Rust CLI For Apple’s WeatherKit REST API

| | Apple, macos, rust, Weather
Apple is in the final stages of shuttering the DarkSky service/API. They’ve replaced it with WeatherKit, which has both an xOS framework version as well as a REST API. To use either, you need to be a member of the Apple Developer Program (ADP) — $99.00/USD per-year — and calls ... Read More

Introducing {weatherkit}: The Eventual Replacement R Package for {darksky}

| | Apple, R, Weather
My {darksky} package has been around for years, now, and the service that powers it was purchased by Apple before the pandemic. The DarkSky API is slated to be shuttered in December of this year and is being replaced by Apple’s WeatherKit xOS Framework and REST API. I’ve started work ... Read More

Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud On Juneteenth

| | Commentary
I realize you have to be living under a rock in the U.S. to not know that yesterday, was Juneteenth (a portmanteau of “June Nineteenth”). Still, I feel compelled to explain that said date marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of ... Read More
Using Leonardo SVG Palettes in R

Using Leonardo SVG Palettes in R

| | R
In today’s newsletter Leonardo, an open source project and free online too from Adobe that lets you make great and accessible color palettes for use in UX/UI design and data visualizations! You can read the one newsletter section to get a feel for Leonardo, then go play with it a ... Read More
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Escaping Groundhog Day

| | Commentary, Personal
Before digging into this post, I need to set some context. Friday, May 13, 2022 was my last day at my, now, former employer of nearly seven years. I’m not mentioning the company name1 because this post is not about them2. This post is about burnout and the importance of ... Read More

Rusty HTML Minifying In R with {rextendr}

| | R, rust
In my M-F newsletter today I mentioned an awesome Rust-based HTML/JS/CSS minifier library that also include batteries for a few other languages. There was no R port, so I made one using {rextendr}. The {rextendr} package makes is as easy to use Rust code in R packages as {Rcpp} does ... Read More
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Keeping Those SSH Keys Safe

| | R
I came across a neat site that uses a Golang wasm function called from javascript on the page to help you see if your GitHub public SSH keys are “safe”. What does “safe” mean? This is what the function checks for (via that site): Recommended key sizes are as follows: ... Read More
full capabilities ESC/POS printing

Update On ESC/POS Package Work

| | R
The morning before work was super productive and there is a nigh-complete DSL for ESC/POS commands along with the ability to just print {ggplot2}/{grid} object. I changed the package name to {escpos} since it is no longer just plot object focused, and the DSL looks a bit like this: library(stringi) ... Read More
ggplot receipt

Turning {ggplot2} Into a PoS (Point-of-Sale) System

| | R
At the end of March, I caught a fleeting tweet that showcased an Epson thermal receipt printer generating a new “ticket” whenever a new GitHub issue was filed on a repository. @aschmelyun documents it well in this blog post. It’s a pretty cool hack, self-contained on a Pi Zero. Andrew’s ... Read More
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses the nation on a live TV broadcast in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 22, 2022.

Full transcript of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s emotional appeal to Russians

| | Commentary
Here is the full transcript of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s video address early on Feb. 24 local time warning that a Russian invasion could cause tens of thousands of deaths. “Today I initiated a phone call with the president of the Russian federation. The result was silence. Though the silence ... Read More