I'm not analyzing COVID data, though I'm impressed with Ontario's open data

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

I’m neither an epidemiologist nor a medical doctor. So, no one wants to see my amateur disease modelling.

That said, I’ve complained in the past about Ontario’s open data practices. So, I was very impressed with the usefulness of the data the Province is providing for COVID: a straightforward csv file that is regularly updated from a stable URL.

Using the data is easy. Here’s an example of creating a table of daily counts and cumulative totals:

data_source <- "[data.ontario.ca/dataset/f...](https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/f4112442-bdc8-45d2-be3c-12efae72fb27/resource/455fd63b-603d-4608-8216-7d8647f43350/download/conposcovidloc.csv)"
covid_data <- read_csv(data_source) %>% 
  select(ACCURATE_EPISODE_DATE) %>% 
  rename(date = ACCURATE_EPISODE_DATE) %>% 
  group_by(date) %>% 
  summarise(daily_count = n()) %>% 
  mutate(cumulative_count = cumsum(daily_count))

From there we can make some simple plots to get a sense of how the case load is changing.

And, I’ll leave it at that, at least for public posting 🤓

Simple brew tea shortcut

Friday, April 10, 2020

Since I’m mostly stuck inside these days, I find I’m drinking more tea than usual. So, as a modification of my brew coffee shortcut, I’ve created a brew tea shortcut.

This one is slightly more complicated, since I want to do different things depending on if the tea is caffeinated or not.

We start by making this choice:

Then, if we choose caffeine, we log this to the Health app:

Uncaffeinated tea counts as water (at least for me):

And, then, regardless of the type of tea, we set a timer for 7 minutes:

Running this one requires more interactions with Siri, since she’ll ask which type we want. We can either reply by voice or by pressing the option we want on the screen.

A simple Shortcut for tracking workout time

Saturday, April 4, 2020

I’ve been tracking my time at work for a while now, with the help of Toggl and Timery. Now that I’m working from home, work and home life are blending together, making it even more useful to track what I’m doing.

Physical exercise is essential to my sanity. So, I wanted to integrate my Apple Watch workouts into my time tracking. I thought I’d be able to leverage integration with the Health app through Shortcuts to add in workout times. Turns out you can’t access this kind of information and I had to take a more indirect route using the Automation features in Shortcuts.

I’ve setup two automations: one for when I start an Apple Watch workout and the other for when I stop the workout:

The starting automation just starts an entry in Timery:

The stopping automation, unsurprisingly, stops the running entry:

As with most of my Shortcuts, this is a simple one. Developing a portfolio of these simple automations is really helpful for optimizing my processes and freeing up time for my priorities.