In my semi-daily run of brew update I noticed that proj4 had been updated to 5.2. I kinda “squeee“‘d since (as the release notes show) the Equal Earth projection was added to it (+proj=eqearth). As the team who created the projection describes it: “The Equal Earth map projection is ...

Despite having sailed through the core components of this year’s Talk Like A Pirate Day R post a few months ago, time has been an enemy of late so this will be a short post that others can build off of, especially since there’s lots more knife work ...

The wayback???? package has had an update to more efficiently retrieve mementos and added support for working with the Internet Archive’s advanced search+scrape API. Search/Scrape The search/scrape interface lets you examine the IA collections and download what you are after (programmatically). The main function is ia_...

I was chatting with some cyber-mates at a recent event and the topic of cyber attacks on the U.S. power-grid came up (as it often does these days). The conversation was brief, but the topic made its way into active memory and resurfaced when I saw today’s Data ...

The sergeant???? package has a minor update that adds REST API coverage for two “new” storage endpoints that make it possible to add, update and remove storage configurations on-the-fly without using the GUI or manually updating a config file. This is an especially handy feature when paired with Drill’s ...

Nowadays (I’ve seen that word used so much in journal articles lately that I could not resist using it) I’m using world tile grids more frequently as the need arises to convey the state of exposure of various services at a global (country) scale. Given that necessity fosters ...

Apple has run the death bell on 32-bit macOS apps and, if you’re running a recent macOS version on your Mac (which you should so you can get security updates) you likely see this alert from time-to-time: If you’re like me, you click through that and keep working ...

It’s been over a year since Headless Chrome was introduced and it has matured greatly over that time and has acquired a pretty large user base. The TLDR on it is that you can now use Chrome as you would any command-line interface (CLI) program and generate PDFs, images ...

The development version of splashr now support authenticated connections to Splash API instances. Just specify user and pass on the initial splashr::splash() call to use your scraping setup a bit more safely. For those not familiar with splashr and/or Splash: the latter is a lightweight alternative to tools ...

✨ I had to processes a bunch of emails for a $DAYJOB task this week and my “default setting” is to use R for pretty much everything (this should come as no surprise). Treating mail as data is not an uncommon task and many R packages exist that can reach out ...

Continuing the blog’s UDF theme of late, there are two new UDF kids in town: drill-url-tools🔗 for slicing & dicing URI/URLs (just going to use ‘URL’ from now on in the post) drill-domain-tools🔗 for slicing & dicing internet domain names (IDNs). Now, if you’re an Apache Drill fanatic, you’...

Both my osqueryr and macthekinfe packages have had a few updates and I wanted to put together a fun example (it being Friday, and all) for what you can do with them. All my packages are now on GitHub and GitLab and I’ll be maintaining them on both so ...

I’ve mentioned @stiles before on the blog but for those new to my blatherings, Matt is a top-notch data journalist with the @latimes and currently stationed in South Korea. I can only imagine how much busier his life has gotten since that fateful, awful November 2016 Tuesday, but I’m ...

A colleague asked if I would blog about how I crafted the grid of world tile grids in this post and I accepted the challenge. The technique isn’t too hard as it just builds on the initial work by Jon Schwabish and a handy file made by Maarten Lambrechts. ...

NOTE: There is some iframed content in this post and you can bust out of it if you want to see the document in a full browser window. Also, apologies for some lingering GitHub links. I’m waiting for all the repos to import into to other services and haven’...