I really dislike being asked “how big is your lab?”. The question usually arises at scientific meetings when you are chatting to someone during a break. Small talk can lead to some banal questions being asked, and that’s fine, but when this question is asked seriously, the person asking really just wants to compare themselves […]
Author: Stephen Royle
Super Automatic: computer-based tools for research
Since I have now written several posts on this. I thought I would summarise the computer-based tools that we are using in the lab to automate our work and organise ourselves. Electronic lab notebook – there are previous posts from me on picking an ELN platform and how to set up a WordPress ELN as well […]
For What It’s Worth: Influence of our papers on our papers
This post is about a citation analysis that didn’t quite work out. I liked this blackboard project by Manuel Théry looking at the influence of each paper authored by David Pellman’s lab on the future directions of the Pellman lab. It reminds me that papers can have impact in the field while others might be […]
Experiment Zero: Using a Raspberry Pi Zero camera
This is the first post at quantixed about Raspberry Pi computing. Pi Zero is a minimalist Raspberry Pi that can be coupled to a camera. With this little rig, you can make time-lapse footage amongst other things. I’ve set up a couple of these now. One was to make a time-lapse movie of some plants […]
Til I Die: Seeking new music
I’ve been following the tweets from an account called Albums You Must Hear @Albums2Hear. Each tweet is an album recommended by the account owner. I’m a sucker for lists of Albums That I Must Hear Before I Die since I’m always interested in new (or not so new) music recommendations. I wanted to assemble a […]
Tips from the blog XI: docx to pdf
A long time ago I posted a little Automator routine to convert Word doc/docx files to PDF. Not long after that, this routine ceased to work due to changes in Microsoft Word (I think). It’s still very useful to convert a whole folder of docx files to PDF in order to avoid Word and just […]
New Lexicon: how to add a custom minted lexer in Overleaf
This quick post comes courtesy of LianTze Lim (an Overleaf TeXpert) and Kota Miura (a bioimage analyst). I asked on the ImageJ forum some time ago how to add an ImageJ Macro lexer for a LaTeX document I was writing. Kota responded with this lexer for pygments. I then asked Overleaf if it was possible to […]
Pledging My Time IV
The Green Leek 10.5 km run is a mixed terrain race now in its third year. Today’s was a wet and muddy edition. The chip times were posted this afternoon and using my previous code, I took a look at the results. I was a bit disappointed with my time, which was about 24 […]
Multiplex: Small multiple artwork from GPX tracks
I’d seen the small multiple artwork of running and cycling routes from Marcus Volz’s R package Strava all over the web. Ads for “posters of your GPS tracks” pop up on Reddit and I’d notice a few #Rstats people put up their posters on Twitter. I’ve had the package bookmarked for a while and this week […]
My Blank Pages VI: Programming in Igor Pro
It has been a long time since I wrote a book review. A few months ago I read on IgorExchange that Martin Schmid had written a book about programming Igor. I snapped up a copy. I’m a competent Igor programmer but I was hoping that this book would be useful for lab members that want […]