Roy Bijster

Tromsø: a beautiful place in Northern Norway

Roy Bijster on October 30, 2019

From 12 October – 19 October, my wife and I spent a week in Tromsø (Tromso) in Northern Norway. October is definitely not the busiest time of the year, as most tourists gravitate to either the midnight sun season or the polar night season. Moreover, October is Tromsø’s wettest month, and is notorious for its cloud coverage that hide the northern lights behind a white veil. Nonetheless, we had an amazing time visiting the city and the area. Here are our tips for a trip to this area in October.

Uniform figures in your thesis using Matlab

Roy Bijster on September 14, 2019

If there is one thing that I learned from writing a doctoral thesis, it is how much of a pain managing data and figures can be. For example, you perform a simulation in year 1, an experiment in year 4, and when you write up the journal paper or the thesis chapter in which you compare the two, you need to fetch the right figures and have them look professional, printable, and preferably in a uniform style. Moreover, the figures need to be adaptable to different uses, such as poster presentations, a conference talk or a printed publication. In this article, I will outline the method I have developed for myself for achieving this in Mathworks Matlab and LaTeX.

A visit from St. Nick

Roy Bijster on December 24, 2018

With a modest home recording studio at my disposal and so far no time to really use it, I felt I should do some Christmas greetings in audible format. I ended up recording “A visit from St. Nick”, also known as ” ‘Twas the night before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore / Henry Livingston Jr.

Setting up a home studio for podcasting

Roy Bijster on September 18, 2018

For a few years now I have been thinking of doing something with audio. It was Isabel Curdes on Twitter that set the right example by making audio versions of her blog posts as a trial that triggered me to actually start doing it. I want to set up a podcast / audio blog about things that interest me. There will probably not be an overarching topic other than that.

How to clean up your Twitter feed from politics?

Roy Bijster on September 11, 2018

Over the past years, I’ve been active on Twitter and been part of the analog photography community on that platform. Unfortunately, my Twitter feed has changed from being photography dominated to being polluted by American and US politics. I was about to leave Twitter for a while, when Craig Pindell suggested I just block out the words related to posts I don’t want to see. This seems to work pretty well. Quite a few people have asked me for the list of words I block out, so here it is.

Installing BEM++ from source

Roy Bijster on August 22, 2018

During my PhD, I implemented a Python+BEM++ alternative of the SCUFF-EM code for the fluctuating surface current formalism for near-field radiative heat transfer.

The developers of BEM++ are very active and maintain the code very well. They also try to make the installation of the framework as easy as possible, and release a Docker installer for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Unfortunately, this cannot be used on the computing cluster of Delft University of Technology, because of the lack of root permissions.

The system administrators do not support installing third party software, so I had to go the long way round and do a complete installation from source code myself. From the Google group for BEM++ it seems more people want to run the code under similar circumstances. Below you will find the steps I took to get BEM++ installed on our cluster, and solutions for problems I ran into. You will probably not be able to just copy the steps one-by-one, but I hope it may serve as inspiration to get it going in your environment. A bit of knowledge about linux and compiling will help you a lot.

I am moving to the Fuji X system

Roy Bijster on August 4, 2018

At the Printer Attic I recently published an article titled ‘How the cameras that I use change with how I approach photography’. When I started shooting on large format film, I obtained the possibility to manipulate every sheet entirely to my liking with the print I wanted to make in mind — completely independent from the other pictures I took that day. It made that I slowly moved away from medium format, and started to dislike shooting roll film and 35 mm altogether. When I go out to shoot, I go with making a print in mind. For more casual shooting or vacations, I take a digital camera. The sheer bulk and weight of my digital kit (Canon 6D, Sigma 24-35 mm f/2 and Canon 70-200 mm f/4 USM L) are disproportional to this purpose for me. The bag was left at home, or became a nuisance more than a joy when I went out. I ended up selling the kit in order to replace it with a smaller, and lighter set.

Nothing worse than an empty page

Roy Bijster on July 29, 2018

You probably got here after clicking on ‘Blog’ in the top menu. Unfortunately, there is not much to see here at the moment. I am currently working on rebuilding this site and writing new content.

In the future you can expect blog posts on a broad range of topics. As this is my personal website, there will be no specific theme and the only common denominator will be me. I will be writing about projects that I am working on, technical problems I have encountered, books I’ve read, recipes I have tried, cameras I have bought and pictures I have taken. If those are things that interest you, I would like to ask you to keep an eye on this page and come back later.