S Anand

Could you spare a minute & share your COVID-19 vaccination cost, please? LinkedIn

This is my first Lightboard video – interacting with a data visualization on-camera. Hans Rosling did something like this with BBC 4. That’s been my inspiration. In this video, I share the screen time of the Harry Potter supporting cast. The bar chart race was created in PowerPoint, and the lightboard effect was created with OBS. (I’ll share a tutorial soon.) What do you think of the video? Any comments? Questions? ...

Comicgen now has a very versatile character – Aavatar. Pick your gender. Hairstyle. Emotion. Attire. Pose. Colors. Create your own character. (It’s open-source.) https://gramener.com/comicgen/v1/ The variations are staggering. It throws up surprising ones too, like crossdressers or bald women in sarees 🙂 What I’m struggling with is: Who needs this? What could they do with it? I’m not sure. If you have ideas or know someone who might, please let me know 🙏 ...

I’ve a theory. PowerPoint can do anything. (Excel too). Shape operations are especially powerful. In this tutorial, I create an address card icon and export it as SVG. I don’t need Sketch / Illustrator for this. They’re great. But no, thanks. I’m pretty good with PowerPoint 😄 Have you seen PowerPoint do anything that made you go “Wow! This is cool!”? Do share. I’d love to hear about it. http://www.s-anand.net/blog/designing-complex-shapes-in-powerpoint/ LinkedIn

We are looking for a Chief Sales Officer. (For Princeton, New Jersey.) Do you ensure clients get value from what you sell? Do you have the energy to go after partners and logos relentlessly? Do you feel the thrill of using data to tell stories? Are you game to take a $10m data company to $50m? We would like to talk to you. Please visit 👇 https://gramener.com/job/?id=90554 LinkedIn

I use PowerPoint instead of Adobe Illustrator or Sketch. I’m familiar with it, and it does everything I need. One of the features I’m really excited by in PowerPoint is the ability to manipulate shapes. Let’s say you have a rectangle and a circle. You can select both of these shapes and in the Shape Format > Merge Shapes dropdown, you can: merge them with a union combine them (like an XOR operation in Boolean algebra) fragment them, which breaks them up into pieces intersect them subtract them This is so powerful that you can create any kind of shape. Let’s take an icon from Font Awesome at random – say an address card – and create it. ...

For 10 years, I’ve enjoyed building data visualizations by writing code. Today, we launched the Gramex IDE at https://gramex.gramener.com – and it aims to make me redundant. Everyone can do the same, but without code. I’ll miss the good old days, but looking forward to a brave new world of low code. LinkedIn

When we started Comicgen – a JavaScript library to generate comics - https://gramener.com/comicgen/ – I didn’t expect it to become the #1 page on the Gramener website. Today, we had another unexpected surprise. The Comicgen Power BI plugin is a Power BI Editor’s Pick: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-march-2021-feature-summary/ It’s open-source: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-US/product/power-bi-visuals/wa200001420. Try it out. #datacomics #comics #dataanalysis LinkedIn

Daksh India is an NGO that works with legal & political data – such as every single legal case in India. They’re looking for a senior #datascientist who can explore such data and publish visual insights. What I like about such roles is that it allows you to publish your work and build your portfolio. You could apply at https://dakshindia.org/work-with-us/ (via Surya Prakash B S) LinkedIn

Unofficial Guide to Programming Minecraft with Websockets. My daughter got me hooked on Minecraft. (If you see me staring intently at you during a Zoom call, I’m probably fighting a mob.) As it turns out, Minecraft is pretty programmable. You can send it messages using websockets that can place blocks, create mobs, get information, and more. None of this is officially documented, though. So I spent a few weeks reverse-engineering this and put together a guide to programming Minecraft. ...

Jolie No. 1 There are more Bollywood actors in Hollywood. Some are even turning down Hollywood roles. So we wondered: How easily can a Bollywood actor connect to a Hollywood actor? As part of the Oct 2019 Gramener data story hackathon, Anand, Kishore, and Niyas created a Jolie No 1 — a data video where Govinda announces (in our imagination) that he will act with Angelina Jolie in Jolie No 1, but declines to comment on who introduced them. ...

Here are some famous funny dialogues by Tamil comedian Vadivelu. Can you guess which movie they’re from? Don’t worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green.

At PyCon Indonesia, I spoke about a project we worked on with the World Mosquito Program. The World Mosquito Program (WMP) modifies mosquitoes with a bacteria – Wolbachia. This reduces their ability to carry deadly viruses. (It makes me perversely happy that we’re infecting mosquitoes now 😉.) Modifying mosquitoes is an expensive process. With a limited set of “good mosquitoes”, it is critical to find the best release points that will help them replicate rapidly. ...

There are more Bollywood actors in Hollywood. Some are even turning down Hollywood roles. So we wondered: How easily can a Bollywood actor connect to a Hollywood actor? As part of the Oct 2019 Gramener data story hackathon, Anand, Kishore, and Niyas created a Jolie No 1 — a data video where [Govinda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Govinda_(actor) announces (in our imagination) that he will act with Angelina Jolie in Jolie No 1, but declines to comment on who introduced them. We picked a theme first The hackathon theme was “movies”. We explored 5 themes: ...

Here are beautiful first interludes from Harris Jayaraj's Tamil film songs. Can you guess which movie they’re from? Don’t worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green.

Ganes and I created a data movie on speed-cubing records as part of a Gramener hackathon. Here’s a video of us talking about how we created it. Anand: We picked the Rubik’s cube story for this hackathon. Tell me more about how this excited you. Ganes: Since my son started solving the Rubik’s cube a few months back, I’ve been fascinated with these competitions. I still don’t know how to solve it, but I like watching it. ...

Contronyms are words that have two meanings that are the opposite of each other. Sanction, for example, may mean restricting something (e.g. sanction against imports) or approving something (e.g. sanctioning imports). Scan may mean to look at cursorily (e.g. scan a document) or look at in detail (e.g. scan an X-Ray) Fine may mean excellent (e.g. fine wine) or average (e.g. the wine’s fine). I enjoyed this list of 75 contronyms.

Minecraft lets you connect to a websocket server when you’re in a game. The server can receive and send any commands. This lets you build a bot that you can … (well, I don’t know what it can do, let’s explore.) Minecraft has commands you can type on a chat window. For example, type / to start a command and type setblock ~1 ~0 ~0 grass changes the block 1 north of you into grass. (~ means relative to you. Coordinates are specified as X, Y and Z.) ...

Always a pleasure when our work lands on Andy Kirk’s list 😊 – thanks for being a great motivator, Andy! LinkedIn

One problem I’ve had in Markdown is rendering a content in columns. On Bootstrap, the markup would look like this: <div class="row"> <div class="col">...</div> <div class="col">...</div> </div> How do we get that into Markdown without writing HTML? On Python, the attribute lists extension lets you add a class. For example: This is some content {: .row} … renders <p class="row">This is some content</p>. But I can’t do that to multiple paragraphs. Nor can I next content, i.e. add a .col inside the .row. ...