Category Archives: Software

Maxima, Octave, and Gnuplot in OS X Snow Leopard

Posted on February 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

A nice collection of free math software for the Mac, covering both symbolic and numeric math and graphing. When you go to the main project pages from Maxima, Gnuplot, and Octave, it seems that no well supported Mac versions are available, at least not without compiling it yourself. Fortunately, this is not quite accurate. Read more to see how. Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Software

Tagged , , , , , ,

Optimal Setup for Gmail, Apple Mail, and iPhone with IMAP

Posted on August 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

I am truly thankful for this article that explains the best way I have found to configure everything “for maximum happiness” as the author puts it without the slightest bit of exaggeration. See for yourself:

http://db.tidbits.com/article/10253

However, I should note that I do modify the approach a little bit for my own purposes. I do happen to like Gmail’s “All Mail” concept, so I am skipping the steps suggested to hide the “All Mail” and “Starred” folders; but that is certainly a personal preference and does not change the overall excellent method described.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Software, Tips & Tricks

PDF OCR Batch-processing with ScanSnap

Posted on December 27, 2009 | 7 Comments

The ScanSnap S1500M (but also the S1500 as well as the earlier models S510 and S510M) comes with ABBYY FineReader for OCR support. This is great for creating searchable PDFs. Especially handy on a Mac with Spotlight. The problem is that in the default setup, each scan is OCRed right after the scan and depending on the age your machine (my G5 is getting a little long in the tooth) in can take quite a while. When you’re in the process of scanning many hundred’s of pages of paper documents, you don’t want to have to wait for the computer to do it’s OCR recognition, you’d rather feed it all the documents and let it do OCR while you’re doing something else. Continue reading →

→ 7 Comments

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, MS-Windows Platform, Software, Tips & Tricks, Workflow

Tagged , , ,

Remove Short Description for Feed Items in iGoogle

Posted on October 17, 2008 | 1 Comment

When I looked at my iGoogle page today I found a short description under each item. Unfortunately that made the paper longer than one screen so I couln’t view all my items w/o scrolling — very inconvenient. Even worse, there was no immediately clear way to restore the original layout. I tried to click on the small arrow in each block to edit the settings, but to no avail.

The solution can be found when clicking on “My Account” in the top right corner. Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Software, Tips & Tricks

Tagged , , ,

Small & Fast Adobe Acrobat Alternative for Windows

Posted on October 10, 2008 | Leave a comment

If you regularly use Adobe Acrobat Reader on Windows then I am sure you have come across the problem that certain documents load and display unacceptably slow, even on a fast dual or quad core CPU and on machines with ample memory. In particular, I am talking about quickly scrolling through a graphics or photo intensive file in continuous display mode. I want to be able to grab the scroll-bar, or alternatively, use my mouse wheel to very quickly scan through the whole document, and frequently, Acrobat halts briefly while (presumably) buffering the content on the next few pages. Why is that? I don’t know, I find it exceptionally frustrating that a program made by the company who set the standard is not able to offer good performance and recent hardware.

Now, one might be inclined to blame the hardware, alas, that’s not the case. Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in MS-Windows Platform, Software

Tagged , , , , ,