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I'm making today "Twitter Tuesday" (a.k.a. light commentary with links to tweets or threads) since I have a boatload of onboarding left at Day 2 of my new job at GreynNoise Intelligence and zonked kind of early last night.
Picture [Im]Perfect Tables
Yesterday, the Financial Times' Alan Smith (@theboysmithy) posted a tweet on the madness of the World Health Organization (WHO) publishing data tables in png's:
Maarten Lambrechts (@maartenzam) — an outstanding data journalist and data visualization expert — noted that Excel (for macOS) has a prominent button (on the "Data" tab) that will extract data from a picture (from a file or the clipboard). I try not to use Excel for anything, but had to see how well this worked:
The tool gives you an opportunity to review and modify the extracted data before importing:
Excel preserved the tabular nature of the data, but, as usual, is still quite lonely since it treated the 1-5
's (et al.) as a date.
I don't have to deal with data from pictures too much (and use the built-in AI-driven copy-text-from-picture that macOS has on Apple Silicon), but I'll likely try this first when I do.
[Fuzzy] Space Age seD
Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) posted a tweet:

with a short gifcast about two command-line tools I hadn't heard of before:
Space Age seD (sad): CLI search and replace made with Rust
FuZzy Finder (fzf): A general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder made with golang.
The gifcast shows them in action. I usually use the (very old) Perl one-liner Kieran mentioned:
perl -i -p -e "s/foo/bar/g" *.txt
and, do not have much cause for mass search/replace, but sad
looks solid and fzf
has a great feature set and plugs into a cadre of environments beyond just the command line.
Static Visualizations
This thread, by Alastair Otter (@alastairotter | homepage), regarding static visualizations resonated well with me, so I won’t steal any thunder from Alastair’s posits, so consider the expository the thread itself:

(h/t Matt Stiles for the RT of Alastair's thread!)
FIN
If you give sad
or fzf
a go, make sure to share your thoughts with others in the comments. ☮