Whiteboards are great infovis tools, but expensive and need space. Solution: the whiteboard coffee table. It’s the very poor man’s Microsoft Surface (with no BSOD!). Also, if your taste in home decor tends toward the spartan (as does mine), this makes a great dinner table; it’s durable and really easy to clean. Most importantly, it’s [...]
Use Zotero in a separate window
September 25, 2009 – 5:05 pm
As I’ve written before, I love the free citation manager Zotero. And the group and sharing features that just dropped as part of v2.0b7, while still a little buggy, are taking the awesomeness up another level.
But one thing about Zotero has always really annoyed me: the horizantally-split screen. I never feel like I [...]
Prezi: presentation junk 2.0
April 30, 2009 – 2:50 pm
It’s 2009. I think everyone out there knows that Powerpoint is, at best, overused (at worst:Stalin). Particularly gruesome is the animated slide-transition “feature,” which I think most agree has the same communication effectiveness and subtle charm as “<blink>” tags, mouse-cursor trails, and hilarious animated gifs of cats.
So how is it that presentation tool Prezi is [...]
Zotero Report Customizer 2.0
August 26, 2008 – 6:19 pm
As I’ve discussed in a previous post, I’m an enthusiastic user of the free reference manager Zotero; I’m impressed with how such young, open-source product has managed to quickly outshine established, non-free alternatives like EndNote.
One difficulty I (and others) have had with Zotero, though, is in generating reports for a group of articles. Particularly, [...]
Zotero: the best open-source app you’ve never heard of.
May 17, 2008 – 5:46 am
There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Zotero. But, speaking from experience, Zotero is one of the best open-source projects out there. What is it? In the project website’s words:
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right [...]