During the pandemic, many virtual seminar programmes have popped up. One series, “Motors in Quarantine“, has been very successful. It’s organised by my colleagues Anne Straube, Alex Zwetsloot and Huong Vu. Anne wanted to know if attendees of the seminar series were a fair representation of the field. We know the geographical location of the […]
Category: adventures in code
Say It Ain’t So: using Weezer album cover colours in R
I’m a long-term fan of Weezer. Such was the brilliance of their first two albums that I have stuck with them through thick and thin. And dear me, there has been some very thin music. Nonetheless I own every album – thirteen of them. Among them are six albums entitled “Weezer”. These records are colloquially […]
Find The Answer Within: using grep to find lost code
A short tech-tip this week. How can you find a line of code somewhere on your computer? I often find that I need to write a line of code and I can’t remember the exact syntax. To add to the frustration, I can remember writing a similar line before, but can’t remember in which file […]
Walk This Way
Over the holidays, I had an idea about looping an animation between two images. I wrote some code to do this in Igor Pro (sorry, no R this time…). This post describes how the code works and how you can make a similar animation. There was a reason to do this animation, but as a […]
Rotation: using quaternions in Igor Pro
Quaternions are essentially magic. With just four numbers, they can describe the position and orientation of an object in space. For example, the rotation of an object about one axis. Consecutive rotations can also be described by a quaternion. There are many explainer articles which help to understand quaternions and their uses (they are used […]
Turn A Square: generative aRt
A while back I visited Artistes & Robots in Paris. Part of the exhibition was on the origins of computer-based art. Nowadays this is referred to as generative art, where computers generate artwork according to rules specified by the programmer. I wanted to emulate some of the early generative artwork I saw there, using R. Some […]
Timestretched: audio stretching on the command line
I was recently reminded of the wonders of paulstretch by a 8-fold slowed down version of Pyramid Song by Radiohead. Paulstretch is an audio manipulation widget that can stretch or compress the time of an audio recording. Note that it doesn’t “slow down” or “speed up” a recording, it resamples the audio and recasts it […]
Garmonbozia: Using R to look at Garmin CSV data
Garmin Connect has a number of plots built in, but to take a deeper dive into all your fitness data, you need to export a CSV and fire up R. This post is a quick guide to some possibilities for running data. There’s a few things that I wanted to look at. For example, how […]
All Around The World: Maps and Flags in R
Our lab is international. People born all over the world have come to work in my group. I’m proud of this fact, especially in the current political climate. I’ve previously used the GoogleMaps API to display a heat map on our lab webpage. It shows where in the world people in the lab come from. […]
Installing open source PyMol on a Mac
This is a quick “how to” post. There is a licensed version of PyMol (MacPyMol) available, but the open source version can be installed on a Mac free of charge. The official page has a guide, which is not terribly detailed, and I found this excellent guide which is unfortunately out-of-date. Here is an updated […]