In our University - and also our Data-Center GWDG we use Open-Source Software whenever it is possible. So, instead of using proprietary Video Conferencing Services, such as Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams / Skype, the GWDG provided us a reliable Big Blue Button Service. This Software is - compared to the proprietary solutions mentioned above - limited in its functionality, especially the fun part!

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

Joe Friel reposted an article earlier this year on Efficiency Factor in running. Efficiency Factor (EF) can be viewed in Training Peaks software and he describes how it is calculated. This post describes how I went about calculating EF in R using a single gpx file. What is Efficiency Factor (EF)? Essentially, EF is the average distance that you are propelled forward per heart beat. The higher the number, the more efficient you are at running.

I’m a long-term fan of Weezer. Such was the brilliance of their first two albums that I have stuck with them through thick and thin. And dear me, there has been some very thin music. Nonetheless I own every album – thirteen of them. Among them are six albums entitled “Weezer”. Weezer’s “Weezer” albums (source: Wikipedia) These records are colloquially referred to by the colour of the album.

So this is essentially what happened instead of us sitting down and thinking how we could spend our money in the most technologically savvy way to the benefit of science, scholars and society. A generation later, roughly US$300 billion poorer and none the wiser, it seems.

Over the holidays, I had an idea about looping an animation between two images. I wrote some code to do this in Igor Pro (sorry, no R this time…). This post describes how the code works and how you can make a similar animation. There was a reason to do this animation, but as a proof of principle I used two band logos.

A while ago, I set up a couple of Raspberry Pi Zero cameras to make long-term time lapse movies. To recap: the idea was to take pictures every ten minutes and turn them into a movie. The process is totally automated so that every day, the photos from each Pi get saved to a server, and then processed into a movie that gradually gets longer and longer. At the end of the week, if the back up went OK, the photos get deleted from the Pi’s SD card.

This is a quick set of tips to improve your Twitter experience. YMMV on these tips. Plus I can see Twitter changing things so that they no longer work, but this advice is correct as of today.

Time for an update to a previous post. For the past few years, I have been using an automated process to track citations to my lab’s work on Google Scholar (details of how to set this up are at the end of this post). Due to the nature of how Google Scholar tracks citations, it means that citations get added (hooray!) but might be removed (booo!). Using a daily scrape of the data it is possible to watch this happening.

This week, the Vancouver ScholCommLab packed things in early and hit the bowling lanes. Team bonding, apparently, is best achieved by participating in competitive individual “sports.” Each of us had their own unique strategic, from granny-style bowling to a carefully orchestrated gutter-bounce approach.