Last weekend I made my first ever soda bread. And it was a disaster!

Turns out there's a difference between baking powder and bicarbonate of soda. Basically it barely rose and was very dense.

Forever wanting to learn from my mistakes I found a different recipe and the right ingredients and tried again yesterday morning. And I nailed it! I don't often feel too homesick for Ireland, but this really took me back to my grandfathers table for breakfast. It tastes very different to anything I've found outside of Ireland so I'm glad I can now make it for myself in not much time at all!

As a scientist, I know I have to reference my sources. This protocol is adapted from the BBC Goodfoods Irish Soda Bread recipe and Bigger  Bolder Baking with some small changes.

Preheat your oven to 220 C - the rest doesn't take too long and should be ready as the oven is.

Dry ingredients - mixed together

• 260 g whole wheat flour
• 260 g white / all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 35 g butter (unsalted ideally)
• 1 teaspoon table salt

Wet ingredients - mixed, then poured into dry

• 400 ml butter milk
• 1 egg

When it is all mixed together, don't over kneed it. It shouldn't be too sticky and if it is you may need to add more flour as I had to. Make a rough form on a floured baking sheet. Flatten to about 3-4 cm thick evenly and score the top deeply. Apparently this helps even cooking but I'm no expert! This loaf will rise as it bakes as you'll see in my photos.

At this point you can do something a bit fun. Taking the little bit of leftover buttermilk/egg, spread it over the surface of your dough form, then sprinkle some oats or seeds onto the surface. This will help in browning the crust and give it some flavour.

Place into your pre-heated oven (220 C) for 15 min then, without opening the oven, reduce the temperature to 200 C for  an additional 30 minutes. After it cools slice and enjoy with a large spread of butter.

Other things to try

I am really proud how this one came out. I'm usually more of a helper in the kitchen rather than doing things on my own. I think for the next one, I would add some oats or seeds into the dry mix. Maybe that's not as traditional, but I can make my own Irish traditions out in Austria.

As you may have seen from my previous post, I have now finished my PhD. I wanted to wait until all the final changes to my thesis were done before writing up more posts about doing your thesis through LaTeX.

So, part 2, tables.

Tables are really easy in WYSIWYG programs like Word. Simple tables are not really a problem in LaTeX but the moment you want to do something slightly different, things get harder.

It is possible to just write out the markup for your table from scratch, and that's a good exercise to understand how things work that I recommend to do. However, you can also "cheat" or use a shortcut.

Excel2latex is a plugin for LaTeX that allows you to export the table you design there as LaTeX code directly ready to paste into your environment. You can do things easily that are otherwise fiddly to code in LaTeX such as colouring cells, complex arrangements of merged and split cells, and where to put borders. I used this for every single table in my thesis, editing and fixing small bugs as appropriate. It probably saved hours of time versus writing it myself.

Let's go through some specific examples from my thesis to demonstrate...

The Basics

\usepackage{threeparttable, booktabs} % booktabs for \bottomrule\toprule\midrule
\usepackage{longtable} %for tables that go over more than one page.
\usepackage{array, multirow}

% Table generated by Excel2LaTeX from sheet 'fab'
\begin{table}[ht]
	\caption{French-American-British Classification of AML\cite{Krause2007, Behm2003}} \label{tab:fab} 
	\footnotesize
	\begin{tabular}{lp{0.6\linewidth}l}
	\textbf{FAB\#} & \textbf{AML name} & \textbf{Cell origin} \\
	\midrule
	M0    & Acute myeloblastic leukaemia without differentiation & Myeloblast \\
	M1    & Acute myeloblastic leukaemia with minimal differentiation but with the expression of myeloperoxidase & Myeloblast \\
	M2    & Acute myeloblastic leukaemia with differentiation & Myeloblast \\
	M3    & Acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL) & Promyelocyte \\
	M4    & Acute myelomonocytic leukaemia (AMML) & Monoblast \\
	M4eos  & Acute myelomonocytic leukaemia bone marrow eosinophilia & Monoblast \\
	M5    & Acute monocytic leukaemia (AMoL) & Monoblast \\
	M6    & Acute erythroid leukaemia (AEL) & Proerythroblast \\
	M7    & Acute megakaryocytic leukaemia (AMKL) & Megakaryoblast \\
	\end{tabular}	
\end{table}

Table 1.1 is a simple table with just 3 columns - a good one to start with. The first block of code are the packages I've used for all the tables. Not all are needed for all tables but since they are loaded, it's easier to include them here.

The second block of code first opens the table environment and determines how it is located in document (here, top[of page]). The caption appears at the top of tables by default and at the bottom of figures. Obviously you and probably should include references here. I also labelled all my figures/tables etc for ease of cross referencing. It's easier to do this at the time with something descriptive rather than numbering as your order may change with edits.

I found the default text size in tables too large so I changed everything to \footnotesize but this is a personal choice. Then the actual table data begins with \begin{tabular}. The arguments to this look confusing at first but are easy. If you had {ccc} you'd have 3 columns each with centred text, {lll} would have left aligned text, and {rrr} right aligned. My middle column here is marked to be a particular fraction of the total line width p{0.6\linewidth} because I needed to force the width to be longer for clarity.

The next line is the header row and I've emboldened each of the headers. Note how elements in a row are delimited with "&" and the end of the line is with "\\".  Also note the \midrule to add a line. Then the tabular and table environments need to be closed. That's it! Your first simple LaTeX table. A bit more complicated already than Excel but using the Excel2Latex plugin linked above will help.

Images in tables

% Table generated by Excel2LaTeX from sheet 'C nucleosides 1'
\begin{table}[htbp]
	\footnotesize
	\centering
	\caption{Cytidine and medicinal analogues}
	\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
		\hline
		\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\textbf{Cytidine}} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\textbf{Cytarabine (ara-C)}} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\textbf{Gemcitabine}}\\
		\hline
		\hline
		\includegraphics[width=0.15\linewidth]{Figures/chemicals/cytidine} & \includegraphics[width=0.15\linewidth]{Figures/chemicals/cytarabine} & \includegraphics[width=0.133\linewidth]{Figures/chemicals/gemcitabine} \\
		\hline
	\end{tabular}%
	\label{tab:c-derivatives}%
\end{table}%

Of course it is also possible to include images in a LaTeX table. For this, I found it easier to have the figures already prepared in a folder. Using Excel2latex, you can include the necessary code to include a figure in a column \includegraphics[width=0.30\linewidth]{Figures/chemicals/cytidine} for example.

I'm not actually sure that the multicolumn code is required here - it's been a while since I wrote this so not sure why it's there at all! But it is useful for the next thing I want to explain...

Merging headers

\begin{table}[htbp]
	\centering
	\caption{Common DNA intercalators used in the treatment of haematological and other malignancies}
	\footnotesize
	\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|}
		\hline
		\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{\textbf{Anthracyclines}} \\
		\hline
		\hline
		\multicolumn{1}{|c|}{\textbf{Daunorubicin}} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\textbf{Doxorubicin}} & \multicolumn{1}{c|}{\textbf{Idarubicin}} \\
		\includegraphics[width=0.30\linewidth]{Figures/chemicals/daunorubicin} & \includegraphics[width=0.30\linewidth]{Figures/chemicals/doxorubicin} & \includegraphics[width=0.30\linewidth]{Figures/chemicals/idarubicin} \\
		FDA approved 1979 & FDA approved 1974 & FDA approved 1990 \\
		Indications: & Indications: & Indications: \\
		\multicolumn{1}{|m{4cm}|}{AML, CML, neuroblastoma} & \multicolumn{1}{m{4cm}|}{Bladder, breast, stomach, lung, leukaemias, ovarian, and others} & AML \\
		\hline

Table 1.4 is only part of a more complex larger table but this is sufficient to outline the important next step: merged cells. \multicolumn{3}{|c|}{\textbf{Anthracyclines}} \\  means that we create a column that spans 3 columns, it is centred with lines on each side, and has the bold text Anthracyclines. This can be applied anywhere. LaTeX will count the total number of columns when compiling and throw an error if it is greater than it should be as defined in your \begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|}.

Mixed figures and tables

It is also possible to mix figures and tables together.

% Table generated by Excel2LaTeX from sheet 'Chemical R'
\begin{table}[htbp]
	\centering
	\footnotesize
	\includegraphics[width=0.2\linewidth]{../Figures/chemicals/purinesR3}
	\begin{tabular}{ll|lll}
		Common name & Abbreviation & R1    & R2    & R3 \\
		\hline
		Adenosine & A     & OH    & H     & H \\
		Deoxyadenosine & dA    & H     & H     & H \\
		Vindarabine & ara-A & H     & OH    & H \\
		Fludarabine & 2-F-ara-A & H     & OH    & F \\
		Cladribine & 2-Cl-dA & H     & H     & Cl \\
		Clofarabine & 2-Cl-2'-$\beta$-F-dA & H     & F     & Cl \\
	\end{tabular}%
	\caption{Common purine analogues and their structures. Positions are labelled in red.}
	\label{tab:purinedrugs}%
\end{table}%

I only had to do this a couple times during my thesis and it's probably not necessary most of the time. My technique was opening a table environment \begin{table}[htbp] then inserting the image, before opening the tabular. I chose to have the caption at the end for this, but that's a personal choice.

Tables over multiple pages

\begin{longtable}{ll}
\caption{List of Abbreviations} \\ 
\textDelta \textPsi m   & Change in mitochondrial membrane potential \\
DAPI  & 4',6-diamidino-2-phenylindole \\
7-AAD & 7-Aminoactinomycin D \\
ActD  & Actinomycin D \\
...
...
...
TOPOII & Topoisomerase II \\
yPAP  & Yeast polyadenylation polymerase \\
	
	\end{longtable}%
	\label{tab:abb}%

For my appendix, the content was over two pages. I didn't feel it was appropriate for two columns (technically four), so used the longtables package that I called in main.tex above. It's not a difficult package to use and is quite normal. I used the excel2latex plugin to cheat in making the list easier. I also kept a running list of abbreviations I used during my thesis in that same excel sheet to make things even easier.

Conclusions

LaTeX tables can be quite intimidating for a newbie. I had read and watched a few tutorials explaining them and it scared me off for a while. After spending a little time, they were actually one of the easier aspects of writing the thesis, and I hope that some examples I ran through here are also helpful to you.

Ok not yet...there is still some paperwork to do and the university has to confer the degree blah blah.

About 2 weeks ago I had my PhD defence back in Zurich, and luckily I passed. The exam was challenging and the small party (apero) afterwards was a great opportunity to see some friends who I haven't seen in months. It was a nice conclusion to 5.5 years of work (that should have been 4 ish).

The PhD exam process at the University of Zurich has two stages - a public presentation with Q&A afterwards, followed by a private exam with just your PhD committee (and other professors). My presentation went fairly well I feel, but the exam was tough. I honestly felt under prepared as I had started a new job just a few weeks before which took up the time I should have spent studying.

But passing is the only thing that matters. I'll hopefully get my thesis printed and hardbound over the next couple weeks and finish the remaining paperwork so I can officially use my new title. I can't promise it won't go to my head for a few weeks - booking flights with my title etc.

My Professor and I agreed to write a couple of papers resulting from my work, so I'll have those to work on too. Regardless, I feel like a giant weight has been lifted. I have been so eager to move on from this stage of my life for the last year or more, and it's finally (nearly) over.

I really owe a big thank you to everyone who has supported me over the last few years. I could not have gotten this far without the help of so many people, from colleagues in the lab to friends and family.

Oh deary, I appear to have forgotten about this blog. Some quick updates:

• I moved to Austria about 3 months ago and since then,
• I have written my PhD thesis.
• Currently it sits with my Prof for corrections.

I wrote my thesis in LaTeX hoping it would make things easier than using Word which chugs horribly in large documents with dozens of figures. Not to mention the pains of layout.

I believe LaTeX is a great way to write a thesis, but there are a lot of hurdles I was unprepared for when starting. Here, I will outline to solutions to most of them.

There are now online services for writing in LaTeX (Overleaf.com probably being the largest) but as I was expecting to write at times with no/limited internet access, I wanted to do things locally. I used TeXstudio for most of the work, occasionally writing in a text editor with LaTeX highlighting (Sublime Text v3).

The basic template that I use came from this website, and while not perfect, it does make a lot of things easier than starting with a blank slate.

