TU/e campus software

Always forget the link for campus software like I do? Find the list at this page.

MarcoPolo

I use my MacBook every single day, both at home and at university. Although you can specify more than one outgoing mail server in Apple mail, it is a bit annoying that you have to change the setting every time you change location. Enter MarcoPolo. This is quite a new program, but I use it on a daily basis and am very happy with it. MarcoPolo guesses at which location you currently are and can do a numer of things based on this guess. For me it changes outgoing mail server, default printer and, at university, switches off wifi.

It's free, it works great and, if you need this functionality, I strongly recommend it. Of course it also has builtin Growl support!

Visit MarcoPolo's website.

Growl!

This is another type of application that you may not be familiar with. Growl is a program that shows notifications, little messages pop up on your screen. The great thing is that programs can let you know some task is completed, new mail has arrived, hardware was added to your system etc etc. This all happens without interfering with what you were doing. The messages do not distract, are yet informative and above all: different programs let you know stuff in a consistent way.

Many programs have Growl support built in; for some you can install little helper scripts or programs. I have installed GrowlMail and HardwareGrowler.

The program is free and super useful, so go get it!

Rulers

Every so often I need to measure data from a picture or pdf file. I keep searching for the perfect onscreen set of rulers. I found one a while ago that allowed me to first set up the scale with a few mouse clicks and then do the measurements. Alas, I have lost track of that app.

However, this RealBASIC app seems to be quit up for doing the job, and better still it runs equally well on Windows as on Apple. (RealBASIC should even run on Linux, no?) Check it out at: http://www.omnidea.it/en/software/rulers/index.html

Journler: how to organize things

Yesterday, I already discussed how to make more use of Spotlight with SpotInside. Spotlight is great for finding things, and you can find things even after you forgot where you have put things. I still tend to put things together in subfolders of subfolders, but sometimes wonder if things should go into my Programming/C++ folder or in my Work/SomeProject folder. In the end things tend to get scattered around anyway.

Wishing I had a Mac at my disposable the whole day, I would use this program: http://journler.com/. It lets you make a journal of things you collect. For me, when working on a project there is a lot of files on the periphery of the actual research or coding that can get lost. Scientific articles with interesting infomation, but how to store that knowledge. I tend to carry a lot of notes and articles with annotations. But these are all in paper, and that's hard to backup, or in half a year: hard to find.

With this fabulous program, you can make notes, and store all kinds of files with those notes. This means I could store a PDF together with my own notes about why this article was useful to me or what idea I got from it, in a digital form. Digital for me means backup-able, re-findable, re-usable.

Unfortunately having a Mac only at night, I cannot properly use to program, lest a sync all the files I generated or used during the day anyway. But that would mean I already would have organized them, and I need this program for that...

SpotInside: usable spotlight queries

MacOS X comes with a handy desktop search built right in. However, choosing what you are looking for from a long list of results can be quite awkward. On my ageing Mac Mini — a real Mac being a PowerPC! — also the search-as-you-type feature of spotlight makes it painfully slow, to the point of unusable.

A better way to search the results is offered by SpotInside. It shows the contents of almost everything, makeing it a treasure to find what you are looking for.

Vienna RSS reader

Surfing from website to website to quench the thirst for nerdy news can be quite consuming as interesting websites as slashdot.org, digg.com and tweakers.net move more and more into the Web 2.0 era and their pages take longer and longer to load. If, on top of that, you decide to start a blog to replace an unfortunately and most stupidly perished snipsnap wiki that you and (much more so) a friend had filled with information about all the computing bits and pieces of a numerical analyst's life, then the daunting task of visiting even more website can become quite frightening.

Of course, what one needs is a decent RSS reader and while Safari displats feeds quite nicely a real RSS reader can safe a lot of time. On MacOS, I prefer Vienna (http://vienna-rss.sourceforge.net/vienna2.php) opensource and complete.