor told her, “When you read the chapter’s in your book, follow each line with your finger.  Follow your finger with your eyes and don’t stop moving.  Your brain works faster than your eyes.”  Of course, your eyes would do nothing without the brain, but I was surprised when I tried this myself and realized how much I was still grasping of what I was reading.  I really was able to follow along and speed read in a way that I never thought possible.

Squirt works similarly.  First, save the bookmarklet into your bookmark bar (if you don’t have the bookmarks bar, CTRL+Shift+B can activate this in many windows browsers.  Squirt also has a basic how to enable on the website as well).  Once the bookmarklet is saved, begin browsing for anything on the web that interests you.  Click the bookmarklet and a new pop-up will begin running through the text on the page one word at a time at a high pace.  It does this in a way that your eye doesn’t have to move and allows the brain to process each image of a word at its own speed without waiting for the eyes.

Squirt has simple user controls as well.  Space will pause and play your article.  The up and down arrows control your words-per-minute speed.  The left and right arrows control where you are in the article.  The “S” key will open the settings menu.  Controls are located in settings and you can also change font type here as well.

Squirt is available for free here and hopefully with more support will become available on more platforms or even be bought by Kindle so that I can blow through some of my digital textbooks.