Technology

Essential administrator tools for Microsoft Windows

Wuen I find myself in times of trouble / Mark Russinovich comes to me / Speaking words of wisdom / Run PE, Run PE.

Don't ask me to remember where that little Beatles rewrite originally came from, but it's sound advice- referring, of course, to Sysinternals Process Explorer. PE is one of many tools I keep around for troubleshooting and maintenance on Windows-based computers. Here are a few of my favourites.

How to set up a new Windows laptop: Nuke it from orbit

Microsoft Windows is actually pretty solid these days, notwithstanding the occasional hopelessly bone-headed interface design decision (Win8 Metro, anyone?). The NT 6 kernel family that underpins Vista, Win7 and Win8 is, now that Vista's teething pains are overcome, pretty slick and reliable.

The same can't be said for the heaps of shovelware that just about every single OEM ships on their new Windows machines.

How to get presentable graphs and figures from MATLAB

MATLAB is great for making high-quality figures for publication. It has a pretty steep learning curve, though, if you're used to spreadsheets.

MATLAB's huge advantage for graphing is that everything can be tuned and tweaked with commands and scripts. You only have to fuss over the first graph in a series; once you have everything the way you want it to look, you can use the same formatting script on all your other graphs. Presto, they all look good and they all match.

How to get presentable graphs and figures from Excel

Excel's default settings for graphs often result in something a bit ugly, and getting those graphs out of Excel can be a finicky process. Font sizes get screwed up, the top and right tickmarks are usually missing by default, and so forth...

So, here's my quick reference for getting Excel plots to look the way I want them to look, so that they will show up as intended when used with a proper typesetting system such as LaTeX.

This seems to work for Excel 2007/2010 and XP/2003

Get the chart on its own page

Quick Review: Nikon D7000 digital SLR camera

The verdict

The D7000 is Nikon's best all-round camera as of late 2011. If you can't get a particular shot with this thing, you probably won't get that shot with any other camera at any price.

You can spend as long as you want tweaking just about everything on the D7000 to get it set up exactly the way you want it. Then, when you lift it to your eye, it gets out of your way and just works, exactly as it should.

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