How-to's and tutorials

Tutorials

Embarrassingly (and potentially dangerously) amateuristic, but possibly useful.

• My introduction to statistics via simulation programming; also presents an argument for a valid role of NHST in experimental research.
• Programming online tasks in barebones JavaScript.
• Programming Tasks for Psychological Experiments using Presentation.
• Data Wrangling in Social Science and Psychophysiology using Matlab.
• Sending triggers and event markers via USB, how to get TTL pulses and other marker-bits out of a USB port.
• Homebrew Heart Rate Sensor Measurement via Arduino.

Note: there's another "book" floating around that's actually just an expensive version of my thesis, which is freely available here as a PDF.

Brief how-to's and worse tutorials

• SPSS Macro's, syntax for running a regression as a Macro over a vector of dependent variables.
• A wavelet analysis tutorial that even a psychologist (like me) could understand (PDF), from trying to figure this out as a student.
• Me, Myself, and MRI (PDF), more "pathetic first attempts at understanding something technical by a psychologist."
• R example program.
• Linux command line basics.
• Overlaying images in Matlab.
• Interactive plotting in Matlab.
• Printing high-resolution figures in Matlab.
• Batch-process SPM analyses.
• Similar matrices and linear transformations.
• Formulas for statistics.
• Principal Components Analysis (PCA).
• Reset MySQL root password
• Use MySQL to get information from the UCSC genome database.
• Stop Windows Vista autoupdate from restarting.
• Nesting conditions.
• Save high-resolution figures from PowerPoint.

Random odds and ends

• SHERPA/ROMEO journal policies on self-archiving.
• Pubmed: "Lastname INITIALS"[AUTHOR] AND 2011[DATE - PUBLICATION], or use [AUTHOR - FIRST]
• Firefox: to use the New Tab screen as the homepage, set it to about:newtab
• Word: to keep a chunk of text together, in the sense of not letting it be broken up over different pages, use Keep with Next or Keep Lines Together in the paragraph properties.
• Stop laptop going to sleep mysteriously, despite setting all the obvious power settings correctly. I had this problem on my Lenovo y510p but I've seen other people struggle with it, found the saving tip on a forum for HP laptops. The problem is Intel Rapid Storage Technology, open it up, and disable the "Link" thing on the Performance tab. That seems to also be able to shut things down when it feels like it.
• Install Python with all the good bits, on Windows: don't even try to figure it out, just use the brilliant Anaconda distribution.
• Henson's fMRI Design efficiency page.
• Just got this tip as part of a reviewer invitation: How to be a good (not just nasty) reviewer. I'd add to that: If you don't have the competence to evaluate something properly, don't go ask other people online and copy the harshest opinion someone confidently spouts! I've seen this happen on methodology forums. This could make your review completely unfair and dysfunctional, while by your own tacit admission you're not able to judge whether that's the case or not. If you don't know the extent to which something is a real problem for a paper, be honest and just leave it alone (and learn about it, but not in the context of having a reviewer's potential impact) or raise a much more tentative concern in your review.
• Volume going low on PC after removing headphones: After searching for software solutions, it turned out brute force solves all again in this case: just have to jiggle / lever the headphone plug around while it's half in and if the angle is right the volume goes back to normal.
• List of psychology journals.
• APA formatting checklist
• Mysterious .htaccess and .htpasswd problems when password protecting a directory: Upstream directories may have to have rw permissions (credit to Craig Jacobs).
• Install the Mendeley Web Importer add-on in Firefox when it keeps on losing the connection (taken from a Mozilla Support comment) - right-click and save the add-on xpi file, then open it using firefox.exe.
• Read files with special characters in Python: with open(filename, 'r', encoding="latin-1") as f: