From the category archives:

applications

Evernote: Organize notes, emails, photos, and more all in one place.

by Kelle January 25, 2010

This is a guest post by Sarah Kendrew (blog, Twitter) a postdoc in infrared astronomy at Leiden Observatory working on instrumentation for the European Extremely Large Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.

The tag line of note-taking application Evernote reads “Remember Everything”. The great thing is, with Evernote, you don’t need to remember. If you [...]

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MarcoPolo – Context-aware computing for Mac

by Tom January 11, 2010

MarcoPolo is a very cool (free) application for MacOS X that uses information about the current state of your computer, or evidence, to automatically perform actions.
For example, one can use MarcoPolo to automatically change the Network Location if an ethernet cable is plugged in or a specific Wi-Fi network is present (useful if you need [...]

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Google Wave Notifiers

by Eli December 28, 2009

Google Wave is a promising platform for online collaborations. It’s currently in a alpha/beta state and its growing pains are evident: slow and lack of notifications. I have been using Wave for two months and think it’s a great tool despite the drawbacks. It has proven to be incredibly useful for large scale collaborations where [...]

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Use DropBox to keep Multiple Computers in Sync

by Kelle December 23, 2009

In my current work setup, I have two offices and, like many astronomers, multiple computers. While ideally, my MacBook Air is my primary machine, DropBox has enabled me to get my most vital data and applications (1Password, Things, and BibDesk) synced up between my laptop and home and office desktop computers.

This is Part 1 [...]

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Your friend Convert

by Jane Rigby November 18, 2009

Do you use the tool “convert” to manipulate plots and images?  It’s simple, powerful and downright great!  Quick examples:
Modify a plot for presentation use, by swapping to a black background with white lines, so it’s easier to read on a screen:
> convert  -negate frompaper.ps  forscreen.jpg
Make a thumbnail:
> convert -geometry 50×50 big.jpg thumbnail.gif

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Why I use BibDesk instead of Papers

by Kelle October 29, 2009

Folks have been clamoring for a Papers vs. BibDesk post and here it is, finally. Since I don’t actually use Papers, this post is more of a listing of my reasons for sticking with BibDesk for the time being. This topic has been discussed elsewhere and is sure to be visited many times in the [...]

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Spectral line analysis tools

by Jane Rigby October 2, 2009

This is an embarrassing post, but I’m going to forge ahead.  Time was, we used IRAF and we hated it, but what else was there?  Now, there are many choices, lots of them buggy and badly documented, some of them superb.
Say I have a one-dimensional, flux-calibrated, wavelength-calibrated spectrum.  (So, all the hard work of calibration [...]

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QLFits: The Quick Look generator for FITS files

by Kelle September 4, 2009

Here’s a guest post by software developer and astronomer Cédric Foellmi describing the cool little plugin he’s created. I’ve been using it and I love being able to use Quick Look to look at a spectrum instead of having to go through the whole rigmarole of xgterm – iraf – onedspec – cd /blah/blah – [...]

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Learn to Take Breaks with Anti-RSI

by Kelle August 13, 2009

Breaks, both short and long, are widely regarded as productivity enhancing and as one of the easiest ways to prevent and reduce repetitive strain injuries (RSI), such as carpel tunnel syndrome. (More RSI prevention tips.) AntiRSI is a free application that monitors your keyboard and mouse activity and reminds you to take short “micro pauses” [...]

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DS9 and Remote Files

by Jessica August 12, 2009

For the longest time, one of my major computing hurdles has been to figure out the best approach for viewing remote FITS files with SAOImage DS9. Currently, using DS9 over ssh is painfully slow, if not impossible for interactive color scaling for example. So I have often resorted to copying files to my local machine [...]

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