Browse > Home / Archive by category 'How To'

Embedding a 3D figure into a PDF

November 9th, 2009

How do you share a 3D diagram? Acrobat! It turns out that the ubiquitous Acrobat Reader contains a 3D engine that works great for distributing interactive 3D figures.

Setting bash variables from an XML file

November 8th, 2009

Here’s a quick way to set bash variables using data from an XML file

Posted in Computer, How To

A side view of cells with Galena

September 22nd, 2009

Putting small, cubic, crystals of galena on the surface of a culture dish provides flat surfaces that are ideal for good side-views of attached cells for light microscopy.

Valap brush

September 21st, 2009

I made a valap brush—essentially a modified soldering iron, with a metal brush at the end. It heats up just enough to melt the valap—so you dip it into solid valap, which it melts, then you paint the liquid valap on at leisure.

Installing VTK on Mac OS X

September 6th, 2009

Download Universal Binaries of the VTK libraries for OS X here (also how to build them yourself). The comet program uses VTK for all its 3D rendering—if you want to compile comet with 3D output, you’ll need to link against the VTK libraries.

Tags: ,

Building GSL as a Universal Binary

September 5th, 2009

Here’s a universal binary of the Gnu Scientific library (GSL) for OS X, including the ppc, ppc64, i386 and x86_64 architectures. Works with Leopard and Snow Leopard.