Finished Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett. He was a genius with amazing books, and this one is no different. As every Discworld novel, kept me entertained until the end and had a lot of funny moments. Totally recommended, even if you know nothing about Discworld!
Can’t believe OmniFocus 4 is finally out! I’ve been using the beta for what it feels like forever and I’m glad the good people at the Omni Group managed to get it out before Christmas. They deserve a nice holidays break!
David vs Goliath: Beeper is trying to fight with Apple
From Beeper’s blog: We—of course—expected a response. What we didn’t expect was 1984-esque doublespeak. The statement is complete FUD. Beeper Mini made communication between Android and iPhone users more secure. That is a fact. Make no mistake, the changes Apple made on Friday were designed to …
I took some images using a microscope that uses a technique that breaks the light limit, called super-resolution. It allows to show structures smaller than the light we see coming from them. Here the cell’s skeleton (actin filaments, that help cells move and keep everything in place inside it).
The water heater broke today; the warranty expired a few months ago. Something similar happened with the fridge a few months ago. Is there a secret code in appliances that makes them malfunction as soon as the warranty expires? Maybe we can start a new conspiracy theory…
Finished today the Audiobook Red Team Blues, from @pluralistic@mamot.fr A fantastic novel, perfectly narrated by Wil Wheaton. I don’t know how Cory will continue the saga, as the story is very well round up, but I’m looking forward to the second part next year!
Finished Avatar: Legend of Korra today. I know I’m late to the game, but I really liked it and was a good closing to the Avatar series. It started a bit meh and took me a while to get hooked, but they really stepped up and got a very well rounded story. I’m glad I got into the series this year!
The fun part of naming genes when working with flies
Fly scientists have a good sense of humor. When naming genes, they have way more creativity than scientists working with mammals. Our (human) genes are named p53, RAS, CELSR, FGF, etc. All acronyms that define the function of the product. But fly people are fun.
Two in one: When work gets in the way of blogging, plus I finally finished writing my big manuscript
Looking backwards, I started my blog at a bad time. My research project was reaching its final stage, and that meant having to write a lot. If I think about it, maybe me starting the blog was a way to try to avoid starting writing, but I really though with all that was happening with Twitter (and …
Today I had a Teams remote meeting where the browser window only showed an error message, but somehow my image and audio worked. I’ve been talking to a bunch of URLs and numbers for about 20 min while the other party could see me without any problem. It’s been… weird.
Bloggers, mini-bloggers and micro-bloggers: what’s your take on blog analytics? I know micro.blog doesn’t give you, but do you use tools like tinylytics or do you prefer not to know how many people visit your posts?
I started educating myself to use Salesforce’s CRM to manage part of our nonprofit. It’s insane the amount of things one can do with that! I know most of the stuff I could do it with a custom database (MySQL, FileMaker or Panorama), but it’s great to have all the tools ready to be used already.
I spent about 100 hours playing Slay the Spire on Steam two years ago and unlocked everything. Apple Arcade releases Slay the spire+. Me: “nah this time I won’t play that much” 50 hours later… Me: “just one more run with the Defect before going to bed” Damn that game is addictive.
The only Prime Day deal I’ll recommend is to leave Audible and join Libro.fm, which allows you to escape the giant’s (Amazon) grasp, support your local library and, if you subscribe with this offer, you get a free credit for any audiobook, with no strings attached so you can unsubscribe …
Reading about Threads I’ve seen takes complaining about it not being available in the EU due to its “draconic laws”. Surprisingly, this comes from people that have normally been privacy advocates. I’m happy EU reps have taken privacy seriously, and I hope they don’t …
Opened the first rosé of the season. Starting with a 2022 Ridge Lytton Estate Rosé was a great idea. Zesty, perfect amount of sweetness and just delicious and refreshing. One of the best Rosé around here! 🍷
Finished yesterday Avatar: the last Airbender. I’m very late to the train, as it was finished 15 years ago, but I have to say: it is one of the best animated series that I’ve watched, both in terms of character development and worldbuilding. Can understand how they’ve created such …
Sad to see it finally happening. Apollo, the best iOS app for Reddit, closes on June 30. They won’t be the only, and it seems Reddit got what they wanted, kill all 3rd party apps. Another sign that social sites are in self-destruct mode and now, more than ever, it’s critical to own your content.
For those looking to dump Reddit after the new API rules come into play and 3rd party apps are banished… Lemmi is the ActivityPub open alternative to Reddit. Think Mastodon for Reddit. Right now is almost empty, big drawback, but if enough people migrate, it might become a good place to hang out.
And like Twitter, Reddit is going full greedy and committed to kill third-party apps like Apollo and destroy their service. Every day, it’s clearer that open alternatives are the only way for social media. As for me, I’ll slowly walk away from Reddit and increase my focus on Micro.blog …
Happy 20th anniversary, Wordpress! Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth …
Little manuscript submitted! We created a very easy to use script to automatically recognize and count cells that are too close to each other to be easily counted, even by hand. Proud of the hours I poured into this protocol. Now wait for editors to decide whether to publish or not.
Today was the day I had to decide whether Micro.blog was going to stick for me or not. I’m glad to say that after the trial period, I found it very appealing for many reasons and I’ll stay around here to host my thoughts and rumbling. And of course, with crossposting it will all go to …
Saturday at the lab, admiring the neatness of the bench and the electronics of a pipette. Simple, yet still interesting to observe daily lab equipment.
My years-long journey with Reference Managers
I did my first real lab work back in 2010. I joined Ernst Wimmer’s lab in Germany during my Erasmus Scholarship and for the first time, I was exposed to proper lab work, lab notebooks, reading articles within a project, and scientific writing, including citing vast amounts of reference …