Recent content in dev, med & music on rmacd.com
Exactly a month ago, in July 2025, I wrote about the mandatory cost dumped on every GP trainee in the UK: pay the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) hundreds each year to gain access to a training portfolio platform called FourteenFish.
There is a funny obsession with titles amongst healthcare leaders. Nearly every CEO and Chair you spot leading a trust or a health board these days refers to themselves as a “professor” or a “doctor”.
See previous post about the RCGP and FourteenFish for context. Today I’ve sent a letter to Rt Hon Wes Streeting MP, the Health Secretary, about what I see as an unnecessary and unfair cost being forced on every GP trainee in the UK.
Congratulations to me, I’ve secured a GP training post. No popping corks yet though. You see, having successfully gained a spot to train as a GP, I have now been emailed by the Deanery, on behalf of the Royal College of General Practitioners, to ask me to take out a membership as a GP trainee.
The following motion (Motion 43) was presented to BMA ARM 2025 on 24 June, 2025: Your browser does not support the video tag. That this meeting reaffirms the BMA’s position statements of June 2024 and January 2025 on the Israel-Gaza conflict, which underscore the imperative of upholding international humanitarian law and the protection of healthcare workers and infrastructure in conflict zones.
Driven by pure spite for the fact they’ve put various charges up again across the airport (and as a local resident, it just means more cars hanging around in places they shouldn’t, to try dodge the drop-off fees), I wanted to dig a bit more into who owns the airport.
Who remembers when NHS Education for Scotland tried to limit claims on study budgets? Incensed, I wanted to know how much was being claimed by the same directors who wanted to cut back on doctors’ claims:
Time to talk about Goodbody Clinic. They offer various blood tests for cancers. Their “lung cancer testing” page, in particular, appeared in my Sponsored Links this morning. Let’s have a look, shall we?
See here for other articles on dodgy “MRI Cancer Scans” Vista Health, another favourite. We’ve already covered the fact there is no such thing as a “full body cancer screen”, and how these types of screening-not-screenings can cause harm.
See here for other articles on dodgy “MRI Cancer Scans” or here for the series on “bad ads”. These predatory adverts keep coming up: this one for Phoenix Hospital Group, offering “Full body MRI cancer screening”1.
Recently I was trying to figure out a way of accessing the “universal search” index available via the Synology UI, in a way that didn’t require logging into the UI itself.
Purpose of this page is to list various Group Policies that I’ve set, to strip out all the useless nonsense from Windows 10. Get rid of search suggestions within Explorer
More parasitic price-gouging on the part of Airbnb. Edinburgh is inundated with Airbnb properties; every year the prices keep going up, anyone who doesn’t have piles of cash is priced out, Airbnb reaps £££, nobody wins.
A set of searches that I tend to undertake a couple of times a week. All UK-based .org domains mentioning PAs in last month All .co.uk domains mentioning PAs in last week (excluding some news sites / forums) All .
I use yt-dlp for downloading videos from YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, etc. A full list of all the “extractors” is available here. Here are some of the download strings I use:
Map of MAPs. This is based on the MAPs Scope of Practice published by the British Medical Association. Once responses start coming back, results of the requests will be plotted on a map, available for the public to peruse as they see fit.
Happy leap-year-day? My attention was drawn to this piece from Full Fact: So I sumbitted a request to the Australian Department of Home Affairs for the following information: Number of General Migration (subclasses 189, 190 and 491) and Employer Sponsor Migration (subclasses 186, 187 and 482) visa applications lodged, granted, refused and on hand from 2013 to 2023 (inclusive), by year, for…
This is in follow-up to the HSCS committee hearing, 16/01/24. Original request, 16 January 2024: I refer to your appearance before the HSCS Committee today, 16th January 2024, regarding the regulation and expansion of Medical Associate Professional roles within NHS Scotland.
This is in relation / follow-up to this Tweet, regarding PAs being recruited to supervise doctors at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness: On 23/12/2023 the following request was sent to NHS Highland:
This is in follow-up to the original request made to the General Medical Council (GMC) in October 2023, regarding the regulation of Medical Associate Professionals (MAPs) in the UK. Follow-up, dated 8 December 2023:
Roughly transcribed (there may be errors); links open to the Scottish Parliament TV website. Alternative link (YouTube) Committee members: CH: Claire Haughey (Convener) PS: Paul Sweeney (Deputy Convener) SG: Dr Sandesh Gulhane
TL;DR The Guardian were caught collecting user data without consent in LocalStorage (similar to cookies). The Guardian repeatedly denied there was a problem. They’ve now fixed their website. Naughty Guardian. Don’t be like the Guardian.
Request, dated 26 October 2023: In your news article “More information on PAs and AAs” [link], “Our work to introduce regulation of PAs and AAs is wholly funded by direct grant from the DHSC and closely managed to ensure no cross-subsidisation from doctor fees.
Resources for talk given at University of Edinburgh, 11 August 2023 Links to articles MacDonald, R. (2023) ‘GMC is criticised for investments in Nestlé and McDonal’s’, BMJ (Online), 380, pp. 580 Available at: https://doi.
Allan MacDonald (jnr) - flute, bodhran Ronald MacDonald - piano Iain MacMaster - whistle, accordion Allan MacDonald (snr) - pipes Òrain agus port no dhà aig cèilidh còmhla ri Raghnall agus Ailean – join Ronald and Allan MacDonald (and friends) for a cèilidh of Gaelic, Scottish, and Irish tunes and songs.
