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) […]
Category: computing
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 […]
Free Bird: moving to Mastodon
There’s plenty of guides to getting going on Mastodon, aimed at people leaving Twitter. I just wanted to post a couple of technical points about making the switch that might be of interest to people who maintain webpages with Twitter content (feeds, embeds). Mastodon status updates (feed/timeline) Twitter provided a widget that meant that an […]
I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You III: fixing SMTP on Raspberry Pi
Sometimes an update causes a chain reaction which borks a system. Here are some notes on how I fixed a SMTP mail issue on my Raspberry Pi camera project. A quick recap: the RPi camera takes pictures every ten minutes, each night the images get sent to a server and each week the transferred images […]
Multiplex: comparing Plex libraries
This website is all about niche tech tips and this post is no exception. I run a Plex media server. This allows me to stream my music collection when I am out and about. Plex pass owners get the nifty plexamp app for listening to music, which I really like. The databasing for the movie […]
The Package: learning how to build an R package
I recently made my first R package and was asked how I did it. The answer of course was: I searched, read, and stumbled around until it was done. But having gone through the process I figured it was worthwhile summarising what I did and what I found tricky. First off, there are a ton […]
Tracking: announcing new R package TrackMateR
A short post to announce TrackMateR, a new R package to analyse TrackMate XML outputs. Code Instructions Background TrackMate is a plug-in for ImageJ which ships with Fiji. It’s essential for single particle tracking work, particularly for microscopy movies. For example, tracking the movement of fluorescent vesicles inside cells. A tracking session generates a TrackMate […]
Slacker: archiving information from a Slack workspace
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. […]