Introduction Do you have a R package that’s just on GitHub? How often do you check it? CRAN follows a rolling release model, so any day one of your package’s dependency packages could be updated - breaking your package! Or maybe you teach a...

Introduction When I’m switching projects I naturally start with Finder. I’m sure if I became a Terminal warrior there are faster ways of searching for files (e.g. the Television fuzzy finder TUI). And I know there are other ways to avoid u...

Introduction I regularly need to produce exercises/tutorials for my students. One fantastic feature of R Markdown is that it allows me to create one R Markdown document which can be rendered to both the question document and the solutions document. Thi...

Introduction Like alot of lecturers I’m teaching at the moment. If I have a presentation to do that’s mainly images I’ll use Powerpoint or Google Slides. If the presentation includes maths or code or both I used to use LaTeX Beamer. Over the years ...

Introduction Have you ever wanted to be able to quickly open a Data Science app, say RStudio Desktop or Positron in the current Finder window at the click of a button? We’ll see how to achieve this by creating Automator apps. Here’s a screenshot of...

Introduction Have you ever typed Amazon into the Google Chrome address bar and seen the address bar indicate that it’s now searching the Amazon site? It turns out this is a feature in Google Chrome called site search shortcuts. We can see what defa...

Introduction MLwiN from the Centre for Multilevel Modelling (CMM) at the University of Bristol (disclaimer: where I also work) is a fantastic piece of software (Charlton et al. 2024). The name suggests it only works on Windows, but as we’ll find out this is very much not the case. However, ...

Introduction: how to open a second instance of RStudio Desktop on macOS On macOS when RStudio Desktop is open it can be inconvenient to open a second (or third or fourth) instance of it. If you left click the RStudio Desktop icon nothing happens. I...

Introduction CRAN is a fantastic resource, in particular because it provides binary packages for Windows and macOS (for both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs). Because there are so many Linux distributions CRAN does not provide binary packages for Linu...