It’s been a long time coming, but swatches? is now on CRAN. What is “swatches”? First off, swatches has nothing to do with those faux-luxury brand Swiss-made timepieces. swatches is all about color. R/CRAN has plenty of color picking packages. The colourlovers? ? by @thosjleeper is one of my ...

I know some folks had a bit of fun with the previous post since it exposed the fact that I left out unique MQTT client id generation from the initial 0.1.0 release of the in-development package (client ids need to be unique). There have been some serious improvements since said post ...

Most of us see the internet through the lens of browsers and apps on our laptops, desktops, watches, TVs and mobile devices. These displays are showing us — for the most part — content designed for human consumption. Sure, apps handle API interactions, but even most of that communication happens over ports 80 ...

More sites are turning to services like Cloudflare due to just how stupid-easy it is to DDoS a site. Sometimes the DDoS is intentional (malicious). Sometimes it’s because your bot didn’t play nice (stop that, btw). Sadly, at some point, most of us with “vital” sites are going ...

I’m in the market for Christmas presents for my true love, @mrshrbrmstr, and thought I’d look to an age-old shopping list for inspiration. Just what would it set me back if I decided to mimic the 12 Days of Christmas in this modern day and age? Let’s try ...

Over the past few weeks, I had been noticing that some posts in the R-bloggers feed were getting truncated in Feedly. I don’t remember when I noticed that since I usually click through immediately from the headline entry to the R-bloggers page vs read in Feedly since ultimately I ...

Our family has been reading, listening to and watching “A Christmas Carol” for just abt 30 years now. I got it into my crazy noggin to perform a sentiment analysis on it the other day and tweeted out the results, but a large chunk of the R community is not on ...

Earlier this year, I made a package that riffed off of ProPublica’s really neat voting cartograms (maps) for the U.S. House and Senate. You can see one for disaster relief spending in the House and one for the ACA “Skinny Repeal” in the Senate. We can replicate both ...

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 ...