A while ago I noticed that a lot of my Facebook friends "liked" a page called "This Man Took A Photo Of Himself Everyday For 15 Years In A Row, Look at the Results!", or something similar. Curious as to what that was about, I clicked on the link. It …

For my research on Avian Influenza in waterbirds, I recently needed data on lakes and marsh-areas in Europe. I ended up compiling a spatial dataset from a number of different sources, including the EU Corine Land Cover database (CLC2000v13), the lake depth dataset compiled by Ekaterina Kourzeneva for the FLake …

Here's a little list of software I regularly use for science-related work.

Zotero A highly useful reference manager implemented as a Firefox plugin (although there's now also a Standalone-version, which works with Chrome, Safari and, well, stand-alone ;-). Especially useful are its features to retrieve citations and PDFs while browsing, and …

Installing LibreOffice on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx)

LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice.org after Ocracle acquired Sun and started charging money for previously free products (such as the ODF import filter for Microsoft Office). The 3.3 release of LibreOffice has a number of interesting features (such as …

Shapefiles are a format developed by ESRI (the makers of ArcGIS) to store and share geospatial data. Many interesting datasets are freely available in shapefile format. Shapefiles can be viewed with a number of freely available applications, such as ArcGIS Explorer (which requires the .NET framework or Silverlight) or ArcReader …

It seems hard to believe, but fax-machines have been around for over a century, and the current digital fax technology stems from the 1980s. Back in the days, for most people faxing a document was the only fast alternative to sending it by normal (as in non-electronic) mail. These days …

Here is a list of some graphics software I find useful:

Raster graphics

The GIMP A cross-platform photo and image editor

Phatch A cross-platform photo batch processor

Geeqie An excellent and fast image viewer and organiser for Linux

DigiKam A photo-editor and manager for Linux

IrfanView An excellent image viewer …

This blog entry was originally written in April 2007.

As almost anyone will know, the de facto "standard" document format for the last decade or so has been the MS Word Document, or .doc file. Every week I receive dozens of .doc and .xls files per e-mail. And every now …

After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, I was happy to notice that audio in all applications (including Skype) was finally working perfectly! However, I was less happy to notice that Pulseaudio was using quite a lot of CPU-time, and that the sound quality was absolutely awful... So I decided …

Creating and printing a multi-page CD booklet can be a bit of a headache. Firstly, not all programs support the re-ordering of pages required to make a foldable double-sided booklet. Moreover, the page-size is non-standard, which may give difficulties with commandline-tools such as Ghostscript and psnup. It took me a …