Category: programming

  • An Update on my Roll-Your-Own IoT

    As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go…

  • Coming Full Circle: Contributing to the Python Project Matrix-Nio

    Somewhere around 15 years ago, I started learning Python because I’d gotten deep into genealogy and started using the free and open source project Gramps. As I was also pretty deep into free software (somewhere around that time I became a supporting member of the FSF for a few years – and I think my…

  • Milestones reached in two of my Python Projects

    For my btrfs snapshot program, snapintime, I have reached version 1.1.1. About six years after starting this project, it now covers all the cases I wanted to back when I started. I’m very happy with where it’s now at. For my Extra Life Donation Tracker (PyPi page here), I’ve reached my v4.2.0 release. This release…

  • My Photostats Python Program

    My Photostats Python Program

    11 years ago (HOLY MOLEY WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?!?) I wrote about Jeffrey Friedl’s LR Stats plugin. As you know if you’ve been around my blog for a while, I love stats! It’s the biggest reason I do my end of year posts with my music, reading, and video game stats. Well, I haven’t…

  • PyCharm 1 week Update

    I’ve been using PyCharm for about a week now across a couple projects. I’d like to note a few things I’m really enjoying: PyCharm is aware of your venv config and you can use it to pip install new packages. Ok, so pip is easy to use for installing. But it also provides a quick…

  • Programming Tools Q12020

    I decided to document the tools I’m using for development since the various programming subreddits I frequent always have someone asking what tools they should be using. IDEs/Editors Linux As I wrote in September, I’ve moved to using KDevelop for my larger projects. Its built-in Python parser (working with flake8) has helped me find a…

  • Hey, Pycharm, hey.

    Hey, Pycharm, hey.

    Back in September I wrote about moving to KDevelop for my larger Python projects and also staying with Kate for my smaller projects. I’ve REALLY been enjoying all the features as I work on more and more complex packages involving lots of files. But for a few episodes of Python Bytes now (and/or maybe Talk…

  • QGit vs GitQlient

    QGit vs GitQlient

    I wrote about GitQlient a while ago. A few days ago I got a GitHub notification that GitQlient had finally reached 1.0. Consequently, the author created an Appimage version of the client so I was finally able to try it without having to compile on my own. As I started taking screenshots for blog post,…

  • My first PyPi Package!

    My first PyPi Package!

    I was reading Serious Python by Julien Danjou as well as looking through other Python repos when I realized that my Extra Life Donation Tracker repo was a mess. (It’ll be different by the time you read this, but here’s how it looked at the time) After learning about how things should be structured and…

  • Getting rid of some old Java textbooks

    I had been hanging on to these books in case I ever found myself wanting to do some Java programming. But as I’ve come to learn (mostly because of Python, but also through following the Perl 6 saga), languages change and evolve and so a couple books from nearly 20 years ago probably won’t be…

  • 2019 In Programming

    This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start…

  • BBQ Thermostat Project: First Live Test

    This is copied over from my Hackaday.io page. Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph: On the good news front: While I didn’t…

  • Unity 2D Game 6: Tilevania

    The sixth, and final, game of the Udemy class on Unity 2D was a tileset Metroid-Vania game which the instructors named Tilevania. I never played Metroid and maybe only played Castlevania once, but its legacy does persist in some newer games like Spelunky. This was the closest I’ve come to making a Mario clone. My…

  • Unity 2D Game 5: Glitch Garden

    The fifth video game I made in Unity was another clone of a game I spent a lot of time playing, this time as an adult – Plants vs Zombies. For comparison, here’s Plants vs Zombies: and here’s my finished Glitch Garden: We learned a lot of techniques and reinforced even more, but the biggest…

  • Git gets interesting

    This used to look pretty regular. Just two parallel lines with the devel branch connecting into the master branch here and there. But then I merged master into devel because I added issue templates on the github website directly into master. Things got….interesting…. Here’s the before (but a few weeks ago): Here’s what it looks…