A short tech-tip this week. How can you find a line of code somewhere on your computer? I often find that I need to write a line of code and I can’t remember the exact syntax. To add to the frustration, I can remember writing a similar line before, but can’t remember in which file it was (or for what project, or even when it might’ve been). How can I quickly track that line down? Today I needed to write a LoadWave command in Igor.

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.

Quaternions are essentially magic. With just four numbers, they can describe the position and orientation of an object in space. For example, the rotation of an object about one axis. Consecutive rotations can also be described by a quaternion.

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.

I have been running a pi-hole to block ads on my home network for a while. It’s great! Not only are ads blocked, but it speeds up internet browsing because… the ads do not load. I wondered if it would be possible to use a pi-hole to make a child-safe internet experience to protect the little people in the house. Sure, there are ways to do this in most routers but they are not ideal.

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.

A while back I visited Artistes & Robots in Paris. Part of the exhibition was on the origins of computer-based art. Nowadays this is referred to as generative art , where computers generate artwork according to rules specified by the programmer.

Garmin Connect has a number of plots built in, but to take a deeper dive into all your fitness data, you need to export a CSV and fire up R. This post is a quick guide to some possibilities for running data.  There’s a few things that I wanted to look at. For example, how does my speed change through the year? How does that compare to previous years? If I see some trends, is that the same for short runs and long runs?

Our lab is international. People born all over the world have come to work in my group. I’m proud of this fact, especially in the current political climate. I’ve previously used the GoogleMaps API to display a heat map on our lab webpage. It shows where in the world people in the lab come from. This was OK, but I wanted to get an R based solution to make this graphic to make it easier to automate updates.