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pg_timetable

Link parkin’: pg_timetable

pg_timetable is an advanced job scheduler for PostgreSQL, offering many advantages over traditional schedulers such as cron and others. It is completely database driven and provides a couple of advanced concepts.

In any serious development effort, I’m likely to have PostgreSQL in the stack so might as well take advantage of it for scheduled tasks too. One less piece of kit to worry about.

Plus: Pavlo Golub’s series of blog posts on pg_timetable. Pavlo is the creator of pg_timetable. Part of CYBERTEC’s PostgreSQL Professional Services.


sqlite-utils

Link parkin’: sqlite-utils.

CLI tool and Python utility functions for manipulating SQLite databases

This library and command-line utility helps create SQLite databases from an existing collection of data.

Can’t believe I haven’t stashed Simon Willison’s insanely useful toolkit on this here blog. Makes it insanely easy to do stuff with sqlite databases from the command line and from within Python. For example

If you have data as JSON, you can use sqlite-utils insert tablename to insert it into a database. The table will be created with the correct (automatically detected) columns if it does not already exist.


LEADS - The League of Embeddable, Alternative DataStores

PostgreSQL is totally awesome. But sometimes it’s more useful to have pure file(s) storage and query for your data. Herewith a collection of data storage engines that somewhat cover the space of more well-known engines:

read more ...


Working With Git and Pip

Previously I mentioned libpytunes and went to kick the tires. I thought it was published on PyPI but turns out it wasn’t. So here I am going pip install libpytunes and wondering why I can’t subsequently do a import libpytunes.

I’ve always known you can do pip install from a git repository, but a while back Adam Johnson wrote up some of the details. There are plenty of other good overviews out there, (e.g. Simon Willison’s), this one just caught my eye recently.

Now pip install git+https://github.com/liamks/libpytunes actually installs the module and my import statement works as expected. Bonus, you can put git+https://github.com/liamks/libpytunes into requirements.txt and setup.py files as well, to achieve similar results.

Unfortunately the liamks version got hit by a trivial API change in plistlib in Python 3.9, so there was still breakage on my end, but Anirudh Acharya has a forked repo with the necessary one liner fix. Of course I used pip install git..., and now my Music.app experiments are proceeding apace.


Music Library Exporter

Link parkin’: Music Library Exporter

Music Library Exporter allows you to export your library and playlists from the native macOS Music app.

The library is exported in an XML format, and is compatible with other applications, services, and tools that rely on the Music (previously iTunes) XML library format.

🎉 🎊 🥳 BONUS!! CLI SUPPORT 🥳 🎊 🎉

Aside from the main Music Library Exporter application, this project also includes a command-line program called library-generator.

Now licking my chops for some serious Music.app automation, although I’m a little nervous about compatibility. Will give it a test drive and report back.


GitHub Archive

Can’t believe I’ve never posted about GH Archive

Open-source developers all over the world are working on millions of projects: writing code & documentation, fixing & submitting bugs, and so forth. GH Archive is a project to record the public GitHub timeline, archive it, and make it easily accessible for further analysis.

There’s a solid 10+ years of freely available GitHub spewed JSON to practice data spelunking, system benchmarking, and query hacking against.

Update: The CNCF DevStats project puts that data to interesting use through application of actual CNCF projects. So meta!

This is a toolset to visualize GitHub archives using HA Postgres databases and Grafana dashboards. Everything is open source so that it can be used by other CNCF and non-CNCF open source projects. The only requirement is that project must be hosted on a public GitHub repository/repositories. Project is deployed using Equinix bare metal Kubernetes nodes and deployed using a Helm chart. It uses many more CNCF projects under the hood.

At least Google couldn’t find any such post on my site. Maybe that’s a hint to implement some real local search. 🤣


PyOPML

Link parkin’: PyOPML

Welcome! This documentation is about PyOPML, a Python package meant to read, manipulate and write OPML 2.0 files.

Stashed in light of previously mentioning the OPML that the Overcast app generates.


YASnippet

I’ve been looking for a way to jump start my blog post authoring process via text expansion or templating within Emacs. Just haven’t had the time to go digging. Luckily a potential solution came to me: YASnippet

YASnippet is a template system for Emacs. It allows you to type an abbreviation and automatically expand it into function templates. … The snippet syntax is inspired from TextMate’s syntax, you can even import most TextMate templates to YASnippet.

