Random useful thoughts

Since my last post about it, the method to upload via Garmin Connect has stopped working. It relied on using the old version of the Garmin website, which has been taken down. I now use GPSBabel with the front end gpsbabelfe (listed as gpsbabel-gui), both available on the Linux Mint repos. Using the input options: snwhite=0,get_posn=0,power_off=0,erase_t=0,resettime=0 and output options: course=0 Works well and can be uploaded straight into Strava.

I recently bought an Ibanez GA5GCE and absolutely adore it. It's as if Ibanez put everything I like about my RG570 into a classical acoustic guitar. Thin neck, low action, easy high fret access, slim body, perfect! My only gripe was that the cable connecting the electronics inside was loose, which caused a rattle when moving the guitar around and an annoying buzz on certain notes. I googled and found other people having similar issues with different guitars. Their fix was to remove the strings, put your hand inside the guitar and reroute the cable in a position that wouldn't move. I tried this but couldn't fit my hand inside as the body is so small and thin and I have quite large hands. In the end I fixed the problem by removing the electronic control panel and tightening the wire as described below. Unscrew the four screws that hold the panel in place. It comes out easily as shown. Inside the guitar you can see that the offending cable is the one connecting the jack...

So, chrome is my favourite web browser but by default it has some annoyances. Luckily these can be fixed by editing the flags page: chrome://flags/ My pet peeves are: Overscroll history navigation : this constantly wants me to go back a page if i don't scroll perfectly up and down on the thinkpad pointing stick mouse Smooth Scrolling : makes everything seem laggy and unresponsive. Like mouse smoothing on games, never wanted. These are easily turned off in the flags page

More of a note to self than a blog post, but a really useful way to generate vectors of binary numbers in Matlab is the following dec2bin(Num,nBits)-'0' This generates a vector of "nBits" in length for number "Num". The '0' at the end converts it from a string into a vector for some reason. E.g. dec2bin(3,4)-'0' = [0 0 1 1] I found this out from Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5744576/convert-decimal-to-binary-vector

Annoyingly, when trying to use the IOP journal template with the amsmath package you receive an error saying ! LaTeX Error: Command \equation* already defined.                Or name \end... illegal, see p.192 of the manual. which is caused by both amsmath and iopart having a definition for \equation*. This error occurs whether or not you are using \equation*. Not using amsmath makes writing maths so horrific you may as well use Word, but there is a way round; place the following lines before importing the amsmath package: \expandafter\let\csname equation*\endcsname\relax \expandafter\let\csname endequation*\endcsname\relax This removes the \equation* definition from iopart so that there isn't a clash when amsmath is imported. Perfect! Now you can use \align, \eqref, \text , etc. which are not part of the iopart package. I found this solution on stack exchange , but it took quite a while to find. Happy Latexing!

In the last post I looked at how much of your pay check goes into national insurance and tax both in absolute value and percentage. In this post I look at how much it is possible to claim in tax credits and how this would have changed under the now scrapped cuts proposed in the summer. The tax credit system as a whole is pretty complicated and there are many rules and regulations about who can claim etc. There are also added complications when situations change during a year, for example due to change in earnings or birth of a child. I will not look at the complicated edge cases but rather some simple situations so that trends can be seen. I am also not in any way an expert in taxes, in fact I have spend the vast majority of my life in education and therefore not paying any tax. Furthermore even though I currently have a job and pay tax it is in Germany, so I have no first hand experience. This study is purely for curiosity's sake. To accurately calculate your own claim to tax c...