Andrew B. Collier / @datawookie

Two new features in the {emayili} (0.4.6) package for easily sending emails from R.

Package Setup

If you have not already installed the package, then grab it from CRAN or GitHub.

# From CRAN.
install.packages("emayili")
# From GitHub.
remotes::install_github("datawookie/emayili")

Load the package.

library(emayili)

Check that you have the current version.

packageVersion("emayili")

[1] ‘0.4.6’

Let’s quickly set up an SMTP server. We’ll use SMTP Bucket, which is incredibly convenient for testing.

SMTP_SERVER   = "mail.smtpbucket.com"
SMTP_PORT     = 8025

smtp <- server(host = SMTP_SERVER, port = SMTP_PORT)

UTF-8 Characters in Attachment Filenames

It’s now possible to attach files with names that include non-ASCII characters. Suppose I wanted to send this image (source) of Wenceslao Moreno.

I’ve been hosting a MySQL database on a DigitalOcean server for a few of years. The project has been on hold for a while. Entropy kicked in and the server became unreachable. Fortunately I was still able to access the server via a recovery console to export the database using mysqldump and download the resulting SQL dump file.

Now I want to resurrect the database locally but I also want to migrate it to PostgreSQL.

Inspired by the informative post from Jumping Rivers about selecting the correct image file type, I decided to optimise PNG file size as part of this blog’s CI pipeline.

Suppose that you want to use {emayili} to send birthday messages (this post motivated by issue #61).

I ran into a bit of a snag when updating a {blogdown} site. Suddenly, inexplicably, the images were no longer present.

I have a rather obscure situation where I want to launch Selenium… but with JavaScript disabled.

According to the Automobile Association (AA) the fuel price is the sum of four main components:

• the basic fuel price
• the general fuel levy
• the Road Accident Fund (RAF) levy and
• wholesale and retail margins, distribution and transport costs.

This article suggests that almost 70% of the fuel price in South Africa is due to taxes and levies.

How much of South Africa's petrol price goes to taxes https://t.co/m96j0TaKlS

— BusinessTech (@BusinessTechSA) January 29, 2021

I used data from {saffer} to examine this assertion.

I started using rain (a South African ISP) back in March 2019. The coverage was good (the only place I couldn’t get a signal was at Lanseria Airport), while the bandwidth was consistently high. I loved the fact that it was affordable, reliable and portable.

Much has changed.

I have a project where I need to have a persistent Selenium session. There’s a script which will leave a browser window open when it exits. When the script runs again it should connect to the same window.

The transcripts for the South African President’s speeches are available here. I’ve just added these data to the {saffer} package.

I’ve been adding topological maps of South Africa to the saffer-data-map repository. The maps are originally in MrSID format (.sid files), which is a proprietary file format developed by LizardTech (a company which has been consumed by Extensis).

The {saffer} package is a nascent collection of things relating to South Africa. I’ve just added fuel price data.

I have a SQLAlchemy count() query which is being called fairly frequently in my API. The query itself is not terribly inefficient, but it’s being called with sufficient frequency that it has a performance impact.

A couple of days ago I posted an analysis of the price of nitrile gloves at Dischem.

I had a suspicion that there was more data beyond the history that I got from Strava (see previous post). And indeed my hunch was confirmed by downloading my history from Garmin Connect.

My colleague, Matt, noted that nitrile gloves are getting really expensive.

I’ve been itching to do some analytics on my running data. Today seemed like a good time to actually do it.

I’ll be generating some plots using the {strava} package developed by Marcus Volz.

I needed to have a Redis server available as part of the GitLab CI pipeline for this blog (simply because I wanted to use the {rredis} package). After fiddling around for some time trying to install the redis-server package using apt I discovered that GitLab CI actually provides Redis as a service, which makes the process remarkably easy.

Some details of the “standard” services (Redis, PostgreSQL and MySQL) supported by GitLab CI can be found here:

I’m busy preparing slides for the Why R? conference using the brilliant {xaringan} package along with {xaringanthemer} to tweak the styles. There are plots rendered into the document as well as static images.

The scrapy-rotating-proxies package makes it simple to use rotating proxies with Scrapy.

One issue that I’ve run into though is that pages which return a 404 error are retried (and the corresponding proxy is marked as dead). This does not make sense to me since if a server returns a 404 error this generally means that the requested page is just not available. It’s not a proxy problem; it’s a URL problem.