I recently did a webinar for ASCB called “From Microscope To Figure”. For posterity, I am re-posting the webinar here with some additional info.

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 get deleted.

It’s been a while since I posted a breakdown of half marathon times. The last time seems to have been 2018. I decided to give my old code a clean-up and quickly crunched the numbers from the 2022 Kenilworth Half Marathon. First, the results: Briefly, the code below reads in a csv file of race results downloaded from the provider.

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 and TV show side of Plex works great, but the music side has its peculiarities. The problem I have a large music library.

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 of resources out there that describe how to go about building a package.

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 XML file.

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. This means any messages older than 90 days will no longer be visible.

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 my library is precious (to me) since it tracks my listening habits over 17 years.

Previously I wrote about latin squares and set a puzzle. 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 a possible 66. The density plot shows the pairings in the lower triangle, grey represents 0. A randomly generated latin square (where all rows and all columns feature 1 to 12 exactly once) is shown where all possible pairs are captured.

A comment from a referee led me to find a method to describe curvature of membranes. This is a quick write-up of our solution. I couldn’t find a solution readily available in Fiji, so I created one using a combination of Fiji for tracing the curvature and IgorPro to do the fitting. If there is any interest I can convert this code into an all-Fiji routine. The code is simple and a gist is available here.