Niche tech tips are the cornerstone of this website, and here is another. How to upgrade an iTunes/Music library whilst maintaining the database. I know everyone streams music these days – hence this is likely a very niche tech tip – but I still maintain a large music database on a server. The data in […]
Category: fun
Latin Quarter II: Colours and Latin Squares
Previously I wrote about latin squares and set a puzzle. Can we make a latin square where all possible pairs are represented in adjacent squares? We can demonstrate this for an n x n latin square where n = 12 In the above images, the normalised latin square only has 12 different pairs out of […]
Weather Report: building a weather station
As a project idea for a young engineer we wanted to build a Raspberry Pi-based Weather Station. Our last attempt at building something – a sound-responsive LED display – was a failure. So it was important to build something really easy to help us get back on track. Here are some notes. We essentially followed […]
Latin Quarter: Colours and Latin Squares
I read about aesthetic uses of Latin Squares on John Cook’s site a few months ago. Since I maintain a resource to use colour tables in Igor Pro, I thought it would be fun to use Latin Squares to display colour tables for easy visualisation. Briefly, I wrote some code to generate a 9 x […]
Puzzles Like You: Lightbulb puzzle
I found this great puzzle hidden in an app aimed at children. There are 300 lightbulbs in a row, labelled 1 to 300, each with an on/off switch. We count from 1 to 300 and flick the switches as follows: on “1” all lightbulbs are switched on. On “2” lightbulbs 2, 4, 6, 8 etc. […]
Easter Everywhere: when is Easter Sunday?
A colleague said to me “Everyone is running on fumes with Easter being so late this year.” Really? Is it late? I admit to being completely perplexed by this religious date and its movement around the calendar. I always feel like I am the last to know when it is, let alone whether it is […]
Fixing a hole: reinstalling pi-hole
I run two pi-holes on my home network (details here). The older of the two was in need of a refresh. Here are some notes on how I did a reinstall. For those that don’t know, a pi-hole is a simple ad-blocking solution. You can donate to the project here. Problem The pi-hole itself can […]
Wordless Song: Benchmarking Wordle performance using R
A quick post about a puzzle called Wordle that is currently taking over the internet. It’s a mastermind-like game where the object is to guess an unknown 5-letter word. Puzzlers are encouraged to share their results after completing a puzzle. Here is an example for puzzle 192. So how do you know if your performance […]
Untitled: “The structural basis of…” titles for structural biology papers
This recent tweet made me chuckle. It does seem that many structural biology papers have a title that begins “The structural basis of…”. I took a quick PubMed survey to look at its popularity. First a search of “structural basis”[ti] AND “journal article”[pt] gives us the number of research papers with “structural basis” in the […]
Target II: Monitoring a running goal in R
As 2021 draws to a close, it’s time to check back in on a previous post. As a recap, Garmin Connect offered four challenges to run 3 x 505 km and 1 x 505 km, one in each of the four quarters of 2021. Completing all four would mean running 2021 km in 2021. I […]