Slack is a wonderful tool for communicating and organising work in teams. Many academic groups are using the free version (since the pricing is simply incompatible with how we are funded). Slack has had a 10,000 message limit for free tier workspaces for many years but they recently changed it to a 90 day limit. […]
Author: quantixed
Tips From The Blog XVIII: upgrading a Music/iTunes library
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 […]
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 […]