On Comics

This is just a really big fish (note the hand is several feet away from the glass).

Ever since reading the Medium is the Massage I have been interested in how media is evolving. At the moment I read/watch several media: television, movies, webcomics, internet articles, internet discussion, blogs, newspapers, fliers, Facebook, scientific articles and e-mail. Each are unique with their own strengths and weaknesses, I was interested to find this brief essay/illustration (much like Scott McCloud) on the evolution of the online comic.

Read Full Post »

GeekTools Commands

A nice way to decorate an underpass.

The other day I mentioned that I starting using GeekTools. When I first got it thought “Looks pretty cool” followed by “How do I do that?”. So here are the four commands I use (one is a bit more involved):

System Uptime (Refresh 240):

uptime | awk ‘{print “UPTIME : ” $3 ” “$4″ ” $5 “”}’

System Processes (Refresh 5):

top -ocpu -FR -l2 -n20 | grep ‘^….[1234567890] ‘ | grep -v ‘ 0.0% ..:’ | cut -c 1-24,33-42,64-77

Calender (Refresh 3600):

cal | sed “s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/ $(date +%e) / $(date +%e | sed ‘s/./#/g’) /”

Current iTunes Song (Refresh 10):

osascript /Users/michaelhutchins/Music/iTunesInfo.scpt

This one just actively runs a scripts that I acquired (along with the originals) from this site of GeekTools programs and commands. The uptime I adjusted slightly while the others are pretty much the original.

I should mention that the refresh rates are in seconds even though it has no demarcation.

All of these are Shell scripts with everything at the default setting except font color, I chose white since it shows up better on my current background.

Read Full Post »

Flying Out

I will probably be in a very similar plane.

I am flying out to Seattle today for my first graduate school visit, this one to the University of Washington Earth and Space Science department.

It should be fun, I am already liking it as they are flying me out, housing and providing food.

After this I have a handful of weeks until my next set of visits to Wisconsin and New Hampshire.

Weather is going to be an issue.

Read Full Post »

The Midgie

I need to use my Lensbaby more often.

Last week I was contacted on Flickr as someone wanted to use one of my photos. My photo of the Stirling graveyard is going to be published in a free print travel magazine for Scotland, The Midgie. I might not ever see the photo in print but is a nice feeling to know that I am closer to becoming a published photographer.

This is my first in print publication, though not paid. One day I might be paid for doing what I enjoy (aside form Science).

Read Full Post »

Customizing OS X

The doors of the Santa Barbara Mission.

Always envious of the new laptops and computers being produced I recently started to feel a bit stale with my relatively old computer; I decided to try out a small bit of customization to freshen my OS X install up a bit.

After a bit of searching I found really only two applications to help my computer feel a bit newer. The first was easy enough, a simple dock coloring program. One feature of 10.5 that I really liked was the translucent menu bar, since I rotate my desktop background through my photos once a week or so it is nice to have a subtle color change at the top. With Dock Color I am able to now match my dock as well.

When looking up custom desktop setups one that grabbed me had system information embedded in the background, that is above the desktop wallpaper layer but below everything else (including icons). I found a way to do this through the application GeekTool. With it I my current system processes that use more then 0.1% of my processor listed, current system uptime, a basic calender and my current iTunes playlist.

This resulted in my current desktop which looks like:

My current desktop setup.

On top of the basic OS X applications I found these programs to be essential to a smoothly operating system:

• Quicksilver – A very fast application launcher, much better then spotlight on my system.
• Dropbox – Online file backup and shared folders.
• Caffeine – One-click to prevent display sleep, excellant with the power options being lost in the 10.5.5 update.
• Synergy – Floating overlay that displays the new iTunes song, also adds global iTunes control hotkeys.

The first three are free and there are free alternatives to Synergy out there, in fact a replacement would be global hotkeys and an info display from GeekTools.

With several of these programs (Quicksilver and Geektools come to mind) I only scratching the surface of the potential, but I am perfectly happy sitting on the surface.

Read Full Post »

Another Long Exposure

 

Isla Vista beach at night at high tide, note the kelp.

