Category Archives: HowTo

Breadboard 5V regulator

Since I intend to do a lot of fiddling with Arduinos, and because I need the soldering practice, I bought the breadboard voltage regulator kit (by Solarbotics) from Makershed. The kit is simple – it just requires the soldering of … Continue reading

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cloning trick: ligation of multiple inserts

I’ve spent the last couple months building a plasmid library, and in the process I thought of a trick. Ligations, perhaps the worst part of cloning, are notoriously finicky reactions. The goal is to take several pieces of linear DNA, … Continue reading

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Mindforge Tutorial: Cleartype Tuner

As part of the continuing closet-cleaning series: WindowsXP text is ugly and induces eye-pain and headaches. Here’s what you can do about it:

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Mindforge Tutorial: Try out Linux using Wubi

Still cleaning out the closet… I made this video tutorial a couple years ago for my brother‘s and my short-lived computer company. It’s a little outdated, but (probably) still accurate.

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Mindforge Tutorial: Disk Images

If your first thought, when reading the title of this post, was “What in the hell is a disk image?”, you probably aren’t alone. But before you decide that you don’t care enough to read on, let me quickly tell … Continue reading

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LabTeX

Lab notebooks are the linchpin of any scientific endeavor, since they serve as proof for everything that an investigator has done (and as a personal reference for long-forgotten protocols). The standard is to use a bound notebook with handwritten (in … Continue reading

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useful bioinformatics resources

I’ll try to keep this page updated with the kinds of things that I’m familiar with and find the most useful. The resources in this list will be used extensively in tutorials on this site. General Genes:       … Continue reading

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Get Notepad++ NOW

What follows is from an old post I wrote on replacing Windows Notepad with Notepad++, but is just the part where I ramble about how amazing it is and why you should use it. To get to the post on … Continue reading

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Notepad++ and Regular Expressions

A few years ago I wrote a post on making Notepad++ your default text editor, wherein I expressed my extreme love for this little piece of open source software. To date, I use it for just about everything and, after … Continue reading

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Connecting Python to the Web at UT Southwestern

While working on a little Python script to do  some datamining for lab, I stumbled upon a serious problem: When connecting to the Internet via the school’s network, whether hard-wired, wifi, or through VPN, I could not get Python to … Continue reading

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