This is just a quick tip as it took me a little while to sort this out. In the lab we have two QNAP TS-869 Pro NAS devices. Each was set up with a single RAID6 storage pool and I ran them as a primary and replicant via rsync. We recently bought a bigger server and so the plan was to repurpose one of the NAS boxes to be a Time Machine for all the computers in the lab.

A while back I made this little Automator script to convert Microsoft Word doc and docx files to PDF. It’s useful for when you are sent a bunch of Word files for committee work. Opening PDFs in Preview is nice and hassle-free. Struggling with Word is not. It’s not my own work, I just put it together after googling around a bit. I’ll put it here for anyone to use. To get it working: Open Automator.

I recently gave a talk at a retreat for new PIs working at QMUL. My talk was focussed on tips for getting started, i.e. the nitty gritty of running an efficient lab. It was a mix of things I’ve been told, worked out for myself or that I’d learned the hard way. PIs are expected to be able to do lots of things that can be full-time jobs in themselves.

I put a recent code snippet put up on the IgorExchange. It’s a simple procedure for averaging a set of 1D waves and putting the results in a new wave. The difference between this code and Average Waves.ipf (which ships with Igor) is that this function takes the average of all points in the wave and places this single value in a new wave. You can specify whether the mean or median is used for the average.

An IgorPro tip this week. The default font for plots is Geneva. Most of our figures are assembled using Helvetica for labelling. The default font can be changed in Igor Graph Preferences, but Preferences need to be switched on in order to be implemented. Anyway, I always seem to end up with a mix of Geneva plots and Helevetica plots.

What is the best music to listen to while writing a manuscript or grant proposal? OK, I know that some people prefer silence and certainly most people hate radio chatter while trying to concentrate. However, if you like listening to music, setting an iPod on shuffle is no good since a track by Napalm Death can jump from the speakers and affect your concentration.