Category Archives: Tech

Tech

Cutting back on e-mail checking

I’m something of a pioneer of on-the-go email checking. Maybe pioneer is too strong. Let’s say “early adopter”. I used to check my email using my WAP-enabled phone when I was on vacation. It was painful, but it worked. Eventually I graduated to a Treo 600 with Chattermail for always-on IMAP-push email notification (equivalent to Crackberry service, basically). This was before everyone and their cousin had a Crackberry.

On the Treo, when I get new mail, the little green light starts blinking rapidly instead of its normal once every two seconds or so. Over the last 2.5 years or so I’ve apparently developed a habit of glancing down at my belt holster, looking for that rapid flashing to see if I have mail.

Lately, people have been talking about the benefits of shutting down the auto-updates and instantaneous reminders. It seems like all the cool kids are doing it.

I’ve started trying it. The email on the phone is generally turned off. If I’ve been away for a while or I have time to kill (waiting in a long line or whatever), I’ll fire it up. At work I check email as a break after I’ve finished a major goal or a big block of little goals, and after lunch. I’m keeping it down to once or twice in the evenings at home. So far, it’s been mostly okay.

I find myself doing odd things. I look down at my phone, even though I know the email program is off. I bounce my mouse down to the dock in Mac OS X, looking for the little red circle with a number on the Mail icon to tell me I have mail. Occasionally I actually open the Mail app without that being my original intention. Hopefully after a week or two I’ll be able to break those habits.

How often do you check your email?

“Skim” – A program for scientific reading

When I read scientific papers, I mark them up a lot. I underline useful snippets of information, circle reference numbers to check later, write questions in the margins, and so on. Until recently, I was doing this on paper, and then transcribing my notes manually to a FreeMind outline. However, since discovering that I can do all of this and more in Adobe Acrobat, using the built-in OCR scanner to produce text even from scanned PDFs, I’ve gone digital.

Acrobat is pretty expensive, though, especially if you aren’t an official student or faculty at a university with an educational discount. I prefer to avoid lock-in to commercial software, especially expensive commercial software when possible. Anyhow, PDF is now an open standard, with good native support under OS X. I had wished for a long time for a good open-source PDF editor that I could use to mark up scientific documents. Skim is the answer to my wishes.

Skim is designed for scientific reading, and marks up PDFs reasonably well. It is free and open-source software (FOSS if you like acronyms), and comes in Universal Binary and source code flavors. Lifehacker did a brief review of it, as have others if you search the interwebs. I tried it, but ran into one rather frustrating problem. It doesn’t restrict its highlighting to a single column of text. Thus, if you have two-column text, as is found in most journals, it will select across both, totally ruining your ability to highlight a sentence. I don’t know how much of a showstopper this is for others, but for now I’m still using Acrobat. However, since it’s open-source and I think it has a potentially wide audience, there’s a good chance a fix will be made in the future.

For most people who want to add notes to PDFs on a mac, it should work splendidly.

Stupid Word

Dear Microsoft Word,
Please stop trying to outsmart me. I promise you that I really want to select the letters I drag the mouse across, and not the surrounding words.

Thanks,
–Brock

This is one reason why journals should not require submissions in MS Word format. Gar.

Mac Beautiful

I’ll pop my head up from working on the paper to share this with you:

For the record, I have a mac like that with the 30″ display at work, and yes, it’s everything it looks like and more.

Thanks to bluekitsune for the link.