Anyway, the program is now available in full final release 1.0 (it was beta previously). Apparently there are various improvements, but it was excellent to begin with.

For those of you who find you can’t do anything interesting with Web 2.0 functionality in D2L, there are some good tutorial videos out there on how to circumvent the system and bring in proper web capabilities.

I found this one which discusses using iFrames, a trick that I believe will be quite useful for my course.  Upon showing it to a friend, he commented that the tutorial should actually be entitled “So Your IT Department Insists That You Use Stone Tools: How to Use Stone Tools To Open Packages from Canadian Tire“.  The laugh I got from that alone almost makes the last several weeks of frustration worth it.  Almost.

If you haven’t tried Dropbox yet, you really should. And, if you decide to, go ahead and use this referral link — it will give both of us some bonus storage space free.

You wouldn’t believe the things some people throw away.  Most notable (aside from a wireless keyboard and mouse set still in the original box) are what I am calling FIFEs, computers that are Free, Intact, and Fast Enough.  Operationally, I am setting a minimum cut-off of Pentium 4, which is what I still have in my office at work.  In the past week, I have found two FIFEs — Pentium 4, 160Gb HDD, 1Gb RAM, LCD monitor, etc.  I have taken them back to my office, cleaned them up, formatted the hard drives, and started installing software.

As a follow-up to my previous post about free science software, I am trying a little experiment in putting together a 100% free desktop computer that can be used by undergraduate research students in my lab.  The first step is to find a FIFE, then to install a free operating system like Ubuntu, and then to install the various free office, stats, graphing, imaging, web, and other necessary software.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Operating system:

• Ubuntu
• Kubuntu
• Edubuntu

Office suite (Word processor, spreadsheet, presentations):

• OpenOffice.org

Web browser:

• Firefox
• Opera
• Chrome

(Also free, but not worth the price: Internet Explorer)

Email and personal information manager:

• Gmail and Google Calendar
• Evolution (Ubuntu)
• Kontact (Kubuntu)
• Thunderbird

Reference manager:

• Mendeley

PDF reader/creator:

• PDFCreator

(A PDF creator and editor is included in OpenOffice.org)

Statistics software:

• R (with R Commander or RKWard for easier use)
• SOFA
• PSPP

Graphing software:

• SciDAVis
• Graph

Image viewing/editing software:

• OpenOffice.org Draw
• GIMP
• Paint.NET
• IrfanView

Audio editing software:

• Audacity

Lab management software:

• Feng Office

Collaboration software:

• Google Docs
• Google Wave
• Dropbox

Scheduling:

• Doodle
• Tungle.me
• Jiffle

Hack: A clever use of technology, software, or modified items to solve a problem or increase efficiency.


Academe: The community of scholars and students engaged in higher education and research; also known as academia or acadème.


Hackademe: A website devoted to sharing clever uses of technology, software, or modified items to solve problems related to information overload, time management, organization, productivity, and other challenges faced by academics on a daily basis.

Firefox
This is the best browser, period, and it finally surpassed IE! One of the great things about open source programs like this is the add-ons that people contribute. In particular, I recommend:

• ColorfulTabs
• Cooliris
• Download Statusbar
• FireFTP
• FoxTab
• TinyURL Generator

WordPress
The best blog and website authoring software for intermediate to advanced users. To really help with webpage design, I recommend working with the Atahualpa theme. Some of the best plugins:

• Announcement and vertical scroll news
• Contact Form 7
• DM Albums
• LJ Custom Menu Links
• Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
• Quote Comments
• Quotes Collection
• Superb Slideshow
• Theme My Login
• Viper’s Video Quicktags
• Visitor Maps and Who’s Online
• WP-Table
• Youtube with fancy zoom

Skype
Free online video chat and inexpensive long-distance to land lines. Extremely useful for keeping in touch with friends and family.

Google Earth
See the whole world from the comfort of your chair (unless your chair is uncomfortable).

Mendeley
Free reference management program that you will love, trust me.

PBWorks
Wiki software that is WYSIWYG rather than Wiki-code. Very useful for collaboration.

Webspiration
A free online (and not free desktop) concept mapping/flow chart program that can be useful for organizing ideas.

