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Unlocking the Future: My Top Research Tools to Supercharge Your Work in 2025

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In today's fast-paced environment, research moves at a staggering pace. Whether you're an academic, a market analyst, or just an inquisitive thinker, the tools you employ may make a huge impact. In 2025, a new wave of AI-powered and digitally linked research tools will be available to improve processes, increase productivity, and even uncover previously imagined findings. In this article, I'm delighted to offer my personal roundup of research tools that are changing how I work—and might potentially improve your research process.

Writing and Productivity Tools: From Drafts to Final Papers

A major part of research is not just gathering data but also transforming that data into well-articulated reports, papers, or presentations. The following tools help elevate your writing process, ensuring clarity, coherence, and academic rigor:

SciSpace [Visit]

SciSpace redefines how we discover and digest academic literature. With its semantic search engine, SciSpace understands the context behind your queries—bringing up relevant papers even if they don’t contain your exact keywords. Its features include AI-generated summaries, integrated citation management, and a built-in LaTeX editor for technical documents. This tool has become indispensable for quickly gathering and organizing the research you need.

Semantic Scholar ⭐ [Visit]

A well-known tool in the academic community, Semantic Scholar uses AI to sift through vast amounts of scholarly content. It highlights the most influential papers in your field, provides citation analysis, and even offers personalized research feeds. Best of all, it’s completely free—making it a go-to resource for researchers on any budget.

QuillBot [Visit]

We all know about this one. QuillBot offers robust paraphrasing and summarization capabilities to refine your drafts and ensure your writing is clear and engaging. It provides several writing modes that let you adjust the tone and style of your text, making it an excellent companion during the revision process. It is a really helpful tool plus a friend who helped you always in your academic years.

AI-Powered Research Assistants: Your New Brainstorming Buddies

The rise of research assistants driven by artificial intelligence is among the most revolutionary developments in research technology. These tools are meant to assist you in compiling, evaluating, and synthesizing material from all across the web. Here are some really notable sites I use:

Consensus [Visit]

Consensus is a search engine that uses AI to find answers in scientific research. When you have a specific research question in mind, Consensus can be your shortcut to evidence-based answers. It combs through scientific literature to provide quick, cited responses, saving you the trouble of piecing together information from multiple sources. While it doesn’t replace detailed analysis, it’s perfect for quickly validating a hypothesis or understanding the general consensus on a topic.

Elicit [Visit]

Elicit has been earning its reputation as a true “AI research assistant.” It streamlines the literature review process by semantically searching for relevant papers, extracting key findings, and even suggesting research gaps. Instead of manually combing through databases, you can let Elicit do the heavy lifting, making it easier to refine your research questions and focus on critical analysis.

Scholarcy [Visit]

This tool condenses lengthy research articles into bite-sized summaries and creates flashcards of key points. It even auto-generates reference lists, saving countless hours of manual work. But nowadays we can easily ask ChatGPT or Deepseek AI to summarize the research paper.

Essential Reference Management: Zotero and Beyond

Zotero ⭐ [Visit]

Even in an era dominated by advanced AI tools, classic research tools remain indispensable. One such tool is Zotero—a free, open-source reference manager that every researcher should have in their toolkit. Zotero automatically captures citation information from your browser, organizes references into customizable collections, and integrates seamlessly with word processors to create citations and bibliographies in thousands of styles.

From AI research assistants that serve as your personal analysts to powerful writing and data organization tools—and even classic reference managers like Zotero—the modern research toolkit is more dynamic and integrated than ever before.

For me, these tools have not only boosted my productivity but also transformed how I approach complex research problems. Whether you’re in academia, industry, or simply passionate about exploring new ideas, I encourage you to experiment with these tools and see how they can help you unlock new insights. Feel free to ask me any questions or reach out to me for feedback at ehsanur.rahman@bracu.ac.bd

Crafting Your Own Minecraft Bedrock Server: A 2024 Server Setup Guide

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Playing Minecraft is fun. Playing Minecraft with your friends is even better. But what if you are playing on your friend's world in Minecraft Bedrock Edition and suddenly your friend goes offline? You'll get disconnected instantly from their world.

Well, you can avoid this by setting up your own Minecraft Bedrock server. This way, you and your friends can connect to your server and play Minecraft together without any issues. I just did this today and it was pretty easy but a bit confusing at first. That's why I'm writing this guide to help you out. In this guide, I'll show you how to set up a Minecraft Bedrock server on DigitalOcean.

Prerequisites

Before we start, you need to have the following prerequisites:

A DigitalOcean account
A Droplet - Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS) server
A domain name (optional)

If you don't have a domain name, you can use the droplet IP address to connect to the server.

DigitalOcean Droplet Setup

I will be using a Digital Ocean Student's plan which includes $200 in credit over 12 months. But if you do not have that or no longer a student, you can use the following link to get your own free $200 credit for 2 months.

After you have created an account, you can create a new Droplet. But at first, create a new project. I will name it "Minecraft Bedrock".

After that we have to select region I selected "Bangalore, India" because it's closest to me. It's recommended to select a region that's closest to you to avoid any network issues.

