Posted by R | datawookie

Making the Most of Mobility

I became aware of the Community Mobility Reports data courtesy of this tweet from Mike Schussler: Next time someone tells you that people are misbehaving you can tell the the data says no they are listening doing as they are told. Data from our mobile phones shows we staying away from retail, … Continue reading →

{blogdown}: Optimise PNG Image Size

Inspired by the informative post from Jumping Rivers about selecting the correct image file type, I decided to optimise PNG file size as part of this blog’s CI pipeline. OptiPNG As suggested, I used optipng. Let’s see how well this works on a large sample PNG file. $ optipng moon.png ** … Continue reading →

This is not Rain: It’s a Trickle

I started using rain (a South African ISP) back in March 2019. The coverage was good (the only place I couldn’t get a signal was at Lanseria Airport), while the bandwidth was consistently high. I loved the fact that it was affordable, reliable and portable. So much has changed. Rain on … Continue reading →

Cyril’s Speeches

The transcripts for the South African President’s speeches are available here. I’ve just added these data to the {saffer} package. library(saffer) Let’s take a look. glimpse(president_speeches) Rows: 621 Columns: 6 $ date <date> 2016-01-07, 2016-01-21, 2016-01-23, 2016-02-06, … Continue reading →

Topographic Maps for South Africa

I’ve been adding topological maps of South Africa to the saffer-data-map repository. The maps are originally in MrSID format (.sid files), which is a proprietary file format developed by LizardTech (a company which has been consumed by Extensis). Although MrSID is efficient from a storage … Continue reading →

Price of Fuel in South Africa

The {saffer} package is a nascent collection of things relating to South Africa. I’ve just added fuel price data. The {saffer} package can be installed from GitHub. remotes::install_github("datawookie/saffer") Then load it up and you’re ready to … Continue reading →

Retail Pricing: Latex Gloves

A couple of days ago I posted an analysis of the price of nitrile gloves at Dischem. @mattdenni the price of nitrile gloves has increased dramatically over the last year.More details at https://t.co/nTm481mjwH.@AndrewJacksonZA this might be of interest to you too. … Continue reading →

Retail Pricing: Nitrile Gloves

My colleague, Matt, noted that nitrile gloves are getting really expensive. These things are getting really expensive! pic.twitter.com/RwJoMS5Xoy— Matt Dennis (@mattdenni) January 4, 2021 Is this real or only in his mind? Let’s check it out with Trundler. Setup Load the library and … Continue reading →