Business intelligence tools like Power BI and Looker Studio (formerly known as Google Data Studio) help companies visualize and analyze data to gain valuable insights. But which platform should you choose for your organization? Here we compare the pros and cons of Microsoft Power BI and Looker Studio. Overview of Power BI Power BI is a business analytics service developed by Microsoft. It connects to various data sources, applies intelligence to transform and model data, and creates interactive reports and dashboards....
As an R&D engineer, working within one of the largest wafer fabs in Europe, I spend a lot of my time analyzing data and generating reports, in order to make informed decisions about product design and process. It’s essential to use tools that can help analyze data quickly and easily, so I can identify trends and problems and take corrective action. Two popular data analysis tools for engineers like myself are SAS JMP and Microsoft Power BI....
I’ve been using VBA to generate pivot tables in Excel for a few years now, and I’ve found it to be a very powerful tool. I can use VBA to quickly and easily create pivot tables that summarize large amounts of data. I can also use VBA to update pivot tables as my data changes. In this blog post, I’ll show you how I use VBA to generate pivot tables. I’ll start by explaining what pivot tables are and why they are useful....
Many eInk devices now available Much has happened in the world of eReaders since my original blog posts highlighting the need for more 13.3" eReaders and it’s now more than 7 years since I bought my 9.7" Onyx Boox M96. There are now many 13.3" options available as well as 10.3" devices. I won’t go into details here or plug any particular manufacturers; a quick search on YouTube will present you with many up to date reviews and comparisons....
Back story I don’t have time to be a web developer. I was lucky enough to get into building websites as a kid, before many people had an internet connection at home and before the phrase “Web Developer” really existed. In those early days I was using simple HTML with inline formatting. I actually remember CSS coming in and making things instantly more complicated, while opening up significantly greater possibilities....
I recently had the honour of giving an invited talk on Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) at the Ex-Spring Industrial Conclave which was hosted by Exeter University. Apart from introducing the magnetic recording paradigms (LMR, PMR and HAMR) and emphasizing the need for energy-assisted magnetic recording in order to continue areal density growth, I shared details on the HAMR recording physics and highlighted challenges that have been overcome in the last few years in order to bring HAMR to product....
Recently I used balenaEtcher to create a bootable Linux drive. It is a nice Windows program that simplifies the process of creating Linux disks and is recommended by some Linux distro vendors. After the program successfully writes a bootable Linux USB drive, the drive no longer appears correctly in Windows. That’s because a bootable USB contains certain drive partitions with filesystem types that are not visible to the Windows operating system....
Zotero is a cross-platform literature manager that is able to sync to a remote server and across multiple user devices. There are many alternatives available, each with strengths and weaknesses, but I am currently using Zotero to manage my literature because it is free and works with WebDAV for additional free storage. In this article I will describe why optical character recognition (OCR) is important for Zotero and suggest a way to add OCR to existing items in a Zotero library....
If you want to plot something on the terminal in ASCII you can use “eplot”. eplot itself is a Ruby script that acts as a frontend for gnuplot. eplot can be downloaded from the project’s GitHub page. It makes it easier to pipe numbers into gnuplot, which can otherwise be a bit of a hassle. It also has a dumb terminal mode which allows us to plot using ASCII. Plotting like this provides a way to quickly check data files without requiring any x windowing system, which might not be available when logging in remotely over the terminal....
Previously I showed how it was possible to obtain sunrise and sunset times for a whole year at any location on Earth, from a public source. This time I am going to explain how to fetch that data, clean it up and create graphical visualizations like the one below, all using Python. A Jupyter Notebook is available on GitHub. Such data might even be useful in, for example, simulation of solar power generation....
jinsngjung / Pixabay Today is 2nd January and the days are getting longer again. I was thinking about sunrise and sunset times and wondering if I should do some data analysis and plotting of these to visualize how they change over the course of a year. Of course, the first step is to get a suitable data set. You can get a data set of sunrise and sunset times from this page on the US Naval Observatory (USNO) website....