Software

Travis Dawry @tdawry In spreadsheets you see the data but the code sits behind it.
In a programming language you see the code but the data sits behind it.

Antiporn Software

Qustodio is what we've used.

Antivirus Software

I am trying out the free version of Bitdefender on the HP. Norton has a cheap first year and then a very high second year.

Design

• Are computer scientists taught the basic principles?
  • Transparency (being able to guess commands)
  • Recoverability (being able to reverse mistaken commands)
  • Don’t Repeat Yourself – DRY. Don’t Repeat Yourself is the principle that any code in your program should only be written once, and never duplicated.
  • Separation of Concerns. Separation of Concerns is when you separate your program into modules that each deal with one particular focus, or concern.
  • Don’t Make Me Think. This principle was originally intended for web design, being the title of a book by Steve Krug. **Keep it Simple. Lastly, the classic KISS principle (keep it simple stupid) is no less relevant in coding than it is anywhere else.
  • Make frequently used commands easy to do.
  • Give most commonly desired outcomes as defaults; do not require options to be specified.

Transparency

• When people say an app is easy to use, they often mean it is easy for *them* to use. For example, maybe to send a message, you just press CTRL-ZA. The problem is, it's very hard to use unless you know the secret commands like that, and there's no manual, and HELP is useless.

• People who overabbreviate in Twitter are the same as people who write computer languages with commands like prt for print and \a for alpha. Newer wiser, designers use print (Python) and \alpha (LaTex). Don't make us memorize more than we have to. Don't exclude newbies.

Discord

See the Discord page.

Email

• Tech Radar 2021 Picks for Email

Text Messages via Email

*If the phone number is 123-456-7890, the email address would be [email protected]  for Twigby

Email Tracking

CloudHQ is good.

Gmail

• Searching for emails that are big or with attachments and emptying the trash can. In the email search, type : has:attachment larger:10MB To see how much storage is used, go to https://one.google.com/storage

• To create emails lists, open up the separate app GOOGLE CONTACTS. Then Choose CREATE LABEL. Create it. Then go to IMPORT. Check the box of the label you want to add emails too. Then choose CREATE MULTIPLE CONTACTS. Then cut and paste a list of email addresses into the window that opens up.

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Fonts

• This is a good webpage discussing "safe" fonts for websites that are commonly working on people's computers. A good webpage for cursive fonts is Kinsta.com.

Google

Google added an obnoxious "Related Searches" feature at the bottom of every search, which cuts out 1/4 of your searches on the page and gives you useless suggestions for different things to search for that are never relevant. To get your search screen real estate back, you can go to google.com, then to Settings at the bottom of the page, find Search Customization, I think it is, and then turn off the evil feature. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252374688

HTML, webpaqges

The language HTML has its own page.

Hard Disk Space Analyzers

Wiztree is amazingly fast and good. It is free.

Javascript

The language Javascript has its own page.

Software for Writing

• MathPix will turn pdf's into Latex and is very good.

Music software

Musescore is good freeware.

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Apps for Writing

Text Editors

• VIM might be good.

Tex

• Mathcha editor

• my Latex page, outside of Rasmapedia

• Latex

OCR, processing image into Text

• FreeOCR is quite acceptable. It loses paragraphing, but turns multi-page pdf into plain text. TechRadar has a good review of OCR software, paid and then free at the end.

Acrobat

• smallpdf.com is good for editing one file per day online, doing things like rotating, splitting, or combining. I think you get one "save" command each day. Easy to use.

• 5 Best Free PDF Readers and Viewers for Windows 10 in 20197th March 2019 by Manish Sahay is a good review. Adobe itself is an unpleasant company that writes bad software and has moved its pdf-writing software on line, probably to better rip off customers and harvest their information. Their reader is purposely limited and unsatisfactory and they write poor software anyway. I've tried Foxit and been disappointed for some reason, and PDF-XChange Editor was bad enough for some reason I forget that I decided it wasn't minimally satisfactory. Sumatra is very clean, but requires CTRL-mouse if you want to select text. So i have settled on STDU Viewer, at http://www.stdutility.com/stduviewer.html.

• NitroReader and MS Edge are treacherous when dealing with pdf forms, doing weird stuff to the contents.

• "Open source alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for PDFs,"

04 Feb 2020 Jason Baker (Red Hat) Feed Seth Kenlon (Red Hat)

• Libreoffice seems to be good. It does a great job of printing *.docx files to *.pdf. It was easy to install and it's freeware, opensource.

• PDFEncrypt, a simple little opensource app to put a password on a pdf file.

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Operating Systems

Linux

• Rickdailytips on installing Linux.]

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Organization and Filing

I like Wikimedia. Aaron Laws writes: I use git for that. https://sourceforge.net/u/dartme https://sourceforge.net/p/dartme/gitrepo/ . I don't know what that means, though.

Python

Python has its own page.

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Scheduling Meetings

• I briefly found When2meet.com good. It is, utterly simple and effective, but as of January 2022 it requires all users to download obnoxious software, so it is bad. Doodle is too hard to use too. For meetings of 4 to 6 people, simply emailing them all with a list of meeting times is best. All the software available seems to be Overfeatured.

Shell Tools

• MIT course is good (2024) on using BASH, scripting, etc. Unix-like stuff.

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Meeting Video Apps like Zoom

• Software pundit has a good survey of 5 of them. Google Meet is easy to use and has an hour-long limit on the free plan. For a whiteboard, it uses something like Google Docs. Google Docs is a good alternative to the Zoom whiteboard too.

