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Coming to an Elementary School Near You: Regular Expressions
It may not come this year, or next year, or even in the next five years, but I hereby predict that the art of regular expressions, or its future equivalent, will become one of the basic literacy skills...
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Reformatting Confucius with Regular Expressions
It was a fine spring afternoon in 1867. Mr. James Legge was just back from China and had settled back into his home in Clackmannanshire, Scotland. When he turned on his SteamBook Pro to check for mail...
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Finding the Women of Heimskringla with Regular Expressions
Two weeks ago I suggested that learning the art of regular expressions, or its future equivalent would become a skill for digital literacy in the age of information. Last week I told a story about...
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Introducing QGIS
Over the last few years there are a growing number of universities who offer workshops and instruction for faculty and students in the use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Most of us...
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Using the WorldMap Platform
Last week I introduced the open source application QGIS, which gives all of us free access to powerful geographic software and liberates the more casual users among us from dependence on the commercial...
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Styling Maps with TileMill
Today I want to introduce a nifty open source mapping software application, TileMill. TileMill is created by the developers of MapBox and is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. MapBox is primarily a...
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Download a Sequential Range of URLs with Curl
Ever hear how they talk about this being the world of “big data”? Ever notice how those fresh young grad students in the social science and humanities departments are playing around with huge...
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A Tool for Reviewing Tables of Information
The age-old technology of the flashcard remains our most faithful friend when memorizing facts. The rise of many powerful apps such as Anki and gamified platforms like Memrise have also given flashards...
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Ask RoMEO About Your Favorite Journal’s Open Access Policy
Next week is Open Access Week and its admirable slogan is, “Set the Default to Open Access.” As a recently minted PhD graduate who wants to both publish with recognized journals in my field and widely...
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Setting up a Local Folder Backup Sync On Your Mac
Hopefully most our readers here have a good backup routine in place. After learning the lesson the hard way, I now I use an obsessive combination of a cloud-based system (I use SpiderOak, which we...
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The Portable Ninja Standing Desk
Before hitting grad school, I spent some pleasant months doing tech support at a call center for Norway’s largest internet provider. Back then, my minimum wage and a 31% income tax still left me with a...
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Ye Olde iPhone Backup Server
Do you have an old smart phone, tablet, or computer in a drawer or a closet somewhere that you never got around to selling or giving away? You might consider setting it up as a development server as...
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Collaborative Writing with Etherpad-Lite on Mac OS X
We are huge fans of collaborative writing here at ProfHacker. I think there is still huge potential for growth in this area. When I sit next to a friend in a conference audience who has never...
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Omeka 2.0 Is Here
Omeka, the web publishing platform for sharing rich digital collections recently got a major update to 2.0. This open source project from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George...
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Markdown and Mdpress for Presentations
I see Prezi presentations instead of PowerPoint slides at a lot of conferences these days. When done well, they can challenge the presentation paradigm and make innovative use of an “infinite canvas,”...
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Markdown Slideshow Example: Mdpress
Last week I introduced a way to create Prezi-style “infinite canvas” style slide presentations written in plain text with markdown formatting. I used a free command line utility called Mdpress which...
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Markdown Slideshow Example: Pandoc
In my last two postings, I introduced a way to create slide presentations by writing them in a simple text file, with Markdown formatting, and add some of the “infinite canvas” features of Impress.js....
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The Wizards of Vim
I met a Vim wizard for the first time in 1994. Two of them actually, a married couple. They really were wizards, at least in that mysterious internet gaming environment known as a MUD. That meant they...
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Getting Started With a GitHub Repository
If we look across the landscape of collaborative writing on the web, there are a few clearly discernible hubs of activity. Wikipedia and Google Docs might be identified as two of them, but one the...
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Direct Editing and Zen Mode in GitHub
In my last posting I went through the simple steps of starting a brand new repository on GitHub, the leading online service for hosting code and text based projects backed with the version control...
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