A common site for notes for all of Flip’s classes and lab students.
A list of tools that I use for things and what things I use them for. Cribbed from previous classes, maybe useful to you and yours.
Every Day
These are things I use… every day.
Visual Studio Code — This is the main writing and coding environment I live in. It’s a ‘kitchen sink’ of tools, but makes programming, writing, analyzing things very nice. I am a multi-decade veteran of emacs1, with side-quests to 𝛼lpha2, BBEdit ,and Sublime Text, but I’ve been a VS Code user for the last few years. You can get a plugin for almost any system or language you can think of.3
Mathematica — We have a site license @ RIT. I’ll put a link to the download page here as soon as I figure out what it is. I’ve written gigabytes of code, packages, add-ons, prose, papers, assignments, love letters, and more in it.
Quarto — My current favorite scholarly writing environment. This page is written in it.
GitHub — A place for things and stuff. This page is revision controlled in there, and the rendered pages are served from there.
Zotero — The finest reference manager.
Litmaps — An amazing AI based research tool that Flip uses every single day. It’s like a super-powered Zotero.
kitty — An open-source terminal emulator that is very nice. A bit of a pain to configure, but very powerful.
nb — A command-line tool for taking notes. It’s very simple and clean, and it’s easy to use with a text editor. It uses Markdown, so it’s easy to use with Quarto. This page lives in there.
Supporting Cast
Stuff that relates to the above.
Markdown — This is the formatting language that Quarto uses. It’s a very simple way of writing that can be converted to a lot of other formats, like HTML, PDF, and Word.
TeX — Are you a super-nerd? This is how you prove it. This is the scientific writing formatting language. You can write in Quarto with it too. Quarto acts as a sort of ‘front end’ that is easier to use than just raw, straight TeX and LaTeX.
BibTeX — This is the reference formatting language that TeX uses. It’s a bit of a pain to use, but it’s very powerful. Zotero can export to it, and Quarto can read it.
Pandoc — This is a tool that converts between a lot of different writing formats. It’s a bit of a ‘kitchen sink’ of tools, but it’s very useful. It is the engine that Quarto uses to convert between different formats.
Mermaid — A really great way of making charts and diagrams. It’s integrated into Quarto. There are some interactive tools there too.
ChatGPT — Duh. But check out the “Scholar GPT” and “Wolfram GPT”.
Hypothes.is — A tool for annotating web pages. It’s very useful for research and collaboration.
Perforce — This is a version control system, like github, that we use at MAGIC. It’s a bit of a pain to use, but it’s very powerful. It’s good for binary files, like images and 3D models.
iA Presenter — I use Keynote for presentations, but I’ve started using Presenter a little more often. It’s very simple and clean, and it’s easy to use with a text editor. It uses Markdown.
Anaconda Python — A distribution of Python that is very useful for data analysis and visualization. It comes with a lot of tools that are useful for scientific computing.
Every Once in a While
More specialized tools that I use every once in a while.
Docker — A platform for developing, shipping, and running applications in containers. It’s very useful for creating reproducible environments.
PsychoPy — A tool for building psychophysical experiments, both online and in the lab. Uses Python, also has a nice GUI for building things.
RenderMan — I’m 99% sure that nothing I wrote is still in there. MAGIC has 50 seats of the full version, let me know and I’ll get you hooked up.
Wolfram Alpha — We have a site license for this too.
Jupyter — This is a tool that lets you write code and text in the same document. It’s very useful for data analysis and visualization. It’s basically a borrowed version of Mathematica’s notebook interface, but for Python, R, and a few other languages.
iA Writer — A great Markdown editor for macOS, Windows, and iOS. It’s very simple and clean, allowing you to focus on writing instead of formatting.
Specialized Stuff
Tools that I use for very specific things.
OpenImageIO — A library for reading and writing images in various formats. It’s very useful for image processing tasks. Use its command line tools
oiiotoolor call it from Python.Fuji — This is an image processing tool that is free, based on the famous
ImageJ. It’s got all the good stuff added in.RStudio — The preferred tool of data people the world around. But Flip doesn’t use it that much, preferring Mathematica.
Unreal Engine — This is a game engine that is free to use for educational purposes. We use it a lot for virtual production sorts of things.
Unity — Another game engine, this one is free for educational purposes too. It’s a bit more user-friendly than Unreal, but not as powerful.
Houdini — A powerful 3D animation and visual effects tool used in the film industry. Colin says it’s an IDE for graphics.
Nuke — A compositing tool used in the film industry. It’s very powerful for visual effects work.
OpenScad — This is a tool for making 3D models. It’s a programming language used to describe the object you want to make. It’s very powerful, but not very user-friendly.
Blender — A free, open-source 3D modeling and animation tool. There is a RenderMan plugin for it.
meshlab — A tool for working with 3D models. A ‘kitchen sink’ of tools, but it’s very useful for mesh-based geometry.
argyllcms — A powerful color management tool. Command-line based, but very powerful. There are GUIs for doing monitor calibration and printer profiling.
Homebrew — A package manager for macOS. It’s very useful for installing command-line tools that aren’t available in the App Store.
Objective See — A collection of security tools for macOS. It’s very useful for keeping your computer safe.
Meta Stuff
