DNA fingerprinting at Bioclub

Last month, I co-organized a DNA fingerprinting workshop at Bioclub, Shibuya. The workshop consisted of a pre-orientation session on Tuesday and 2 days of wet lab experiments during the weekend.

We had a total of 5 attendants, and it was quite challenging to coordinate all of them to complete the workshop in time. Fortunately, the students were all extremely nice and never had a problem with them.

I spent quite a lot of time creating the slides of the pre-orientation session. You can see them above if you want to know the details of the workshop. On Saturday, we extracted DNA from pig and cow liver and amplified a region of the mitochondrial DNA called Cytochrome B by using PCR. Then we mixed the PCR product with a solution of taq1 restriction enzyme and let it digest overnight. On Sunday, we conducted a gel electrophoresis to identify the length of DNA fragments that remained after the digestion. The pattern observed allowed us to distinguish pig tissues from cow tissues.

Tennis in Japan

Recently I got a tennis racquet from Yahoo auctions and I have already played a few times. I am a complete beginner but also a fast learner. At the moment, I am able to serve quite fast but with low accuracy. I also need to control the strength I use to hit the ball.

If you are alone but you want to play tennis, or if you have a group but you don't know how to reserve a tennis court, I suggest you use the Tennisoff website. For example, you can apply to entries containing the sentence 参加者募集中, which means "recruiting participants". Also, if you live close to Tokyo there are tennis meetups where you can participate.

Open Source Conference Tokyo Fall 2018

I forgot to report on Open Source Conference (OSC) Tokyo/Fall 2018. This is probably about the 8th time I attend OSC, but I have only reported it a couple of times. The next one will be in February!

As usual, the event was held at Meisei University, about 15 minutes walk from the Tama Zoo and its station. Actually, I'm embarrassed to say that I have never visited the zoo. Maybe I'll do next time.

The talks. You can find them listed on the event website both for the 27th and 28th sessions. The first talk I went to was given by ftake, and it was useful to catch up with  Btrfs and its transactional updates. I also attended a talk about project Sebastien (android sample).

Apart from the talks, the booths were impressive as usual. In particular, I got interested in Musashino's which was full of second-hand routers modified to run OpenWRT. Some keywords I annotated while I was checking out the booths:

• Xiao project, @osarusystem, iot.osarusystem.com
• magpi.cc, pygame zero invaders (raspi magazine)
• Asus t100ta laptops
• ddrescue (Data recovery tool)
• glusterFS (network file system)
• sl command
• jlcpcb, pcbshopper (cheap PCB makers)
• Murachue nintendo64 Linux port: slides, GitHub, wiki, everdrive64
• opendronemap (create maps with drones)
• maps.gsi.go.jp (in 3D like Google Earth!)
• OKUTAMA+ RasPi astronomy telescope made by mad genius @nanbuwks
• Build and usage examples explained in Qiita
• Open hardware conference (next in February 2019)
• Tokaidoragu meetup in Yokohama in December
• Yuuki Enomoto
• bme280
• irsend
• coscup
• yuki ohgami: genetic MBR
• 2bo

Conclusions: going to OSC is always a good learning experience. I got interested in hacking some second-hand router. I also found super cool the telescope made by @nanbuwks, and I was impressed by Murachue's Linux porting to the Nintendo64.

Edinburgh

In October 2018, I had the chance to attend the Automated Testing Summit and the Embedded Linux Conference in Edinburgh thanks to a sponsorship by the Linux Foundation. I spent most of my time working, attending meetings and discussing projects.

I used the little free time I had to explore the streets of Edinburgh. I was impressed by the city's architecture, and I loved the cobblestone paths and old-style buildings.

In particular, the Edinburgh castle, which is on top of a hill in the middle of the city, was astonishing. The Linux foundation organised a sweet party inside the castle, and even a better one in the National Museum of Scotland, another must-see.

After my hiking trips in Snowdonia and the Black Mountains in Wales, as well as my trip to the Lake District in North West England, I had always wanted to hike in Scotland. I didn't have time for a long route, but luckily Edinburgh has a hill called Arthur's Seat within walking distance.