Announcing 'words'; an R package containing scrabble allowed english words
I’m thrilled to announce the release of my new package words. words is an extremely simple package, but I’m excited to use it for my future projects.
Recently I’ve been playing around with some word based puzzles in R. One of the examples of this is wordbuilder, which finds all valid words of from a given list of 5 letters. In an example like this, one of the challenges is finding a list of valid english words.
Generated plots not showing in blogdown
Debugging why my plots weren’t showing up in blogdown
While writing my last post, I discovered that while using blogdown::serve_site(), any plots generated by R code weren’t showing up in the website.
The first thing I did was remove the .gitignore file under my static directory. This unfortunately didn’t fix the issue (but I suspect was still a contributor to the final fix.)
The second thing I did was add a setup R chunk that had the code knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE, fig.
Auto-authentication with scrobbler
Authenticate automatically using environment variables
I’m pleased to announce a new version of scrobbler which introduces a slightly new way to authenticate download_scrobbles and update_scrobbles calls. This change is released on CRAN, so you can get the update by running
install.packages("scrobbler")
New authentication In previous versions of scrobbler, whenever you wanted to download scrobbles you had to pass in your username and API key.
library(scrobbler) my_data <- download_scrobbles(username = "your_username", api_key = "your_api_key") This quickly gets tiring (particularly with the API key), so I’m pleased to announce there is now a better way.
Tracking your music history with scrobbler (part 2)
By Conor Neilson
| Jan 15, 2021
| r, tutorial
In part 2 of this series, we’ll be looking at how to actually start using scrobbler to download your music history.
As a quick recap from part 1, scrobbling is a service offered by Last.fm, where any music you listen to on other platforms (i.e., Spotify) is recorded and stored by Last.fm, along with a timestamp and associated metadata. scrobbler is intended as an interface to that database, so you can download and explore your music history with the full freedom of R.
Setting your posts preview in blogdown
By Conor Neilson
| Dec 23, 2020
| blogdown
In which I learn about post summaries.
In various hugo themes, you get the option of having a ‘preview’ of the text that your post contains. For example, this is how it looks on my blog:
I’ve always been irritated by not being able to control what text went into that little description section. Early in my blogdown journey I looked into it, but quickly got lost in Hugo’s .Summary and .
Finding my most played song in a single day with scrobbler
By Conor Neilson
| Dec 17, 2020
| r, tutorial
Ever since publishing my first post about the development of scrobbler I’ve been meaning to spend much more time writing and showcasing some of the analyses I wanted to do with it. As with many things, life gets in the way, but this is my effort to show something small and simple.
My idea for this post came from Spotify’s ‘2020 Wrapped’ video they make for you showing trends of your listening over the previous year.
Tracking your music history with scrobbler (Part 1)
By Conor Neilson
| May 11, 2020
| r, tutorial
Note: This is the first of a 2 part post about scrobbler. This first one will deal with what exactly scrobbles are and how to get started, while part 2 will focus on actually using the scrobbler R package.
Like many people, I’ve always loved music. While my skills at playing music are embarrassingly non-existent, I basically listen to music all day every day. Therefore, it was only inevitable that I would eventually start to muse on how I could apply my love of data to my love of music…
Resetting fileInput in Shiny
While working on my (currently WIP) package nebula, I ran into an issue with resetting the fileInput component in Shiny.
In short, nebula allows you to upload a photo of an otolith (fish ear bone), and mark the positions of the growth rings (like in a tree trunk). Once you’ve finished, you can download the positions as a csv file.
The issue I ran into, is once you’ve finished marking your photo, if you want to then start a new photo, you need some way of resetting the fileInput, and removing the current photo.
A silly typing mistake
Recently I was working on my WIP package ‘verhoeff’, for calculating check digits based on the Verhoeff algorithim. I was at the stage where most of the basic code was written, so I was starting to test simple examples.
I was testing an early implementation which I thought would work. I used the code
calculate_digit(prepare_number(1), dat$d5, dat$d5_p, dat$inv_v) In this code, prepare_number simply does some checks to see if the number is valid, and converts it to a numeric vector.
Calculating the number of gifts in the ’12 Days of Christmas'
Over the holiday period my partner was talking about a question she was posed at a work quiz, which was “How many gifts in total are given in the song”The 12 Days of Christmas”. I thought this was a great opportunity to showcase some of the basic skills that are useful to master in R, namely functions and *apply.
First, we need to consider how to calculate the number of presents gifted in any given day.