I spent the day watching safety videos for an X-Ray diffraction machine. I must say that I am not feeling very safe about vacuum hoods.

Read Full Post »

Dropbox

 

A long exposure shot of a UCSB beach.

For my last lab report I was collaborating with my lab partner on data analysis, in the past we e-mailed the documents back and forth which resulted in several duplicates and on one occasion a misunderstanding because of file versions.

Then I joined him in using a program/web service called Dropbox. With Dropbox (the free version) I have 2 Gb of online storage for files. I designate folders on my computer and those folders and their contents are constantly synced with the online service so I can access them anywhere. Likewise if I had multiple computers the folders would stay in sync between them.

Important to my lab work my friend and I can share a folder where we both have access to contents. Secondly revisions are saved on the Dropbox server so if someone, say me, accidently overwrites an important file we can go back and restore the previous version. 

Overall I am really satisfied with the service and it would be perfect if it enabled the editing of the files online (even just basic text files) to keep an ongoing notes file.

In the end the impetus to make me join was that one day I forgot my flash drive and I could not work on my lab without any of my files, after that I quickly joined.

Read Full Post »

Twenty Five Things

Sometimes the train tracks need to be crossed for a good photo.

 

Recently on Facebook there has been a viral meme spreading called 25 Things. In it someone write twenty five things about themselves and tag twenty five people who repeat the process including tagging the original person. I was not tagged for a while then recently I was, I felt that I should write twenty five things but only tag those that tag me, in effect ending my branch of the tree. If I had not read an article (that I can’t find right now) about how this meme spread I might not have been interested enough in doing this. After writing it I thought I could repost it here.
 

The rules for this meme is to write twenty-five things about yourself and tag twenty-five people including the person who initially tagged you. Sort of a chain letter of narcissism. I was initially hesitant about writing one of these, then I was tagged and felt I should end the spreading on my side by simply not tagging anyone new except those that tag me in theirs (not a long list).

1. I have a compulsion to make people laugh through words, it does not always work but I feel that I should try.
2. Due to this I am usually shy around new groups of people until I know what types of humor will make them laugh.
3. Ever since I was little I wanted to be a scientist, I imagined an organized lab with incompressible equipment and most importantly myself in an awesome lab coat. I have come to realize that as a physicist I will never have the clean lab nor the lab coat.
4. I love playing games with other people: card games, board games, video games, laser tag and anything that requires planning and strategy. However I don’t care much for team sports like football (both kinds) or basketball.
5. I used to play a lot of video games during and before high school, now I find that I rarely play any game that is not with friends in the same room.
6. The best I have done in any sporting events is being a part of the second place novice male recurve archery team for Edinburgh University and eighth place in a fencing tournament for novice male foil for UCSB.
7. I just got my driver’s license at the end of last summer and that might be because the guy giving me the test was texting throughout the whole thing. 
8. I have a general aversion to talking on the phone, don’t know why I have it but I find myself almost always preferring any other means of communicating. I really should learn semaphore to help with this.
9. Growing up I never thought much about religion as an institution, I generally thought along buddhist lines with karma but never identified with a single religion. Looking back I can see that it was a generally progression to being an atheist. 
10. While an atheist I still find my diction to be flavored by religious phrases and imagery.
11. I want to live without having any regrets, in the end I want to be happy.
12. I read everything that I can, if nothing is available I will start reading signs, ingredient labels (some good stuff there) or even the safety card in airplanes.
13. When writing I spell out numbers two words or less in length and try to follow grammatical rules. Texting takes me a while.
14. While I consider myself at least a decent photography I find myself really bad at taking photos of people and events. 
15. I don’t like wearing just t-shirts. Whenever I can I like to either have a collared shirt, something hooded or a sweater. However I don’t go all the way and wear blazers like a philosophy major.
16. I enjoy mooching rides from people. For almost all of the school breaks (aside from summer) I have found a ride with someone to someplace sort of near my home. It is always fun to see if a conversation can be kept going for five to six hours. Unless we are stuck in traffic, that is never fun.
17. I associate various bands, albums and genres with particular periods of my life, for example: the first two Franz Ferdinand Albums remind me of Edinburgh while Jack Johnson and the Beatles remind me of my freshman and sophomore year at UCSB. 
18. I love science: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, materials and astronomy. Sure there are some I would rather just love a surface level but overall I really enjoy learning about what we are learning. 
19. I probably own more then forty feet of books, a majority of that consists of science fiction, fantasy and science books. It is unlikely that I will sell any of them.
20. When writing non-academically I use the words “so”, “well” and “but” o the point where it starts to bother me.
21. I really dislike so many of these with starting with “I”.
22. I have never figure out how to use a semi-colon except in computer languages.
23. I enjoy a good story be it from friend, a book, a movie, a TV show, anime, video games, the internets, music, poetry or art. Especially if there are lasers involved. 
24. I love baked goods. It could be that I rarely had any freshly baked items growing up (maybe four times a year) but I do love well baked items or those that are at least half butter or sugar.
25. I am content with calling pi/3 roughly one.