Now we have to select the Droplet image. We want to select Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS). There's also a Minecraft image in Marketplace, but that is for Minecraft Java Edition. We planned to play Minecraft Bedrock Edition, so we have to select Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS).

After that we have to select the size of the Droplet. I have selected Basic / 4 GB / 2 vCPUs. You can select more resources if you want to. But for a Minecraft Bedrock server, 2 GB of RAM is enough.

After that we have to select the authentication method. You can use either SSH keys or password. SSH keys are recommended because they are more secure. If you don't have any SSH keys, you can create a new one. In case if you do not know how to use it, you can use password.

Then we will add the hostname. You can use any name you want.

Setting up the server

Now we have to setup the server. We will login to the server using SSH with root. But at first, update the server after you login with apt update && apt upgrade. It is necessary to update the server so that it has the latest security patches and bug fixes.

Now we have to install unzip package so that we can unzip the Minecraft Bedrock server file which we will download later.

apt install unzip

For security reasons, it is recommended to use a new user instead of root. So we will create a new user with adduser command. I will name my user minecraft-admin.

adduser minecraft-admin

Installing the Minecraft Bedrock server

After using the minecraft-admin user, we have to install the Minecraft Bedrock server. We will download the server from the official Minecraft website. You can download the server from here. Click on the checkbox "I agree to the Minecraft End User License Agreement and Privacy Policy" and then right click on the "Download" button and copy the link.

We will download the server in /home/minecraft-admin/minecraft-bedrock. So we have to change the directory to /home/minecraft-admin/minecraft-bedrock and then download the server.

mkdir /home/minecraft-admin/minecraft-bedrock
cd /home/minecraft-admin/minecraft-bedrock
wget [copied-link]

After downloading the server, we have to unzip the file. Delete the zip file after unzipping.

unzip bedrock-server-1.21.31.04.zip
rm bedrock-server-1.21.31.04.zip

Configuring the server

Now we have to configure the server. We will use the nano command to edit the server.properties file.

nano server.properties

Edit the server properties as per your requirements. Visit Minecraft Bedrock Wiki to learn more about the properties.

Once you are done, save the file and exit. Then run the following command.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./bedrock_server

And now the server will start running. But we have to run the server in the background. So that, if we get out from the SSH, the server will keep running.

touch /etc/systemd/system/bedrock.service
nano /etc/systemd/system/bedrock.service

Add the following content to the file.

[Unit]
Description=Minecraft Bedrock Server
After=network.target

[Service]
User=minecraft-admin
Group=minecraft-admin

Type=simple

WorkingDirectory=/home/minecraft-admin/minecraft-bedrock
ExecStart=/home/minecraft-admin/minecraft-bedrock/bedrock_server
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now we have to enable the server to start on boot.

systemctl enable bedrock.service

Then we have to start the server.

systemctl start bedrock.service

Check the status of the server with the following command.

systemctl status bedrock.service

If you see active (running) in the output, the server is running. If it is not, check the Troubleshooting section.

Troubleshooting

If you are facing some errors. Check the permissions of the server folder.

ls -l /home/minecraft-admin/minecraft-bedrock/bedrock_server

Ensure it's executable (-rwxr-xr-x). If not, make it executable with the following command:

chmod +x /home/minecraft-admin/minecraft-bedrock/bedrock_server

After that, check ownership of the server folder.

ls -ld /home/minecraft-admin/minecraft-bedrock

Ensure it's owned by minecraft-admin:minecraft-admin. If not, change the ownership with the following command:

chown -R minecraft-admin:minecraft-admin /home/minecraft-admin/minecraft-bedrock

Setting an user as operator

Unlike Java edition, Bedrock edition doesn't use ops.json file to manage the operators. Instead, it uses permissions.json file.

Edit the permissions.json file with the following command.

nano permissions.json

Add the following content to the file.

[
  {
    "xuid": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
    "permission": "operator"
  }
]

If you don't know the XUID of the user, you can use the username instead.

[
  {
    "permission": "operator",
    "name": "username"
  }
]

Now we have to restart the server.

systemctl restart bedrock.service

Setting up a domain name

On your DigitalOcean dashboard, go to Networking -> Domains. Click on Create Domain. Then add your domain name. Make sure your domain name is pointing to your DigitalOcean server IP.

That's it. You have successfully set up a Minecraft Bedrock server on DigitalOcean. Access the server with the server IP and port and enjoy playing Minecraft with your friends.

The Internet Archive Breach: Why your password might be safe!

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Recently, the Internet Archive, a well-known digital library famous for its "Wayback Machine," was the target of a significant breach. Attackers breached the website between October 9 and October 11, 2024, revealing more than 31 million user accounts. The breach included email addresses and hashed passwords, leading to widespread concern among users.

was it a little more than a DDoS? pic.twitter.com/eoJI7Gr4ya
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) October 9, 2024

Do they have our passwords as well? Users without Password Managers should definitely be worried about this. But a breath of relief for you people. At least the Internet Archive site hash the user passwords using Bcrypt. This hashing method is highly regarded for its ability to securely store passwords, providing an essential layer of security. So, if you're curious about whether your password remains secure, here's what you need to know.

