Archive for November, 2011
Leveraging the tube
It is not always easy to find time to learn new things and the best time I have found is the London transport: like lots of people I spend between 1 hour and 1 hour and a half per day in the tube and I’m trying spend this time intelligently, ie. not playing angry birds.
If you think about it, that’s 6-8 hours per week you can spend learning new stuff! That’s a lot…
Books
Computer science books are generally massive beasts and I do not want to carry them in the tube, I generally use my iPad instead. GoodReader and DropBox is my preferred combo: I just organize my books within the DropBox folder on my PC and then synchronize GoodReader with the book folder, works very well over Wi-Fi or even 3G.
Videos
I watch lots of videos, my preferred sources are:
- Channel9: videos are available in mp4 directly so you do not need to do any conversion to put them on iPhone or iPad
- MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW): you can access directly lots of MIT undergraduate and graduate courses for free and some of them are available in video format. Example: Introduction to Algorithm contains 25 lectures, all available in mp4 format.
- iTunes U: you have probably already used iTunes, but maybe not iTunes U. Instead of browsing music or videos you can access courses from the best Universities. Example: Programming Massively Parallel Processors with CUDA, 16 lectures on NVidia CUDA. iTunes U is really friction less: subscribe to course, synchronize with iPhone/iPad, done.
When I find videos which are not in mp4 format I use MediaCoder video encoder: it’s free, easy to use and configure, it has templates for iPhone and iPad screen resolutions, can use your GPU (fast) and support batch encoding: you setup several videos to encode and MediaCoder will process them one after the other automatically.
No comments