General

I highly recommend learning a little about LaTeX planning on spending weeks or months writing in it. It requires a certain level of comfort writing markup style, and if this scares you, given the importance of your thesis LaTeX may not be for you.

Some things to be aware of. I will state certain package that need to be included. These should be done above  \begin{document} in your "main.tex" file if you're using the Masters/Doctoral thesis template above. I find it useful to add comments all over my .tex files. Add a package? Comment to explain why you did and what it is for. This allows you to remove it later if you're not usually it any more or if it was just for testing.

Comments are easy, just add a % to the start of the line. If you are using TeXstudio, you can highlight text in bulk and Ctrl+t to comment out the whole block.

I also recommend writing in chapters and comment out chapters you aren't working on i.e.

\include{Chapters/Chapter1} %intro
% \include{Chapters/Chapter2} %synergy

Not only will it be faster than compiling the whole document every time you want to check a small layout change,  especially important when you have more than a couple of chapters done and the density of figures/tables etc increases.

Images

This is a complicated and important topic. Most scientific work is centred around the figures that you make, and so it really important that this is done right. Before you even consider any LaTeX code for images, I recommend you create your images as SVG files (inkscape is a great free tool to do this), then export as PDF. I initially read that I should export images as .EPS files (enhanced post-script), however my microscopy images were then subjected to compression and artefacts became apparently which was not acceptable. All software I used to create figures allowed for export as SVG or to Inkscape for manipulation (GraphPad Prism, imageJ, FlowJo) and I can't imagine that there would be a case where this is not possible.

If you have to use .EPS and those figures are not bitmap (i.e. microscopy), you can do so, but will need to include the epstopdf package usepackage{epstopdf} above \begin{document} in your "main.tex" file.

Make your images in Inkscape and save as SVG (for future editing) but export as PDF. You can usually edit imported text here (i.e. axis of graphs) and I would re-do these if necessary as not all symbols will transfer well to Inkscape. It also allows for you unify your fonts and text sizes. I would also label the figure parts at this stage a) b) c) etc. Pick a font size (probably 12) and stick with it for all figures. This helps later.

You can click and drag the PDF file of your image into TeXstudio. There you will be presented with a dialogue box where you can enter details that eventually just appear in the code inserted. Eventually, when familiar it's easier just to write it yourself in my opinion. Let's break it down. \begin{figure} starts a figure environment but isn't strictly necessary to insert an image, but it helps with formatting. \centering is pretty obvious - it lines up the figure to the centre of the writing environment of the page (i.e. not including the margins). \includegraphics[width=0.7\linewidth]{filelocation} sets the embedded image to 70% of the page width. Note that you don't need to include .pdf at the end of the file name. LaTeX realises this and deals with it for you. In the cast of imported .eps files, they get converted to PDF here.

\caption is self explanatory but can be combined with other markup for example to embolden a few words at the beginning.

It is important to put a unique label on images that is also descriptive. In the text you can then reference it with \ref{fig:label} which will post just the figure number, or \autoref{fig:label} which will post "Figure 4.1" etc.

I would recommend adding a couple notes using comments at the end of every figure. 1) %source: identify the source of your data as it's not always so obvious years after acquisition to go back and trace where it came from, especially after removing some of the text to make the figure look cleaner. 2) %todo this syntax adds a highlight by default in TeXstudio and makes it easier to spot where you want to make changes later.

\begin{figure}
	\centering
	\includegraphics[width=0.7\linewidth]{Figures/bonemarrowdevelopment}
	\caption{Bone marrow development. As humans age, haematopoietic cells are gradually replaced with adipose tissue, changing the colour of bone marrow from red to yellow.\cite{Li2018}}
	\label{fig:bonemarrowdevelopment}
\end{figure}

Future posts

Other articles to come when I find time to write them:

Tables : Easy ways how to create using excel, including tables that cross multiple pages

Referencing: Using Mendeley and to CWYW (cite while you write)!

Greek: Your alpha beta gamma deltas

Chemical names: I'll explore some packages for easily writing out chemical structures. Note I did it all manually, but I do not recommend this.

In 74 days I move to Austria. I'm not finished my Ph.D. (yet) but I will have submitted to my committee by the time I leave.

There's a lot of work to do, but having a date and a firm deadline provides motivation to work my ass off and get things done.

