Productivity tools, coherence and friction 19 Feb 2021

After starting my graduate studies last year, I have tried various research tools to search for a suite of tools that would help me to perform my research activities (mainly reading and writing) more efficiently and productively. My requirements of these tools are - able to streamline current activity individually while also work together as a whole between tools, essentially fit into a coherence personal workflow. The word personal is important here. I realised that there is no one-size-fits-all tool, although I guess the tool designer would like to accommodate as many peoples/customers as possible. It was an interesting journey so far….

Parallel Execution in R - Divide and Conquer 13 Aug 2020

(Image by Robert V. Ruggiero)

Parallel processing is not a new concept in computing. With the need to process/analyse massive amount of datasets today efficiently, the idea of parallelism seems like an attractive idea. There are a few goodies in R that I came across previously that not only can help to speed up the processing, but also make you think about the structuring of your code - splitting your code into smaller independent chunks, and these chunks can be executed independently across CPUs or GPUs.

Not so optimised academic writing workflow... 19 Apr 2019

Recently I have to submit a piece of written work for university and found that there are few improvements that I can made to my current writing workflow (inspired by different peoples out there). Basically I was required to write a research proposal by synthesising many papers and information.

Initially, I thought my current setup is good - but after this week, I don’t think it is optimised.

Keyboard navigation in MacOS 31 Jan 2019

There are many advantages in using the keyboard solely to perform day to day tasks on a computer or laptop. The main advantage is reducing the switching time between the keyboard and mouse to increase the productivity. Also for the fast typist out there, the keyboard is more convenient and quicker way to perform an action. However, the operating system (OS) nowadays is designed with usability in mind, which means it is in Graphical User Interface (GUI). It is hard to navigate to a specific area of the screen purely using the keyboard. Technically you can do it, by using the “arrow” keys to move the mouse pointers but it is counter-productive and very slow, not to mention the accuracy.

Personal finance using RNotebook 08 Jan 2019

rawpixel

One of my new year resolutions 2019 is to improve the automation of my personal life, including tracking my finances. Fortunately, I have been tracking my expenses over the last 9 months since April 2018 and now I have the data to generate a summary report about my income and expenses, in order to produce a budget for 2019.

Notes organisation with Markdown, Visual Studio Code and Pandoc 28 Dec 2018

History

I have been using various note organiser tools, such as EverNote, MacOS Notes, Bear, Microsoft OneNotes over the years to keep track of my brainstorm ideas, study notes, project ideas, software commands, deployment instructions and some how-tos.

However, I still feel constrained by the limitation of the tools and unable to do exactly what I want to organise my notes. Here are some of my rants about these tools: