Tool of the Week: Making Animations in Matlab

Posted on by mrsoltys
Once you've made a pretty plot in Matlab, making an animation might help you understand temporal phenomena.  Making an animation is super easy in matlab, weither you're working with figures or images.  There are two methods to do this, but the most robust is using the VideoWriter class.  It's compatible with all versions of quicktime on both Mac and PC.  Here's how you do it: 1)...Read More

Tool of the Week: Running Multiple Instances of Matlab on Mac

Posted on by mrsoltys
[caption id="attachment_605" align="alignleft" width="249" caption="Notice There are two Matlabs Running!"][/caption] My research often involves running Matlab Code that can take hours to run. Admittedly, Matlab isn't the fastest language out there, but it has super powerful debugging tools, and image processing packages that make it really easy to use for a non-computer scientist. While matlab is running a bit of...Read More

Tool of the Week: PowProject.com

Posted on by mrsoltys
Sometimes figuring out where to go skiing feel's like a roll of the dice.  Where's the snow deep enough to not hit rocks?  Where are the freshies at? In the backcountry, it gets even worse: Will the snow be windswept? Will it be steep enough to ski? Will it be too steep to ski safely? How's the avi danger? How...Read More

Tool of the Week: Zenni Optical

Posted on by mrsoltys
Over the holidays I've been getting lots of complements on my new glasses.  I decided to try out some thicker, bolder frames and got a pretty good response to them!  For those of you that wear glasses, you know how expensive glasses can be.  So trying a new style used to be a risky investment... until I started buying my...Read More

Tool of the Week: Google Sketchup

Posted on by mrsoltys
Google Sketchup is a Free, easy to use, and intuitive 3D modeling tool. [caption id="attachment_599" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Here are some drawings for a bed i designed, but never built, because i realized my room was too small"][/caption] Because it is free, I've found Google Sketchup to be a great tool to use in the classroom when teaching my high-school classes...Read More

Tool of the Week: Evernote

Posted on by mrsoltys
Evernote is a free app for windows, pc, and smartphones, and is a great way to remember stuff. [caption id="attachment_584" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Evernote Screenshot"][/caption] For research: I love being able to quickly snap screen shots of plots and clip them to Evernote, with a description of what's going on and what i'm working on daily. I can easily e-mail a...Read More

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: Show hidden files in Finder

Posted on by mrsoltys
For advanced mac users, you may get frustrated when you can't find a hidden file and have to access it through the terminal.  In OS X, there's an easy workaround to change the finder's default mode to always show hidden files. Open the terminal and use this command: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES Now just restart the finder by holding...Read More