I thought this a momentous enough an occasion to make a blog post about. Also I took a really pretty photo on Thursday while waiting for a bus. You'll see that as the cover photo.

So this PhD is taking longer than expected. Currently, I am contracted for 5 years on what was originally a 4 year degree programme. The blame on the delay is hard to place. Crappy results, crappy experiments, crappy plans, poor motivation as a result of the above...

Then things started "working" - and by that I mean I got some interesting results. Without boring everyone with the details, It could be 5 1/4 years before I finish now. I would like to finish in 2018 but it could be Q1 2019 before I actually defend if I look at things realistically.

Some things have to change to get done.

There have been a couple of media influences recently that have made me realise something I know I already knew. My attention span has been shot to shit by my bad internet practices. (those links are well worth checking out, even if the last is a long podcast)

tl;dr writing is hard because I can't focus on anything.

My solution for this is to try a few things - not as extreme as CGP Greys nuclear option of removing everything (yet)

1. Facebook is deleted/deactivated (again).
2. Block is installed on my phone to block reddit, twitter, instagram, during work hours.
3. Many apps (BBC news) uninstalled off phone entirely.
4. The big one. Cold Turkey installed on my work laptop. This is set up to block "time wasting" websites of my choosing.

Some things I have somewhat under control. Podcasts are strictly for when I'm doing brainless tasks like certain lab work, or walking/running. I can't work on tasks requiring concentration while hearing voices anyway (hence my penchant for instrumental music)

Cold Turkey (CT) is hard core. Literally can't trick or cheat it. I allow myself 30 min a day on those websites, which during a 10h work day isn't crazy in 5 min breaks. Yesterday, that wasn't a problem. Today that time was nearly gone by lunch. It makes me only guess at the hundreds of hours I may have wasted over the last 4-5 years.

I'm really doing this far too late if I'm honest with myself. I felt my attention slipping a couple years ago, being poisoned by the search for the next hit of novelty. Reading a book has become impossible, reading a scientific paper a drawn out torture. Even writing this post, I find myself having to hold back urges to check the news/twitter/whatever to keep myself entertained.

CGP Grey is doing 4 months locked away from highly addictive sources of media: never-ending scrolling feeds, sources of flicking between the same 2-3 apps for hours. I know I should do something similar. Going full Cold Turkey would be hard right now. I want to allow myself time for these things after work hours. If there was an app that only allowed me access if I had written a thousand words a day that might work...

So today I finally found some time to update this website. Granted it's still running an out-of-date version of Ghost, but I finally figured out how to modify the front page.

The default theme for Ghost (Casper) in it's latest version looks like this https://demo.ghost.io/

Which is very pretty in a magazine sort of way. I had a different vision, that was a lot closer to an older Casper theme, especially for the front page.  I wanted to combine something with a big header image, which has my name, and a short bio, links to public social media, then scroll down to see any blog posts. Like this post!

I was coming from the below page - identity from HTML5 UP - a great resource for a quick landing page, but not really what I want long term as manually creating pages for blog posts would get tedious and discourage me from writing.

There were a list of changes I wanted to the otherwise bland header page.

• profile photo
• links to social media
• more detailed bio.

So I opened up the index.hbs file that defines the front page of this ghost theme, and got cracking.

            <div class="img" style="background-image: url(/blog/content/images/2018/07/profile--2-.jpg)"><span class="hidden">{{name}}'s Picture</span></div>
        </figure>

This block of code was inserted above the <h1 class="page-title">{{@blog.title}}</h1> and puts my beautiful face above the header. Ideally I should have been able to copy the ghost snippet to pull in the author image for the whole website, but that wasn't working. Possibly because the index page doesn't have an author - Wasn't able to figure this one out but linking the image directly works fine. I'll revisit if the solution comes to me in a dream.

<h2 class="page-description">
    I'm a cancer biology PhD student with a passion for new technologies. 
<hr/>  
    <p>PhD Student @ University of Zürich</p>
    <p>IT Team Leader @ <a href="http://lszysn.ch" class="fplink">LSZYSN</a> </p> 
    <p>Podcaster @ <a href="http://thefutureof.io" class="fplink">thefutureof.io</a></p>
</h2>

The extra text for the subheader was easy, and just HTML. I would like to have put it into the CMS GUI but there was a character limit and it wouldn't process the markup.
I had to add a class to the <a> because it was being coloured too dark to be seen by default. I address this later in the CSS modifications.