Google Reader and iGoogle
Keep track of your favourite blogs, news feeds, journal TOCs, and even automatic literature searches.

Dropbox
Online folder synchronization to keep everything synced on multiple computers.

Animoto
A very cool app that creates animated slideshows with music automatically using uploaded photos and videos. Major kudos for their offer of a free pro account to any non-profit humanitarian organization.

OpenGoo
A free lab management program that lets students and advisors keep track of projects, share files, and set schedules.

Wordle
Word usage for any text — very neat.

Poynt
An absolutely outstanding free app with local searches for people, businesses, restaurants, and movies, including the ability to watch trailers.

LaunchPad
An easy program that allows you to create icons for specific websites, SMS contacts, or phone contacts.

Vlingo
A voice recognition program that lets you speak commands, dial contacts by voice, and compose messages by talking rather than typing. The recognition is pretty good. Available in a free and a pro version.

Google Mobile
A tool for accessing various Google programs (which can also be installed separately), including Google Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Search, and so on.

WeatherEye
Local weather with current and 5-day forecast from the Weather Network.

THE Flashlight
Simple little app that activates the camera LED, letting you use the BlackBerry as a flashlight (nice to set one of the side buttons for this for use in the dark). There are also free apps that turn on the message LED and produce a white screen (such as BerryTorch), but these are far less bright.

BlackBerry App World
RIM’s app store, with both free and purchase apps.

Viigo
Combination RSS reader, news, weather, and other functions.

I played around with Zotero, but I prefer something standalone rather than embedded within a browser. You may like it, though, so feel free to check it out.

Instead, I have decided to make the switch to Mendeley, a desktop application with an optional online sync function. It is still in beta, but is coming along nicely and soon should be able to do all the things I want. Specifically, allowing PDFs to be linked with records and read within the program, searching within PDFs, creating “playlists” rather than separate files for each paper I am working on, and automatic organization and renaming of PDFs in a single folder.

The program is not quite there yet, but I am now very optimistic. For now, the automatic metadata extraction is pretty much useless when you import a PDF, but then again I currently have to enter everything manually anyway with my existing program. In this case, you can have the PDF open in the same screen as the record update window. This alone is much easier than flipping back and forth or printing every reference.

[UPDATE: The metadata extraction works a lot better if you set up a Mendeley account and mostly use newer reprints, and even better if you then do a “search by title” once the file is imported).

Another issue is that it is dreadfully slow when loading if you have a lot of PDFs. Apparently this only happens when you first input a bunch of new papers, but we’ll see. I have thousands of papers that will need to be entered, so if it can’t handle it, then it’s not going to work. Also, it has a tendency to crash when inputting a lot of papers.

In short, the program looks like it will be great once the bugs are worked out and some other missing features are incorporated.

This raises a larger point, which is that free, community-driven projects are getting to be my preferred kind of software. This is because the programmers are usually very responsive to user feedback, and in many cases users themselves can create add-ons for specific functions that make the software even more useful. Here are some additional examples:

Firefox — A great browser, with an unbelievable collection of user-provided plugins.

Google Earth — Simply awesome.

iGoogle and Google Reader — Also awesome. (Google Desktop looks good too, but I haven’t used it).

IrfanView — A nice image viewing program.

Mesquite — Phylogenetic analysis software (there are many others, but I am partial to this one).

OpenGoo — A free lab management program that lets students and advisors keep track of projects, share files, and set schedules.

OpenOffice.org — A free office suite with counterparts to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

R — My statistician colleagues swear by this open source stats program, but I haven’t really tried to figure it out yet.

Skype — Free online video chat and inexpensive long-distance to land lines. Extremely useful for keeping in touch with friends and family.

Thunderbird — If you don’t have Outlook, try this free email software.

WinTidy — Simple little application that restores your icon positions on the Windows XP desktop if they get moved around (e.g., following a crash).

WordPress — Not just for blogs. Entire websites can be created using it (e.g., Evolver Zone), and there are lots of user-created themes and add-ons available.

Xobni — A plugin for Outlook that indexes email and makes searches vastly easier.

Zone Alarm — A free firewall program.

If you have other suggestions, leave a comment and I may add them to this list.