For today’s AFK activities I played a bit with recycling old stuff. You have an alarm-clock box you mean to throw away? Why not use it as a physical folder for small papers? I used mine as an organiser for inspirational flyers, booklets etc.
While strolling through a friend’s copy of The Economist today, admiring a very coherent visual identity they chose, I remembered reading this blog post about R having such a theme a while back.
Lead by curiosity, I gave it a try.
Blue makes for a soothing colour to present such shocking data, don’t you think?
Quick instructions…
Want a nice GUI to read through your Twitter (and Facebook) feeds in Ubuntu?
While the official TweetDeck site doesn’t offer a native client and it is not possible to install it on top of Adobe Air anymore (since it’s been dropped), it is possible to get TweetDeck as a wrapped web app in Ubuntu – through Chromium’s “create application shortcuts”.
TweetDeck in Ubuntu – multiple columns show various feeds.
Doing some web design these days, I find that Ubuntu offers a really mature stack to tackle the job with powerful applications and good OS integration. Drag’n'drop a wide spectrum of objects between applications to avoid having to browse through your files, multiple desktops to reduce window chaos and the do-one-thing-but-do-it-right philosophy stemming from the terminal era and general speed are some of the advantages that you notice quite quickly as really helpful. I’ll shortly cover some of the apps I use and their best features.
For the initial concept forming I use:
As I went searching for an RStudio equivalent for Python I discovered IPython notebook, which I shortly described in this Stack Overflow answer:
IPython has a really cool sub-project called IPython notebook. It basically allows you to interactively code and document what you’re doing in one interface and later on export it as a notebook or script or print it as static html (and therefore pdf as well).
It starts a web application locally and you use it from your browser.
There’s also a Qt console for IPython, a similar project with inline plots, which is a desktop application.