</h2>
<ul class="icons">
    <li><a href="http://linkedin.com/in/paulmaceoin" class="fa-linkedin">LinkedIn</a></li>
    <li><a href="http://twitter.com/pmaceoin" class="fa-twitter">Twitter</a></li>
    <li><a href="https://www.instagram.com/theskymoves/" class="fa-instagram">Instagram</a></li>
    <li><a href="mailto:paulmaceoin+website@gmail.com" class="fa-envelope-o">Email</a></li>
</ul>             

Right underneath the <h2> tag, I add the code for the icons. These are quite clever and completely lifted from my previous site above. The icons come from http://fontawesome.com. The files for the fonts were copied across into the /assets/fonts folder, and the CSS was mostly taken from the original page too. I removed the drop shadow as they were originally white icons on a white background so the shadow was what you were seeing.

I've added my custom CSS below in case someone comes across this site and finds it useful. It's pretty clear though I think.

/* pauls custom CSS for icons*/
@import url(font-awesome.min.css);

figure.author-image {top:-100px;
left:10%;
padding:2px;}

a.fplink{
    color:white;
}


/* Icon */

    .icon {
        text-decoration: none;
        position: relative;
        border-bottom: none;
    }

        .icon:before {
            -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
            -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
            font-family: FontAwesome;
            font-style: normal;
            font-weight: normal;
            text-transform: none !important;
        }

        .icon > .label {
            display: none;
        }

ul.icons {
    cursor: default;
    list-style: none;
    padding-left: 0;
    margin-top: -0.675em;
}

    ul.icons li {
        display: inline-block;
        padding: 0.675em 0.5em;
    }

        ul.icons li a {
            text-decoration: none;
            position: relative;
            display: block;
            width: 3.75em;
            height: 3.75em;
            border-radius: 100%;
            border: solid 1px #c8cccf;
            line-height: 3.75em;
            overflow: hidden;
            text-align: center;
            text-indent: 3.75em;
            white-space: nowrap;
            
        }

            ul.icons li a:before {
                -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
                -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
                font-family: FontAwesome !important;
                font-style: normal;
                font-weight: normal;
                text-transform: none !important;
                font-size:30px;
            }

            ul.icons li a:before {
                color: #ffffff;
               /* text-shadow: 1.25px 0px 0px #c8cccf, -1.25px 0px 0px #c8cccf, 0px 1.25px 0px #c8cccf, 0px -1.25px 0px #c8cccf;*/
            }

            ul.icons li a:hover:before {
                text-shadow: 1.25px 0px 0px #ff7496, -1.25px 0px 0px #ff7496, 0px 1.25px 0px #ff7496, 0px -1.25px 0px #ff7496;
            }

            ul.icons li a:before {
                position: absolute;
                top: 0;
                left: 0;
                width: inherit;
                height: inherit;
                font-size: 1.85rem;
                line-height: inherit;
                text-align: center;
                text-indent: 0;
            }

            ul.icons li a:hover {
                border-color: #ff7496;
            }

    @media screen and (max-width: 480px) {

        ul.icons li a:before {
            font-size: 1.5rem;
        }

    }

ul.actions {
    cursor: default;
    list-style: none;
    padding-left: 0;
}

    ul.actions li {
        display: inline-block;
        padding: 0 0.75em 0 0;
        vertical-align: middle;
    }

        ul.actions li:last-child {
            padding-right: 0;
        }

/*end custom CSS*/

Back in May of 2018, I took a well deserved break from the PhD to nip over to Toronto. My parents also flew in from Edmonton.

Below is a video I've put together of my time there. Lots of things are missing for the sake of time or that I was not filming, or what I did film ended up being not good enough to make it in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibe_vEiry3g

It's rare in the tech community that any device, especially a smartphone will be even talked about 2 years after its release. The pace of release of new devices is so fast that mainstream tech bloggers who need to drive website traffic by discussing the latest and greatest, have moved on and forgotten. The idea of people using a smartphone that is more than a year old may be outside of the perception of those who change their devices weekly for reviewing, but I think it's worth seeing how some of these devices fare after more than the usual "I've had this phone for the last week, here are my opinions" you hear at the beginning of so many YouTube reviews.

