In which I review the new Inbox by Gmail...
Currently Inbox is invite only. You can apply for an invite at www.google.com/inbox or get a friend to invite you.
The Thirteen Doctors: Before Regeneration
In which I talk about the actors who played the Doctor in their other roles...
TIME magazine published a video on the other roles of the Doctor. I felt it was too brief however so here is my version:
Owncloud on FreeNAS 9.2
New hosting live!
This site has now moved to blog.tawilkinson.com . I've transferred my domain tinkertailorsoldiersponge.com across too so any links to that will continue to work.
Welcome to my new site!
Tom Out!
Fancy Thesis Tables in LaTeX: An Idiots Guide
In which I provide a template for generating fancy, production quality tables for theses...
LaTeX as I've mentioned previously, is a document preparation system well known for its brilliant equations and can also be utilised to make very nice looking diagrams. The tables it generates, however, while neat are a little lacklustre. This is aimed as a very simple guide to editing tables (regular LaTeX users may find this tutorial very basic).
Tom 3.5 & Life Plan 2014
In which I talk about fitness and the road ahead...
Tom 3.5
So once again I am unhappy with my level of physical fitness having let it slide a lot with work and other stress getting in the way. I need a new ridiculous goal but first I need to get back to my old fitness levels. I'm back on the old horse having started running everyday again and I've rejoined the gym. Expect a longer post in about 2 weeks time about how things are going.
I'm thinking my next "ridiculous challenge" should either be Tough Mudder or an ultra marathon (~40 miles not one of the 100 mile ones).
Why Tom 3.5? Well my last fitness drive was Tom 3.0. This isn't entirely a new leaf it's just me reminding myself to get back to what I was doing and hopefully take it further.
Life Plan (2014)
These are my goals for the next 10 years. I'm going to start posting the one year goals each January instead of having fixed New Year's Resolutions.
This Year:
- Start learning Guitar (again)
- Start learning Piano
- Get a job
- Finish my PhD
- Don’t have a fat graduation photo
- Receive my QSA at Windsor
- Receive my DofE Gold
- Write more short stories
- Enroll on another marathon/Tough Mudder
In 5 Years:
- Be earning £40k+
- Be married or almost married
- Have a published book
- Have worked towards grades in Piano
- Grade 5 music theory
In 10 Years:
- Have children
- Grade 8 Piano
- Have several published novels
Procrastination
So I'm in full thesis writing mode at the moment but that doesn't mean I'm constantly writing. I do procrastinate (though usually with other jobs I need to get done) and this brilliant article explains why that's helpful: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-06/17/jorge-cham-phd
State of the Thesis
The thesis is currently 122 pages long with 29,206 words and 154,203 characters.
Tom Out!
20,000 views!
In which I discuss some blog stats...
Firstly thank you everyone who has come to my little corner of the internet to get me to this point. When I started off a little blog about tea 3 years ago I never expected it to be seen by anyone outside my group of friends. Secondly I actually ticked over 20,000 views about a week back but haven't had the time to write this post until now.
Word 2010: Footnotes and Mendeley
In which I discuss getting footnotes and Mendeley references to look nice in Word...
I may not have mentioned it before on this blog but I am a Mendeley advisor and a strong advocate of this free reference manager. In fact I cover the pros and cons of it in this video:
Plex & Pydio on FreeNAS 9.2
In which I revisit my home server...
So I've previously discussed how to set up AjaXplorer on FreeNAS 8.3 but now that jails are easier and there are new plugins I thought I'd update you all on some of the newer features (also things are much easier now!)
Quick & Easy: Thai Green Curry
In which I make a quick & easy Thai Green Curry...
So after a weekend where I made a nice traditional Thai green curry I was stuck with some leftover ingredients and not much time to make food before going out to a party. I almost made a quick mushroom soup chicken with rice meal but since I had some spare ingredients around I had a go at making a quick curry. It ended up being very tasty!
Data Drudgery, Steampunk Stark & Tepid Tea!
In which I discuss the borishness of data anlaysis, try an interesting new tea and lay out my next Tailor project...
Data? I 'ardly know 'er!
In a break from continuous Thesis writing I have recently been running another imaging experiment. This was, as you could expect, a fairly hectic few weeks with early mornings and late nights. It was, however, much better than the weeks following where I am now stuck with the unenviable task of analysing image after image in ImageJ. Regardless of your research area this is the boring part of a PhD - repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again. Hopefully there is light at the end of the tunnel though and this will be my final experiment - Great Success!
Now all I have to do is finish writing an 80,000 word thesis...
Delayed Christmas Icing & Marzipan Resurrection
In which I finally ice my Christmas Cake...
So I made a Christmas Cake in November and never got round to finishing the icing. Luckily Christmas cake is well known for it's survivability and this one has been well fed with brandy.
2013 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here's an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,700 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
How Far Did Javert Fall?
In which I answer a question posed to me via a webpage...
This post will be in the style of What-If XKCD without the awesome diagrams and scroll-over text.
So a good friend of mine recently posed the question "How far did Javert fall?" by the medium of this webpage: http://www.mathalicious.com/lesson/the-fall-of-javert/. I clicked on the webpage expecting an entertaining answer to the question but sadly found it was actually an exercise left to the reader. I realise this is a lesson plan but humour me.
Proper Gradients for MetaPost Pulse Sequences
In which I improve upon the previous post...
In yesterday's post I talked about using MetaPost to generate Pulse Sequence Diagrams for MRI documents. I have been using this to make nice diagrams for my Thesis. There is one problem, however, with the pulse sequence file provided on Mark's website - it generates square gradients.
Pulse Sequence Diagrams Using Metapost
In which I use MetaPost to generate publication quality pulse sequence diagrams...
Pulse sequences are the series of radio-frequency pulses required to generate an MR image. If you are an MR Physicist you will see these a lot and probably wondered how can I generate nice pulse sequences for my thesis, papers etc. Well handily using MetaPost and these files you can!
Movember Ends!
Osmanthus Green: Thesis, YouTube, Update!
In which I review some floral green tea and update you on my life...
Thesis Writing
So thesis writing is fully under-way now and my supervisors assure me that writing will get harder and longer as it continues - fun, fun, fun!
It takes me a while to get into writing but I expect I'll make a video about Thesis writing soon. I actually quite enjoy writing though so I hope I'll be able to keep the pace up and stay on schedule :)
Christmas Cake - The Cake!
In which I bake the cake...
So in order to bring you yet another Christmas recipe I have broken with tradition and made my Christmas cake before stir-up Sunday. Here it is!
Word 2010: How to Insert Numbered Equations Properly
In which I run through a useful tip that Microsoft managed to just miss explaining...
The Problem
If you, like me, are in the process of writing a long scientific document which requires multiple reviewers to be able to view changes you may sadly be saddled with using Microsoft Word.* Now, in defence of Microsoft, they have definitely improved the way Word works. Using track changes, Mendeley and with a little bit of tinkering you can have a passable writing experience and be able to send documents out for review by your supervisors. They've even included an equation editor that allows you to put equations in your document and save them for later use.
Sadly in formal scientific writing we often like things to look nice, pretty and numbered like this...