By @edent · emfcamp python tildagon · 2 comments · 500 words
The Tildagon has 2MB of RAM. That's not enough to do... well, most things you'd want to do with a computer! There's not much processing power, so running complex image decoding algorithms might be a bit beyond it. Is there a simple image format which can be parsed and displayed? Yes! The ancient Portable PixMap […]
Continue reading →By @edent · emf emfcamp python tildagon · 1 comment · 350 words
I'm beginning my adventures in MicroPython in the hope that I'll have something interesting working on the Tildagon Badge for EMF2026. Here's a basic implementation of a clockface. Here's how to set the time on the badge. There's a hardware clock which should keep time between reboots. Install mpremote on your computer. Connect the Tildagon […]
Continue reading →By @edent · emf emfcamp python QR Codes · 2 comments · 900 words · read ~497 times.
This was a bit of a labour of love - and something I wanted to get running during EMF Camp. I'm documenting in the hope it'll be useful for EMF 2026! Here's the end result: Background I'm going to assume that you have updated your badge to the latest firmware version. You will also need […]
Continue reading →By @edent · MastodonAPI python untappd · 450 words
A few years ago, I wrote some code to post Untappd check-ins to Mastodon. I've recently updated it to also post a photo of the beer you're enjoying. First up, you'll need a file called config.py to hold all your API keys: instance = "https://mastodon.social" access_token = "…" write_access_token = […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Computer Science language programming python · 7 comments · 300 words · read ~165 times.
I've been thinking about programming languages and their design. In her book about the divergence of the English and American languages, Lynne Murphy asks this question: wouldn’t it be great if language were logical and maximally efficient? If sentences had only as many syllables as strictly needed? If each word had a single, unique meaning? […]
Continue reading →By @edent · compression Computer Science python · 10 comments · 350 words · read ~5,639 times.
(This is, I think, a silly idea. But sometimes the silliest things lead to unexpected results.) The text of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is about 146,000 characters long. Thanks to the English language, each character can be represented by a single byte. So a plain Unicode text file of the play is about 142KB. In […]
Continue reading →By @edent · money openbanking python · 1 comment · 450 words
As I mentioned last week, MoneyDashboard is shutting down. They are good enough to provide a JSON export of all your previous transactions. It is full of entries like this: { "Account": "My Mastercard", "Date": "2020-02-24T00:00:00Z", "CurrentDescription": null, "OriginalDescription": "SUMUP *Pizza palace, London, W1", "Amount": […]
Continue reading →By @edent · mastodon MastodonAPI python · 3 comments · 1,150 words · read ~2,794 times.
I wrote a moderately popular post on Mastodon. Lots of people shared it. Is it possible to find out how many different ActivityPub servers it went to? Yes! As we all know, the Fediverse is one big chain mail. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. When I write a post, it appears on […]
Continue reading →By @edent · HowTo python · 350 words · read ~874 times.
The Selenium WebDriver is a brilliant way to programmatically interact with websites. You can write little Python scripts which can click around inside browser windows and do "stuff". I use it to download a file generated by a Javascript Blob and automatically save it to disk. Here's how. Set up the WebDriver After you've installed […]
Continue reading →By @edent · HowTo python tutorial WordPress · 1,200 words
This is ridiculously niche. If this is of help to anyone other than to me... please shout! The IntenseDebate comment system is slowly dying. It hasn't received any updates from Automattic for years. Recently it stopped being able to let users submit new comments. So I've switched to Commentics which is a self-hosted PHP / […]
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