Monday, November 09, 2026
Here are some 3D illustrations of choanoflagellates I made to show the lifecycle of the choanoflagellate I’m studying. My goal was to show the shapes of the cells in cartoon-like form for clarity, but with enough detail to show all the important bits, and also convey the 3D relation of the cells in colonies. I […]
Here’s a basic mediawiki extension to render thumbnails for quicktime (.mov) files. Mediawiki (the engine that powers Wikipedia) doesn’t understand Quicktime files by default, so doesn’t produce thumbnails for them. I hacked together this extension to create thumbnails for the movies so you can browse through snapshots of the movies in the search results, media […]
This script re-orders The Economist Audio Edition mp3 files into an iPod audiobook, allowing you to resume from the last listened position and includes chapter marks for each story, and original artwork. I’ve been very happy since The Economist started their audio edition—now I can listen to the whole of the magazine on my iPod! […]
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.
Here’s a quick way to set bash variables using data from an XML file
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.
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.
In my first attempt at making screencasts, I’ve posted two tutorials on how to get the comet program working on OS X.
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.
The comet paper (or ‘In silico reconstitution of actin based symmetry-breaking and motility’) has been accepted to PLoS biology!
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.