Category Archives: Student life

Lets talk about chalk

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Most people doing math at university won’t be strangers to writing on blackboards with chalk. However, the experience can vary a great deal. It can range from feeling like scratching a sharp rock on a rough surface, accompanied by screeching sound. And writing is often just barely legible. Needless to say, this can be rather uncomfortable for anyone. But for some people on the autism spectrum, it can be unbearable.

But does choosing a different type of chalk matter? Can one tell a difference? The answer is yes, one can. There is a reason Hagoromo has been called the “Rolls Royce of chalk” (aside form its price tag). From personal experience, I can say it is an absolute pleasure to write with. By comparison to… “lesser” chalk, writing with Hagoromo is silky smooth. Lines are bright and writing is effortless. A worthwhile investment for anyone who regularly writes on blackboards.

Use cases for Git at university

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Even if you are not developing developing software, the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) version control system (VCS) Git, can be of much use for students. Features like branches and tags can make your life easier and save you time and grief.

For coursework

For each course you take, create a folder and initialize a Git repository. Afterwards, you can add all the files you use and keep histories and remote backups of all your files and homework. This works especially well for those of us who use the \(\LaTeX\) typesetting system or other markup based document systems. No more need to tell your professor that the dog ate your homework because your disk or computer crashed, or a coffee spilled on your keyboard.

Theses

Each year, I see posts by fellow students writing on message boards, asking how to recover files from thumb drives, desperate to recover their bachelor or master theses. Weeks or even days before the due date. No backup. Don’t be one of them! Use Git! Use one of the numerous free Git hosting services to back up your work af often as you want, for example after each writing session and write a short description of what you did in the commit message. Is your advisor asking for a major revision you may (or may not) agree with? Create a branch, and keep your original work while you work on your revision, and and work on both at the same time. Use tags to mark each draft version, and be able to restore an exact copy of each one.

But, but… a command line tool?

Well, yes. But firstly command line tools are not as scary as you might think. You might not agree, and there are plenty of free GUI tools to manage Git repositories, both open and closed source. I sometimes use SmartGit (https://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/) which is free for students. All major platforms are supported, Linux, MacOS and Windows, easily installed. For Windows and MacOS go to https://git-scm.com/. Linux users can either download the latest version from the mentioned website, or from their package manager of choice.