From the category archives:

applications

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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Resizing Windows and Focus Follows Mouse with MondoMouse

by Kelle August 5, 2009

This is a guest post (our first!) from Steve Rodney, a graduate student at the Univ. of Hawaii.

MondoMouse has become an indispensable application on my mac. This app frees the mac user from the tyranny of Apple’s dogmatic lower-right-corner fixation. Why in the world are we restricted to resizing windows only from that tiny little [...]

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Keeping track of your PDF papers with Papers

by Jane Rigby July 31, 2009

The New York Times (of all places) wrote about the chore of keeping track of all the scientific papers on your desktop:  all those PDF files cryptically named 1998A+A__338_781M.pdf and fulltext.pdf .  Or worse, 0903(4).3037v1, because it’s faster to re-download the PDF each time you need it, than to find it in your download folder. [...]

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Devtools In Chromium

by Eli July 8, 2009

Since the Chromium project started releasing builds of their browser I have been testing it from time to time. The latest build for OS X, 20223, has significant improvements from just a month ago. After using it for a day I found some nifty features and the one that really caught my eye is devtools. [...]

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