https://pages.charlotte.edu/andy-voelker/
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Andy Voelker

VLC Media Player

March 18, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Multimedia

vlc-logo

Availability: Free Download
Comparable: Quicktime

VLC media player (commonly known as VLC) is a portable, free and open-source, cross-platform media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project.

VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-Video, video CD and streaming protocols. It is able to stream media over computer networks and to transcode multimedia files.

The default distribution of VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins.  It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux and OS X.

Tags: media player

Google Forms

March 18, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Productivity & Utility

googleforms

Availability: All Labs | Faculty/Staff | Access
Part of: Google Apps
Comparable: Qualtrics Research Suite

Google Forms is a tool that allows collecting information from users via a personalized survey or quiz. The information is then collected and automatically connected to a spreadsheet with the same name. The spreadsheet is populated with the survey and quiz responses.  Forms can be embedded in websites for surveys, information gathering, request forms, sign-up forms, etc.

Tags: cloud

Celestia

March 18, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Analysis & ModelingDesign & Visualization
Availability: Free Download
celestiaComparable: Google Earth, Starry Night Pro, Stellarium

Celestia is a free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.  All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.  Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that’s not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.