Updated May 2025 Consultancy Triaplex Inc. (non-healthcare) Jan 2022-Dec 2023 Academic University of St Andrews research assistantship 2020-22 Attendance at WONCA Conference, Limerick (funded by University of St Andrews) July 2022 Attendance at NADEGS Conference, Carnoustie (funded by University of St Andrews) February 2023 Financial
I had a bit of bother getting Mastodon up and running on a Fedora box so figured I’d write up the main sticking points. Preamble The scope is to: Put most of this inside Docker Use AWS S3 for object storage Use AWS SES for mail If you’ve got Postfix already running locally, or don’t want to run storage on S3, just ignore these bits.
Even though I’ve literally purchased a couple of the ISO standards, I’m unable to open the files on Linux without access to a Windows VM (within which I can run their stupid PDF de-DRM-er).
This environment: CentOS 7.x WP 5.x PHP 7.x Fail2ban 0.11.x WP/PHP running in Docker In /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/wplogin.conf: [Definition] failregex = .*php7:notice.*\[client (<HOST>).*wp-admin.*Password Mismatch ignoreregex = Then in the WP home, we want to log errors to SYSLOG.
For whatever reason, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe got rid of their mobile app this year - a decision that has not gone down too well with punters and performers alike.
Publications See Google Scholar profile. Press June 2020 Kinder F, Harvey A. Covid-19: the medical students responding to the pandemic. BMJ Student. 2020 Jun 15;369:m2160. Available from: http://www.bmj.com/lookup/doi/10.1136/bmj.m2160 May 2020
CMake manpages are about the most verbose manpages on the planet. All I wanted to do was import an external project and customise the build options without having to go and add files into the child project / patch them / whatever.
Back in February or so, I’d been covering some ground on atopy and allergies etc and came across a company called IntoleranceLab Ltd (Company #11049115). They claimed to perform “Allergen and allergy testing” with nothing more than a few strands of hair.
Getting copies of annual returns and company information from Companies House is easy. Searching the data in those returns isn’t quite so easy. CH use a PDF format (PDF/A, akin to fax) that ensures maximum compatability.
I had a small project to display some simple stats for, for some static content sitting in an AWS S3 bucket. I could have forwarded everything to Elastic+Kibana and showed some fancy graphs and charts, but I was only being asked for what I could easily produce via AWStats.
For S3 logging, awstats needs its LogFormat set up in the following manner: %other %extra1 %time1 %host %logname %other %method %url %methodurl %code %other %extra2 %bytesd %other %extra3 %refererquot %uaquot %other %other %other %other %other %virtualname %other Amazon’s documentation is available here
In my case, I had data stored in a Realm file that I needed to re-export to JSON. First of all we’ll need Realm Studio. Set up, open the Realm file and then export the models, as shown:
This is more written as an aide-memoire to myself than anything. It’s a process I’m currently using for bulk-processing a set of documents of various forms (MS Word, PPT, PDF, LibreOffice etc), converting them all to PDF, running OCR on any embedded images and then sticking the end-result into Elasticsearch via Tika (not documented, plenty documentation elsewhere re this final step).
See the UI here Following on from here and here, this is just putting together a couple of blocks from bl.ocks.org to plot data from the PhysioNet site. Read converting PhysioNet JSON to CSV to import other data sets.
PhysioNet data is available in binary (dat) form but their web site also provides records in JSON. These records include samples / measurements from 12-lead ECGs recorded at 1ksps. To convert these to CSV we can use the ol’ jq:
Another one for the todo list. Fancy plotting leads I/II/III out and making and interactive scroller for time vs vector / direction. Input data might be from here or here. Unfortunately both of these are for synthesising a single lead.
high res .png .svg PNG without annotations .svg without annotations License: CC-BY-SA Notes of interest Buccal comes from bucca: Lat, ‘puffed, filled out cheek’1. Related to the rather wonderful word bucculentus, “having fat cheeks”2; which in turn gives its name to Caranx bucculentus, “wide-mouthed trevally”, a fish with a rather large mouth3.
Note this requires Macports It’s 3am and you’re hunting for that graph you clipped a couple of weeks ago. Report is due in for 10 the next morning. You swore up and down you’d never do this again, but here we are, can’t find the file or the reference.
For a small project I was working on, I wanted to distribute video via MPEG-DASH instead of my usual go-to, HLS. Like HLS, MPEG-DASH supports delivering video via adaptive bit rates.
Only posting these here because I keep copying these defaults between systems; it’s about high time I come up with a better way of syncing all my settings across boxes though …
EN4 data is available here as netCDF format. It’s a set of data that pulls back salinity and temperatures from beacons across the planet. It’s recorded as a grid accurate to 1°.
Site Privacy Policy Last reviewed April 2020 No cookies are used I’m not tracking you “But you use Disqus” Yes, but as you’ll see from their blog post, they only set cookies on your system with your consent.
Dumping ground of quack-tastic articles I’ve bookmarked for us all to enjoy Fancy trying your hand at curing cancer? You can do it too. Just call yourself a “pH Doctor”, whack a charge of a couple of $k per treatment on top and you’ll be doing grand: The dying officer treated for cancer with baking soda
Dumping ground for useful links I’ve found here and there General Radiopaedia Free, online radiology reference Zero to finals Free resource, summarises key concepts Natalie’s Casebook Whole load of clinical cases
Page Title Page 01 Dainty Davie Pages 02-06 Rattling Roaring Willy Pages 06-08 Lass of Livingston The Lass of Livingston Pages 08-12 Cailleach Ouir Pages 12-13 New Claret Pages 14-15 Pease Strae Pages 16-17 Lord Forbes’s March Pages 18-22 Leith Wynd Pages 22-25 John Ochiltree Pages 26-29 Jenny Jo!