Source code and info from EmacsWiki.

YouTube demo embed after this break …

read more ...


Hacking iTerm2

Even though I’ve expounded on the coolness of xonsh, I haven’t put it to use in full anger yet. I’m thinking it might best be leveraged as an interactive shell workspace, sort of like Jupyter Notebooks but without the Web browser bits and much more of a CLI.

But I’ve been thinking about how to make launching a new space as cheap and mindless as possible. Enter scripting the iTerm2 terminal emulator using its Python API. From an example of scripting iTerm2 straight from another command line:

This script demonstrates two concepts:

  1. Launching iTerm2 using PyObjC and running the script only after it is launched.

  2. Creating a window that runs a command.

So if the command is “kickoff xonsh with some args,” either in an existing or newly created virtualenv, it becomes almost trivial to fire off new interactive spaces.


20 Years of Simon Willison

Just had to acknowledge Simon Willison’s 20th anniversary of blogging. I have a very loose tie in that I used to have an appointment at the Medill School of Journalism. At the time, the concept of Content Management Systems wasn’t ingrained in media circles. Working with a colleague, we introduced a rudimentary platform that was used as part of every MS student’s stint in Medill’s downtown Chicago newsroom.

So of course when I first heard of Django and how it was born in a newsroom, I had to have Adrian Holovaty come up to Evanston and give a talk. For a while, Adrian and I lived relatively close by in Chicago and would bump into each other at ChiPy meetups. Thus the extremely loose tie to Simon.

I really enjoy and admire Simon’s current stream of work, especially on Datasette. Despite the volume, his blog is one of a handful that I look forward to with anticipation for new content. That guy can crank out some code, but also has good taste in problems, and will go down a few layers into the technology. Here’s to many more posts to come!


Messin’ With Music.app Data

I wanted to start liberating my OS X Music.app data, noticing that you can “Export… > iTunes Libray” to spit out XML to the file system. Next stop was parsing the XML. Hang on, there’s gotta already be a Python module(s) for that right?

itunesLibrary was the first port of call. It inhaled my 18 MB of XML library file, but the object interface didn’t click with me. It was sort of Pythonic dictionary like, but not quite.

Turns out the exported XML is just an Apple property list (plist) file and there’s a plist parsing library in the Python standard library. libpytunes is a thin wrapper around plistlib. I need to give it a longer test drive, but it seems a bit more complete than itunesLibrary.

Beyond intermittently doing a manual slog through menus, I was hoping there might be a way to automate this via Apple’s scripting machinery. Doug’s Applescripts is the go to in this space, especially for things related to the OS X Music app. Apparently, Doug is not sanguine on leveraging the XML format or Apple’s replacement:

So anyway, the XML has finally gone away, effectively, since it is no longer automatically exported.

I’ve been trying to incorporate the ITLibrary framework into my projects whenever I can, especially for apps that need to display lots of tracks or playlists (like Media Folder Files Not Added).

But ITLibrary was apparently last updated for macOS 10.13. And now that iTunes has been split out into the media apps, it’s usefulness over the XML file has not been improved.

(And please. Don’t let me hear anyone suggest some groovy way of exporting the XML automatically. Forget about the XML. Unless it’s for backups or something.)

And mind, this was in October 2019. I suspect much hasn’t changed since.

But for me, the XML is enough in the short term. If I ever get working daily snapshots I’ll be happy. The real fun will begin when transmogrifying the data into something ingestable into an SQL engine and thence marrying with Discogs Data.

Apropos Elle Driver, “You know I’ve always liked that word … ’sanguine’ … so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.”


LF AI & Data

Link parkin’: LF AI & Data Foundation.

The LF AI & Data Foundation supports open source projects within artificial intelligence and the data space.

This overview deck provides a lot more detail.

Didn’t realize that the Linux Foundation had an Artificial Intelligence and Data thrust, with a bushel of projects under its umbrella. A few of them are having a pretty big industry impact.

Discovered this via poking around at the Milvus repository:

Milvus is an open-source vector database built to power embedding similarity search and AI applications. Milvus makes unstructured data search more accessible, and provides a consistent user experience regardless of the deployment environment.

