Although I have a battery indicator on the bottom of my laptop screen I don’t alway check that often enough. That’s why I wanted to add an extra warning in the form of an audio signal. So even if I’m turned away from the laptop, it should still catch my attention.
Originally I looked for a Python module to generate barcodes, and I found the treepoem module. This used Pillow to create bitmaps, and I preferred to have PDF or other resolution independant formats. Looking through the README, I found that treepoem is a wrapper for bwipp. This is a set of PostScript procedures to generate barcodes.
Since I’m familiar with using PostScript, I decided to use bwipp directly.
This is based on an answer I gave on stackoverflow. That answer is specific
to the tkinter toolkit that comes with Python. The principles apply to
other GUI toolkits and languages as well but the terminology used (like
mainloop and idle task) may be different.
This article documents how I set up Python and the syslog daemon so that Python programs can log to syslogd.
When you are exploring a problem, in general first write a command-line program whenever possible.
It will take less effort to write then a full-blown GUI.
Recently I wrote a program to remove the protection from ms-excel files.
The original version was written as a command-line program. Later I re-used the relevant code for a GUI program for use on ms-windows. This was mainly for the benefit of some colleagues who are not comfortable with using the command-line.
In this article I want to contrast the two programs.
Creating a screenshot from a terminal, using standard UNIX tools.
There are basically two ways in which one can make use of a modern CPU with multiple cores for computationally intensive work.
In the first case, all data is implicitly shared. In the second case, data must be explicitly shared or communicated.
The first option is often said to be more convenient. I would like to make the case that this usually makes the task more difficult, because of the need to manage all shared data.
Sometimes I’m too hasty with updating ported applications, and I need to roll
them back to a working version.
Since I use svnlite to manage my ports tree, this is relatively easy.
But since it is different than I’m used to (since I mostly use git),
I thought I would document it here for convenience.
Sometimes I need to use some binary data (e.g. a bitmap image) in a Python
script.
In a package, you can store this data portable in a data subdirectory of
a modules using the package_data argument of setuptools.setup.
This won’t work in a standalone script.
You can of course make your script into a package, but here I want to show an
alternative solution.