Mine

24 Oct ’08

Mashing vector graphics with bitmaps

When publishing figures, you want your images to look sharp. When processing figures with lots and lots and lots of data points (i.e. proteome comparisons), you do not want to store all these dots in a svg format. Rather, you want to convert the dots to a png picture, import the png into inkscape, and then add the axis, the labels and shuffle around the panels of your figure in the right order.

To be able to do this while retaining quality, some magick is required.

23 Oct ’08

One Twit to rule them all

Ran into a few blogposts that explained how I could synchronize my facebook and hyves updates by using twitter. he two applets you need are twwwitter and a facebook app to let hyves and facebook be updated by twitter.

It is that easy :). Now just to figure out how I put my twitters on my 'me' profile on this webpage, and we are slowly freeing ourselves from social websites.

update: It's also possible to update your gtalk status with your twitter messages, using twitter2gtalk
update2: It's also possible to get your friends' facebook status messages send back to twitter, using twitterfeed.com

7 Sep ’08

Stabilizing camera movies

Have been making small movies with my photocamera this weekend, and put some effort into post-processing the movies. For some it was necessary to rotate the avi file by 90 degree, and for others some kind of image stabilization was very needed (I'm not a natural steady shot, which is interesting when you're shooting movies, handbows and crossbows). Doing these things is not as hard as may sound, and I've documented the howto here.

16 Jun ’07

The impact of a sunset

A sunset just passed by, and it is pretty. We've all seen thousands of sunsets (mainly in the evening), and for a moment I wonder what biological effects a sunset still has on human beings. Wikipedia has remarkably little to say on the topic of circadian rhythms or melanopsin-containing ganglion cells, which are the photosensitive cells in your eyes (not rods or cones) that are responsible for these nonvisual effects of light on your body.

14 Jun ’07

The 100th Monkey

Something I heard come up about a thousand times before, as it is a fairly popular story.. and as I am a biologist, my expert opinion ;) is requested *cough*. To stop the embarrassment of knowing nothing more than the story itself, I took it upon myself to study the story in a bit more detail..

But first, a summary of the hundredth monkey story:

26 May ’07

The missing fossile link

If I remember correctly, one of the criticisms on the evolution theory, is the gaps in the fossile record. There has long been a search for fossiles of ape-men, and of other in-between species (reptiles and mammals, for example). With my understanding and knowledge of biological experiments on the evolution of species expanding, I wonder if this gap has not yet been closed.. not by finding fossiles (which may have well occurred with me being unaware of it), but by the observation that evolution isn't the slooooooooooooow process people expect it to be.

Yours

14 Jun ’08

Haiku

The sleeplessness of a friend of mine gave rise to a number of Haiku poems that he shared with me. I'm not often exposed to haiku, and was surprised by how much I liked them. Here are three of them.

16 Jan ’08

Musicovery, Deezer

If you've given up on the US-only Pandora.com, and Last.FM hasn't snared you, then there's two france-based alternatives: Musicovery (excellent party interface) and Deezer (just excellent for music). The former is still accessible for everyone, and the latter can be unlocked with some javascript, so that you can access all the music on it.

7 Aug ’07

Microbia

This is just too cool. I just returned from an exposition called 'Genesis' in the central museum of utrecht, and saw a short movie of two dutch filmmakers (Floris Kaayk and Sil van der Woerd). These two have been creating (fictional) nature documentaries of artificial lifeforms. These movies are called "The order Electrus" and "Metalosis Maligna" and are definitely worth watching.

29 Jun ’07

Jabber web client with transports

Just a small thing: Colibri IM is a web-based java jabber client. The reason why you'd want to use something as unstable as jabber transports to communicate with your MSN / ICQ friends instead of MSN or Meebo's webchat interfaces?

4 Jun ’07

Commuting by Bike

Spotted an article from some american in Amsterdam (capital of the my country) about bikes. Brought a big smile to my face to see his pictures of biking people and read his suprised comments about our biking habits. Bikes are such a great way to navigate our compact cities!

Also visit: Bag of Souls

Wandering Thoughts serves as my second weblog, where the things end up that don't fit the artificial life theme of BagofSouls.com, but that I do want to write about.