In the fall 2009 I started playing ultimate frisbee. It wa a very good decision given that the day of my PhD defense was getting closer. Ultimate requires quite a bit of running, and i could do that quite easily, sometimes even in the right direction. Marleen is the one introduced me to the sport and now we love to play together. We both play in Gronical Dizziness, the club in Groningen. The fact that we both love to play so much is also that the bunch of people hanging around the club is very nice, which definitelly helps! I became so enthusiastic about it that I even edit and co-author some news items in our lovely quarterly frisbee magazine, De ultimatief. The club also organizes a indoor frisbee tournament, the Martini Cup. I am personally not a lover of indoor frisbee, i've a thing for beach ultimate, but the tournament of the club always has something special to it. Maybe just the fact that is just so close to home, maybe just because it is so close to Christmas and everybody is good.
The operative system I use is Ubuntu Linux, between all the desktops available my favorite is Kubuntu. I am a enthusiastic supporter of the principles of the free-software foundation. Among all the available free softwares the ones I use more frequently are Firefox, which is a great web browser, Videolan's VLC is my favourite media player. In analysing my data I always try to opt for the statistical package R, wherease for image manipulations I use GIMP, but if I need vector based images than my favourite is Inkscape. When preparing documents the superstar is Latex, which I use with the integrated Latex environment editors Kile or Texmaker, two superlative GUIs that permit a very easy interface with Latex (in Windows TexnicCenter and the package manager MikTex are my favourite). Latex becomes a very powerfull editor when used in combination with JabRef, a great, and more than just a reference manager. I recently started to practice with the C programming language, which I compile using GCC. However, more recently I've made the switch to C++ given that I'm following the course of Frank Brokken, which is the toughest course I've ever followed. In this Kate is my favourite text editor, many of the features it has are so cool that i could hardly do anything without right now. I do also use Kate for R, because it colour codes commands and it allows you to do other handy things. I regard Audacity as the best free sound editor.
For more 'work-related' activities I use a free set of Matlab functions for doing experiments, as the Psychtoolbox, whereas I visualize the changes in brain state using Fieldtrip in combination with EEGlab. Note that, nonetheless these libraries of functions are free, they have been developed to run under Matlab, which is NOT free-software. However, they partially work also under Octave, which is totally free-software which aims to 100% compatibility with Matlab.