Not Just a Datum

Introduction You may be asking yourself: why would I want to setup RStudio Server on Windows? I already have RStudio, what would be the benefit of running RStudio Server in a Linux Virtual Machine (VM) on my Windows machine be? Here are a few reasons: Multiple RStudio sessions running simultaneously Development for deployment on a Shiny Server Test package development independently of OS For the purposes of this tutorial, we're going to use VirtualBox , however any virtualization product will work, and we'll be installing Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS , although your preferred Linux distro is also acceptable.  Steps Figure 1. Fresh VirtualBox Manager GUI. The red arrow indicates where to click to setup a new VM. Go ahead and start downloading your distro as it may take a few minutes. Download and install VirtualBox. Hopefully your Linux distro has finished downloading, as installation of VirtualBox may interrupt network connectivity. Go ahead and start Virtu...

Edward Tufte and Stephen Few are frequently mentioned together. Several blog posts have talked about their similarities and even compared Tufte to God and Few to Moses, as Jorge Camoes did  here . Tufte would have preferred a simplistic bar plot, and may have enjoyed the first graph aesthetically. Few would have thought the colors and the lines were too distracting, and that the data would be better presented in a table. Both these ideologies leave out the full human condition, although Tufte breaches it by appealing aesthetically, not just the merger of functionality and minimalism, but by creating it a thing of beauty it can be more appreciated. However, if you add to the data the ability to interact with it, you can begin to connect more on a personal level with the data and you form a type of bond with it. Enter  Shiny R . Shiny R is a terrific way to embed interaction with your data. If you followed my previous post, you'll notice I promised a link to my shiny app...

Hello all, been awhile since I've posted. Here I'm going to show how you can use R to connect to your Plex Server, using my Home Setup as an Example. I'll also link to a shiny application hosted on shinyapps.io at the end of this blog. Setup Find your Plex Media Server database file, mine was /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Databases/ . Ugh, so many spaces. You may need to escape them if pasting this directory into your shell for a cd command. Also you'll need read and write permissions. I've added both my account and the plex account to a group called shield and gave group read/write controls on the directory. You'll need a few packages for this to work, and if you're familiar with R, you should be able to do this easily. I'm running RStudio Server on the same server that Plex is running on, but connecting remotely should not be a problem (I probably should be jailing each of these). To se...