I really should have spent the time writing this working on my lab report, it has been glaring at me this entire time.

Read Full Post »

LaTeX

The Santa Barbara mission at sunset.

Three weeks ago I was writing a lab report for my senior physics lab, the first lab report I had to write in over a year (other labs were all notebook based) and I chose to do it in Microsoft Word 2008. Suffice to say it was a relatively frustrating experience with some very delicate formatting that could not be disturbed by changing fonts, font sizes or line spacing.

While writing the report I looked over my friends paper and it looked amazingly more professional than mine. He used LaTeX, a typesetting language used for any document that requires specific typesetting. It is used extensively in the science academic community because I instantly recognized the default font and format as that used by professors throughout out my time at college.

Now I have a new lab report to write and I am attempting to do so all through LaTeX (alright I initially wrote most it in TextEdit). So far I have have gotten through the 141 page tutorial up to mathematical typesetting, essentially I skimmed over most things I did not need except for the command to display pi. 

One nice thing about LaTeX is that the file can be read by free applications on any operating system and they will display the same results. This is very helpful when needing to send rough drafts between my lab partner and myself as he uses three operating systems.

So far I am using TeXShop and it is all working great. Once a document is written with all of the appropriate tags it needs to be typeset, which is sort of a render or a compile of the document, and if there are no errors (like the wrong command) a PDF file will be the output.

When I first heard about LaTeX I wanted to learn it but I had no motivation, now that I am using it as a tool instead of an abstraction I feel that I am learning it better. In a way it is similar to most learning, if it has to be done either through a class or a job then there is more motivation to learn.

Since it is free I recommend giving it a shot for formatting a final object intended for printing or distribution. I won’t be using it for humanities papers or every day typing (that is taken care of with MacJournal or TexEdit) but for any future lab report it will be my program of choice.

Read Full Post »

University of British Columbia

 

The roof of the San Francisco Academy of Science.

Today I was accepted into the Physics and Astronomy department at the University of British Columbia. This is not an official acceptance yet as the graduate school itself has to also accept me into the program. It is nice in a way to hear back at this stage, it means that in the near or semi-near future I will get a definite yes or no from the school (I am in the same state with New Hampshire).

Unlike the other programs I applied to this one is a Masters program in Canada. I would have applied to the doctoral program but I could not, instead one transfers into the program from within the masters program. I really don’t know how I feel about this method of doing things, on one side if it turns out that I really dislike the school or simply research in general I can stop easily at a Masters and move on. Or I could continue onwards.

Once I hear back from the graduate school officially I will see if they have a day to visit or at least more information about the process. I am hesitant about the UBC for two main reasons: the lack of communication (sent by mail instead of e-mail and in general) and I don’t know if they have enough research that I am interested in at the school.

Reading the acceptance the year pay was listed at $20,000, normal for a program. Except it is probably in Canadian dollars. I then checked craigslist for a quick view of the cost of living and housing was on par with Seattle in terms of the numbers being shown and they were also probably in Canadian, so it will be a comparable to the other schools in pay.

Just waiting now to get more information, in the meantime I have next weekend scheduled for the University of Washington open day.

Read Full Post »