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 […]
Category: computing
Calendar: Assessing Raspberry Pi Camera Uptime
A while ago, I set up a couple of Raspberry Pi Zero cameras to make long-term time lapse movies. To recap: the idea was to take pictures every ten minutes and turn them into a movie. The process is totally automated so that every day, the photos from each Pi get saved to a server, […]
Tips From The Blog XII: Improving your Twitter experience
This is a quick set of tips to improve your Twitter experience. YMMV on these tips. Plus I can see Twitter changing things so that they no longer work, but this advice is correct as of today. I see a lot of people on Twitter complaining about two things: Twitter changing the tweets shown from […]
Child’s Play: pi-hole set up for a safer internet
I have been running a pi-hole to block ads on my home network for a while. It’s great! Not only are ads blocked, but it speeds up internet browsing because… the ads do not load. I wondered if it would be possible to use a pi-hole to make a child-safe internet experience to protect the […]
Rollercoaster IV: ups and downs of Google Scholar citations
Time for an update to a previous post. For the past few years, I have been using an automated process to track citations to my lab’s work on Google Scholar (details of how to set this up are at the end of this post). Due to the nature of how Google Scholar tracks citations, it […]
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 […]
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. […]
All That Noise: The vesicle packing problem
This week Erick Martins Ratamero and I put up a preprint on vesicle packing. This post is a bit of backstory but please take a look at the paper, it’s very short and simple. The paper started when I wanted to know how many receptors could fit in a clathrin-coated vesicle. Sounds like a simple […]
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 […]