iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 07/06/2025

I got a bit of time on this today! Without the index column requirement, I can use this to accept multiple measures and handle splits. This example is 253K rows, but only has 364 unique values, so the DAX is fast and in-visual calcs take ~10ms. Top split = spring/summer, bottom = autumn/winter

A prototype violin plot visual, showing the distribution of temperature readings over 5 New Zealand regions from 1927 to 2019. This is a computed kernel density estimation (KDE) of 253 thousand data points, but 364 uniqe values. Two measures have been supplied - one counting temperature values and the number of occurrences for each value for spring/summer, represented in the top (or blue) split of the violin - and the second measure is a summary of occurrences of temperature values over autumn and winter.

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 22/04/2025

*About* a week. Not too bad with the long weekend in the middle!

Three books. From left to right:

Don't Make me Think by Steve Krug

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 28/03/2025

They have a Sub Pop store at SEA! 14-year-old me is geeking out (and bought a lot of stuff on the way out) 😅

A photograph of DM-P's haul from the Sub Pop store in Seattle Tacoma Airport. From left to right, an Electro Harmonix Big Muff π Nano guitar pedal, Electro Harmonix Small Clone guitar pedal, Sub Pop store paper bag (rear), Sub Pop mug (front), and two Sub Pop t-shirts

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 22/03/2025

The journey to #MVPSummit begins in Christchurch NZ! I'm really looking forward to catching up with friends and meeting many new ones :) Safe travels, all! #MVPBuzz

It's a picture of me, Daniel Marsh-Patrick! I'm in an airport, and a little red in the face, but otherwise fine :)

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 22/01/2025

Deneb v1 activity looks pretty quiet, but I'm still just as busy working on Deneb in general. I'm looking forward to a point where the code on this next project is organized/good enough to open back up!

A partial screenshot of GitHub's repository list for the deneb-viz organization. Two projects are shown, and each has some simple statistics and an activity indicator, shown as a line chart.

The bottom entry shows the summary and details for the deneb project, which is the public/open-source repository for the Deneb Power BI custom visual. The activity graph looks busy, until about halfway across the x-axis, where it tapers off and eventually goes to zero.

The top entry shows the deneb-2 project, which is currently marked as private. The activity graph for this project ramps up at roughly the same point on the x-axis that the deneb project ramps down. After this ramp up, the level of activity fort he deneb-2 project is roughly consistent to that of the deneb project.

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 17/11/2024

The Chromium bug causing blurry custom visuals in #PowerBI should now be resolved as of Chrome >= 131.0.6778 and Edge >= 131.0.2903 I've tested my visuals (Deneb, HTML Content, etc.) and they all look good for me from these versions on, so hopefully other folks enjoy similar success :)

An image showing two version numbers of popular web browsers.

For Google Chrome, this shows Version 131.0.6778.70.

For Microsoft Edge, this shows 131.0.2903.51.

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 17/11/2024

As I've not had much time to explore some newer parts of #PowerBI lately, I've spent a Sunday afternoon playing with #PBICoreVisuals. It's certainly been interesting taking a clustered bar chart, throwing away the "bar" part, and then just using layout and annotation features to build a box plot 🤔

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 18/10/2024

Our archery club has grown significantly in the last few months so we've done some work to organise ourselves a bit better - it's been fun doing data viz in the physical realm

A whiteboard showing a visual representation of an archery range. Lane # is encoded on the x axis, target distance on the y axis. Each target uses shape to represent the type of boss (what stops the arrows) and the image on each point shows the target face (or a compound bow if someone decides they want an easy day 😉). There's also a label for target size under each point. For the geospatial folks, there are also labels representing which side the border hedge is on and where our shooting line is placed. We can

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 08/10/2024

My reMarkable Paper Pro just arrived - a little bit bigger than the 2 (left) and already excited about the possibilities for reading and for my day to day workflow :)

A photo showing a side by side comparison of the reMarkable 2 (left) and reMarkable Paper Pro (right)

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 29/09/2024

The Great Deku Tree was a nice weekend project... made slightly longer by sliding off the table at a critical point ⅔ of the way through and smashing itself up pretty good 🙃

Photo of completed LEGO kit - The Great Deku Tree #77092

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 15/09/2024

Data viz in the wild (at Aarhus H): probably unsurprising for many, but for someone with a minimal amount of Danish in their vocabulary and from a country that doesn't *really* do trains, this takes the guesswork out of where you need to be on a platform, relative to your train carriage👌

An image of a train departure screen, taken at Aarhus H station. The screen shows a visualization of a train, where the screen currently is on the platform, relative to the train and where you should ideally be for your carriage and seat

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 11/09/2024

I've arrived in Aarhus for #PowerBINextStep and found a nice spot in the hotel with my fellow Kiwi @rezarad.bsky.social to put the finishing touches on the #Deneb training day materials, ready for what should be an exciting day of learning tomorrow!

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 28/08/2024

Today's fun hack with #PowerBI page tabs: using Unicode to create "bold" "section headings" for training day sessions.

A bunch of tabs from a Power BI workbook. Some of them use Unicode text to appear slightly bolder than others. There aren't many (any?) configuration options for these things, so we make do with what we can :)

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 11/03/2024

Now starting the long journey from Christchurch to Redmond and looking forward to my first in-person #MVPSummit and meeting lots of people for the first time!

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 07/01/2024

Sunday afternoon project: UpSet plot concept using #Deneb and #VegaLite in #PowerBI. Transforms are fully dynamic and have no hard-coded dependencies. There's a bit of work to do to make the finished product a bit more presentable, but figuring this all out was the tricky bit :)

An image of an UpSet plot, plotted using the Deneb custom visual in Microsoft Power BI and the Vega-Lite language. Learn more about upset plots at https://upset.app/

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 09/11/2023

Found this little guy in my visualizations pane this morning, which means 1.6 should be live for most of you now. Hope you enjoy it! #deneb #PowerBI

A partial shot of the Power BI visualization pane, with a terribly drawn callout to the presence of the new version of the Deneb custom visual in there.

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 03/11/2023

#deneb 1.6 for #powerbi has passed certification! 🎉 This should take a short while to deploy fully to your reports (a couple of weeks). In the meantime, Deneb's website has been updated with the latest details. The best place to start is the change log: deneb.link/changes

Shows the Deneb visual editor interface inside Microsoft Power BI. On the left is a pane containing the JSON for a Vega-Lite specification. On the top-right is a preview image of a scatter chart of temperature deviation from 1951-1980 baseline over time.On the bottom-right is a data table of some of the data that sits behind the chart.

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Daniel Marsh-Patrick @dm-p.nz · 01/10/2023

Yeah, I'm having fun tracking down all the parts locally, and most of my spares are either bent or have teeth marks (turns out I was not as kind to my LEGO as I remember). I would like to get that Thunderjaw on the shelf next to my Tallneck one day... This is my plan for this afternoon, anyway :)

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