Many running races and events have been cancelled or disrupted due to the pandemic. To fill the void, I’ve been taking on Garmin’s “Challenges”. In Garmin Connect, you can accept a challenge set by Garmin (I think users can challenge each other too). Completion of these challenges gives the user points, which I’ve become somewhat obsessed with.

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. The code is available here and a detailed description is at the end of the post. The solver found 264 solutions from 33 placements.

I have a long-running project to make timelapse movies using a Raspberry Pi Zero with camera module. I’m capturing a countryside view and have images for two years. The uptime on the Pi is seriously impressive, but nonetheless I wanted to upgrade the Pi so that it would send me updates of how it’s going, so that I would know if it image capture had failed. Here is my solution.

It is an annual event on quantixed to post the papers I have selected for MD997 Frontier Techniques and Research Skills in Biomedicine. Previous selections are grouped here. The deal is that each student picks a paper from the list and then uses it to write a “grant application” for a research project. They also present the paper to the class and finally we do a grant panel where projects are scored!

I was working on a figure in Adobe Illustrator today. The ai file had 32 embedded TIFF files (we tend to embed images rather than linking them for portability reasons). I wanted to change all of the images, but to do this I needed to know where the originals were.

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 this year, COVID-19 had affected these trials.

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 these courses all the time. Well, I did until the pandemic struck.

One of several features that Strava put behind a paywall was the ability to compare performance on similar courses. I miss this comparison tool and wondered how hard it would be to code my own. This post is a walkthrough of how I approached the problem. The code is available here. It uses the trackeR library in R to convert the GPX tracks to a huge dataframe. This is then processed by IgorPro.

We have a new preprint out. This is a short post to describe our findings and highlight some of the software I developed for analysing cell migration and cell shape data.

I searched several times in vain to solve this problem. After finding a solution, I thought i’d put it up here. The problem Formatting of units using siunitx in LaTeX does not match the typeface of the body text. We like to use the helvet package to get a close approximation to Helvetica in LaTeX.

Here is a fun post about using colour palettes in R. It starts with a computer game… After a few years of sporadically playing Super Mario World 2 – Yoshi’s Island on the Retropie, I made it to the final level.