Monthly archives: July, 2011

Jul262011July 26, 2011July 26, 20111Commentby L.

MATLAB Mobile 2.0: cloud computing

Posted in Software

MATLAB Mobile is a way to use MATLAB from an iOS device. It’s cute, but a bit odd, because you used to need to have MATLAB running on your own server in order…

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Jul232011July 23, 2011July 23, 20110Commentby L.

Tell the NIH what to spend money on

Posted in Tips

There’s an RFI (request for information) out now for the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience (the structure that cuts across different institutes that all support neuroscience: NINDS, NIMH, NEI, etc.). These RFIs are an…

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Jul222011July 22, 2011July 23, 20113Commentsby L.

CDF: Mathematica’s PDF

Posted in Software

Wolfram is pushing a new document format called Computable Document Format (CDF). It looks like PDF + embedded Java apps.

One the one hand, there’s the xkcd viewpoint. This is basically just another step…

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Jul212011July 21, 2011July 18, 20114Commentsby L.

Taro Tools and PPT for Igor Pro

Posted in Software

Last Friday afternoon to Saturday morning I had a marathon data analysis session. It was almost completely in Igor Pro. I used TaroTools so heavily that I dropped Taro another thank you note. It’s really saved me so much programming and analysis time. I highly recommend checking it out. Prof. Ishikawa…

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Jul202011July 20, 2011July 17, 20111Commentby L.

Rapid prototyping is rapidly maturing

Posted in Tips

In the past year, since Labrigger’s …

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Jul192011July 19, 2011July 19, 20110Commentby L.

Proto open source

Posted in Uncategorized

Ars Technica has a short, but nice article on the US Government’s role in AT&T’s decision to release Unix to a wider…

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Jul192011July 19, 2011July 17, 20110Commentby L.

Baudline: Signal analysis

Posted in Software

Baudline software (Linux/OSX) is free software for analyzing the spectral components of signals. It’s really well-made and has a lot of features. This can be useful for analyzing…

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Jul182011July 18, 2011July 17, 20110Commentby L.

Draw schematics online

Posted in Software

DrawSCH lets you draw schematics online, in a browser window, and then get JPGs or PNGs emailed to you. (link)

PDF export is in the works, but the SVG export works fine, if you want a vector file. Handy.

(via)

…

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Jul172011July 17, 2011July 16, 20113Commentsby L.

2pLSM: When will scientists stop making their own?

Posted in Hardware

In the early days of patch clamp electrophysiology, everyone made their own patch clamp amplifiers because there were none commercially available. I was lucky enough to be educated by scientists of such lineage, and…

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Jul162011July 16, 2011July 16, 20111Commentby L.

OpenPCR: Now shipping

Posted in Hardware

Over a year ago, we covered the OpenPCR project. Following their successful Kickstarter campaign, which netted twice their funding goal, they’re now actually shipping the devices.

To start, this is a $512 PCR machine…

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Jul032011July 3, 2011July 3, 20110Commentby L.

Papers per person per year

Posted in Uncategorized

The subject of prolificacy came up in lab the other day. A study from the 80s (pdf) plotted the number of papers from a lab versus the number of people in…

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