QR Codes

To make your own QR code with your name, phone number, email, website etc. taht will go right into Cellphone contacts, go to the free site: https://www.qr-code-generator.com/guides/how-to-create-a-qr-code/ This site makes it very easy. Another site is https://www.qrcode-monkey.com/#sms .

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Social Media Apps

• A good essay on real life versus even good Twitter. Social media is too compulsive.

Bluesky

• Quiet Posters app. You pin it to your homepage, and it shows you posts from the quiet people you follow, who don't post very much, giving even their old posts priority.

• Clearsky app shows you who is blocking you, but not who is muting you, which apparently is more linked to the individual's profile and cannot be accessed from outside.

Buffer

• Buffer is very good for posting to Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook. It does other picture and social media apps too.
• Buffer does not allow posting to ordinary Facebook posts. It does allow posting to a Facebook "page", taht does not show up in people's feeds but does show up on your home page. The best thing might be to use Buffer to post to that, and then repost to the feed manually occasionally.
• Buffer Stories Creator is not useful for me. It is for use with Instagram, etc. I guess it puts text into image format.

Facebook

• Buffer does not allow posting to ordinary Facebook posts. It does allow posting to a Facebook "page", taht does not show up in people's feeds but does show up on your home page. The best thing might be to use Buffer to post to that, and then repost to the feed manually occasionally.
• Facebook "stories" can be edited on a phone, in theory, but I couldn't find correct instructions fro doing it on a computer. I don't think Buffer will work posting to a "story", but I didn't try hard.

Twitter

Nothing yet.

Substack

• For my Substack posts, to get around the Twitter throttling, go to the Substack page.

Twitter

• Finding all of someone's Twitter tweets or followers

• http://fllwrs.com/ for tracing who has started and stopped following you. nNO GOOD

• How to find out if you're shadowbanned

• SUGGESTIONS from heidi briones@HeidiBriones·21h8) mass delete DMs and confirm that they will be deleted on Twitter's end after a period of time or just "forever delete" like gmail. i don't trust Twitter to delete my DMs and it makes it even more sketchy if you can't "select all" and delete1359heidi briones@HeidiBriones·21h9) get rid of the stupid "other people don't tweet like this" warning. super annoying and authoritarian.28130heidi briones@HeidiBriones·21h10) more options to promote spaces. i think spaces are one of the best things on twitter but the only thing you can do is tweet them out. can i pay to have them promoted to a certain group? not sure but if i can, it's not obvious and we should have the option1236heidi briones@HeidiBriones·21h11) features that "block party" app already has like "block everyone who likes this tweet" or "block everyone who follows this account" makes a huge difference in user experience to be able to mass block4241heidi briones@HeidiBriones·21h…. i'll probably add more to this later, but it's a start.

• and yeah, obviously unban ALL accounts that these fascists blocked other child exploiters. oh, and talk to @elizableu about getting the child exploitation permanently out. thx, you'll prob never see this, bye61392Teacher in RI@teacherinRI·20hReplying to @HeidiBriones and @elonmuskLots of great ideas here17heidi briones@HeidiBriones·20hReplying to @teacherinRI and @elonmuskthanks!4David@hcetamd·20hReplying to @HeidiBriones and @elonmuskI'd add a partnership with @signalapp to allow two users to securely establish a Signal conversation. This could replace the "DM for Signal" stuff that much of the journo crowd has in their bios.218heidi briones@HeidiBriones·20hReplying to @hcetamd @elonmusk and @signalappthat's pretty cool4

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Squarespace (website design)

This is what MFSA uses.

Statistics Apps

Which Stats App Should You Learn?

I have learned a little R and don't like its style. It is free and opensource and can do lots of things, whcih is good, and statisticians use it most ofa nything. Economists use STATA most, which is better for regressions and more user-friendly for everything. It isn't open-source, but it has lots of user-programmed routines, so it isn't going to get competed out of busienss. What I would like to move to for everything is Python. It is free but isn't used as much for regression and deosn't have as fancy commands, but it is more pleasant to use than R. That is one advantage, but its biggest one is that Python is an all-purpose language like Fortran or Pascal or C++. You do simulations with it, or webscraping, or symbolic algebra (like Mathematica), of matrix operations (like Matlab), it is easy to install, and I can teach my 7th graders how to have fun with it, even the ones who can't convert Celsius to Fahrenheit.

Still Images, PHotos

• https://filehippo.com/download_picasa/post_download/ is the place to go to download Picasa, a good old, free photo organizer that does some good editing too.

• gfpgan will bring a bad photo into focus. See https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1673790187866865665.

Video

• Google Photos will crop video on the Iphone, but not on the laptop or Android, it seems.

• Windows 10 free video editors web article.

Converting from one video format to another

• HD Video Converter Factory, which only allow you 5 minute videos in the free version. But if it's conversion from phone video, that may be OK.

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Windows

• best and another article with keys on activating Windows.

• The Downloads file is at c:/erasmuse-l/Downloads

• To refer to a file with spaces in its name in the command line, use double quotes, e.g. "My file is this.pdf", not My file is this.pdf.

• Large files need deleting via the command line, not in the usual file directory app. Type cmd into the upper right corner to get the black terminal box.

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Worse Is Better

I wish Android, Facebook, and Windows would realize that most of us like their product as it is, and any new feature is (a) almost surely undesirable, and (b) too distracting to be worth learning about evne if it had some slight positive value. See "Worse is better" in Wikipedia.

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