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Andrew Heiss's blog
Site URL: www.andrewheiss.com/atom.html
Feed URL: www.andrewheiss.com/atom.xml
Posts: 10
Followers: 2
Generating universes within universes with a single seed
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2026/04/13/seeds-predetermined-universes/
Published: April 13, 2026 04:00
Introduction “…as an ook cometh of a litel spyr…” Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400),Troilus and Criseyde Book II, line 1335.In Chaucer’s Middle English, a “spyr” is a seedling. Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. Traditional English idiom,…
How to automatically convert TikZ images to SVG with Quarto
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2026/02/25/tikz-quarto-svg-fun/
Published: February 25, 2026 05:00
Back in 2021 I wrote a little guide to how to use tikz chunks in R Markdown documents. {knitr} supports tikz natively, and with some some shenanigans and special settings—and after recompiling LaTeX with one extra feature and setting a new environment…
How to make your data analysis life easier using Positron, Raycast, and Espanso
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2026/01/13/dsl-positron-workflow/
Published: January 13, 2026 05:00
On January 13, 2026, I was on Posit’s Data Science Lab to talk about my Positron settings and other neat workflow-y things I use to make my life easier. I’ll post the video here once it’s up. This isn’t a standard blog post—it’s mostly just a list of the…
How to open a folder as a Positron project with macOS Quick Actions
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/07/22/positron-open-with-finder/
Published: July 22, 2025 04:00
tl;dr Download and unzip this:  “Open in Positron” Quick Action Put Open in Positron.workflow in ~/Library/Services. Now you can right click on folders in Finder, go to Quick Actions, and select “Open in Positron” to open folders as projects in…
How to use Positron’s Connections Pane with DuckDB
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/07/10/positron-database-connections/
Published: July 10, 2025 04:00
One more Positron-related post! It’s a quick one, just to highlight one feature I think is really neat and helpful: the Connections Pane. In a newer research project I’m working on, I have geocoded data for every foreign aid project run by most donor…
Use Positron to run R inside Docker a image through SSH
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/07/05/positron-ssh-docker/
Published: July 5, 2025 04:00
I’ve long been a proponent of making quantitative research reproducible. It’s the main reason I do all my scientific writing in Quarto—I can mix code and text in the same document so I don’t need to copy/paste numbers, tables, and figures from some…
Open files in external programs with Positron or Visual Studio Code
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/07/03/open-files-external-programs-positron/
Published: July 3, 2025 04:00
Positron’s Quarto support is really quite robust and it’s full of nice little features like previewing a citation using whatever bibliography style your document is using (Chicago, APA, etc.) when you hover over a citation key: Preview of a citation …
How to use a histogram as a legend in {ggplot2}
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/02/19/ggplot-histogram-legend/
Published: February 19, 2025 05:00
On Bluesky the other day, I came across this neat post that suggested using a histogram as a plot legend to provide additional context for the data being shown: Joey Cherdarchuk’s original post Here’s a closer comparison of those two maps (click to…
How to move Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in maps with R
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/02/13/natural-earth-crimea/
Published: February 13, 2025 05:00
The Natural Earth Project The Natural Earth Project provides high quality public domain geographic data with all sorts of incredible detail, at three resolutions: high (1:10m), medium (1:50m), and low (1:110m). I use their data all the time in my own work…
Using USAID data to make fancy world maps with Observable Plot
https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/02/10/usaid-ojs-maps/
Published: February 10, 2025 05:00
As part of Elon Musk’s weird Department of Government Efficiency’s unconstitutional rampage through the federal government, USAID’s ForeignAssistance.gov was taken offline on January 31, 2025. It reappeared on February 3, but it’s not clear how long it…