Three years ago I created ELDonationTracker to use the Extra Life API to provide donation alerts on my screen while I’m streaming or recording games. About a year and a half ago, I actually had to start using it because the previous donation tracker I’d been using stopped being maintained. Since then I’ve been steadily […]
Category Archives: programming
Strange Dream
Last night I had a dream that combined Games of Thrones and Perl programming. Like it was in the GoT world, but we had to do some Perl programming to defeat the Lannisters.
Exploring btrfs for backups Part 6: Backup Drives and changing RAID levels VM
Hard drives are relatively cheap, especially nowadays. But I still want to stay within my budget as I setup my backups and system redundancies. So, ideally, for my backup RAID I’d take advantage of btrs’ ability to change RAID types on the fly and start off with one drive. Then I’d add another and go […]
Exploring btrfs for backups Part 5: RAID1 on the Main Disks in the VM
So, back when I started this project, I laid out that one of the reasons I wanted to use btrfs on my home directory (don’t think it’s ready for / just yet) is that with RAID1, btrfs is self-healing. Obviously, magic can’t be done, but a checksum is stored as part of the data’s metadata […]
Exploring btrfs for backups Part 4: Weekly Culls and Unit Testing
Back in August I finally had some time to do some things I’d been wanting to do with my Snap-in-Time btrfs program for a while now. First of all, I finally added the weekly code. So now my snapshots are cleaned up every three days and then every other week. Next on the docket is […]
Exploring btrfs for backups Part 3: The Script in Practice
Night of the second day: # btrfs sub list /home ID 275 gen 3201 top level 5 path home ID 1021 gen 3193 top level 275 path .snapshots ID 1023 gen 1653 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2146 ID 1024 gen 1697 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2210 ID 1025 gen 1775 top level 275 path .snapshots/2014-03-13-2300 […]
Exploring btrfs for backups Part 2: Installing on My /Home Directory and using my new Python Script
I got my new hard drive that would replace my old, aging /home hard drive. As you read in part 1, I wanted to put btrfs on it. This is my journey to get it up and running. Plugged it into my hard drive toaster and ran gparted. Because of the peculiarities of btrfs and […]
Creating Nice-Looking Buttons in QML on KDE
Back in October I created a GUI for my Python amortization table program. One of the things I lamented was that the buttons in QML look like crap. I want my buttons to look like buttons, not blue patches no a white screen. I don’t really know what made me look, but yesterday (during the […]
My Second Ever Useful GUI Program
A while ago I wrote about my first ever useful GUI program. And in one of the series of posts that followed I explained that the reason I hadn’t made a useful GUI program before now is because all the typical stuff has already been made over and over. We don’t need any more tetris […]
Developing My First Plasmoid: The QML Code
Back in February I posted the code to the data engine I developed for my plastmoid. At the time I’d wanted to clean up my plasmoid before posting it on here, however, I’ve become stuck on a key feature so I was hoping that maybe by posting the code I could get some help. (As […]
Developing my first plasmoid: The Data Engine (in python)
I figured it’d be neat to show you how my plasmoid works so you could use it when developing your own plasmoids. Here’s the main.py of my data engine. The indentation is off, in case you try to copy and past this in. Here are the imports: from PyQt4.QtCore import * from PyKDE4.kdecore import * […]
Developing my first plamoid Part 2
OK, so it’s been a year since I last blogged about working on this program. I tried working on the data engine in August and then got stuck right around the time I started my first semester of grad school so I had to drop it, even though it got stuck in my head and […]
Automatically Posting your Top 3 Artists from Last.fm onto Twitter (with Python!)
I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week. So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me. Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday. I’m […]
Programming to the Rescue: Amortization Automation
What I love about programming is the instant feedback. In most programming languages, after you set up a framework for the barest bones of a program you can then run it at every step of the way to confirm that you are moving towards your goal. What I love second-most about programming is the fact […]
365 Graph
Today I worked on a python program to create a graph of the views of all my photos in my 365 Project set. Here’s the result: (click for full size) I was curious how they stacked up and I wanted to see if I could detect any patterns. Except for a few outliers, they’re mostly […]