Last updated 02 August 2012
This page has somewhat grown to handle the following chapters:
Links - links to interesting websitesMarkus Fisher and his team at Festo demonstrate their flying bird on Ted Talks: A Robot that flies like a bird.
Drew Berry's talk on Biomedical Animation in Sydney 2011. Features awe-inspiring animations: Main page or download the 54 MB video.
If you're a piano player and you like The Funk, there's no better site than Jonathon Wilson's website GrooveWindow. Start with How to play a funk groove to get a glimpse of this great music. I'm using a lot of Jonathon's stuff in my Piano Groove Tutor. Jonathon also has a facebook site with lots of video clips of some of the best Funk and Jazz performances.
Free web application giving you the capability to explore the world's public dataset using animated statistics: gapminder online. You can also install a desktop version: gapminder standalone version.
An hour long documentary featuring Hans Rosling, the inventor of gapminder: The joy of stats. This is also a good introduction to Statistics, covering distributions and correlations.
Ted Talk on gapminder: Hans Rosling on TedTalk.
Dr Jill Bolte Taylor talking about her experience suffering a stroke in her left hemisphere: Dr Jill Bolte Taylor on Ted Talk
Great podcast on the origing and impact of Language from the American radio science show 'Radiolab': Words
The Australian ABC radio's Science Show recently featured a talk given by Naomi Oreskes at the University of New South Wales about her book Merchants of Doubt. It gives a fascinating insight into the history of Climate Change Science and Climate Change Scepticism: Naomi Oreskes talk
The Khan Academy is a great site for self-education. Sal Khan, the guy who does these video presentations is widely recognised by the likes of Bill Gates and Google - who just donated 2 million dollars to the good cause. I use it a lot to read up on scientific topics. There's also lots on finances, calculus, history, etc. The presentations are very well done and somehow rememberable and they tend to follow the established education curriculum. Try the biology lecture on viruses for example.
Famous website that features ... riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world (as its website proclaims): Ted Talks.
The Berkeley University makes a lot of its units available as webcasts (either video or audio only): Berkeley University Webcasts. The unit Letters and Science: Social Psychology: Self and Society was of particular interest to me.
Another interesting unit is Letters and Science: Descriptive introduction to Physics from the Spring 2010 semester. It features lectures by prof. Richard A. Muller who wrote the book Physics for future presidents. Lectures 19 and 20 in this course are on Global Warming and give a very unbiased view on the subject.
A sample of various software I've successfully used over these last few years. Wherever possible I use free software.
Areca configuration file in Windows 7: Users\User\.Areca\workspace\<yourName>.xml
When new target created, add in batch file at Users\User\Documents\Areca\
Help: see Areca documentation
Window disappears or is unreachable:
Press Alt + Space, select Move and use arrows until window appears.
View the Resource Monitor: type resmon in Start (or type it in the command line). Resource Monitor lets you keep an eye on CPU, Memory, Network status and Disks status of your system.
Here's a little tip on how to open the command line in any directory. This
relieves you of the arduous task of including lengthy path names in situations where the command
needs to access particular files:
Create a text file that contains the single word cmd and
rename it with a bat extension (like work.bat).
Place the batch file with the files you are working with.
When you double click on this batch file, the command line will open in the work area's directory.
Following commands are widely used:
When an application or the OS throws an error (including a blue screen of death), the
system will create a report which can be viewed in the event logger. On windows 7, this can
be accessed at
Control Panel → Administrative tools → Event Viewer
→ windows logs → Application
You need to double click on the event. For a more detailed analysis you will need windbg.exe.
This is part of larger platforms such as Windows Driver Kit or Windows SDK.
Check if you have it available by typing windbg in the start
window.
To use windbg, open (ctrl + D) the dmp file which is located in C:/Windows/minidump.
To start with, type
!analyze -v.