Milvus 2.0 is a cloud-native vector database with storage and computation separated by design. All components in this refactored version of Milvus are stateless to enhance elasticity and flexibility. For more architecture details, see Milvus Architecture Overview.


HYTRADBOI?

This looks like an interesting set of presentations: “Have You Tried Rubbing A Database On It?”

HYTRADBOI was a day of lightning talks about turning a data-centric lens onto familiar problems to yield strange new solutions (and maybe exciting new problems). Talks ranged from wild ideas and unlikely experiments to cutting-edge research and production war stories.

Being loosely affiliated with the Berkeley Computer Systems Mafia (TM) the general theme of “let’s talk intersection of data management and everything else,” is near and dear to my heart. Gotta give a shout out to CIDR as an analog, but strictly from the academic R&D perspective. And definitely without the radical format experiment!

Really useful background information and conference postmortem

Background

Fundamentally, every computer system is about storing, moving and transforming data. The line between operating system, database and programming language is somewhat arbitrary - a product of specific problems, available hardware and historical accident.

But today the problems and the hardware have changed dramatically, and as a result we’re starting to see people experimenting with redrawing the lines.

Postmortem

A lot of people expressed a surprising amount of support for the conference. I think there is a lot of pent up demand for a database conference that isn’t just SaaS ads. That support meant that people were very willing to help promote the conference and were forgiving of the many technical issues. Many people bought tickets knowing that they wouldn’t be able to attend, because they wanted something like this to exist.

Via Simon Willison


Feedbin API

Link parkin’, Feedbin API Documentation

This is the official documentation for the Feedbin REST-style API.

Does what it says on the tin. Guess who has a few years worth of starred items to retrieve?

P. S. Can’t recommend Feedbin enough as a feed aggregator and reader. Maybe it’s selective memory, but feels just as good as the late lamented Google Reader, even though I don’t use the Web frontend much. That Feedbin has a solid client ecosystem, of which two apps I use daily, speaks well of the business. I pay for it and my subscription is on auto renewal. Rock solid and no drama.

Now let’s see if I can’t take advantage of that API.


Collaboration Invitations

So I’ve been struggling for the longest time with my personal dotfiles repository trying to share it between personal and work activities. Two separate branches seemed to eliminate some of the difficulties, but SSH access was quite frustrating. It was challenging dealing with multiple public keys, across multiple machines, one of which typically was used infrequently. Suffice it to say I banged my head against a lot of SSH and git config file walls.

Then I just gave up and decided to push the work branch to a work GitHub account and deal with cross pollination via merges over HTTP. Part of the problem was attempting to keep the personal repo private for no good reason. I really thought at some point I’d be adding public keys into the repository just to make life easier and became totally paranoid. YAGNI.

The final piece of the puzzle was sending collaboration invitations between the two accounts, thereby providing push access to both repos with one SSH key for each persona. 🤦 C’mon man!

Now it’s fairly straightforward to share changes between the two configurations. I’d dare say I could even go back to making the personal repo private, but what’s the point.


pyLast

Link parkin’, pyLast

A Python interface to Last.fm and other API-compatible websites such as Libre.fm.

Will come in handy for downloading a years’ worth of scrobbles from my account and conducting some analysis.


PostgREST Potential

First off, I really need to generate some basic discriminative descriptive statistics across all of this Discogs data. Pick off the low hanging fruit.

Having said that, since I’ve got the data in a PostgreSQL instance, including my own custom views, some kind of HTTP based API to access the data would provide an interesting prototype.

Enter PostgREST

PostgREST is a standalone web server that turns your PostgreSQL database directly into a RESTful API. The structural constraints and permissions in the database determine the API endpoints and operations.

What would oEmbed cards look like for pure textual playlists?


Discogs Data SQL Views

This sat in the drafts folder for a bit, but I finally decided to just hit publish and stop seeking perfection.

Well that was a mildly annoying adventure discovering how to get code syntax highlighting working. Pelican’s markdown support includes CodeHilite by default but I couldn’t figure out how to actually trigger. Turns out once I installed the Pygments module, things kicked in.

