Links and Tips

Which applications have free educational accounts

RMIT Tips

Remove random numbers from your new RMIT email address

  1. Log in to WorkDay
  2. Click on your profile in the top right corner and click “view profile”
  3. Click on the “Actions” link
  4. Click on “Personal Data” in the menu pane
  5. Click on “Change My Preferred Name”
  6. Change your preferred name, for example, I used the initial of my first name as shown in the screenshot. Click “Submit”. Alternatively, middle names may work as well (I haven’t tried that).
  7. Once you have changed your preferred name, submit a ticket to the Service Request Portal (ServiceNow) asking to update your email accordingly.

Once they update your email address, you can change your preferred name again so it syncs across RMIT’s systems again. It can take some time to sync all the systems.

People can still email you at the “original” email address with the number in it. You can change the settings in Outlook that you will respond to emails with your “new” email address.

Lastly, the Microsoft Authenticator keeps on displaying my “numbered” email address when I need to confirm logins. It seems that this whole workaround just creates aliases that are still linked to that initial email address.

Sign up to Google Drive with your RMIT email address

  1. Open a private browser tab
  2. Open https://accounts.google.com/signin/v2/identifier?hd=rmit.edu.au&service=ah&sacu=1&rip=1&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin
  3. Follow the sign-up process with your RMIT email address

Terminal Commands

Reducing a video file

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx264 -crf 20 output.mp4

Extracting .wav file from .mp4 file

ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 output_audio.wav

Extracting the first 10 minutes of a video file

ffmpeg -ss 00:00:00 -i input.mp4 -t 00:10:00 -c copy output.mp4

Merging two .mp4 file

MP4Box -cat file_one.mp4 -cat file_two.mp4 -new merged_file.mp4

Spelling check for LaTeX

find . -name "*.tex" -exec aspell --lang=en --mode=tex check "{}" \;

Keeping your Homebrew up to date

brew update && brew upgrade && brew cleanup

Copying and synchronising files and directories remotely as well as locally in Linux/Unix

rsync options source destination
rsync -a source destination

Using say with voice Alex on the command line and output the audio to a file

say -v Alex "Hello World" -o out.aiff

Counting words in file

ps2ascii input.pdf | wc -w

Change the screenshot file format on your Mac

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg;killall SystemUIServer
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type gif;killall SystemUIServer
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type PDF;killall SystemUIServer
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png;killall SystemUIServer
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type tiff;killall SystemUIServer


How to create a citation alert for a paper without citation in Google Scholar

How to create a citation alert for a paper in Google Scholar

  • Get the cluster ID which identifies your article, this is a 20 digits identification
  • Amend this ID to the following URL: https://scholar.google.ch/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&as_sdt=5&cites= and open that new URL in your browser
  • Click on the “Create alert” button

Resources

Productivity tools