Bcrypt’s Security

The passwords disclosed in the Internet Archive incident were hashed with bcrypt, a hashing technology that is slow and resource heavy. Bcrypt uses numerous rounds of encryption, so even if attackers have the hashed passwords, decrypting them would require significant computer power. This makes bcrypt a strong choice against typical assaults such as brute-force and rainbow table attacks, in which hackers test all possible password combinations to discover a match. In reality, bcrypt's purposeful latency renders these solutions unfeasible and wasteful, while yet offering a high level of password security.

Salted Hashes

In addition, bcrypt employs salts, which are random data added to each password before to hashing. This provides further protection against assaults since, even if two users use the same password, their hashes will differ owing to distinct salts. The addition of salts to the Internet Archive's encryption mechanism makes it exceedingly difficult for hackers to use precomputed attacks like rainbow tables. Even in major breaches, bcrypt's mix of encryption and salts prevents user passwords from being easily reversed.

Good News for Strong Passwords

If you used a strong, unique password for your Internet Archive account, it is probably safe. Cracking bcrypt hashes becomes much more difficult when using a strong password that includes letters, numbers, and special characters. While no system is unbreakable, a well-hashed and salted password saved using bcrypt is one of the most secure choices available today.

Change Your Password Anyway

Even if bcrypt provides great security, changing your password is still a good practice. After this attack, the Internet Archive advised users to change their credentials. Moreover, it's advisable to update those too if you have used your Internet Archive password on other websites.

Why You Should Use a Password Manager

Using a password manager is one crucial first step towards increasing your general security in view of the Internet Archive breach. All of your passwords are kept in an encrypted vault within a password manager, which only allows access with a master password. This guarantees that, without you having to remember all of them, every one of your accounts may have unique, sophisticated passwords. A password manager also guards against reusing passwords, a typical weakness that raises the danger of exposure should one service be hacked as it did in this attack.

Have I Been Pwned: Check if You’ve Been Compromised

Along with using a password manager, you should also check to see if your email address or password has been leaked in known data leaks. Have I Been Pwned is a useful tool for this because it lets you see if your account information has been stolen in a number of different internet security hacks. If your data is stolen, the site will let you know by emailing you the address you provided. If these databases find your account, change your password right away on the sites that are affected, and think about using a password manager to keep this from happening again.

Effortless WordPress Deployment with Docker-Compose

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Keeping up with and setting up a WordPress site can be hard, especially when you have to deal with dependencies, server setups, and problems with compatibility. Docker-Compose makes this process easier, letting you run WordPress and its services, like MySQL, in separate, simple containers. If you're a developer looking for a consistent work environment or a site owner looking for a secure and scalable setup, Docker-Compose is a quick and easy way to install WordPress. This guide will show you how to use Docker-Compose to easily set up and run your WordPress site.

Make sure you have Docker and Composer installed. We'll start by breaking down the Docker-Compose configuration file. Here's the full code you’ll use to set up WordPress with MySQL:

version: '3.3'

services:
  db:
    image: mysql:5.7
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/mysql
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: wordpress
      MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress
      MYSQL_USER: wordpress
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: wordpress
  wordpress:
    depends_on:
      - db
    image: wordpress:latest
    ports:
      - '8000:80'
    restart: always
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db:3306
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wordpress
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: wordpress
      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wordpress
volumes:
  db_data: {}

Open a terminal and create a new directory for your project. Inside this directory, create a file named docker-compose.yml and paste the above code into it.

mkdir wordpress-docker
cd wordpress-docker
nano docker-compose.yml

With the file saved, run the following command to start the containers:

docker-compose up -d

This command will pull the necessary images (WordPress and MySQL) and start the services in detached mode (in the background).

Once the containers run, open your browser and go to http://localhost:8000. You should see the WordPress installation page where you can set up your site.

Now that you’ve learned the basics of running WordPress with Docker-Compose, try extending the setup by adding services like Nginx or Redis, or explore Docker’s networking capabilities to improve the performance and reliability of your WordPress site!

How to edit "WP_MEMORY_LIMIT" and other PHP.ini values?

We can do this by adding custom PHP configurations to your WordPress container. Modify your docker-compose.yaml file to address this issue:

version: '3.3'

services:
  db:
    # ... (db service remains unchanged)

  wordpress:
    depends_on:
      - db
    image: wordpress:latest
    ports:
      - '8000:80'
    restart: always
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db:3306
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wordpress
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: wordpress
      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wordpress
      WORDPRESS_CONFIG_EXTRA: |
        define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M');
        define('WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M');
    volumes:
      - ./php.ini:/usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/uploads.ini
volumes:
  db_data: {}

Now, create a new file named php.ini in the same directory as your docker-compose.yaml file with the following content:

upload_max_filesize = 64M
post_max_size = 64M
max_execution_time = 300

We've added a volumes section to the wordpress service to mount a custom php.ini file. The new php.ini file increases the upload_max_filesize, post_max_size, and max_execution_time.

Dummy

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT

Dummy

.dummy {
  &:hover,
  &:focus-within {
    background-color: #eee;
  }
}