In which I get ready for Dawi to return to The Old World...
With The Old World bringing back two of my white whales from my childhood in the form of Bretonnians and Dwarfs I’ve had a lot of fun projects this year. I wanted to do a slightly different Dwarf scheme than the old green and gold I remember seeing in White Dwarf as a kid and settled on the old Zhufbar livery of white and light blue. It makes for a striking force on the table top and is relatively speedy to paint up as detailed below!
In which I finally start delivering on the promised painting guides...
I have been sat on a fully constructed Battle of Pelennor Fields box for just about a year after purchasing it as a Christmas present to myself at the tail end of 2021. Having signed up to a few "slay the grey" style challenges in the New Year I thought it was time to start with a nice easy paint job.
In which I modify an old family recipe to be vegan friendly...
After successfully turning my hand to vegan Christmas cake I thought it was high time I adapted my old Christmas pudding recipe to be vegan too.
In which I discuss getting the dominant colour from an image quickly...
I have recently made a Discord bot that searches for online versions of board games to help people find games to play remotely. This link will add it to your server.
Discord embeds have a colour bar down the side that can be manually set. I thought it would be cool to have this display the 'average' (i.e. dominant) colour of the board game box and decided to investigate the best way to do it.
In which I plan my holiday tasks…
So it may just be because it is 2020 or perhaps I'm just a bit lazy but I’ve found that I often start holiday breaks with a list of things I’d like to do and by the end of the trip* I’ve not achieved most of them. Whether it’s odd jobs or relaxing activities I wanted to get through I just accidental sit around and don’t do them. This holiday season I decided I needed a to do list and though I’d try out the new Todoist Boards feature.
*Or, let’s be real this year: sitting on the sofa at home.
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).
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.
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:
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!)
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.
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.
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!
In which I run through a useful tip that Microsoft managed to just miss explaining...
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...
In which I celebrate...
Look what greeted me today:
Thank you everyone for reading my ramblings, costume ideas, recipes, geeky computer ideas, airsoft tales, reviews and tea posts! Everyone knows that people who read my blog are the best kinds of people!
Thank you all!
Tom Out!
In which BT fails to deliver, just like OP...
Dear BT,
It appears you didn't take the sentiments of my previous letter to heart. I'm afraid that is going to be detrimental to our ongoing relationship. In fact I'm afraid I have some bad news for you - we're going to have to part ways.
In which I moan about BT...
Dear British Telecom (BT),
Last year I had the pleasure of enjoying BT Infinity. In a student house of five I don't recall ever experiencing slow internet or any outages. Naturally when I moved to a new house I was more than happy to start a contract with you. I was even looking forward to having a landline for the first time.
In which I set-up a nice web GUI for my home server...
So I recently invested in a HP ProLiant MicroServer N54L to backup my PC to. Also it should be quite useful as a media server etc. I've installed FreeNAS as my OS but wanted to have a easy-to-use Web interface for accessing my files over my Network. I followed the guide here: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/howto-ajaxplorer-with-nginx-in-plugin-jail-mysql-optional-webdav.10297/ but a few things need changing as always.
In which Chrome causes some problems for once...
So my work computer has been playing up a lot recently. It's been so slow that I've even had to hard reset several times. I've tried the usual tips and tricks:
None of this worked. Starting up Task Manager I found that Chrome was using about 60% of my CPU even when I wasn't actively using it. This was odd so I had a quick Google...
Chrome runs plugins as separate processes (which is why there are so many processes in Task Manager called chrome.exe). If one of these has a high CPU usage you can end the process and chrome will give you an error that the plugin has crashed. You can then disable that plugin.
Annoyingly it was Adobe Flash Player causing the problems. Since I use this all the time I couldn't just uninstall it. The problem was luckily easy to solve - I had enabled hardware acceleration to fix a YouTube bug a few weeks back. Turning that off sped the computer up significantly.
Sorting out Flash did reduce the load Chrome was putting on the CPU but didn't remove all of it. It turns out that Chrome has a real time anti-malware protection feature which can use a lot of processing power. You can disable it in Settings>Privacy>Enable phishing and malware protection. This didn't have as much of an effect as the Flash problem but has helped speed up my computer. *
*If you're worried about not having the protection I've found Lavasoft Adaware to be more than ample against malware.
