Top 1%

Quick follow-up on a metric I first reported five years ago - I'm still in the Top 30 categorization researchers worldwide (among about 4500 published authors). That puts me in the top 1%. Methodology here:  http://willslabblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/top-30.html

Supporting Wikimedia Foundation

I donated $20 to support wikipedia.

Supporting FSFE

I joined the Free Software Foundation Europe as a supporter (60 EUR annual payment).

Supporting GNU Toolchain

GNU toolchain, which includes a great C/C++ compiler among many other things, is central to many free software projects. They are now accepting donations. I donated around 7 mBTC (milli-Bitcoin, as of 2017-09-11, 1 mBTC = ~ £5).

This was the first thing I've ever done with Bitcoin, and it was a bit of a faff. Buying bitcoin with GBP is not easy, and involves all manner of authentication steps, including mobile phone verification - so...much harder than getting, say, Euros or US Dollars.

Supporting TOR

Tor is a web browser and project standing against tracking, surveillance, and censorship. At the moment, Mozilla is matching all donations - I donated $75 (and got a free t-shirt).

https://donate.torproject.org/pdr

Installing PsychoPy 1.85.3 on Ubuntu 17.04

This is a bit fiddly. The following worked for me:

N.B. Do not try to do just Stage 2. This will not work and may break stuff.
Stage 1
Install psychopy from the neurodebian repository (see PsychoPy website), but ensure you use --install-suggests i.e.

sudo apt-get install --install-suggests psychopy

You also should install flac if you don't have it

sudo apt-get install flac

This should give you a working version 1.83.

Stage 2

However, some scripts written in the current version 1.85.3, won't work, so you now need to update to the latest version. You can do this using  pip install (as covered on the PsychoPy website). I installed the following components listed on the psychopy website, which is mainly the core bits (I did not try to install button box support etc.):

pip install numpy scipy matplotlib pandas pyopengl pyglet pillow moviepy lxml openpyxl configobj psychopy

pip install xlrd

pip install psychopy_ext

pip install python-bidi

pip install cffi pysounddevice pysoundfile

In addition I also had to install the following things not mentioned on the PsychoPy website:

pip install json_tricks

Paying for free stuff through Patreon

My monthly Patreon payments just went out - Bryan Lunduke ($2) - Linux journalist and activist - and Zoe Blade ($2) - just super-cool electronic music artist.