This section is dedicated to various productivity tools, online content, and resources that I found to be helpful. There is no particular order or preference. Items are from various distinct domains. Potentially valuable in your daily work or side hustles.
Vimium is chrome extension that provide keyboard shortcut for web navigation. You can control entire (~almost) web browsing with this. Need to spend some initial time in key mapping and shortcut learning. Instead of using default Vim style I used with following mapping. Note, instead of alphabets, I converted everything to numbers!
Custom Key Mapping:
# Insert your preferred key mappings here.
unmapAll
map f LinkHints.activateMode
map <right> nextTab
map <left> previousTab
map x removeTab
Characters used for link hints: 123456
If you ever get stuck with chart or graph image but no data points provided, then this tool can come to your rescue. WebPlotDigitizer by Ankit Rohatgi is an interesting tool to extract data points from graph images. It work with continues series as well, a background detection algorithm helps.
You need to specify axis points (X-Y, polar, bar etc.); based on which calibrations are performed. Then you select the require data points on the image to get the values. It is opensource and cross-platform.
Saving really high resolution chart/graph images from excel is still a challenge. Especially, scientific journals have explicit requirements for the submission of figures: Most commonly they require high-resolution TIFF files. Using Excel with the XL Toolbox add-in, you can produce graphic files that meet the requirements of many journals.
Aaprt from scientific work you can do may different excel related tasks. As website says: "Daniel’s XL Toolbox is a free, open-source add-in for the Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheet software that helps you to analyze and present data and increases your productivity. Its primary target audience are life scientists, but it has proven useful for humanities and industry as well"
Windows built in file explore limitations can be overcame using this file explorer. Plus it has various customization that can be truly powerful. There are other file explorer as well however my biggest motivation was the 'group by' functionality. I preferred simple two colum layout, although other customization are possible. It allowed to open two tabs side by side.
Other notable names to take a look at Total Commander, Directory Opus, and Xplorer²
GeoGebra is a free software program that lets create mathematical constructions and models where you can drag objects and adjust parameters -- to explore algebra and geometry simultaneously (highly interactive!). You can use existing math explorations or build your own.
It's browser-based and also has downloadable App. It covers most high school common core math expectations, especially those involving graphing or geometry.
Everything Search Engine can locate files and folders by name instantly. It uses minimal resources and has a clean and straightforward user interface that easily allows for quick and simple file indexing, and searching. It is lightning fast - exactly what Windows search itself should have been. This is probably the best desktop search tool I have used.
Unlike Windows search "Everything" initially displays every file and folder on your computer (hence the name "Everything").
Bulk Rename Utility allows you to easily rename files and entire folders based upon extremely flexible criteria. You can add date/time stamps, replace numbers, insert text, convert case, add auto-numbers, process folders and sub-folders...and many more!
It is quite easy to use. Carries a great interface. Powerful and highly functional.
Greenshot is a free and open-source screenshot program for Microsoft Windows. You can take several types of captures to suit your requirements. The USP is Simple yet incredibly effective keyboard shortcuts. You will have the options between a classic clipboard or to output as an image file, with many formats available you can benefit from the best quality and an overall better rendering.
Four simple keyboard shortcuts to make effective use of Greenshot:
• Screen print: area
• Shift + Print: select an area
• Alt + Print: open window
• Ctrl + Print: capture the entire screen
Path Copy Copy permits the easy copying of file or folder names and paths with seamless integration to the right-click context menu. You have the option to copy the short or long name and path, parent folder location, UNC directory, the Internet path, Unix path, among others. Path Copy Copy is an add-on for Windows Explorer that adds contextual menu items on all files and folders allowing the user to copy the path(s) in various formats. As they mentioned, if the above description makes no sense to you, you do not need Path Copy Copy. 😃
Usage is simple. In Windows Explorer, right-click on any file, folder or group of files and to show the Path Copy Copy menu.
TreeSize is a file and disk space manager. If you want to check an individual directory, if you want to get a quick glance for all of the directories on a hard drive, you’re out of luck. That’s where TreeSize comes in. The software analyses all stored data across your systems and visualizes the results in meaningful charts and statistics. You can easily find out where your disk space has gone and take necessary actions. It provides you with a wide range of file management options.
Notepad++ is a wonderful tool if you require a simple and lightweight text or code editor that doesn't have a lot of extraneous features. It's simple to utilise with numerous documents at once. They support a wide number of coding languages and formats, such as JSON, HTML, and JS, among many others. Plugins are powerful addition.
Also see Sublime Text Editor
MiniTool Partition Wizard aims to maximize disk performance. It helps create/resize/format partition flexibly, convert disk between MBR and GPT disks, convert partition between NTFS and FAT32, and convert dynamic disk to basic without data loss in a few clicks. Note, the 'free' version cannot save any of the data found by the software.
The big plus is its UI, that makes it easy to use all the disk manipulation tools without any prior knowledge about it.
A regular expression (shortened as regex) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Typically it is used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation. It is a technique developed in theoretical computer science and formal language theory. The four main tasks Regex performs are: to find text within a larger body of text; to validate that a string conforms to a desired format; to replace text (or insert text at matched positions); and to split strings.
Your search capability will go to another level if you know how to use Regex! Take a look at some of most commonly used regex and you will be amazed by the applications.
GIMP is one of the most popular open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks. Note that it is not intended for drawing. It powerful features puts itself in a direct competition with photoshop!
A great introduction by Kevin Stratvert can be found here:
Twinkle Tray lets you easily manage the brightness levels of multiple monitors. It adds a new icon into your system tray, where you can click to have instant access to the brightness levels of all compatible monitors. These brightness sliders can adjust single monitor or all monitors at once.
To take brightness adjustment in high-tech mode, supplement above with f.lux. A really creative software that makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. Read their research section to get some interesting information on sleep disorders.
Remember Picassa? A photo manager by Google! This is the modern version of that. It include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, retouching and color adjustments. More than sufficient for your daily needs :)
