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. CodeInstructions 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. Can we make a latin square where all possible pairs are represented in adjacent squares?

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.

This is a ultra-short post related to sending email via the command line on Linux/Rasperry Pi. On 30 May 2022, Google disabled the handy feature that allowed less secure sign in to Google accounts. This feature was a handy way to authenticate command-line routines that send email.

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 this guide from Adafruit which links out to this guide for the CircuitPython part.

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 9 latin square and assigned the values 1 – 9 to a colour table wave. The results were nice.

When preparing images for publication, it is good practice to check how accessible they are for colour blind people. Using a simple bit of code, it is possible to check an image – or a whole figure – in ImageJ for accessibility. For example, Figure 1 from our recent paper. Originally looked like this: Using the script we can see how it appears to people with different types of colour blindness.