One of the most important tool in my productivity toolbox, is a way to keep track of what I have to do and what I have been doing. I’ve tried all kind of tools for the job, from simple note taking with pan and paper, to modern task management platforms with mobile apps and web applications. I somehow was never really satisfied, the main reason being that I haven’t found a solution that allows me to do both of these things in a satisfactory way.
This semester I am going to teach optimisation methods at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. As there are pretty calculation intensive methods that we use for optimisation, we obviously need use a mathematical package. For better or for worse, Universities these days are pretty much tided to proprietary software solutions and more specifically to the infamous MATLAB. So our first task for the semester is to make sure students know how to work with MATLAB.
I’ve been hosting my own website for almost 7 years now, switching from different platforms, themes and content. But since the very beginning, it has been hosted in the namecheap servers. It’s a very nice service and I’m very satisfied with their products and customer service.
Since a couple of years ago, namecheap started offering free TLS certificate issuing for all their hosting products, which is pretty awesome. They offer certificates that are valid for the duration of your hosting contract and they make them available from their website after you login. Even though my website is (for some weeks now) a simple static website and no extra security is really needed, I am always in favor of encryption and security. Therefore I wanted for a while now to issue a certificate and install it on my website.
I am sure many of you remember the legendary Quake series games. We grew up with this stuff. And you remember what was the coolest feature of Quake? No, it was neither the graphics, nor that you could blow your friends in little pieces, after you have killed them: it was the console. It was the only game series that I am aware of (ok, I’m not really a games freak, so don’t take my word for it) that it was offering a ‘console’ to the players. You could do all short of cool things just by pressing the tilda (~) key, such as change from FPS to a TPS mode, draw benchmark data like Frames per second, alter your avatar and so on. In one sentence, it was giving to the player the one thing that Command Lines usually give: POWER!