Server space – cloud or on-campus?


Cloud storage is not the cure-all it is sometimes proposed to be. On-campus servers have some advantages in transmission speed and cost, especially as storage requirements grow considerably. Talk to your campus IT services before shelling…



Bias – Good people aren’t good enough

This is a bit off topic, but it’s my blog, so I’ll allow it.
A brief note on bias:
It’s not good enough to be a good person. Bias can be like an optical…



EasyEDA update – online circuit design

We posted about EasyEDA years ago. They’re going strong. They’ve updated the software, and added an online, free Gerber viewer. They’ve also branched out and sell components.



New online forum for Labrigger

Here are the new Labrigger forums, running on Discourse.

Background: Justin Kiggins asked about having a Slack channel for Labrigger. The poll indicated majority support, so we agreed to set it up….



Labrigger on Twitter

FYI: Labrigger also has a Twitter feed, which has content that doesn’t show up on this web page.



Optical Revolution meeting, Sept 6-10, Woods Hole

The 71st Annual Symposium of General Physiologists is entitled “The Optical Revolution in Physiology: from Membrane to Brain“. It features some great scientists including: Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Atsushi Miyawaki, Eric Betzig, Vivian Gradinaru,…



Using NI DAQmx in MATLAB

This post is from Rob Campbell:
As part of TENSS we have created a set of examples showing how to use DAQmx in MATLAB without the Data Acquisition Toolbox. This…



OpenMV – Fast and easy machine vision

OpenMV is an open source machine vision system. It’s designed to be easy-to-use, with a gentle learning curve. They want this to be the “Arduino of Machine Vision”. The software IDE…



Moire lenses

Moiré lenses are cool: two patterned diffractive optical elements are rotated relative to each other to vary the power of the “lens”. Just watch the video (below).

Demonstration of focus-tunable diffractive Moiré-lenses
Stefan Bernet,…



Democratized state-of-the-art neuroscience

Andre and colleagues have a preprint up on their project generating inexpensive instrumentation for imaging and optogenetics experiments. The 100 Euro Lab: A 3-D Printable Open Source Platform For Fluorescence…



March for Science – Apr 22

OSA – Optical Society of America
SfN – Society for Neuroscience
March for Science



Nature is diluting their brand

From MIT.
Hat tip to J.S.

More print-outs:
Flyer in the Physics building
Kawaii psychophysics



Actually useful comments on scientific blogging

I came across Rachel Thomas’ comments on blogging in the context of machine learning, and they’re good. I’ve been telling people things like this for awhile now and Rachel distills them better than I…



PMT power supply

I was cleaning house a bit, and among my old files I found this, which might be worth sharing. Years ago I made a centralized power supply for a custom 2-photon imaging system I built. There…



Driving a green laser pointer with MicroManager

Reminder: green laser pointers have a ton of IR in them. It needs to be filtered out if you don’t want it. See this old (2011!) Labrigger post.

I.e., Paul and Kurt are…