Category Archives: Uncategorized

Wifi Security: Locking Down Your Home Network

wirelesshome150This guide will help you understand the basics of your wireless router, and how to ensure it is as secure as possible against intruders, also commonly known as free loading neighbors. If you are well versed in the basics of wifi, check out our advanced guide to speeding up your connection.

Apple’s Grapher

grapher1Whether you’re dealing with 2D or 3D graphs, Apple’s Grapher could be just what you’re looking for. With examples provided for everything from differential equations to a Torus-Knot, and easy tools for animation, you’ll find a lot of reasons to consider how Grapher could help you with your academic work. You can also create or import point sets for graphing.

Grapher is a bundled application on all Macintosh computers using MAC OS X. You’ll find it in under Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities.

More at Apple’s website…

Looking for images to use in your blog posts?

~Groundhog up a Tree~photo © 2006 Vicki | more info (via: Wylio)
If you are searching for a way to load an image into a blog posting, there is a site out there that will make this task easy.  The site is wylio.com and it provides a great service for searching Flickr.com for Creative Commons images that fit your search criteria.  In Flickr, people can attribute their images with Creative Commons licensing making millions of images available for public use.  Wylio taps into this vast data store and formats the image of your choice to fit cleanly (with attribution) into a blog post or twitter post.  Since it’s groundhog day, I thought I’d find a snappy free image of Puxatany Phil for this post.

Don’t Forget Your Flash Drive!

USB thumb drive
Although we do the best we can to return users’ flash drives when they are left behind, you might consider taking a more proactive approach. The best way to avoid losing your flash drive, and all your work, is to get in the habit of checking that you have removed it from the computer before you leave. That being said, we all forget things, so another option to ensure that your flash drive is promptly returned to you is to create a text document on your drive titled “please read me if found.” In this document, you can leave your contact information to aid the Computer Center staff in returning your drive.

Erik Ordway Receives the Recognizing Excellence Award

Erik

Erik putting his award where he puts all his important documents

Erik received the coveted Computing and Communications Recognizing Excellence Award Wednesday Dec 15 for his over the top work as Manager of Scientific Computing.  To quote the nomination, “With the loss of one of the two professional positions in the CAL, Erik has been forced to wear many hats.  This might have caused the ordinary human to cower in a dark corner waiting for it all to go away.  As a different kind of human and in spite of this doubling of responsibility, Erik has managed to thrive.

The job roles he has taken on include, but are not limited to: managing the CAL, training and mentoring his 10+ student staff, building and deploying images to support the instrumentation computers in the labs (30+ highly quirky machines), supporting SI and ES planning units as the Academic Computing Liaison, taking on the role of application administrator for Moodle (no small task), managing a multitude of Rails applications and on the side he builds new non-trivial web applications for Academic Computing (SiteTracker and Moodle Connections).  He somehow manages the stress, remains generally friendly, non-confrontational, appears to still get a good night sleep, and by all reports not in the CAL”  Congratulations Erik!

Macworld 2009

Philip Schiller

Philip Schiller

In case you missed the Keynote Address from this year’s Macworld 2009, you can see it here: Macworld 2009 Keynote.

Apple announced DRM-free music as the new standard on their ever popular iTunes music store. Good news for all you iPodders out there. They also announced new versions of iLife (iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, Garageband) and iWork (Keynote, Numbers, Pages).