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articles code

Convert notes from Simplenote to Zim Desktop Wiki

Zim Desktop Wiki is my primary note-making software. I use it to take notes, organize my projects, manage daily and long-term tasks, grow a digital garden, keep a journal, and more. Zim is great for the desktop, but it lacks a mobile app. So I’ve been using Simplenote for saving notes on the go. The […]

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articles code science

EvoDevo Papers on Mastodon

Back in 2015, I created EvoDevo_Papers, an automated account that tweets the latest research papers in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (or evo-devo). I was inspired by the FlyPapers Experiment and the pioneers bots @fly_papers and @phy_papers. I wanted something similar for the evo-devo community to keep up with the literature and discover interesting […]

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imaging articles code

ImageJ macro to synchronize and combine image stacks

When I film embryos under the microscope, some will be younger and some will be older than others—they are never in perfect synchrony. This is fine when watching the recordings of individual embryos, but becomes an issue when you want to watch two (or more) embryos developing side-by-side. In my case, I want to identify […]

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notes code

The PostdocNet website

Sometime ago I created a new logo for the PostdocNet, the network of postdocs of the Max Planck Society. The next step was re-designing their website… but then came 2020! Despite the challenging year, the website recently went live! I hope people enjoy the new visuals and I’m happy to have contributed to the PostdocNet […]

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articles code

Convert video to animated GIF

Something I’m doing more often is converting videos of developing embryos or marine invertebrates to animated GIFs. But how can you do this conversion without affecting the quality of the video? Some time ago I found this guide to convert videos to high-quality animated GIFs using the tool FFmpeg. The trick is to generate a […]

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notes code

The PostdocNet logo

The PostdocNet is an organization that represents the collective of postdoctoral researchers working in the Max Planck institutes spread throughout Germany. The network is relatively recent, only founded in 2019, but has already put forward important proposals to improve the working conditions and career development of postdocs. A few months ago they contacted me to […]

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science articles code

Search PLOS articles using DuckDuckGo

Last year I decided to experiment with DuckDuckHack, the developer platform for the search engine DuckDuckGo. The idea was to use the instant answers to find scientific articles as a quick Google Scholar shortcut. It’s feasible, in principle, but I decided to try something simpler. A plugin that uses the PLOS API to search their […]

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code notes

PLOS DuckDuckHack

Just prototyped a @duckduckhack spice plugin with @PLOS Search API! It shows top5 articles for a query. Suggestions? Edit: check out the final version.

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articles biology code

Living Bibliography

Living Bibliography was born when, a few weeks ago, on a Saturday morning, I bumped into the Hack4Knowledge, a meeting to build apps, tools, and remixes with existing databases to innovate and enrich the creation and dissemination of knowledge. I was already playing with the Mendeley API and took the opportunity to put an idea […]

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notes code

A bicycle for the mind

[The bike is] one of the great force amplifiers of all time because it doesn’t detract from us–it takes everything we’ve got and amplifies it. Most computers today are sold like cars, where as many things as possible are done for you. You don’t have to understand how it works and, in fact, you don’t […]