Tool of the Week: Using Google Forms for Research

Posted on by mrsoltys
I love google docs, it's an awesome way to collaborate on word processing files and spreadsheets, and have them available from anywhere.  I have a few google spreadsheets I use daily in the lab with calibration curves and other important info, but I wanted to talk about a less obvious google doc that i find invaluable: Google Forms.  You may have already heard...Read More

Tool of the Week: Pretty(er) Matlab Plots

Posted on by mrsoltys
Matlab can generate some notorisoly ugly plots... but for many grad student's it's our bread and butter. So here are a couple tricks I use to generate better looking matlab plots: 1) Use Matlab's built-in LaTeX interpreter for your figure titles and labels It produces really nice looking titles and axes labels, even for non-math text. title('$rho=frac{left< c_1^prime c_2^prime right>}{sigma_1...Read More

Tool of the Week: Mint.com

Posted on by mrsoltys
Mint is an online personal finance tool, and the most helpful and easy to use budgeting tool I've ever used.  Simply enter in your user-names and passwords to the accounts you want it to track, and then Mint will automatically download your transactions and assign them to budgets. It also does a great job tracking investments. Mint is complete with...Read More

Tool of the Week: LMGTFY

Posted on by mrsoltys
Let Me Google That For You is a real awesome way of telling people not to bother you with dumb questions that they could ask google.  Just type in a question, get the link, and e-mail it to them.  It will show them how easy it is to search for things in google, instead of asking you. Here's an example scenario:...Read More

Tool of the Week: PayPal

Posted on by mrsoltys
"Every Time I see a bunch of checks taped to the fridge, I just roll my eyes." -William S. (Roommate) [caption id="attachment_324" align="alignright" width="273" caption="Just make sure you select the "Personal Tab" to avoid fees!"][/caption] You've probably heard of PayPal, maybe you even have an account to buy stuff off of ebay or other online retailers.  But I think the most awesome...Read More

Tool of the Week: Gmail Ninja

Posted on by mrsoltys
It's no secret I love google products.  I've used just about every mail client out there and I really think Gmail is the best.  They're always on the forefront of innovation, and a lot of features you see coming out in other mail clients are copied from google. Gmail has made a guide to optimize your e-mail exerpience on gmail called "Become...Read More

Tool of the Week: Google Chrome Extensions

Posted on by mrsoltys
Google Chrome, in my opinion, is the best web browser out there.  I've experienced less crashes and memory usage with google chrome than any other browser i've tried, which is awesome when you're running an intensive data analysis. Chrome runs noticeably faster than other browsers, and has a very clean user experience, and I love browsing in full screen mode (⌘⇧F on a mac)....Read More

Tool of the Week: Mendeley

Posted on by mrsoltys
Mendeley is a program that sorts and organizes PDFs, allowing you to easily keep track of papers you've read.  Mendeley allows you to highlight and take notes on your PDFs, and all of your notes (as well as the full text of PDFs) are searchable... so you can quit saying "I read a paper somewhere..." and find exactly where it...Read More

Tool of the Week: Dropbox

Posted on by mrsoltys
<Update>: This is an older post.  I've recently started using Google Drive for all my cloud storage. </Update> This week's tool of the week is Dropbox. Dropbox is like a flash drive that you can never loose. Its a folder on your computer that gets backed up online automatically. So if you spill coffee on your laptop, or are in a...Read More