Blog

Writing about data science, energy, technology, and the things I build.

Migrating from Blogdown to Astro (with a little help from AI)

Migrating from Blogdown to Astro (with a little help from AI)

After 6 years on Hugo and Blogdown, I finally rebuilt my blog from scratch with Astro, React, and Tailwind CSS. Here's why I made the switch, the options I considered, and how Claude helped me migrate 22 posts in an afternoon.

web technical
4 Lessons from the smart home

4 Lessons from the smart home

2 years and 100 devices later. What are my top recommendations in setting up your own smart home?

Smart Home
East/West patterns in Covid-19: validating claims of correlation

East/West patterns in Covid-19: validating claims of correlation

A review of analysis by Joel Smalley.

COVID19
Daily Covid-19 deaths statistics: an explainer

Daily Covid-19 deaths statistics: an explainer

A guide on how to interpret the daily death statistics published released in the UK.

COVID19
Why COVID positivity rates and deaths don't always correlate

Why COVID positivity rates and deaths don't always correlate

A review of analysis by Joel Smalley, and simulated results to highlight concerns surrounding the interpretation of the statistics.

COVID19
Visualising Neighbouring Polygons in R

Visualising Neighbouring Polygons in R

Guide on how to make neighbouring boundary maps in R.

GIS R
UK goes into lockdown: further Covid-19 analysis

UK goes into lockdown: further Covid-19 analysis

As more countries find themselves challenging the growth of Covid-19, we explore the data behind the outbreak to see the trajectories that countries are taking.

Covid 19 Data Visualisation
Visualising Covid-19 With Animated, Static and Interactive Maps

Visualising Covid-19 With Animated, Static and Interactive Maps

Code to show the global spread of Covid-19

Covid 19 Animated Maps Data Visualisation
COVID-19 Preliminary Data Analysis

COVID-19 Preliminary Data Analysis

Some Preliminary data analysis into COVID-19

Things I learnt at rstudio::conf 2019

Things I learnt at rstudio::conf 2019

My reflection rstudio::conf 2019 and all the packages discovered

Creating Twitter Wordclouds in R

Creating Twitter Wordclouds in R

A guide on creating wordclouds using the rtweet package in R.

Technical R web
Book Launch of "A Village Inheritance"

Book Launch of "A Village Inheritance"

Back in 2014, I discovered a beaten old manuscript written by my grandparents back in the 1973. Today, after smany hours we officially launched the finished book!

book
Walking from London to Basingstoke

Walking from London to Basingstoke

18 hours, 50 miles, some fun and lots of pain. A write up on how the day went, and a lesson on just because you say you will do something, it doesn't necessarily mean you should.

walking data maps
Animated Plots with R

Animated Plots with R

Some examples of using animated plots with geospatial data.

GIS R Technical
Data-driven flowcharts in R using DiagrammeR

Data-driven flowcharts in R using DiagrammeR

A short introduction on how to use R to produce data-driven flowcharts.

R Technical R Markdown
Migrating blog to Blogdown

Migrating blog to Blogdown

R web Blogdown

Mapping UK Local Political Data

For my PhD research, I needed to collect local political data for the UK. This article documents the data sources and procedure used to create a suitable dataset for my analysis, and allows for the analysis to be easily reproduced for use within your own workflow/

R Data Mapping
Writing reports in RStudio: an introduction to RMarkdown

Writing reports in RStudio: an introduction to RMarkdown

Learn why you should consider the benefits of RMarkdown for doing data-driven research. This post shares a presentation which I gave to the Spatial Modelling group, and provides some useful resources for futher reading.

R Presentation Reproducible Resaerch
Using R for Geospatial Data Analysis

Using R for Geospatial Data Analysis

Although R is widely used for data processing and statistical modelling, it is less frequently known for its powers of handing Geospatial Data. This presentation is aimed to show people the benefits of using R in their analyses, and provides practical guidance on how to get started on your first project.

GIS R Presentation
Identifying key influences for planning acceptance of onshore wind turbines

Identifying key influences for planning acceptance of onshore wind turbines

Conference paper presented at ECOS 2017 on my research into understanding why some wind farms are more successful than others.

GIS R Presentation
Cycling Lands End to John O'Groats

Cycling Lands End to John O'Groats

Back in May 2016, a friend and I undertook one of the challenges which we had wanted to do for years and cycled the length of the United Kingdom from Land's End to John O' Groats. It was a fantastic experience and something I would love to do again one day. This blog provides a summary of our trip and aims to aid anyone who may be planning their own trip.

Cycling maps GIS