Anyway, who knew the language of the first code segment to appear on this blog would be SQL? Using some handy regular expression features of Postgres, I layered some views on top of data imported from discogs-xml2db. The target was getting an extraction of releases from the Fabric and FabricLive series. Still a fair amount of data normalization needed to be done, but at least I’ve got 100% recall with not too much extra stuff and that’s only because the titles aren’t quite consistent. Ultimately had to resort to explicitly black listing some rows

Code and example output below the fold

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Discogs Data CSV

So I took the discogs-xml2db tool and ran it against the Discogs Data, May 2022 release. I got back 8.1 Gb, 😱, of csv data to ingest into PostgreSQL. I’ve done it for previous months and it’s ingested just fine, but there’s some interesting exploration that can be done with the csv data, before, and after ingest. But I’m gonna need a few tools:

  • VisiData, “VisiData is an interactive multitool for tabular data.”
  • xsv, “xsv is a command line program for indexing, slicing, analyzing, splitting and joining CSV files. “
  • Data Fluent for PostgreSQL, “Build a better understanding of your data in PostgreSQL.”

Emacs TRAMP

Some might call me an Emacs tramp (🤣), but I’m referring to the Emacs mode that allows for editing remote files over ssh connections.

TRAMP (Transparent Remote Access, Multiple Protocols) is a package for editing remote files, similar to AngeFtp or efs. Whereas the others use FTP to connect to the remote host and to transfer the files, TRAMP uses a remote shell connection (rlogin, telnet, ssh). It can transfer the files using rcp or a similar program, or it can encode the file contents (using uuencode or base64) and transfer them right through the shell connection.

The overall experience is pretty much seamless, while not having to deal with a bunch of warts related to distributed file systems such as SMB, AFS, Dropbox, et. al. Works great even with version control tools such as magit.

The fact that TRAMP can operate over telnet (😱) of all protocols should tell you it’s ancient though. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.


Let’s Keep It Rolling

By my math, I went 29 for 31 on daily posts last month. I was hoping to run the table after a long period of infrequent, intermittent posting. There’s a certain symmetry in how I screwed up right at the beginning of the month and right at the end of the month, but 20+ days in between is not too bad.

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Listening Streak

Streaks App Listening Icon

Speaking of streaks, 1 year ago I set about to listen to more music. The screen capture above, from the Streaks iOS app on my phone, emphasizes that I’ve managed to do that for 365 days straight. 🎊 🥳 🎉 Listening in this case means a minimum of 3 songs, but almost uniformly I got in a full “CD” if not multiples.

What always gets me about these types of streaks is overcoming those crappy days. Days when you fell wishy washy and think you might have COVID. Days when work runs long and you feel dead tired. Days when your kids get on your last nerve. Days when you feel like you let everyone down.

But a little music always soothes the soul, even if one falls asleep in the middle of the mix 🤣.


From the Stars, v1

I have a wealth of starred items stashed away in my feedreaders, plural. Link parkin’ a few things of note. Only goal is to send you off to some pieces loosely joined. Not too much thought put into it.

Recently learned about reader, a minimalist Python module for managing collections of RSS (and other) feeds.

Mark Litwintschik does his usual thorough data spelunking against The Streets of Monaco

Simon Willison was a guest on architecture notes providing a great overview of datasette

Matt Webb talks about his blog writing approach. I use Feedbin much the same way he does. I wonder how many feeds I’m subscribed to?


Yikes! Yak Shaving

Xonsh Terminal on Ubuntu Screen
Capture

Yesterday I lost the plot by yak shaving my shell setup installation process to work better under Ubuntu. The above capture illustrates that lots of progress was made, but then I forgot to actually post. Oh well!

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Peter Wang’s PyScript Keynote

Peter Wang gave a keynote at PyCon US 2022. Apparently it excited a lot of people. The topic was PyScript, a project to put Python in the browser via WebAssembly.

PyScript is a framework that allows users to create rich Python applications in the browser using HTML’s interface and the power of Pyodide, WASM, and modern web technologies. The PyScript framework provides users at every experience level with access to an expressive, easy-to-learn programming language with countless applications.

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pgcli

I’d heard about the tool many times, but I just started using pgcli to interact with PostgreSQL databases from the command line. 🤯

pgcli is really good stuff. Auto-completion, syntax highlighting, Emacs style key bindings, and ssh tunneling, amongst many other great features. And implemented in open source Python (BSD license) to boot. What’s not to love?

