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Some useful customizations for macOS.
4 minute read
Published:
I started using a Mac back in 2018. My computer, an fairly standard HP laptop I’d bought back in 2013, was beginning to become a source of troubles. The charger wouldn’t charge, the keyboard wouldn’t hold the keys in place, and generally the computer wouldn’t compute. This was a problem, given that I was a destitute student. To my surprise, older MacBooks (the white poylycarbonate MacBooks made back in 2010) where dirt cheap, even when bought from overseas and thus with shipping and custom costs included in the price. I bought one for about 130€. It lacked the Euro (€) key and I couldn’t type words containing an ñ directly, but it felt like a small inconvenience and I quickly found workarounds. That little laptop proved hardy and powerful enough for my daily tasks, and it carried me through a computational physics course during which the rubber in the bottom peeled due to the excessive heat emanating from its dying processor. It was a pretty nice machine.
PAULA: Protein Analysis Using a Least-squares Approach
4 minute read
Published:
Last year, I took a physical chemistry class which had to do with the behaviour and analysis of biomolecules (mainly proteins and nucleic acids). It was fun to step outside of my comfort zone and being in a chemistry lab again, and I had a great deal of fun learning about bio-stuff again. The course worked by alternating theory classes (where we learned the formal aspects of the techniques we would later apply) and lab sessions. We were given a small sample of the problem molecule which we wanted to characterise over a period of two-or-so months, which in this case was hen egg-white lysozyme, a cheap and common protein. One goal was to pass polarised ultraviolet light through a sample of this protein, and measure how well the protein is able to twist the plane of the incident light rays. This technique is called far-ultraviolet circular dychroism, and it turns out that learning about the way a protein interacts with these particular wavelengths in this very particular sense yields a great deal of information about its structure!
Exporting your FilmAffinity profile to a .csv file using R.
5 minute read
Published:
Updated May 14th 2024: the code stopped working after FilmAffinity changed the way ratings are shown. A small change in the code was needed to take this into consideration. Thanks to those who emailed me about it!
Making animations in R.
9 minute read
Published:
Animating the results of a simulation comes in handy very frequently, especially when one wants to check the evolution of a system. Even though R does not have native tools especially desiged to generate .gif files, it can be easily done by putting a few lines of code together. To illustrate this, I’ll show the steps to create a simple animation, but keep in mind that the process can be modified to make more complex animations. (There’s nothing a quick Google search won’t give away when it comes to making an R plot look prettier). The full code for this example is available at the end of this post, but I want to explain every bit first to make it clear. Let’s start.