Tools

In 1995, I wrote down the specs for my "dream machine". Comparing it against the machine I have today: Item19952025IncreaseRAM32 MB64 GB2000GPU RAM16 MB8 GB500HDD4 GB1 TB250HDD speed10 MB/s2 GB/s200Processor150 MHz5.10 GHz34Monitor21"27"1.3Resolution2048x15361920x12000.73 Clearly, RAM has seen the biggest growth. Low cost, high demand.Followed by the hard disk - both on capacity and speed. The processor speed increase, in comparison, is modest. What's surprising is that my monitor today isn't that much bigger than what I wanted. The resolution is actually lower than what I wanted 30 years ago! Clearly, I overestimated how important screen resolution would be. ...

Windows PowerToys is one of the first tools I install on a new machine. I use it so much every day that I need to share how I use it. I’ve been using it for a long time now, but the pace at which good features have been added, it’s edged out most other tools and is #4 in terms of most used tools on my machine, with only the browser (Brave, currently), the editor (Cursor, currently), and Everything are ahead.) ...

Arun Tangirala and I webinared on “AI in Education” yesterday. This post isn’t about the webinar, which went on for an hour and was good fun. This post isn’t for my preparation for the webinar, which happened frantically 15 minutes before it started. This post is about how I created the annotated talk at https://github.com/sanand0/ai-in-education-webinar (inspired by Simon Willison’s annotated presentations process) – a post-processing step that took ~3 hours – and the tools I used for this. ...

My most-used apps in 2020 were: Everything. Locates files. Like Finder. Fast and brilliant. Chrome. But Edge is pretty good, and I’m using it for secondary accounts. Visual Studio Code. It’s my note-taker, TODO list, outliner, and IDE. Minecraft. I’m addicted. PowerPoint. I use it to make & edit videos, not just slides. Zoom. Thanks to the lockdown. Breakout rooms are great. Mail. It uses under 50MB. Gmail takes 250MB. VLC. It still plays all formats, but I’m looking for a replacement. Seafile. Our private Dropbox. AutoHotKey. The best macro tool, but hard to use. The new utilities I started using recently are: ...

With Office 365, PowerPoint supports SVG editing. This is really powerful. It means you can draw in PowerPoint and render it on the web -- including as interactive or animated visuals. For example, the SVG in this simulator was created just with PowerPoint. The process is simple. Draw anything. Select any shapes and right-click. Select Save As Picture... and choose SVG. For example, you can use PowerPoint to create Smart Art, export it as SVG, and embed it into a page. See this example on CodePen. ...

I maintain my (extensive) notes in text files. I’ve explored Evernote, Onenote, Google Keep, Apple Notes, and many other platforms. But text files work. I store them as Markdown and sync them on DropBox. They used to be relatively large files (50-100KB) each, on broad topics. For example: todo.txt was a consolidated list of things I had to do people.txt was a list of everything I knew about people (addresses, birthdays, etc) towrite.txt was a list of everything I wanted to write about notes.txt was where I tracked notes about any topics … and more This led to a couple of problems. ...

This year, I’ve converted the bulk of my content into Markdown – a simple way of formatting text files in a way that can be rendered into HTML. Not out of choice, really. It was the only solution if I wanted to: Edit files on my iPad / iPhone (I’ve started doing that a lot more recently) Allow the contents to be viewable as HTML as well as text, and Allow non techies to edit the file As a bonus, it’s already the format Github and Bitbucket use for markup. ...

I’ve updated Mixamail to access Google search results via e-mail. For those new here, Mixamail is an e-mail client for Twitter. It lets you read and update Twitter just using your e-mail (you’ll have to register once via Twitter, though). Now, you can send an e-mail to [email protected] with a subject of “Google” and a body containing your query. You’ll get a reply within a few seconds (~20 seconds on my BlackBerry) with the top 8 search results along with the snippets. ...

Since I don’t have Internet access on my BlackBerry (because I’m in prison), I’ve had a pretty low incentive to use Twitter. Twitter’s really handy when you’re on the move, and over the last year, there were dozens of occasions where I really wanted to tweet something, but didn’t have anything except my BlackBerry on hand. Since T-Mobile doesn’t support Twitter via SMS, e-mail is my only option, and I haven’t been able to find a decent service that does what I want it to do. ...

