medicalnerds.com

If you are a healthcare professional you have a duty to maintain the security of patient identifiable data. Within your job you sometimes need to use a USB key to transfer lists or letters between computers. If you lose your un-encrypted USB key with patient identifiable data then it may deemed negligent and you may […]

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Windows has had built in zip file support with encryption since Windows XP, unfortunately the quality of this encryption is poor as evidenced by the number of commercial programmes available to crack it. Winzip, WinRAR are trialware commercial programs that offer secure AES encryption to your compressed files but cost between 23 and 30 Euros […]

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If you wish to analyse longitudinal data sometimes it is helpful to plot each experimental subject’s data at each timepoint to get a feel for the patterns or trends. You can often learn more from this raw data than a boxplot or line graph of the means. I am a habitual SPSS user but have […]

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I regularly exchange data between computers at University and home. To maintain security, I keep a firewall running on all machines, and “tunnel” through the firewall(s) using SSH – the secure shell. For example, I run a web server on my main machine for web application development, and do not wish this to be publicly […]

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It is often necessary to batch convert PDF documents and graphics into other formats. I explain how to do this using totally free software. Searching for PDF software using Google is fraught with difficulty — one ends up with endless links to commercial sites, who charge lots of money, mislead users into paying for software […]

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Running your own email server is great, but it must be secure against attacks from hackers and “script-kiddies”, idiots who scan networks looking for systems that advertise services and allow remote access. You can secure certain services on your linux-based machine, such as sshd and imapd using tcpd’s hosts.allow and hosts.deny functionality, to limit the […]

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Before you start out with your research project you need to be equipped with the tools required to help you keep notes, write papers and produce professional looking documents. In this 2 part article I will describe 10 of my favourite applications, most of which are open source, all are free.

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Spell checking medical documents can be a real pain. My spelling at the best of times is atrocoius atrocious. Luckily most software, even browsers now support spell checking. The problem is now getting hold of a good medical dictionary to use with your application. Now e-medtools.com a site which specialises in medical spell checking, medical […]

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Using subversion (or any other version-control system) to manage your working laboratory or research files is sensible. All changes can be tracked, and it is straightforward to review old versions of files. I store all work relating to research, including notes, papers, thesis chapters, statistical analyses and even data. If I were to make catastrophic […]

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Pedigrees are essential when documenting large complex families with inherited disease. I spend a lot of time looking after families with a variety of inherited neurological disease, and have spent a similar amount of time trying to find decent software to make this work easier! I last did a systematic search for software last year. […]

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