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
Author Archives →
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
Update On ESC/POS Package Work
The morning before work was super productive and there is a nigh-complete DSL for ESC/POS commands along with the ability to just print {ggplot2}/{grid} object. I changed the package name to {escpos} since it is no longer just plot object focused, and the DSL looks a bit like this: library(stringi) library(hrbrthemes) library(ggplot2) library(escpos) ggplot() +… Continue reading
Turning {ggplot2} Into a PoS (Point-of-Sale) System
At the end of March, I caught a fleeting tweet that showcased an Epson thermal receipt printer generating a new “ticket” whenever a new GitHub issue was filed on a repository. @aschmelyun documents it well in this blog post. It’s a pretty cool hack, self-contained on a Pi Zero. Andrew’s project birthed an idea: could… Continue reading