The so-called “cloud” is a great place.ĬrashPlan is my choice for backup. You should back up your computer, and you should make sure it’s backed up redundantly (i.e. Perhaps you live in a state with volcanos or hurricanes or tornados, or you just have bad technology luck. Even if I backup to a local external hard drive, one bad day in California could destroy both my computer and external drive, and in doing so, two years of blood, sweat, and tears. I live in a state where there are earthquakes. If you need to add an equation to a talk, figure or poster, you just type the LaTeX you want in the little box, press the button, and it makes a little picture of the equation, which you can drag into the right document or export as a pdf, eps, jpeg, or tiff file. LaTeXiT is a wonderful tiny piece of software. Otherwise, an alarming $599 for a standard version, $349 for a student/teacher edition (for the full Adobe Creative Suite.) You can actually buy an academic version of Illustrator alone for $99. Great for making posters and editing plots after making them in your coding language of choice.Ĭost: Your university might have a license for free or steeply discounted price, and it’s often installed in school computer/graphic design labs. There are tons of tutorials out there to make it easier (for example, this one). Other Software that I Could Probably Live Without But Which I Like A Lot: It has syntax highlighting for almost all possible languages, tabbed-editing within a project, vertical highlighting, and is navigable by the normal commands you’re used to (so that you don’t have to play Vim Adventures).Ĭost: $50 for a license, which lasts forever on your machine. There are a ton of text editors out there and you probably have your favorite (emacs? vim?). I took pictures of posters and talks during my last conference and they uploaded straight into my research notebook!Ĭost: Free for up to 60 MB a month of uploads and downloads. ( AstroBetter’s take on Evernote agrees)ĭownload the iPhone/iPad/Android app too. Evernote is easy! You can drag and drop figures straight in, write to-do lists, write down pertinent thoughts, cut-and-paste emails in seconds, take notes at conferences… It’s wonderful. I had a terrible time trying to keep up with a paper research notebook I would start one, and then get too lazy to write things down (I write so much slower than I type!) and WAY too lazy to actually physically cut-and-paste plots with scissors and tape. I use Evernote as a computer-based research notebook. I even get excited when I drive by their HQ in Mountain View (hey, don’t judge!). Dropbox is run by MIT grads so watch out for awesome events like Dropquest 2012, a puzzle-hunt based on MIT’s Mystery Hunt.Ĭost: Free for 2GB (up to 18 GB if you find all the fancy ways to get free space!) Pay $99/year for 100 GB, $499/year for 500 GB. Make sure you get the iPhone/iPad/Android app too, and access your kitten pictures from anywhere. My advisor and I have a shared folder, which comes in handy for updating drafts, collaborating on code, or sharing a new result. You can store papers, plots, posters, pictures of kittens in an online repository that syncs with a folder on your computer. I probably don’t need to tell you what Dropbox is. Apologies to Linux/Unix/Windows folks!) Software I Can’t Live (Productively) Without: (Note that I work exclusively on a Mac, so all these are based on software available for Macs. Over the last two years, I’ve found a handful of software that helps me productive and happy at my screen. We code, we write, we make plots, we think, we read… all from our desk chairs. For many astronomers, we spend 80% of every work day parked in front of a computer screen.
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