Rutgers astro lifehacks
Welcome to the Rutgers astro lifehacks page. Here we -- a bunch of astronomy gradudate students -- have compiled some resources that we've found to be useful during our time here. These include beginner tutorials for coding, repositories of useful documents (such as the department's Ph.D. dissertation TeX template), recommendations of local bars and restaurants, and much more.
Quick links around the Rutgers physics department
Computing resources for research
Linux and Microsoft Outlook
If you use a Linux-based operating system to check mail through the Rutgers mailserver, you can optimize the experience by changing the user-agent string. Your user-agent string informs the Microsoft Outlook Web App (OWA) about which OS you are using, but if it doesn't detect a recent version of Windows or macOS, it will load a fairly unoptimized site and you'll find the page to be fairly slow.
To get around this, you can download extensions such as this one in order to spoof your user-agent string. Be sure to keep the string updated (e.g., to a recent version of Chromium or Firefox). For example, my current user-agent string reads:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.0 Safari/537.36