Earlier this year I set up a bot on Mastodon. The bot, AlbumsX3, posts an album suggestion twice-a-day. Performance has been good. It has only missed a few posts due – I think – to server glitches. However, I have made a couple of tweaks to upgrade the bot since my last post, so I […]
Category: computing
Mr. Mastodon Farm: analysing a mastodon ActivityPub outbox.json file
I migrated my personal Mastodon account from mastodon.social to biologists.social recently. If you’d like to do the same, I found this guide very useful. Note that, once you move, all your previous posts are left behind on the old instance. Before I migrated, I downloaded all of my data from the old instance. I thought […]
Free Bird II: Mastodon macOS clients
This is a brief review of macOS Mastodon clients that I’ve tried. It is unashamedly incomplete/non-exhaustive, but since the ones I found online from computing magazines literally look at one app, I am ahead of the pack here! tl;dr I prefer Ivory on macOS and prior to that, Mastonaut was OK. For clarity: I have […]
Step By Step: recreating a volcano plot in R
We have an analysis routine for proteomics data written for IgorPro. One output is a volcano plot. These plots show the fold change in one sample compared to another and plot that against a p-value to estimate how reproducible any changes observed are. This post is not about that software, but on the topic of […]
Pledging My Time VI: scraping and analysis of race results in R
I’ve posted in the past about analysing race results in R (most recently here). I ran the 2023 MK Marathon and wanted to have a look at the finishing times. The days of race results being made available as a csv or xls for easy analysis seem to be behind us. Instead they tend to […]
Yet Another Movie: IMDB Top 250 movies
I’m not a big movie person. Nonetheless I have a media library with quite a few films in and I wondered how many “films to see before you die”-type movies I had in the collection, and how many were missing. I used R to find the answers. I’ve described previously how to get a plain […]
Tips From The Blog XIX: initialising a new RStudio project
I like to set up a standardised directory structure for RStudio projects. The idea came from here. In brief, the structure is: My typical workflow is therefore to: So far, so good. However, this process is a bit tedious. I find it irritating to open up RStudio (which opens up a previous project by default) […]
Probot: building a Mastodon bot
I have long admired albums2hear, a Twitter bot that posts albums. You can read a bit more about it here. There was no mastodon equivalent and so I decided to build one. You can follow the bot – currently called Albums Albums Albums (or AlbumsX3) – here. Idea behind the bot The idea is to […]
Point Me At The Sky: wall art using Raspberry Pi camera images
I have a long-running Raspberry Pi camera project to capture images of the view from a window (more details here). A recent post on mastodon, which showed a keogram, encouraged me to take my PiCam images and turn them into art. The finished product This is the finished wall art, printed on canvas. Ready to […]
Over and Over: quick ways to reuse handy shell one-liners
There are a few one-liners that I use in the shell to do some really nifty stuff. I struggle to quickly find and reuse these and asked for a solution on Mastodon. A handy one-liner might be something like (taken from here): This converts all the flac files in subfolders into mp3 files. Obviously, we […]