Stuck on a windows system? Well, install Cygwin and you get a fast and perfectly free shortcut to linux CLI essentials like gnuplot, emacs, graphviz, pdftk, imagemagick, and perl with all its convenient modules on CPAN!

Imagemagick, for example, will let you run a CLI oneliner like "for i in *.jpg; do convert -resize 60 $i > thumbnails/$i; done" which automatically resizes all images in your current directory and puts them in a subfolder named thumbnails.

Obviously, you have installed all the goodies you need in your daily IT life on your own PC and smartphone, but what do you do when you are forced to use another PC at the library, the airport or whatever? Let's face it, there are a lot of people out there who don't really care about being able to write kanji (漢字), hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ). But luckily you can simply browse to this neat little service on the web, the Ajax IME. Enjoy :-)

The other day I stumbled on an extremely useful little app for my smartphone, dongsa.net. I think all students of Korean will love this little piece of software which gives you a wide range of the most common inflections of a verb given its base form as input. Check it out: dongsa.net! It's a huge time saver ;-)

According to a news article recently published by Bloomberg, Ben Bernanke generously, and secretly, conjured up and handed over 1.2 trillion (!) of the taxpayers' money to private banks during the last financial panic in 2008.