Well, tried to use powerpoint 2007 to prepare some lectures today only to find a nasty surprise … ink support has taken a giant step backwards and is just about unusable. It seems that the intrepid programmers at Microsoft are colossally shortsighted and only see ink as useful for temporary annotations: you cannot select the ink by dragging a selection rectangle or using select-all, you’re reduced to clicking on each stroke. Ink can’t be grouped with non ink objects but must be treated separately… amazing how much this makes ink useless. Read more »

I’ve been using linux as my main platform for ages and ages … but this doesn’t live in harmony with new laptops especially tabletPCs. Typically on getting a new laptop I had about a month of head-banging frustration to look forward to as I tried to get the power management, modem, wifi, external screen, bluetooth, and of course the tablet pen all to play nicely. Not good. Read more »

Here is a cool idea for startup weekends in science by Paweł Szczęsny. Why not combine the ideas of code sprints and distributed teams for doing science? i.e. set up an intense interaction for a short period for a group of researchers with the aim of say, writing a paper, in a week? Read more »

Can’t believe I missed this one: www.ted.com - TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design. It’s an annual conference where some awesome speakers are challenged to “give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes”. The talks are available for free at the website,

My favorites so far: Read more »

Adventures in Phase Space

I’ve been using mindmaps as the main medium to present ideas in lectures for a couple of weeks. It’s an experiment and I’m still smoothing out some rough patches (If you’re one of my students reading this - yes you’re guinea pigs ;). The software I’m using MindManager Pro mainly because it is the only mindmapping software I have found that interacts nicely with a tablet and allows you to just write (instead of type) the content. Read more »

Check out this great set of video clips and explanations for classical mechanics:
http://www.physclips.unsw.edu.au/

I’ve been playing around in lectures borrowing ideas from Eric Mazur and really enjoying it. I inherited a bunch of clickers to use in lectures but unfortunately they require MS powerpoint to work and the software version I have doesn’t seem to be compatible with the latest powerpoint, sigh. Never mind, exit clickers… Read more »