For reference, my smartphone pedigree has been Samsung Galaxy S --> Sony Xperia Z1 --> LG G4. I also own a Nexus 5x that I use as a backup phone. I intend to go through each of these devices eventually, so I'll update this post with links as I do that. All of my devices have been bought with my own money - though if companies want to send me stuff, hit me up!

My smartphone pedigree: Samsung Galaxy S, Sony Xperia Z1, LG G4. LG Nexus 5x missing as it was used to take these photos!

For expensive or important purchases, I spend weeks antagonising over it. I think it took me 2 months to decide which laptop to buy (Dell XPS 15 9530 in 2014) and when the LG G4 was announced and the first reviews were published I must have watched or read them all. It ticked most of the boxes I had in my head, missing only an AMOLED display for those true and deep blacks characteristic of that technology. I remember asking a reviewer with the device who said that the backlighting was very dim at the lowest so I was content with the compromise, even though I'd lose the battery savings. I hate nothing more than to have buyers remorse and for the most part, I think I chose well with the G4 despite LG giving me many reasons to doubt that link to bootloop.

Then the honeymoon phase. All new devices are treated like a new born baby for a few months before the shine tarnishes a little.

Only used the leather cover for about 8 months but the wear on it from daily use is still very clear.

The leather back scratches or wears away and the phone is no longer so precious and more seen as a tool. I have dropped it a few times and the back cover doesn't fit as tightly as it once did. There are no scratches on the (Gorilla Glass 3) beautiful screen, nor on the camera lens. Hardware-wise I think everything works as it did when new. Because of the wear and tear to the leather back, I switched to the included silver plastic back. Though after taking the photos for this post, I'm going to give the leather another shot. It deserves it - a premium material for a premium phone.

"Hand feel" aka ergonomics

The device feels spectacular in the hand. Having come from an Xperia Z1 just before, the G4 was far less "blocky" with a nice curve that sits well in the hand: no corners digging into your palm. The back is convex making the whole device look and feel far thinner than it actually is. It sits in your hand very comfortably, which is only complemented by the leather case - warm and soft rather than cold aluminium and glass or cheap plastic. Though my device came with a spare metallic plastic back which I used when the leather got a bit worn, even that was fairly premium feeling and definitely doesn't conjour the sensation of cheap plastic. There's also a subtle banana like curve to the display which is hard to notice until you move to another device and sometimes your fingers don't quite hit the screen as solidly. It's never been clear to me whether the curved glass actually provides any usability benefit but I think it helps the phone feel less like a 5.5" slab in your pocket. I think it's a shame that almost all devices released in 2016-7 are flat slabs of glass and metal - not that leather is a great material choice for a phone but having variety in the shapes may prove more ergonomic for some. Device manufacturers don't seem as daring with their form-factors as LG was back in 2013 with the Flex phones...

See the subtle curve of the screen, and how the back can fit gently into your palm?  Yeah, haven't seen that on other phones in a couple of years.

The Display

It's hard to show off a display when it goes through another camera, and is displayed on your screen... Trust me, I've never seen a single pixel, and the colours are great!

The Software

Happily, LG put a fairly light touch on the G4 compared to other OEMs. Arguably though there were few improvements and it would have best been left alone. The colour scheme is not changeable (a cyan on black like the Holo colours of the Android Honeycomb (3.0) days). When I started playing with a true nexus device, I began to long for the options available that LG had removed from stock Android, including lifting to wake the screen. Even though the Nexus 5x has 1 Gb less ram than the G4, it still runs much faster and is far more responsive. This may be because the 5x only has 1080p display. I feel joy when using the 5x because it can keep up with how I use it without stuttering and the G4 occasionally slows down. To reduce frustration with the G4, I try to reboot the phone every 2-3 days. That seems to reduce stuttering with Bluetooth headphones too.

