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.

I recently finished An Essay on Science and Narcissism by Bruno Lemaitre. I found this book really insightful and thought I would write some notes about it here. The book was published in 2016 although I only just got around to reading it. You can grab a copy for free here.

Generating movie files for publication can be a bit tricky. We have a protocol for making them for microscopy data, which simplifies things. However, we recently got this question from a journal: How can we do this? What information is needed for movie files?

We have a new paper out. It’s about how chromosomes get shared during cell division. The paper in a nutshell In science-speak Misaligned chromosomes outside the exclusion zone become *ensheathed *in multiple layers of endomembranes. This event consigns the chromosome to missegregation and generates a micronucleus. In normal language Cells can make mistakes when they divide.

I found this great puzzle hidden in an app aimed at children. Skip to the solution. If you want to work it out, don’t scroll down! Some blurb as a digression so that you don’t see the solution immediately The funny thing about this puzzle was that it was far too difficult for a child’s game.

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 early or late. Let’s have a look at what constitutes an early or a late Easter. The data are available here. This is a quick post with no code example (sorry).

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 be easily updated over ssh using pihole -up however the OS also needs occasional updating for security.