Tom Out!
In which I install Steam on Linux...
Steam is now officially supported on Linux! I decided to try it out.
Firstly - there are only 78 games supported* at the moment. So just be aware some of your faves might not be there yet.
Secondly - if you are running an Nvidia card you need to have x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers version 304.4 or higher installed. Steam will install but it won't get past login if you don't do this. You can solve this on Gentoo quite simply:
In which I setup an IDE for my coding...
As with most of my Tinker posts to do with computers this is a guide to something I might need to do again in the future. You can probably find out how to do it online but I struggled with bits and am putting it here for my own and other's reference.
I am currently demonstrating a C++ lab at the University and it's good to be able to run the example code myself ahead of time. Also I am continuing to teach myself C++ as part of Project Euler.
In which I reassure you that I'm still here...
Apologies all I've been rushed off my feet these past few weeks :/ Normal service will resume next week (with maybe some bonus posts too!).
Tom Out!
In which I get back into coding in C...
I did a programming course* during my undergrad but it's fallen by the wayside recently. In an effort to improve my coding skills, and my understanding of maths, I have started on Project Euler.
*I took two actually but only had time for the coursework in one - I might upload my program for it later.
Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/) is a website which sets maths problems and asks you to solve them with programming. There are currently 410 problems for you to solve.
They usually give an example or two and then ask for a harder calculation. Par example, the 6th prime number is 13 - now find the 15,000th.
This has been very helpful for re-learning my coding skills. You have to break down the maths problem into steps and then work out how the hell you would code that. Also it's fun and challenging!
In which I describe the complexities of analysing 3D images...
3D image analysis just seems to be one of those things that is harder to do than I'd like it to be.
Before starting it is worth pointing out that with MRI you can acquire volumes in two ways - traditional 2D with multiple slices or a 3D scan. As far as this blog post is concerned these are the same.*
A common measure in clinical MRI is the volume of an organ or part of an organ. After all when someone has brain cancer - "How big is the tumour?" can be a very important question. Here are my experiences of trying to measure volumes on MRI images.
*There are differences between these two methods of acquisition but that would require a whole blog post on it's own.
In which I look back on a year (ish) of blogging and look ahead to 2013...
Firstly WordPress have provided this nice summary of my year in blogging: http://tinkertailorsoldiersponge.com/2012/annual-report
So this is my first proper year of blogging (I posted a few things before but wasn't really regular at all). It's been a lot of fun and I'm definitely here to stay :) I've managed the majority of my 3,000 odd views this year :)
Let the summarising commence!
I've messed about with Linux and Windows. I upgraded to Windows 8 and enjoyed it (it hasn't pissed me off yet!). I've also spent a fair amount of time learning $latex LaTeX$.
The main event was Project Thor which was a lot of fun and helped keep me in shape.
I didn't do much in the way of Airsoft this year :(
Due to foolishly agreeing to bake a cake for every CAOS rehearsal in order to become Social Secretary I have baked a lot of cakes this year. Also there was the annual Pudding Party!
I've had a placement at AstraZeneca which has been very useful and is still on going. I've also started looking into PostDoc options.
I reviewed a board game based on a TV show you might just have heard of. I also made an advent calendar full of alternative Christmas songs :)
I drank lots of tea and so it was a good year :)
I got featured on http://www.reddit.com/r/tea/ which was awesome! This is thanks to the Great British Tea Test 2012 :)
Having survived the apocalypse let's have a few New Year's Resolutions:
I'll keep tinkering. No particular promises here but expect some more $latex LaTeX$ and Linux stuff along with anything interesting I find out :)
I'm 'contractually obliged' to make cakes until March sometime once a week so expect more cake making. It'll give me an excuse to use my new Mason Cash mixing bowl and silicon utensils :D
I'm expecting to get the following things* to review next year:
*I should go on KickStarter less!
Armed with my trusty new leaf tea, teapot and a new review style I will continue to drink lots of tea!
Tom Out!
