If you have had the chance to use an iPhone or iPod Touch, you might have noticed a “small” inconvenience: these devices do not appear as removable storage drives in Windows, like prior versions of iPod (classic, nano, etc). This effectively prevents the iPhone and iPod Touch to be used for data transfer. There is some discussion online about why and how this happened. In my opinion, this is a two thumbs down situation for Apple for trying to limit the possible uses of these cool devices. I hope that this business model will soon be replaced by a more open-platform approach.

Fortunately, Albert Pelhe, a good friend of mine, informed me about a workaround to this problem. DigiDNA came up with DiskAid, an application that lets the user copy files to and from the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is freeware and claims to have 0% of adware, spyware and virus content. The only inconvenience is that it must be installed on every computer where the device is meant to be used as a removable disk drive.

If anyone from Apple reads this blog I have a request for them: please let information flow freely. You can try to control it, but you will become unpopular in the realm of techies. Thanks,

Oszkar

I just ran across Slideshare, a (beta) website that lets you share slides (yes the name is descriptive). I uploaded my first set of (PowerPoint) slides, and now I can embed them in this post - very cool:

Andrew Kun

Looking for a job? Check out this post for excellent suggestions on how to get on top of the resume pile.

Literature review is a big part of a scientific underatkening. Thanks to the Internet, most papers are available on line. This resulted (at least for me) in a big number of papers that I read and stored for feature references… Welcome to the age of data mining. As a researcher I have yet another problem on my hands: after I solved the problem of finding information, how do I keep track of it?

This subject was touched upon in other posts (bookmarking, mind maps, references). Given that my major focus of attention (at this moment) is my disertation, I want to be able to have a solution for referencing the information I have found. This basically has some sub-problems: creating references, searching through references, adding them to my documents (thesis, publications, reports), and creating list of references in my documents. I’ll skip discussion of why I was not satisfied with the above mentioned tools. Instead I’ll tell you what I see myself using: Zotero.

Long story short, this is a common scenario: I found a paper using Google Scholar (acm/ieee/etc). Two clicks and my reference is created (with all the author, title, abstract, etc. information added properly). Another click and I’m actually reading the paper. One last click and the pdf is stored with my reference (for feature review). If I found something interesting I can add notes. I can tag the reference (for feature searches). I also can link other references as related. The bottom line: creation of references is a smooth, easy and quick process.

There are plugins for OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Word that allows one to use Zotero reference in the documents. The process of adding references to the text and creating refere lists is a two click deal (also smooth and quick). Installation of both plugins (for firefox and for Writer) was very simple.

For more information take a Zotero tour.

Alexander Shyrokov.

As many of you may know, I spent a good part of the summer in front of the video-editing computer transcribing data from videos of experiments. I used Adobe Premiere to organize and view the videos. However, Adobe Premiere was made for movie/cinematic editing, not data transcription, so I had to “invent” a few ways to import and export the data. I also found a few problems/bugs, so I wrote all of this up in a document which can be found here. I structured this as a sort of FAQ on using Premiere, so I also added some basic (yet vital) processes that took me a while to figure out (like capturing video and exporting videos). Enjoy!

Owen Derby

I have recently realized that when I open multiple documents in Excel they all show up separately on Taskbar but show up in the same window of Excel. This can be very aggravating for anyone who works with multiple documents and multiple monitors. After becoming fed up with Excel I did some research online and found a solution.

My Computer
Tools
Folder Options
File Types
Choose XLSX (XLSX for 2007 or XLS for 2003)
Go to Advanced

Uncheck “browse in same window” in advanced window.

Then highlight Open
Edit

Make sure in the Action box it says &Open

Copy one of the following and paste into “application used to perform action” (Check whether current path has OFFICE11 or OFFICE12 then copy and paste one of the following:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\EXCEL.EXE” “%1″

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE12\EXCEL.EXE” “%1″

Check the box next to use DDE

Remove anything that is in DDE Message box and DDE Application Not Running box.

Make sure the application box says: EXCEL

And in the Topic box it says: System

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=234896&messageID=2510797

Thanks Jon.

Jonathan Oppelaar

Check out www.tinyurl.com. It allows you to create tiny URLs out of long and winding ones. This is neat when you want to send a link in an email to someone without having to worry if their email client will interpret the multiple lines of the link correctly.

It’s also neat if you want to include links in presentations or posters. I’m preparing a presentation for an upcoming talk at Microsoft Research and have just used this site to create a couple of links: one to this YouTube video of the Project54 driving simulator and another to this eceblogger post about the eye tracker that we’ve recently installed in the simulator. Best of all, tinyurl allows you to create your own custom tiny URLs. So, I’ve created www.tinyurl.com/p54sim and www.tinyurl.com/eyetracker.

Andrew Kun

Hello,

AutoHotKey is a handy utility that can be used for automation tasks. This program can move the mouse or send key events to different applications. It also can show dialogs. I mostly use it as a macro recorder that works across all the applications. It supports a simple (as in easy to learn), but powerful scripting language. You can learn more about it by watching this video:

Blue skies!

Alexander Shyrokov

In documenting the various Project54 research efforts I upload many pictures to my Flickr account and many videos to my YouTube account. However, for the past few weeks I’ve had problems connecting to Flickr and to YouTube. Basically, I’d attempt to upload files and the operation would fail. Small pictures would suffer the same fate as large videos - they wouldn’t make it to the destination.

I mentioned this problem to Frank Hludik and he found the problem: it was the TCP auto-tuning that my Vista machine performed. Here is a longer article describing the problem and the solution, and here is a shorter one. The bottom line for me: I disabled TCP auto-tuning and now I can upload pictures and videos. Thanks Frank!

Andrew Kun

The Project54 driving simulator has three NEC WT610 projectors. A couple of days ago Zeljko Medenica checked the status of the projector lamps and found that they had very little useful life left (you can get an estimate of remaining lamp time from the projector). As a lamp reaches the end of its useful life it outputs less light, so the simulation looks dimmer. Also, apparently if you keep the lamp running past its useful life, it may actually shatter inside the projector.

We ordered replacement lamps (we purchased WT61LPE lamps, WT61LP will work too), and installed them yesterday. New lamps are easy to install, assuming you can reach the projector. In our case we had to rely on Oszkar Palinko’s height and balancing capability. A total of four nine screws have to be removed and the old lamp, which has its own casing, slides out of the projector. The new lamp, again in its own casing, can then be slid into the projector.

We visually compared the old and new lamps and could clearly see the difference between the two. In the picture below the lamp on the left is the new one and you can see that it is clear as opposed to the one of the right which became cloudy with use.

Finally, we had to reset the remaining lamp time on each of the projectors - I guess this is just an estimate based on the time the projector was on for.

Andrew Kun