December 3, 2007

Cheap Microsoft and Parallels licenses for NIH users/contractors

This is an interesting tidbit: If you work at the National Institutes of Health as an employee or contractor, you are probably eligible for discounted license prices on many Microsoft products and Parallels Desktop for Mac, or so CIT’s latest…
August 20, 2007

The Inner Life of the Cell

This incredible video was made by some folks at Harvard (supporting by the quite-wonderful Howard Hughes Medical Institute) and came to my attention through the NIH Biomedical Computing Interest Group. Really quite an incredible view of the mechanics of life. …
June 12, 2007

Inconsiderate FBO system design gets my goat

This really shouldn’t bother me as much as it does but check this out:  This is a screenshot from FedBizOpps after a user registers interest in an opportunity. Yeah, let me just click on that “X” at the top most right hand corner.……
June 8, 2007

HOWTO: Scan directly to PDF (well, almost) on OSX

I have to print, sign, scan, and e‑mail a lot of documents and have been seeking out an easy way to do it for a while. It’s been particularly aggravating for multi-page documents because ImageCapture saves each page as individual files. There are…
June 5, 2007

HOWTO: Configure a Linksys WPS54G wireless print server on Mac OSX

While trying to set up our home theater Mac Mini to print to our shared printer, I accidentally deleted the printer on my MacBook (this is what happens if you run too many VNC sessions on machines that share a look-and-feel!). Putting…
June 2, 2007

Use Firefox keyword searches to speed browsing

Via the wonderful Lifehacker, I discovered a feature of Firefox that I can’t believe I didn’t know about before. You can create keywords for search boxes on pretty much any Web page and then, when you invoke the keyword in the Firefox address bar,…

Enigmail — neat‑o GnuGP extension for Thunderbird

I just installed Enigmail, a GnuGP (free, open source version of PGP encryption) extension that makes it incredibly easy to send encrypted e‑mail through Thunderbird. Install of GnuGP was easy using MacGPG, but I hit one snag in getting to grips with…
February 28, 2007

Dovecot Invalid Messageset Error and Solution

Though working for a long time, while trying to read their mail, two of our Thunderbird IMAP users suddenly received the error: “The current command did not succeed.  The mail server responded: Invalid messageset: ‑2147483648:*.” A bit of research revealed that…
January 19, 2007

MS Office Hidden Data Removal tool

Matt Eliot, a colleague here at TCG, suggested this tool in response to my complaints of people leaving comments and tracked changes in Word documents. Rich Renomeron also told me that it works in all Office programs, not just Word. Unfortunately…
January 14, 2007

Grantsfire — grant announcements for the rest of the world

The guys over at Solpath have released a test version of a new project called Granstsfire, which they describe as  an aggregator of syndicated grants information. It enables grantseekers and funders to share and search for information on grant announcements in real…