Wooden keyboard

Clavier en bois en kit au Japon.

Crop pages in a PDF

It's possible to crop pages in Adobe Acrobat:

That's usefull if you have a document that has increadibly wide margines and you'd like to print 2 pages per sheet.

Undo close tab in Firefox

I was looking for a way to undo close tab in firefox an I have found an extenssion for it.
But a comment on the page says: " Useless Press Ctrl. Shift T instead of installing an add on for it." And that's quite true! :)

You can also view the recently closed tabs in the history menu.

Turn off auto notifiers to increase your productivity

Process your email in batches:

A simple way to increase your productivity is to turn off auto notifiers. It’s simply not necessary to check email constantly throughout the day, and doing so will regularly interrupt more important tasks. After receiving thousands of emails I can safely say that I’ve never received one that couldn’t wait 12 hours or so.

Process your inbox in batches. Make it once or twice a day, and try to get your inbox down to zero. This will allow you to plow through the rest of your productive tasks without constant interruption.

I'm sad to say I use outlook at work. Turning off auto notification is called: "Turn Desktop Alerts on or off" in the outlook help page:

On the Tools menu, click Options.
On the Preferences tab, click E-mail Options, and then click Advanced E-mail Options.
Under When new items arrive in my Inbox, clear the Display a New Mail Desktop Alert (default Inbox only) check box.

Why Python

Python Experts - Why They Do Python

Matthew: """Python syntax encourages programmers to write easy-to-read programs . [...]  A well-written python program reads like a book. """

The homogenization of scientific computing, or why Python is steadily eating other languages’ lunch

Tad: """A few years ago, you couldn’t really do statistics in Python unless you wanted to spend most of your time pulling your hair out and wishing Python were more like R (which, is a pretty remarkable confession considering what R is like)."""

Paypal engineering: 10 myths of enterprise python:

Myth #7: Python does not scale

"""Scale has many definitions, but by any definition, YouTube is a web site at scale. More than 1 billion unique visitors per month, over 100 hours of uploaded video per minute, and going on 20 pecent of peak Internet bandwidth, all with Python as a core technology. Dropbox, Disqus, Eventbrite, Reddit, Twilio, Instagram, Yelp, EVE Online, Second Life, and, yes, eBay and PayPal all have Python scaling stories that prove scale is more than just possible: it’s a pattern."""

Astronomers switch from IDL to Python. IDL is a vector oriented programming language. A wiki version of the IDL vs Python comparison, comment from the blog IDL vs. Python:

"Lately I’ve gotten increasingly frustrated with programming in IDL: [...] I find myself spending more and more time on “stupid stuff” like wrestling with the ancient and limited plotting system, building very ugly GUIs which nonetheless take vast amounts of cumbersome code to build, and dealing with namespace conflicts between routines with identical names in different libraries. Python is not perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than IDL in all of these aspects. Like I said, I’m only halfway switched (and certain collaborations are going to keep me in IDL for years, as will all my legacy code) but for new stuff Python seems like it’s got the wind behind its sails."

Interesting modules

• Ipython Notebook, now called Jupyter

xlrd and xlwt

Have a look at those python tools to read and write Excel files:

• xlrd
• xlwt

Maybe have a look at this discussion group: python-excel.