Apple is in the final stages of shuttering the DarkSky service/API. They’ve replaced it with WeatherKit, which has both an xOS framework version as well as a REST API. To use either, you need to be a member of the Apple Developer Program (ADP) — $99.00/USD per-year — and calls to the service via either… Continue reading
Introducing {weatherkit}: The Eventual Replacement R Package for {darksky}
My {darksky} package has been around for years, now, and the service that powers it was purchased by Apple before the pandemic. The DarkSky API is slated to be shuttered in December of this year and is being replaced by Apple’s WeatherKit xOS Framework and REST API. I’ve started work on a {weatherkit} package which… Continue reading
Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud On Juneteenth
I realize you have to be living under a rock in the U.S. to not know that yesterday, was Juneteenth (a portmanteau of “June Nineteenth”). Still, I feel compelled to explain that said date marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that… Continue reading
Using Leonardo SVG Palettes in R
In today’s newsletter Leonardo, an open source project and free online too from Adobe that lets you make great and accessible color palettes for use in UX/UI design and data visualizations! You can read the one newsletter section to get a feel for Leonardo, then go play with it a bit. The app lets you… Continue reading
Escaping Groundhog Day
Before digging into this post, I need to set some context. Friday, May 13, 2022 was my last day at my, now, former employer of nearly seven years. I’m not mentioning the company name1 because this post is not about them2. This post is about burnout and the importance of continuous monitoring and maintenance of… Continue reading
Rusty HTML Minifying In R with {rextendr}
In my M-F newsletter today I mentioned an awesome Rust-based HTML/JS/CSS minifier library that also include batteries for a few other languages. There was no R port, so I made one using {rextendr}. The {rextendr} package makes is as easy to use Rust code in R packages as {Rcpp} does C/C++ code. It was as… Continue reading
Announcement: New Substack Newsletter
Just a quick post to note that I’ll still be doing long-form, single-topic posts here on the blog, but I’ve also started an M-F daily Substack newsletter [free], that introduces 1-3(ish) topics per-issue on stuff I find during my daily RSS trawls. It’s a mix of tech, Mac, linux, data science, science-science, food, and some… Continue reading
Keeping Those SSH Keys Safe
I came across a neat site that uses a Golang wasm function called from javascript on the page to help you see if your GitHub public SSH keys are “safe”. What does “safe” mean? This is what the function checks for (via that site): Recommended key sizes are as follows: For the RSA algorithm at… Continue reading