Yeah, ok, it’s late February, so a bit late for a “new year, new me” declaration, but I’ve been feeling like I should write a little something about… *waves hands in a generalised and unspecified fashion*. So this is a relatively short post about leaving the civil service last year, what I’ve done since and what I’m thinking about for the future.

Two years and one month ago to the day I blogged about setting up the narrowbotr, a Twitter bot that randomly posts locations on the inland waterways network in England & Wales managed by Canal & River Trust. What with everything going on with Twitter at the moment I’ve set myself up on Mastodon, where I’m @mattkerlogue@fosstodon.org, and so why not also migrate the narrowbotr. In this post: Setting up an account Chillin' out, maxin', rtootin' all cool Authenticating the bot Setting up an account There’s more than enough posts and whatnot out there about moving to Mastodon/the fediverse, Danielle Navarro’s blog is particularly good.

Energy costs in the UK, and globally, have been rising significantly as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Energy prices for domestic (i.e. residential/household) consumers in the UK have been subject to a “cap”1 calculated by the energy regulator, Ofgem. The price cap is usually quoted in terms of it’s annual value, which possibly isn’t the most useful approach, especially as we head into the winter months. So I tried to estimate what my energy costs might be… and then I turned that exercise into an interactive calculator that others can use.

TLDR: For very good reasons ODS is a horrible data file format. The OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) format is an increasingly common format for publishing spreadsheets, especially official statistics from UK government departments. I recently encountered a problem when trying to use the {readODS} package to read a published ODS file. More surprsingly, I discovered that {readODS} is the only R package on CRAN for working with ODS files. As a result I’ve started to develop my own package, {tidyods}.

No matter what job we do or who we work for all of us have been in meetings that we knew weren’t worth it. For those of us in the public sector there’s the added pressure knowing that we’re paid by the taxpayer. A couple of weeks ago a friend who works in another government department (for arguments sake the Department for Action) was lamenting that they and their team of six were asked by a someone in another government department (let’s say the Ministry of Meetings) to have a meeting with their team about a joint project they were working on.