A long time ago, in a github repo far, far away there lived a tiny package that made it possible to create equal area, square U.S. state cartograms in R dubbed statebins?. Three years have come and gone and — truth be told — I’ve never been happy with that ...

IBM has a new set of corporate typefaces — dubbed “Plex” — and has released them with a generous open license. IBM Plex Sans is not too shabby: (that image was grifted from a Font Squirrel preview page) The digit glyphs are especially nice for charts and the font iself is just ...

By now, virtually every major media outlet has covered the “280 Apocalypse”™. For those still not “in the know”, Twitter recently moved the tweet character cap to 280 after a “successful” beta test (some of us have different ideas of what “success” looks like). I had been on a hiatus from the ...

Unlike @noamross, I am not an epidemiologist (NOTE: Noam battles pandemics before breakfast, so be super nice to him) but I do like to find kindred methodologies in other disciplines to help foster the growth of cybersecurity into something beyond it’s current Barnum & Bailey state. I also love finding ...

Despite my week-long Twitter consumption sabbatical (helped — in part — by the nigh week-long internet and power outage here in Maine), I still catch useful snippets from folks. My cow-orker @dabdine shunted a tweet by @terrencehart into a Slack channel this morning, and said tweet contained a link to this little ...

This past weekend, violent windstorms raged through New England. We — along with over 500,000 other Mainers — went “dark” in the wee hours of Monday morning and (this post was published on Thursday AM) we still have no utility-provided power nor high-speed internet access. The children have turned iFeral, and being a ...

The Internet Archive recently announced a new service they’ve dubbed ‘Third Eye’. This service scrapes the chyrons that annoyingly scroll across the bottom-third of TV news broadcasts. IA has a vast historical archive of TV news that they’ll eventually process, but — for now — the more recent broadcasts from ...

Modern websites are complex beasts. They house photo galleries, interactive visualizations, web fonts, analytics code and other diverse types of content. Despite the potential for diversity, many web sites share similar “tech stacks” — the components that come together to make them what they are. These stacks consist of web servers (...

spiderbar, spiderbar Reads robots rules from afar. Crawls the web, any size; Fetches with respect, never lies. Look Out! Here comes the spiderbar. Is it fast? Listen bud, It's got C++ under the hood. Can you scrape, from a site? Test with can_fetch(), TRUE == alright Hey, there There goes ...

International Code Talk Like A Pirate Day almost slipped by without me noticing (September has been a crazy busy month), but it popped up in the calendar notifications today and I was glad that I had prepped the meat of a post a few weeks back. There will be no ‘...

I’ve blathered about trust before 1 2, but said blatherings were in a “what if” context. Unfortunately, the if has turned into a when, which begged for further blathering on a recent FOSS ecosystem cybersecurity incident. The gg_spiffy @thomasp85 linked to a post by the SK-CSIRT detailing the discovery and ...

I’ve blogged about my in-development R package hgr a before and it’s slowly getting to a CRAN release. There are two new features to it that are more useful in an interactive session than in a programmatic context. Since they build on each other, we’ll take them ...

Earlier this year, the GDELT Project released their Television Explorer that enabled API access to closed-caption tedt from television news broadcasts. They’ve done an incredible job expanding and stabilizing the API and just recently released “top trending tables” which summarise what the “top” topics and phrases are across news ...