The book “Handbook of Mathematical Functions” of Abramowitz and Stegun is a very important book, if someone does any complicated calculations in physics or mathematics.
There is a website were you can view this book online, or even download it. A pdf version is also available for download.
Assume you have a lot of documents and data. Further you use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Work and Thunderbird instead of Outlook. And you use an IMAP Email Account instead of a POP3 one.
Since you have so much documents you decide to use one of these fancy Desktop Searches to find things you need faster (and they are definitely very helpful). Then you stumble into problems, since only one of these various Desktop Searches is up to the task. I tried them all – here are my considerations: Read the rest of this entry »
If you enter an audio CD or DVD into the CD/DVD drive of your Windows computer, you might install in that moment a root-kit of a copy control program, which prevents you to copy the audio content, or even worse, makes your system unstable and unsecure.
There are two possibilities to prevent Windows from autoplaying the CD/DVD: Read the rest of this entry »
Hmm, there is obviously not any out there. I tried many of them. I actually battled all of them. All suck. Big times. But there is gnuplot. It’s cross plattform, which is not a bad thing if you are working at a research facility. It’s not as easy as other programs, because you need to input commands in shell to get a plot. But this is also the biggest advantage of gnuplot.
So gnuplot is perfect if you make a lot of calculations or experiments and have a lot of data to process – you just write a script and load it into gnuplot and you get all plots. Save them in many different file formats (png, gif, ps, latex, …). No hundreds of clicks every time for one plot. You can even have publication quality plots if you invest more time though origin might be a better choice here.
Actually, did I mention that it’s free?
There is also a nice website out there, which has a lot of tips and tricks, the not so Frequently Asked Questions about Gnuplot Website.
If you want to digitize a plot in an article or report to e.g. do some calculations with them, there is a good program, which is free and cross platform: Plot Digitizer. You scan a plot to png or gif, or cut out a plot from a pdf file and save it as png and gif. Load it into Plot Digitizer, tell it where the minimal and maximal x- and y-values are – voila: you “cracked” the plot.
Just found something completely awesome on the net: I knew about archive.org, but I didn’t knew that there is also an audio archive. And there you can also find a Live Music Archive. Lossless quality (flac), lossless quality (ogg, mp3) and streams of live acts of numerous bands. E.g. Fugazi. Unbelievable. I definitely need a new 300Mb external hard disc …
Experimental Pop Cross-Pollination … what do you await from such a site? I don’t what it’s about, nore why it is there, but you can view nice visual art and photographs, as well some pop music (how come 
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