A quick tech tip. I usually use Audacity for converting audio files and I have a few simple macros set up in there to make life easy. I had some opus music files which do not play in Apple’s Music app and therefore needed converting to MP3 format. Annoyingly, Audacity 3.1.2 on macOS does not […]
Category: computing
Trellisaze II: Updated guide to using Trello in the lab
Back in 2015, I wrote a guide to using Trello for lab organisation. I figured it was time for an update because a few things have changed since then and the topic of using Trello for larger labs came up on Twitter. Note that other kanban-style software is available. Basic Trello setup I set up […]
Play The Game: Retropie in a Retroflag GPi case
The Retropie project is a wonderful way to play retro games on a Raspberry Pi (see previous post). A number of handheld units are available to make a convincing retro gaming experience. One of these is the Retroflag GPi case, modelled on Nintendo’s Game Boy. It’s possible to order one of these pre-built and even […]
Blue Monday: sampling the sky
I have a long-running project Raspberry Pi project to make time-lapse movies of a countryside view (see previous posts). It’s been running for over two years and the results are great. The camera takes images every ten minutes and by assembling movies with different time intervals, you can see seasons change, trees growing or the […]
Over and Over: Preprint revisions on bioRxiv
The aim of this post is to look at revisions of bioRxiv preprints. I’m interested how long preprint versions exist on bioRxiv. In other words: how long do revisions to preprints take? The data from bioRxiv is a complex dataset with many caveats as I’ll explain further down, but some interesting details do emerge. Consider […]
Ten Years vs The Spread II: Calculating publication lag times in R
This post is an update of a previous analysis on quantixed. We have covered publication lag times – the time it takes for a paper go from submitted (received) to accepted and published – a lot on here. It is possible to look at lag times, in R using data from PubMed. Previously my code […]
Shiny Cage: visualising clathrin triskelia in a lattice
Clathrin is a three-legged protein complex or triskelion that can assemble into lattice-like structures. Inside the cell, this assembly helps to create vesicles: tiny packages of membranes containing proteins and goodies for the cell to use. Incredibly our first view of assembled clathrin was made in the 1960s, with resolution improving steadily since then. The […]
Crackerblocks: computing solutions for IQ Block game
The IQ Block game is a puzzle where the player must fit eight shapes into a square space. The challenge is to find as many ways as possible to do it. The box says there are more than 40 solutions! So how many are there? I wrote a solver to crack the IQ Block game. […]
All My Trials: Impact of COVID-19 on rare disease clinical trials
The database clinicaltrials.gov is a web resource of clinical trials around the world. It has a REST API that gives access to clinical trial data. There are some resources available to interact with this resource using R, such as rclinicaltrials and ClinicalTrialsAPI. We were interested at looking clinical trials for rare diseases and particularly whether […]
Cluster One II: comparing cycling performance on similar courses
A short follow-up post. Previously, I looked at how to reproduce a Strava feature that compares performance over similar courses. With a few modifications to the code, I was able to analyse a much larger dataset of cycling performance on similar courses. Two courses with the highest number of tracks are shown below. I cycle […]