Author: Sean Carney

One of the biggest steps you can take to ensure your security online is to keep the software on your devices up to date and install any software updates that come out. This advice doesn’t just apply to your computers and phones, but also internet of things devices like a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black. Luckily this is an easy process with the help of one important software package.

One of the best ways to understand data is through the use of descriptive statistics, figuring out the minimum and maximum values, the median value, and the quartiles.  When you’re working with smaller datasets this is easy, but with larger datasets you need to parse a lot of data to get these metrics.  Luckily, you can use SQL to get descriptive statistics for your data directly from the database.

Once you get your Raspberry Pi, the first thing you need to do before you can use it is install an operating system. The Raspberry Pi is a bit unique since it has no on-board storage and only uses a micro-SD card for the operating system and user files. This guide walks you through how to install an OS to a micro-SD card so you can start using your Raspberry Pi.

I’m working on a dashboard to track COVID-19 cases per capita in Calgary, and while the government’s open data API provides daily case counts within the city it doesn’t have any history available. The easy solution to this is to download the data on a daily basis and archive it myself, but I want to automate the download and loading into the database so I don’t have to think about it. Luckily, MySQL and a bit of shell script goes a long way.

If you need a database for a project, MySQL is one of the most popular choices. It’s free, open-source and is a core part of of the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web application stack. If you want to get started using MySQL for a project, here’s a guide of how to install it on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 20.04.

After you’ve changed the default username and password on our Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black, the next step to securing it is to install and configure a firewall. A firewall will help keep your device secure by limiting or block connections to the services running on your device, creating a far smaller attack surface that can be exploited.

While R is the real workhorse of data analysis and modeling, if you want to share the results of your work with other people your probably going to send it in a spreadsheet. Luckily the xlsx package for R makes it easy to export simple spreadsheets and also has advanced functionality to create workbooks with professional design and formatting.

I’ve long used MPD to listen to music, however one annoying limitation was that the music was confined to one room of the house (short of running speaker wires everywhere). Recently I set up a system that used Google Home to get multiroom audio, while still getting all the benefits of MPD. Here’s how.

Once the data preparation phase is complete, its time to move on to the fun part of the CRISP-DM framework: modeling. Here you’ll chose which modeling technique to use, create some tests to assess the accuracy of your model, build the model, and then assess the model using the tests you created.

When you start using a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black, it comes with a default username and password. While this makes it easy to log in and get started, it also makes it easy for anyone to log in. We should probably do something about that. Luckily this isn’t very hard to fix, you just need to create a new account and disable the default account.