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

• How to download files from command line in Windows, like Wget is doing?

Using PowerShell (Among other useful options listed at this resource.):

• WinWGet

WinWGet is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for Wget. It is FREE. It will keep track of your downloads - add, clone, edit, delete jobs.

• Wget for Windows
• WGET for Windows (win32) (Windows executable file.)

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

• Clink: Powerful Bash-style command line editing for cmd.exe

Overview: Clink combines the native Windows shell cmd.exe with the powerful command line editing features of the GNU Readline library, which provides rich completion, history, and line-editing capabilities. Readline is best known for its use in the well-known Unix shell Bash, the standard shell for Mac OS X and many Linux distributions.

• 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.

• How can you find and replace text in a file using the Windows command-line environment?

This question is answered in numerous ways. Many of the answers point to useful utilities to accomplish find-and-replace.

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.

Data Analysis Tools

Moved content to Data Analysis.

Databases

• MySQL Database Export - Backup Methods

Includes Section: Copying Tables or Databases to Another Host:

(You can) send the output of mysqldump directly over the network to the remote MySQL server. If you can connect to both servers from the host where source database resides, use this command (Make sure you have access on both the servers):

$ mysqldump -u root -p database_name \:

| mysql -h other-host.com database_name

Educate Yourself

Also See: Data Analysis#Learn_Data_Science

Learn to Code

• The Best Websites to Learn Coding Online - Amit Agarwal, Digital Inspiration, Jan 12 2015

The Learn to Code movement has picked up momentum worldwide and that is actually a good thing as even basic programming skills can have a major impact. If you can teach yourself how to write code, you gain a competitive edge over your peers, you can think more algorithmically and thus can tackle problems more efficiently.

• New Year’s Resolution: Learn to Code - by Lena Groeger, ProPublica, Dec. 19, 2012, 2:51 p.m.

Lena Groeger: When I started learning to code, I was amazed by how much was out there: introductory videos, explanatory blog posts, tips and tricks and step-by-step guides. If you're a journalist who wants to make a news app or a student interested in learning to code, you have plenty of paths to choose from.

Multiple Codes

• Codecademy

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

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.

R

• DataCamp

Learn R & Become a Data Analyst

SQL

• Intro to SQL: Querying and managing data (Khan Academy)

Learn how to use SQL to store, query, and manipulate data. SQL is a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data in a relational database, and is used by a huge number of apps and organizations.

• Learn SQL The Hard Way (ALPHA)

This book will teach you the 80% of SQL you probably need to use it effectively, and will mix in concepts in data modeling at the same time. If you've been fumbling around building web, desktop, or mobile applications because you don't know SQL, then this book is for you. It is written for people with no prior database, programming, or SQL knowledge, but knowing at least one programming language will help.

File Transfer

File Transfer Clients for Windows Mac

• OpenSSH Mac OS

Lists several clients recommended for interoperating with OpenSSH from Mac OS machines. Note that Mac OS X includes OpenSSH by default.

• SSH Clients for Windows and Mac

SSH Clients for Windows, Mac, and Unix

• Cyberduck

Libre FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 & OpenStack Swift browser for Mac and Windows.

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.

Getting screenshots from a Mac.

Maintenance

Dual Boot

• Dual-Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu in Perfect Harmony

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.

Print Screen / Screen Grabs / Screen Shots

• Print Screen

In Microsoft Windows, pressing Prt Scr will capture the entire screen, while pressing the Alt key in combination with Prt Scr will capture the currently selected window.

iOS

• OneShot

OneShot for iOS lets you highlight screenshots of text and share them to Twitter.

Linux (Ubuntu)

• Shutter for Ubuntu similar to Windows Snipping Tool

Mac OS

• Alternative to Windows Snipping Tool for Mac OSX
• Taking Screenshots is a Snap

Windows

• Snipping Tool

Regular Expressions

Moved content to Data Analysis.

Rename Files & Folders

• Rename Multiple Files Efficiently Using Excel or Google Docs

To rename files in bulk more efficiently, you can either learn some complex shell scripting language (SED, AWK, Perl) or switch to something more simple--a spreadsheet.

