WinSCP

April 18, 2013 17:30:00 — General Geekery

I'm a command-line guy, but lots of people on my team perfer graphical tools. WinScp is a really useful piece of software. From the WinScp website:

WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client, SCP client, FTPS client and FTP client for Windows. Its main function is file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers scripting and basic file manager functionality.

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MarkdownPad

March 30, 2013  — General Geekery

As some of my co-workers know, I am a huge fan of Markdown. From the Markdown website:

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

...

The overriding design goal for Markdown's formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it's been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown's syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown's syntax is the format of plain text email.

I love the fact that documents formatted using Markdown are readable even as plain text.

MarkdownPad is a Windows Markdown editor with live preview. It allows you to see how your document is formatted as you type. The free version supports vanilla markdown syntax, and the Pro version adds some additional features such as support for Markdown Extra syntax.

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Google Ngram Viewer

March 26, 2013  — General Geekery

A friend of mine recently linked to an article that made reference to the Google Ngram Viewer. From the website:

When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years.

This looks like a useful research tool.

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OneTab

March 12, 2013  — General Geekery

Yesterday http://waxy.org/links/ posted a link to OneTab. OneTab is a Chrome extension that lets you "convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once."

The problem this solves for me is

1. I want certain sites to be accessible.
2. I don't want something as permanent as a set of bookmarks.
3. I don't want 20 tabs taking up memory on my system.

I've been playing around with it and it keeps a record of different tab sessions. You can combine sessions and drag and drop items between them. You can also drag open tabs into the OneTab window to add it to a session.

It's a nice little extension.

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Mirror your Android Device's Screen on your PC

February 3, 2013  — General Geekery

I was going to be on a conference call where I needed to show my Android Phone's screen. I was already sharing my PC's screen. The last time I did this by pointing a webcam at the phone, but the screen was pretty hard for call participants to see. (Especially with my sausage fingers in the way!)

I found a nice solution to the problem. I used androidscreencast to mirror my phone's screen so that folks on the conference call could see it on my share PC screen.

I came across another Android screencasting app called Android Screenshots and Screen Capture, but I haven't tried it. You may want to check it out.

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