Category: Journal

• October 3, 2012

  USB extension cables

  Here’s a standard USB webcam sitting on top of 30 meters of USB extension cables (three 10 meter cables). Three cables daisy chained together with the webcam attached to the end seems to be the functional limit. Adding a 4th 10-meter cable results in the camera not being recognized. These 10 meter extension cables, also…
• January 25, 2012

  ncdf4 R package binaries for Windows

  David Pierce has made available a pre-packaged Windows binary version of his ncdf4 package for R. Go to his ncdf page to download the zip file you need. The current file at the time of this writing is ncdf_1.8.1.zip. http://cirrus.ucsd.edu/~pierce/ncdf/ After downloading the zip file to your Windows computer, you can install this R package…
• September 7, 2011

  Digitizing data from old figures with ImageJ

  Following on this earlier post concerning the retrieval of data from figures in published papers with R, here is a method for doing the same with ImageJ. This is a freely available program that should run on Windows/Mac/Linux, just like R. To extract data points from a figure, you’ll need the Figure_Calibration plugin developed by…
• August 19, 2011

  ImageJ paint brush tool keyboard shortcut

  ImageJ is easy to modify if you know a bit of Java. I don’t know any Java. But here’s what I did to add keyboard shortcuts for the paint brush tool and the line selection tool. The code is based off this help file from the ImageJ website: http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/docs/guide/userguide-32.html The first step was to figure…
• August 12, 2011

  Measuring leaf or algae blade area in a digital photo with ImageJ

  The following is a tutorial on using the freely available ImageJ program from the National Institutes of Health for estimating the area of a leaf or algae blade (or anything else). The process is straightforward once you understand the various steps. You must begin with a photograph of your object, flattened and dried off as…
• July 22, 2011

  BBQ controller, version 2

  I have recently started using an Arduino microcontroller setup to control the temperature in my electric BBQ smoker. It displays the air temperature and three meat temperatures on an LCD screen, while the temperatures can also be viewed over my home wireless network.
• June 27, 2011

  Nahant coyote

  I ran across one of Nahant’s resident coyotes hanging out in the church parking lot on Sunday morning. Surprisingly, it was not eating a local Nahant child at the time, despite the stated fears of a subset of our community.
• June 5, 2011

  Archived water and air temperatures for Nahant, MA

  I’ve added the archived temperature data for the Marine Science Center to my current conditions page: https://www.lukemiller.org/seawater/. The complete timeseries, with some large breaks when the monitoring computer was shut down, can be downloaded in this csv file: 2010-2012_MSC_temps.csv (5MB, right-click and save-as). There are three columns, with the timestamps in Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5,…
• March 9, 2011

  Deploying barnacle settlement plates

  As the northeast slowly starts to shrug off the shackles of winter, the barnacles decide to start spawning their planktonic larvae that float around for a few days, looking for a place to settle. We use barnacles in experiments all the time, so we set out little granite tiles in the field in central Maine…
• January 12, 2011

  Time lapse of fall 2010

  The video above is a series of photos, taken around 8am daily between Oct 10, 2010 and Jan 1, 2011. The view is of the backyard of my current abode. Taken with a Canon 5D (try the HD version on youtube), 35/1.4, Av mode at f/8, ISO 200. My ocean view, such as it is,…