Bulk Rename Files

• How to Batch Rename Files in Windows: 4 Ways to Rename Multiple Files

Bottom line: use this tool: Bulk Rename Utility (Windows only.)

• Confused by Bulk Rename Utility? Take a look at Massive File Renamer instead.

Rename List of Files With Batch File

It's easy to rename a group of files by running a batch file (file.bat), configured something like this:

rename "Old-File_001.jpg" "New-File_001.jpg"
rename "Old-File_002.jpg" "New-File_002.jpg"
rename "Old-File_003.jpg" "New-File_003.jpg"

Using Windows or DOS, just create your batch file using the format shown above, and then double-click it to rename the files in the directory containing both your file.bat and files with the same names as those found in the "Old-File" (left) column of your file.bat file.

• How do I create batch file to rename large number of files in a folder?

See this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3808074

For help with using Regular Expressions in text file, see this answer: Regular expresion in text editor (sic)

Rename Multiple Folders / Directories With Batch File

• .bat file for renaming multiple folders

There are a couple of pretty good answers to this question; answers that explain how the regular expression written into the .bat file actually works.

Text Editors

• Mac text/code editor

Text Extraction

Moved content to Data Analysis.

Investigative Reporting; Journalism; General Research

• The Journalist's Toolbox (Society of Professional Journalists)

The (Journalist's Toolbox) offers sources for useful information on a wide range of topics of interest, especially to investigative reporters. Topics include protecting sources, privacy, data visualization, digital verification, transcription tools, rights-free photos, mobile journalism, public records, copy-editing, and more.

• Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE)

Useful IRE Resources:

- NICAR Net Tour - The National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) is an IRE program.

- Analysis jobs by NICAR - Names the media organizations NICAR has worked for, and lists kinds of analysis jobs NICAR has done.

Convert restricted sound file formats to something more useful, open and free.

• HOW TO CONVERT WMA FILES TO MP3

Does your idiotic voice recorder save its sound files in Microsoft's patent-restricted (and therefore, worse than useless) WMA file format? Maybe the article linked-to above will help.

Journalism Tools

Dictation & Transcription

• Dictation - Online Speech Recognition

Chrome App For Online Dictation

Editor's Note: Monday, December 28, 2015: I tested this app out on my home workstation with my USB headset with microphone. Works well.

• oTranscribe BETA

Upload Sound File, Play It Back At Any Of Multiple Speeds, Transcribe It

A free web app to take the pain out of transcribing recorded interviews.

• Speechlogger | Automatic Speech Recognition & Translation Online

FREE. Accurate. Fun. No installation, no registration. Simply click the mic and start dictating text. Features auto save, auto punctuation, instant translation & more.

• SpeechPad - a new voice notebook

Speechpad is a voice recognition application for converting speech to text (a good external microphone is strongly recommended). It can also convert an audio file to text. The current version of Speechpad works only for the Chrome browser.

Editor's Note: 15:05, 15 January 2016 (PST) Initial test indicates this works pretty well.

• Transcribe

Chrome App For Uploading Sound Files & Transcribing Them To Text

Editor's Note: Monday, December 28, 2015: I found this while searching for sound file to text transcription services. When I was about to use it, I discovered it's not free (but still worth looking into).

• VoiceBase

Another Transcribe-By-Machine Option. Transcribe-By-Human Options, Too

VoiceBase Turns Your Voice Recordings and Transcriptions into a Searchable Database

Transcription Hacks & Tutorials

• Dirty, Fast, and Free Audio Transcription with YouTube

Transcribe Audio Using YouTube (Hack)

Audio / Video File Conversion

• Online Audio Converter (MP3, WAV, Ogg, WMA, M4A, AAC) – media.io

Convert Sound Files Online

Editor's Note: Tuesday, December 29, 2015: Was able to successfully convert WMA file to MP3 using this online service.

References

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Additional Resource Wiki Pages

• Career Portfolio Tips
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