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 run through setting up a Python environment on Windows...
I'm going to preface this post by saying I'm not breaking any new ground here. As is often the case, though, a beginner wanting to set-up an environment to do this will have to go to multiple websites to collect this info so I'm going to distil it into one post.
I am going to talk about Python 2.7 as currently it has the most support for libraries. This method should work equally well for Python 3 but I have not tested this.
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.
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 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!)
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 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 I perfect a macro for listing document details in LaTeX.
I've been using $latex LaTeX$ to typeset my MRI Glossary (see previous PhD post). I really wanted an Appendix which listed system info and $latex LaTeX$ version.*
*Wordpress.com supports native $latex LaTeX$ - which is awesome
After much googling I couldn't figure out how to do this so I asked the kind folks at tex.stackexchange.com and Heiko Oberdiek & Ivan Griffin responded with two macros which I've now combined as follows†:
usepackage{hologo}
usepackage{ifluatex}
usepackage{ifxetex}
usepackage{ifvtex}
makeatletter
newcommand{ShowOsVersion}{%
immediatewrite18{systeminfo | findstr /B /C:"OS Version" > OSv.tex}%
input{OSv}immediatewrite18{rm OSv.tex}%
}
newcommand{ShowOsName}{%
immediatewrite18{systeminfo | findstr /B /C:"OS Name"> OSn.tex}%
input{OSn}immediatewrite18{rm OSn.tex}%
}
newcommand*{InfoLaTeX}{%
hologo{fmtname} textlessfmtversiontextgreater
}
newcommand*{InfoTeX}{%
ifxetex
hologo{XeTeX}-%
theXeTeXversionXeTeXrevision
else
ifluatex
hologo{LuaTeX}-%
begingroup
count@=luatexversion
dividecount@ by 100 %
edefx{thecount@}%
count@=-xrelax
multiplycount@ by 100 %
advancecount@ by luatexversion
x.thecount@.luatexrevision
endgroup
else
@ifundefined{pdftexversion}{%
ifvtex
hologo{VTeX}%
@ifundefined{VTeXversion}{%
}{%
begingroup
count@VTeXversion
dividecount@ 100 %
space vthecount@
multiplycount@ -100 %
advancecount@VTeXversion
.two@digitscount@
endgroup
}%
else
hologo{TeX}%
fi
}{%
hologo{pdfTeX}-%
ifnumpdftexversion thepdftexversion.pdftexrevision
else
ifnumpdftexversion expandafter@carthepdftexversion@empty@nil.%
expandafter@cdrthepdftexversion@empty@nil
pdftexrevision
else
expandafter@carthepdftexversion@empty@nil.%
expandafter@cdrthepdftexversion@empty@nil.%
pdftexrevision
fi
fi
}%
fi
fi
}
I then call this at the end of my document with:
appendix
chapter{Document Details}
Compiled by: InfoTeX
hologo{LaTeX} version: InfoLaTeX
ShowOsName
ShowOsVersion
end{document}
This produces the following output:
†This requires you to use the -shell-escape option when compiling
Tom Out!
P.S. http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/78334/print-system-information-in-latex-doc
In which I discuss poor internet connections.
Today at work I was using a terribly slow internet connection. What interested me was which programs and websites worked on a slow connection and which ones didn't.
These programs/sites worked well:
Wikipedia
Xkcd
Xkcd what if?
These didn't:
Outlook web
Wunderlist
Ctrl-Alt-Delete
Google Mail & Calendar were intermittent.
Why should this be? I'm not sure and would have hazarded a guess that sites and programs which send less data would work better. However, Wunderlist only needs to send short strings of text (calendar events) when Evernote was syncing complete documents. Also with the websites both CAD and Xkcd require images to load. Xkcd managed it easily but I haven't seen today's CAD yet. Maybe the ones which loaded were just better coded/written!?!
Currently I'm writing this from the comfort of First Class with a complimentary glass of Merlot :-) The free Wi-Fi is excellent and speedy - the upgrade was definitely worth it (£2 to upgrade which gets me the normally £6 Wi-Fi, free wine and dinner). My new Archos G9 101 tablet is working very well and for a quick trip like this it's so much better than a laptop.*
Don’t forget complimentary tea too:-)
In which I apologise for this week being low on blog posts and update you on my AstraZeneca placement. Also I use software I normally use for research for other purposes.I'm sorry there haven't been any updates this week. There was no cake made as I had no time for choir on Tuesday, no tea as it's an alternate week and the usual Thor update is delayed (pending a hot wire cutter).
This week I started my work placement at AstraZeneca, the industrial part of my Industrial CASE PhD (see my post on PhD types). Apart from the system shock due to waking up significantly earlier than usual (my commute to UoM is a 15-20 min walk not a 45-60 min drive) the week has been good so far :) I've gone through a load of induction sessions and lots of positive feedback on my study designs and planning for the weeks ahead.
Next week I start work proper with my first study and hopefully the results will be as we predict. Sadly for now I can't give any more details due to confidentiality agreements. Rest assured though if I get a publication out of this placement (which I hope I will) it will be mentioned in this blog :)
On Monday night I managed to take a good set of photos of fellow Scout leader and Networker (Womble) walking ominously towards my camera. I used ImageJ a free, java based image tool commonly used by MRI researchers to animate this simple gif:
Weeping Womble (640)
After fixing some timing issues, adding 'blinks' and a final word of warning I ended up with this final masterpiece of internet animation:
Weeping Womble Final (640)
Proof that research software can be quite fun in your spare time!
Tom Out!
P.S. AstraZeneca
P.P.S ImageJ
So following my post earlier today I now have a working xorg.conf and KDE 4.8.3 is running smoothly. Turns out there is an easy to use utility called nvidia-xconfig which I had overlooked and did the job perfectly. Also importantly I now have Chromium (Chrome for Linux if you didn't know) installed :) Time to start tinkering!
KDE 4.8.3 – looking good
I've provided my xorg.conf here in-case it is useful to anyone. This works with a Nvidia GTS 450 linked by HDMI to a Panasonic 42" TX-P42U30B Plasma TV:
# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig: version 295.71 (buildmeister@swio-display-x86-rhel47-04.nvidia.com) Thu Aug 2 20:28:32 PDT 2012
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Layout0"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "glx"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
# generated from data in "/etc/conf.d/gpm"
Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
EndSection
Section "Modes"
Identifier "Modes0"
ModeLine "1920x1080@60" 182.28 1920 1952 2640 2672 1080 1102 1113 1135
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Unkown"
ModelName "Unknown"
UseModes "Modes0"
HorizSync 28.0 - 33.0
VertRefresh 43.0 - 72.0
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "GTS450"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "GTS450"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DEP-0"
Option "DPMS" "false"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSectionTom out!