Idle Analytics» Computing

Surface Pro 2: first impressions

Reuben — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 08:16:55 +0000

For several years all of my computing, note taking, and organization has happened through a few devices. Most of my mental computing work (actual writing, modeling, programming) happens on my laptop, a 3 year old Dell Core 2 Duo. My note taking, conceptual thinking, and written calculations happens on an iPad (3rd gen) with a …

3360 x 1050 bitches

Reuben — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 03:38:31 +0000

My desktop takes up my whole desktop. Seriously.

Upgrade

Jessica — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:39:53 +0000

Updated the blog to WordPress 2.7. Nice features, like widgetized sidebar (not that that was built in to this ancient theme we use, but it was easy enough to modify it to enable widgets) and dashboard ui improvements. I don't know if the site works any better for you, the reader, but then again I'm …

Microsoft Word is not a good tool

Jessica — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:35:34 +0000

...but it's a better tool than most people are capable of effectively using, apparently. I bet if I asked anyone in an administrative (aka "secretarial") position what his or, more likely, her proficiency level in Word was, he or she would doubtless say "expert." This despite the fact that I have just about never seen …

Something that annoyed me, and how to fix it

Jessica — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 05:12:18 +0000

So, a few days ago I noticed this new, irksome thing was happening--when I typed an incomplete address into the address bar of my Mac's browsers (e.g. typing bedbathandbeyond rather than www.bedbathandbeyond.com), instead of just going to the site, I would get to some weirdo Verizon search page. Grr. Annoying. The Windows machines on my …

I want to want you, iPhone

Jessica — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:15:20 +0000

As everyone probably has been unable to avoid knowing, the iPhone launches this Friday. Normally, new Apple releases cause me to sit on my hands to avoid throwing money at Steve Jobs' head, but this one--eh. It's certainly spiffy, in some ways, and the data plan is $10 cheaper than one I pay now for …

Physics vs Powerpoint

Reuben — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 22:16:05 +0000

Unfortunately, working in Physics means giving quite a few presentations. This would be bad enough, as it takes significant time away from experiments. But, adding to this, everyone uses PowerPoint. The program is wretched for this application. For instance, say we want to display some kind of atomic structure. Atomic structures, if you don't know, …

Comment spam

Jessica — Sun, 07 May 2006 05:48:28 +0000

In an effort to combat the hundreds of spammy comments, you must now complete a simple arithmetic problem to post a comment. This should ensure that only humans can comment, and only humans who can perform arithmetic. Those of you who cannot perform arithmetic may use the calculator that comes with every operating system known …

Things I love about Mac OS X

Jessica — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 17:22:14 +0000

Word 2004 has a function to extract pictures from Word docs and save them to a folder. Word X does not. But this doesn't mean that you can't extract pictures from Word docs in Word X--because Preview, the pdf/image viewer, has a function to create a new document from the clipboard. Fancy. So you copy …

cygwin bad, mingw and msys good

Reuben — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 09:01:35 +0000

Several times in my Windows life I've wanted to compile open-source stuff. Of course, every idiot knows that the de facto tool for doing this is Cygwin, a truly awful port of a Unix-like environment. Considering that all one wants is a basic C compiler and linker, and some basic shell stuff, one wouldn't think …