Computer Productivity Hacks

Command Line

• Manage Network Tasks From the Windows Command Prompt

Mounting shared drives and connecting to remote resources is something you can easily do from the Windows GUI. With our quick guide to the command prompt, however, you can more easily automate large tasks.

• Command Line Crash Course

Quick super fast course in using the command line. It is intended to be done rapidly in about a day or two, and not meant to teach you advanced shell usage.

WGET

• Wget for Windows

GNU Wget is a free network utility to retrieve files from the World Wide Web using HTTP and FTP, the two most widely used Internet protocols. It works non-interactively, thus enabling work in the background, after having logged off.

• Geek to Live: Mastering Wget

Say you want to backup your blog or create a local copy of an entire directory of a web site for archiving or reading later. The command: wget -m http://website.tld

• More advanced wget usage

Tips for mirroring specific directories, update only changed files, etc.

• cliget (A Firefox add-on.)

Download files using curl or wget. This addon generates curl/wget commands that emulate the request as though it's coming from your browser allowing you to download protected files directly to a separate machine (e.g. server).

Windows Command Line

• A Task-Based Guide to Windows PowerShell Cmdlets

Cmdlets are the heart-and-soul of Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's latest command shell/scripting language.

• Microsoft DOS robocopy command

Robocopy: A robust file copy command for the Windows command line.

• An A-Z Index of the Windows CMD command line

Each command is linked to more info about the particular command.

• Xcopy

The xcopy command is a Command Prompt command used to copy one or more files and/or folders from one location to another location.

Generate File List

• How can one extract the names of files in a folder as text?

Example: C:\Users\me\Downloads\MyFolder> dir /b > filelist.txt

(The text in orange shows the command used once you've navigated into the directory from which you want to generate the list of file names.)

• A PowerShell script to list all files and folders within a directory

This tutorial contains several working answers for using Windows PowerShell to list files and folders.

• How to get a list of sub-folders and their files, ordered by folder-names

Works with cmd.exe, but doesn't seem to work with Windows PowerShell.

Folder & File Compression

• How to Use 7Zip to Create Multiple Compressed Folders in One Go

Example: for /d %%X in (*) do "c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\"

• Batch file : Compress folder or file using windows compress

To compress a folder without using any particular compression software.

Text Extraction

• Capture2Text

Capture2Text enables users to do the following:

1. Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
2. Speech Recognition

• PDF TEXT Extraction

Lists several options.

• SILVERCODERS DocToText

Extracts plain text from documents in all popular formats.

• Detexter

Detexter is an app designed to extract text from PDF files.

Data Scrape

• Almost Scraping: Web Scraping for Non-Programmers

Tools and tips compiled by journalists from PBS and Omaha World-Herald.

• Open Source at Scrapinghub

Scrapinghub's list of open source scraping projects.

• Six tools for web scraping – To use for data journalism & creating insightful content

Tools for gathering data from public sources.

Text Search

• geekDadaji - A SEARCH INITIATIVE

Makes tools to search text content, including:

1. FALCON - Text Search Java Project: JSON based text search Java Project
2. HAWK - PDF Text Search Java Project: Taking initiative for Document Text Search

• Xpdf: A PDF Viewer for X

Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

Windows installer: Short Programs/Scripts (Look for the xpdf3.exe / poppler.exe links in left sidebar.)

PDF Conversion

• pdf2htmlEX

Convert PDF to HTML without losing text or format.

Educate Yourself

Multiple Codes

• Codecademy

Learn to code while building a project. Free online courses include: HTML & CSS; jQuery; JavaScript; PHP; Python; Ruby; Web Projects; APIs

R

• DataCamp

Learn R & Become a Data Analyst

D3.js

• d3Vienno

d3Vienno features a series of video tutorials, each about 10-12 minutes long, on using D3.js.

• Interactive Data Visualization for the Web: An Introduction to Designing with D3

D3 Tools

• SVG Crowbar

A Chrome-specific bookmarklet that extracts SVG nodes and accompanying styles from an HTML document and downloads them as an SVG file—A file which you could open and edit in Adobe Illustrator, for instance. Because SVGs are resolution independent, it’s great for when you want to use web technologies to create documents that are meant to be printed (like, maybe on newsprint). It was created with d3.js in mind, but it should work fine no matter how you choose to generate your SVG.

Data Analysis Tools

• D3.js - Data-Driven Documents

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

• Download RStudio

Take control of your R code. RStudio is the premier integrated development environment for R. It is available in open source and commercial editions and runs on the desktop (Windows, Mac, and Linux) or over the web with RStudio Server. Download RStudio (for Windows, Mac, or Linux).

• OpenRefine (Formerly Refine.)

Open Refine is a standalone open source desktop application for data cleanup and transformation to other formats, the activity known as data wrangling. It is similar to spreadsheet applications (and can work with spreadsheet file formats), however, it behaves more like a database.

• Data Wrangler (Stanford Visualization Group)

Wrangler allows interactive transformation of messy, real-world data into the data tables analysis tools expect. Export data for use in Excel, R, Tableau, Protovis, ...

• HTSQL—A Database Query Language

HTSQL is designed for data analysts and other accidental programmers who have complex business inquiries to solve and need a productive tool to write and share database queries. HTSQL is free and open source software.

• Jigsaw: Visual Analytics for Exploring and Understanding Document Collections

Jigsaw is a visual analytics system to help analysts and researchers better explore, analyze, and make sense of such document collections.

Maintenance

Boot Disks

• How to Boot From a CD or USB Drive on Any PC

• Rufus

Rufus is an utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pendrives, memory sticks, etc.

Network Issues

• Local Area Network : How to fix slow LAN transfer speed of files in Windows

Post reviews various "fixes" found all over the web, and which "fix" actually worked for the post's author.

• Change your MTU under Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8

Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) in Windows just doesn’t seem to figure out the MTU for a given path. So Windows uses the default. For the most part this doesn’t affect anyone. But failure of PMTUD will result in some websites not loading correctly, having trouble connecting to normally reliable online services and general Internet weirdness.

Google Drive

• A faster way to access Strikethrough on Google Docs

Select what you want to strike and click Alt+Shift+5. (Option+Shift+5 for Mac).

Ctrl+? to see other such keyboard shortcuts.

• Keyboard shortcuts for Google documents

See Also

• Spreadsheet Tricks
• User:Dave/Web Hack Notes (Non-Wiki)