I always say “A Template is always someone else’s template”. It is almost always impossible to use a template as-is. However good a template, tool or hack might be, it has to be tweaked to suit your need. I have been using several tools throughout my academic and professional journey. The list has evolved and many of the tools and templates have been replaced by better alternatives as the world yielded to my needs :).
Tools for Logging, Tracking & Research
I have used many Agile tools and ways to organise my thoughts and plans. I am a fanatic when it is about documenting and organising my ideas. As a result, I have ended up with scores of tracks and hundreds of items in each of them. I grew from physical notebooks, organisers, and dashboards to dynamic Agile boards.
- swiftkey — Ever since I started swiping, I can’t type anymore on my phone
- google keep — satisfies my simple need – notes and accessibility.
- notepad++ – Nothing beats it when I am at my desktop. Serves as scratchpad, quick code editor, formatting board and much more.
- asana — A easy to use task management tool and much more. It has solved many of my needs. A great launching pad for my notes to my projects.
evernote — best for longer notes and is also cross-platform.I have reduced my use since I now prefer jumping directly from notes to dashboard – google keep to asana- Solid Explorer –
I still use ES file explorerbut the new one has better cloud management – It does it all. - Onedrive and google drive – for accessing my imp stuff across devices. The free storage is enough for my needs.
- google photos – Enough for all my photos across my devices.
- Irfanview – My trusted aid for over 20 years for quick photo editing. Never found anything better.
- Clipchamp for quick video edits, gifs etcetera. Easy and works well with Windows. Others – Canva (sadly doesn’t allow svg free), Inkscape (for svg), PicsArt, pixlrE.
- ChatGPT, Canva and Synthesia for my auto or synthetic text, image and video needs.
- Draw.io – mindmaps, svg, quick slide, charts, infographic – A versatile partner in any crime.
- flaticon and pngegg primarily for my icon and image needs.
- google colab – a
recent butwonderful addition that has made data science coding easy and platform/device agnostic. - visual studio – for my ML needs with Azure SDK, Also a complete tool even when not working with Azure.
- IBM Q, pennylane and strangeworks for all stuff quantum.
- Qutip , Mathcha – tools I use for my research writings apart from vanilla MS Office tools.
- And writing does not complete without Grammarly, Wordtune and QuillBot.
Never type but swype
I am required to participate in the cause (meetings, chats, seminars), and take minutes, but also want to jot down any ideas that I might want to pursue later. This dynamic environment required speed. I used physical notes till 2015 because nothing beats the speed of a quick scribble.
Things changed when Swype came in for android smartphones and allowed me to swipe and not type my notes. This was fast and by the year-end, I was able to swipe faster than I could type. I can now swipe faster than taking shorthand notes. This also saved me the time needed to convert my paper notes to digital.
Sadly Swype died in Feb 2018 and I am having to survive with swiftkey. I miss Swype keyboard but have to live with what is available. I can’t and don’t want to type anymore on a phone. The next transition – I am still waiting when speech dictation will be satisfactory.
Sep-2020 Update – With the COVID-19 lockdown in place I do not need to rely on my phone as much. I mostly use my Microsoft surface. Hence keyboard typing has taken over swiping. I need better speech recognition now more than ever !!
Notes, Idea Collectors (or hoarder!!)
I use google keep, Asana and WordPress P2 to aid my journey of notes, task arrangement, tracking and implementation.
Tools for Data Science & Research
pycharm/colab
My programming languages of choice are Excel Macro and Python. Nowadays I only code in python and I am a big fan of the google colab environment. Colab is similar to a local Jupyter environment but takes away the trouble of system configuration. Since I can save my colab notebooks in google drive or GitHub, I am also device-independent. It is easy for me to move across my devices. It is actually cool.
I intend to post eventually on GitHub or here on my blog. Colab notebooks make it easy to build up an article directly from notebooks.
The rest of the page lists a few of the tools and links that I have collected during my ongoing study. I have not used all of them yet but intend to, this year. I will be sorting and providing my comments as I deal with them.
Data collection
- twg — Python script, leveraging Tweepy, for grabbing tweets from the Twitter streaming API
- Back to Future (btf) tweet collector — tweet searching and streaming.
- GetOldTweets3 — Scrape (historical) twitter data without using the API. Make sure to follow the Twitter ToS.
- fb_scrape_public — downloads public data from Facebook (Python package by Deen Freelon).
- Facebook Group Data Downloader — batch downloads with fb_scrape_public.
- instaloader — powerful and easy-to-use Python API for Instagram (Python package by André Koch-Kramer).
YouTube
- youtube-comment-scraper – downloads the comments to YouTube videos (Node.js, by Philip Klostermann).
Web
- wget — powerful tool, of hacking fame, to use with caution.
Data wrangling
File management
- txtls — Python scripts to do stuff with text data.
Data cleaning
- TXT PURIFIER — notebook for cleaning documents before analysis (Python).
Parsing and tagging
- LXML HTML parsing — notebook about how to parse locally stored html files (Python).
- py-json-parser — notebook on parsing JSON files into pandas (Python).
- JSON-parser — notebook on parsing JSON files into dataframes (R).
- efselab — powerful text tagger (compiler by Robert Östling).
Data analysis
Text analysis
- Textometrica — tool for Connected Concept Analysis (online service/PHP).
- ThingLinker — script for Actor-Network analysis of texts (Python).
- Topic modeling with MALLET — an introduction to how to fit LDA topic models to documents (Java).
- Topic Modelling Tool — A GUI for MALLET’s implementation of LDA (app by Scott Enderle).
- Topic top documents — extracting the most likely documents for MALLET topics (Python).
- Document distances and clustering — calculates and visualizes similarity/distance between texts (Python).
- Sentiment analysis with VADER — produces scores for emotional content in social media texts (Python).
Social network analysis
My Gig
Over the years my greed for machines has taken me across several love affairs. Since I am back home where there is no dearth of space I ended up having a full-fledged PC, XBOX 360, XBOX One and a Surface Pro which recently died and gave way to a Lenovo 2-1
My Current PC
- AMD Ryzen 7 3800X on a Gigabyte B450 AORUS ELITE V2 motherboard
- Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000 16GB at 2300
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 2GB
Samsung Curve Monitor 24inch– A monkey decided to dance on it !!Samsung Curve Monitor 27inch– Why should monkey have all the fun – I broke this one !!!- LG Ultrafine 32″ 4K UHD 32Un500-W
- WD-Blue SSD 256GB SATA M.2.2280
- XPG SPECTRIX S40G 512GB M.2.2280
- WD Blue 1TB SATA Hard Drive
- CORSAIR TX650M
- TVS Gold Blue switch Mechanical Keyboard
- Reddragon ARGB Gaming Mouse
- And a dazzling ARGB Mirror Cabinet for the ambiance.
My Xbox world
- XBOX 360 with Kinect
- XBOX One
- Zebronics JUKE BAR 9700 PRO DOLBY ATMOS – Hell of an experience
- A 50-inch smart Tv to go with it
The Portables
Microsoft Surface Pro 4– Nothing beats it but it doesn’t last as well – Love and Hate relationship which ended with it dying recently.- Lenovo Tab Yoga Duet 7i 8GB 512GB – 11th Gen Intel i5.
- Zebronics Companion 2 wireless combo when I need them.
- My Phone (Just does the job pretty well) 🙂 .
- Jabra 65t – It is great and going strong for 2 years