These are posts where I walk you through my work, it is not detailed enough nor futureproofed enough to be called a tutorial. But I hope they inspire you.

Downloading files from a webserver, and failing.

 Posted on December 8, 2017   (Last modified on November 9, 2022)  |  5 minutes  |  989 words  | 

Recently I wanted to download all the transcripts of a podcast (600+ episodes). The transcripts are simple txt files so in a way I am not even ‘web’-scraping but just reading in 600 or so text files which is not really a big deal. I thought. This post shows you where I went wrong TL:DR : do not assume everything will always work on the internet. Also here is a picture I found of scraping. [Read More]
hack  curl  purrr  scraping 

Building the oomsifyer

 Posted on November 28, 2017   (Last modified on November 9, 2022)  |  3 minutes  |  542 words  | 

Today I will show you a quick hack (OK it took me like 4 hours during my travels today yesterday and today), on how to add a dancing banana to any picture. Now, you might be thinking… Really, why would you add a dancing banana to a picture, but I don’t have time for that kind of negativity in my life. Why oomsifier? Jeroen Ooms is one of those crazy productive people in the R world. [Read More]
magick  example_function  hack  banana  gif 

Where to live in the Netherlands based on temperature XKCD style

 Posted on November 20, 2017   (Last modified on November 9, 2022)  |  5 minutes  |  1041 words  | 

After seeing a plot of best places to live in Spain and the USA based on the weather, I had to chime in and do the same thing for the Netherlands. The idea is simple, determine where you want to live based on your temperature preferences. First the end result: This post explains how to make the plot, to see where I got the data and what procedures I took look at https://github. [Read More]
XKCD  weather  humidex  dplyr  ggplot2  readr  Netherlands 

Generate text using Markov Chains (sort of)

 Posted on January 21, 2017   (Last modified on November 9, 2022)  |  6 minutes  |  1267 words  | 

Inspired by the hilarious podcast The Greatest Generation, I have worked again with all the lines from all the episode scripts of TNG. Today I will make a clunky bot (although it does nothing and is absolutely not useful) that talks like Captain Picard. I actually wanted to use a Markov Chain to generate text. A Markov Chain has a specific property. It doesn’t care what happened before, it only looks at probabilities from the current state to a next state. [Read More]
Markov  TNG  dplyr  tidytext  bot 

Version control with Git

 Posted on March 1, 2016   (Last modified on November 9, 2022)  |  8 minutes  |  1627 words  | 

Keeping track of versions You work on a project and would like to keep track of what you did. That is why keep old versions of your files. That way you can go back if you messed up beyond recognition. Usually that looks like this: Or you use dropbox or something like it: Other people use email. Emailing to themselves or to collaborators when they finished something. [Read More]
beginner  git  version control