I’m running a HomeAssistant instance at home. I’ve configured it to log data into an InfluxDB database, so I can retrieve historical data for analysis later on. In default mode HomeAssistant would aggregate historical data for storage reasons.

So now I want to access the InfluxDB database from R to perform custom analyses. HomeAssistant is still using InfluxDB version 1. To connect to InfluxDB from R, I thought I can use the influxdbr package. But I got some errors because this package seems to be outdated.

Unformatunately Piwik Pro has discontinued their free plan as of the end of 2025. If I wanted to user Piwik Pro I would have to pay at least 420,00 € per year.

As the author of the CRAN-hosted R-package piwikproR I have to decide whether I should continue maintaining the package or not.

My employer still uses Piwik Pro and I will continue using the package for my work but I can’t guarentee that I will continue maintaining the package because I can’t test it anymore at home.

When it comes to using tidyverse in non-American contexts it gets often a little bit tricky. The last time I encountered a problem was when I tried to show the Euro-sign (€) in a PDF created with quarto and the gt-package.

Using html as output format everything was fine, but when I tried to create a PDF the Euro-sign was replaced by EUR.

There’s already an open issue at github ([ https://github.com/rstudio/gt/issues/1345]). But it’s getting pushed further and further down on the list of expected release versions.

Sometimes I want to summarize some categories which don’t have much impact on my analysis. So the best way to do this is using some of the forcats::fct_lump*() functions. But I often struggle to find the way using the weights to order the categories. That’s because the main use case of fct_lump() is a vector of a factor containing several values and getting the most n and the rest combined as “other”.

When working with data provided by common APIs you will almost always get in contact with JSON formatted data. Using R’s rjson::fromJSON will transform JSON to R’s lists. So far so good. Converting those lists to tibble using tibble::as_tibble will fail when the JSON (and therefor the list) contains NULL values. So you havve to replace them before building the tibble.