Niche tech tips are the cornerstone of this website, and here is another. How to upgrade an iTunes/Music library whilst maintaining the database. I know everyone streams music these days – hence this is likely a very niche tech tip – but I still maintain a large music database on a server. The data in […]
Author: quantixed
Latin Quarter II: Colours and Latin Squares
Previously I wrote about latin squares and set a puzzle. Can we make a latin square where all possible pairs are represented in adjacent squares? We can demonstrate this for an n x n latin square where n = 12 In the above images, the normalised latin square only has 12 different pairs out of […]
In Circles: fitting a circle to a curve
A comment from a referee led me to find a method to describe curvature of membranes. This is a quick write-up of our solution. I couldn’t find a solution readily available in Fiji, so I created one using a combination of Fiji for tracing the curvature and IgorPro to do the fitting. If there is […]
I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You II: fixing SSMTP gmail authorisation
This is a ultra-short post related to sending email via the command line on Linux/Rasperry Pi. On 30 May 2022, Google disabled the handy feature that allowed less secure sign in to Google accounts. This feature was a handy way to authenticate command-line routines that send email. I noticed my daily emails had stopped, and […]
Weather Report: building a weather station
As a project idea for a young engineer we wanted to build a Raspberry Pi-based Weather Station. Our last attempt at building something – a sound-responsive LED display – was a failure. So it was important to build something really easy to help us get back on track. Here are some notes. We essentially followed […]
Latin Quarter: Colours and Latin Squares
I read about aesthetic uses of Latin Squares on John Cook’s site a few months ago. Since I maintain a resource to use colour tables in Igor Pro, I thought it would be fun to use Latin Squares to display colour tables for easy visualisation. Briefly, I wrote some code to generate a 9 x […]
Colorblind: Checking figure accessibility for colour blind people
When preparing images for publication, it is good practice to check how accessible they are for colour blind people. Using a simple bit of code, it is possible to check an image – or a whole figure – in ImageJ for accessibility. For example, Figure 1 from our recent paper. Originally looked like this: Using […]
My Blank Pages VII: An Essay on Science and Narcissism
I recently finished An Essay on Science and Narcissism by Bruno Lemaitre. I found this book really insightful and thought I would write some notes about it here. The book was published in 2016 although I only just got around to reading it. You can grab a copy for free here. There’s an abbreviated form […]
Tips From The Blog XVII: determining playback speed of a video
Generating movie files for publication can be a bit tricky. We have a protocol for making them for microscopy data, which simplifies things. However, we recently got this question from a journal: please state the playback speed of each movie file How can we do this? What information is needed for movie files? Usually movies […]
Alignment Zone: new paper on chromosome missegregation
We have a new paper out. It’s about how chromosomes get shared during cell division. The paper in a nutshell In science-speak Misaligned chromosomes outside the exclusion zone become ensheathed in multiple layers of endomembranes. This event consigns the chromosome to missegregation and generates a micronucleus. In normal language Cells can make mistakes when they divide. A […]