Writing a program to draw or change slides is sometimes easier than doing it manually. To change all fonts on a presentation to Arial, for example, you’d write this Visual Basic macro: Sub Arial() For Each Slide In ActivePresentation.Slides For Each Shape In Slide.Shapes Shape.TextFrame.TextRange.Font.Name = "Arial" Next Next End Sub If you didn’t like Visual Basic, though, you could write the same thing in Python: import win32com.client, sys Application = win32com.client.Dispatch("PowerPoint.Application") Application.Visible = True Presentation = Application.Presentations.Open(sys.argv[1]) for Slide in Presentation.Slides: for Shape in Slide.Shapes: Shape.TextFrame.TextRange.Font.Name = "Arial" Presentation.Save() Application.Quit() Save this as arial.py and type “arial.py some.ppt” to convert some.ppt into Arial. ...

The Random Quotes Generator is a simple tool that creates quotes by mixing up words on a web page. The results are often funny, but sometimes surprisingly insightful. Yes, this is the equivalent of a million monkeys typing Shakespeare, except that they’re using the works of Shakespeare as a starting point. And it doesn’t have to be Shakespeare. It could be you or your friends. ...

Creating motion charts in Excel is a simple four-step process. Get the data in a tabular format with the columns [date, item, x, y, size] Make a “today” cell, and create a lookup table for “today” Make a bubble chart with that lookup table Add a scroll bar and a play button linked to the “today” cell For the impatient, here’s a motion chart spreadsheet that you can tailor to your needs. For the patient and the puzzled, here’s a quick introduction to bubble and motion charts. ...

It’s been a good movie month for me, and I’ve managed to nudge closer to my target of watching the IMDb Top 250. But one tool I had in the past, that I sorely miss, is twofifty.org. It’s a now-defunct site that kept track of the IMDb Top 250, and let you strike off the movies that you had watched. You could see which movies you hadn’t seen, keep score, and discuss the movies. Since it’s demise, my movie watching slowed down as well. Earlier this month, I set up a similar site at 250.s-anand.net. It has the same basic function. You can log in, strike out movies that you’ve seen, and keep track of what’s left to see. For the more technically minded, the source-code is at two-fifty.googlecode.com. ...

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to search through the Dilbert archives using text? This used to be possible at Dilbert.com some years ago, as a paid service. In late 2003, I needed to find some Dilbert strips for a client, so I’d subscribed for a year. I could then search for the quotes (I happened to be looking for “outsourcing”, so you can guess the context). But I can’t seem to find the feature any more, even as a paid service. The site looks a lot better, of course. But I can’t find strips. ...

Watch Hans Rosling's TED Talks on debunking third world myths and new insights on poverty and ask yourself: could I do this with my own data? Yes. Google has a gadget called MotionChart that lets you do this. Now, you could put this up on your web page, but that's not quite useful when presenting to a client. (It is shocking, but there are many practical problems getting an Internet connection at a client site. The room doesn't have a connection. The cable isn't long enough. You can't access the LAN. Their proxy requires authentication. The connection is too slow. Whatever.) ...

I read about Google AppEngine early this morning, and applied for an invite. Google’s issuing beta invites to the first 10,000 users. I was pretty convinced I wasn’t among those, but turns out I was lucky. AppEngine lets you write web apps that Google hosts. People have been highlighting that it give you access to the Google File System and BigTable for the first time. But to me, that isn’t a big deal. (I’m not too worried about reliability, and MySQL / flat files work perfectly well for me as a data store.) ...

When I wrote my Tamil song lyrics quizzes, I had two problems: I can't write in Tamil (not on paper, nor on a computer) I can't spell right in Tamil (ந vs ன, ர vs ற) I overcame the first using a Tamil transliterator. I write in English, and you see it in Tamil. The problem of ந vs ன was simple. ந occurs as the first letter of a word, and just before த. Nowhere else. (Is this always true?) ...

I've built a simple Tamil transliterator. You can type in words in English and it will spell them out in Tamil. You can copy-paste the Tamil above into Microsoft Word, etc. You may need to turn on tamil scripts to see the Tamil fonts above. If you have Windows 98, it may not work well. If you've visited this page recently, you will need to refresh this page as well (press F5). ...