The Camera

The stand-out feature of the G4 at release was the camera. The photos it takes still extract "ooh"s and "ahh"s when I show some shots. It is a 16mp 3-axis hardware stabilised sensor with a f/1.8 aperture allowing for sharp, steady shots taken even in low-light. To aid this, I believe the G4 came with one of the first smartphone infra-red laser auto-focus modules which is lightning fast at focusing on the object you want if it doesn't already auto-focus on it. The white balance sensor next to the flash aids in the colour accuracy of shots is probably of more of a benefit to people who shoot in RAW and manuals modes or do intense post editing of their photos. I'm pretty happy with shots first time in auto so I don't feel the need.

A quick nighttime shot of the Limmat River in Zurich at dusk. Used "auto" settings

Manual mode

I did play around with the manual mode a little last weekend. I was in a small village up the mountainside near Flums and could see so many stars on this clear night. I had the idea to play with the exposure time, which goes up to 30 seconds. I feel I was able to get a passable star photo considering the number of beers consumed and that I was only steadying the phone with my hand. LG claimed that this was the first phone that could replace a DSLR or other professional equipment: I'm not entirely sold on that but if it's the only camera you have on you, it's not the end of the world. Since having this phone I've not used my old Panasonic TZ7 point and shoot, despite it having a 12x optical zoom: it's just too bulky to carry that when I can use my phone from my pocket.

a passable star shot with shaky hands and alcohol. 30s exposure.

Battery life

The battery is definitely not as good as it once was. I remember getting 3-4 hours of screen on time when the phone was brand new. Now it struggles to get over 1, meaning that when I'm not at home or work and close to a wall outlet, I'm carrying a battery pack to reduce range anxiety. Sometimes I find myself charging the phone twice during the day and once again overnight. This is with moderate use, usually between experiments where a 5 minute centrifuging of my cells is enough to check Reddit but not do anything actually productive. I've bought official and unofficial replacement batteries (an option not available on most new devices in 2017) but that only has a limited increase in daily use. In truth, I also have more apps and use my phone differently to when I purchased it. There's now a Huawei Watch always connected, frequently along with Bluetooth headphones. There are more apps running in the background, and all of this combined probably accounts for a lot of the reduced battery life I see.

Fairytale phone?

Betteridge's Law says "no"

However, there have also been major hardware issues. The mainboard has been replaced twice due to the infamous LG bootloop problem that has repeatedly affected several of their devices and mine might go again any day. LG is also incredibly slow at releasing updates and quick to abandon devices. For instance, the latest security patch for my phone is from August 2016. It's also on Marshmallow (Android 6.0) rather than Nougat (7.0) which it took months to get after Google released it. The update also reduced battery life for me, despite claiming it would increase it. From what I remember there were minimal other changes during the update, and the device may have been better staying on the version it came with, Lollipop 5.0. Meanwhile, Apple still releases updates for iPhone 5S which is 3 years old.

Replacement?

Because of the imminent death either from old age or a hardware issue that LG is up for a class-action lawsuit I keep on top of new releases and try to find a device that will come close to replacing this and ideally improving on it. This is not such an easy task and there are things I definitely won't find such as the subtle curve to the display (an oft forgotten feature of LG devices - see LG Flex 2) nor removable battery.

I'm going to write another post soon about the possible upcoming devices of 2017-8 that may replace my beloved G4. A lot of future phones currently have a lot of leaks rendered (Pixel 2, Note 8) and I'll be watching them closely...

Conclusion:

The LG G4 is a great phone that I would buy again back in 2015. Its specs still rival many newer devices even if it's starting to show its age. I would love to put its camera against 2017 flagships to compare - I bet it's fairly favourable.

Follow up:

It's now Q1 2019 and for over a year my G4 has become the daily driver of a less technically inclined former housemate. Last I heard, he's getting great battery life out if as his usage is far lighter. It'll probably live for another couple years!

I love playing with the latest gadgets and to see the future directions of consumer electronics. For a while I discussed my opinions on my podcast The Future Of, started with Mark. However, finding time to plan, record, and edit is very difficult for both of us. While we may continue the podcast in the (maybe near) future, I need an outlet for my opinions beyond 140 characters, and I hope that this blog will allow me to share my experiences, good and bad (and ugly), with the products I have used.

I intend to also use this blog to discuss other elements of my life, including my on going struggles with my PhD, efforts in personal productivity improvement, as well as some other bits and bobs.

This is a mission statement (of sorts) and is definitely subject to change