Why did I wait so long? What the hell was I thinking?


55

Another circumvation circumnavigation about the center of solar system completed.

By many measures, year-over-year I’m quite a bit healthier, wealthier, and wiser.

However…….

The Godfather is one of my favorite movies. The first spoken words are:

I believe in America.

Gettin’ harder to maintain belief in these times.

We’ll just have to keep on keepin’ on.


Flyspell and abbrev

Back to improving my Emacs environment. Since I conquered emojis in Emacs, now it’s time to deal with spelling since typos in my blog posts drive me up a wall.

I vaguely had a recollection about some *spell package for Emacs but couldn’t remember the specifics. Turns out it was the built-in flyspell, conveniently covered by Ryan Moore. Especially useful is the keybinding for the mouse click on Macbook trackpads that let’s you see variant spellings.

That led me to thinking about text expansion to help cut down on some of my more frequent lapses (looking at you occasionally). And what would an MPR Emacs post be without a mention of Mickey Petersen (go buy another copy of Mastering Emacs). Emacs has a venerable abbrev package and Petersen ably addresses its usage for spell correction. Job done, but there’s bonus material on using hippie-expand which does a whole lot of interesting dynamic abbreviation expansion, a.k.a replacements based on text already existing in buffers. If you don’t like hippies, he mentions at least three other text expansion modules 😆.

One of the real reasons I need text expansion is one of my favorite emojis is this one, 😆, which is named, I kid you not

SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND TIGHTLY-CLOSED EYES

Sort of a pain to enter after C-x 8 RET even with tab completion.


Python Podcast Recommendations

Below are some podcast recommendations for those invested in the Python ecosystem.

The first four were previously listed in my Favorite Podcasts 2022 list. The Python Podcast.__init__, Python Bytes, and Talk Python To Me are my gotos, in that rough priority order.

Strictly speaking the Data Engineering Podcast isn’t about Python, but there’s enough overlap with the ecosystem that a lot of Python pops up. The PyBites Podcast is mostly specific to participants in the PyBites community and platform. It’s a little more on the personal and professional development side than straight Python ecosystem. Oddly enough, even though I’m recommending it and I’m a paid subscriber on Real Python, I don’t often listen to episodes from The Real Python Podcast. But when I do, I’m highly satisfied.

I just threw in Software Engineering Radio because it hasn’t been mentioned in this blog yet, but it’s really good and has the occasional Python bits 😆.

Actually, Software Engineering Radio was previously mentioned in Deep Diving Podcasts. We regret the error


Python Concurrency Tutorials

Link parkin’: SuperFastPython

Jason Brownlee seems super excited about Python concurrency mechanisms (threads/processes) and helping developers better understand them. A cursory scan of a few of his tutorials indicates a high level of quality and coverage.

I’ve been doing a bit of Python thread programming in the day job, so these topics are of interest.


Finishing Fabric

What does “Finishing Fabric” mean? I have successfully collected digital versions of the 100 releases of Fabric and the 100 releases of Fabric Live. For my purposes, the release count ignores the radio promo mixes. These electronic music mix series were published via the sister label of the Fabric London nightclub.

So why would anyone in their right mind pursue this?

read more ...


Quamina Event Matching

Tim Bray is an Internet Person of Some Renown (TM) that I’ve long admired from many angles: as a software developer, as a blogger, and as a public thinker with considered political and cultural views. As a hacker, the urge to code never seems to wane, so he’s open sourced a library, Quamina, for doing event matching at Amazon scale.

Many moons ago, a gentleman named Bob Wyman was the publicly web facing technical brains behind PubSub.com. Wyman advertised the provided service as “prospective search” against blogs, represented mainly by RSS feed content, among other “real-time” things on the ’Net during that period. You could upload matching patterns and then follow streams of content items that matched the patterns. As a business, it didn’t quite work out, but I remember Wyman occasionally dug into the underlying algorithms that made massive numbers of patterns effectively match with low latency. I’ve fruitlessly tried to rediscover his musings to no good effect.

So Quamina looks like a modern take on the core algorithmic challenge within PubSub: taking extremely large numbers of patterns and matching content in extremely low amounts of time. Patterns are expressed as JSON and match against JSON objects. Given that many popular formats have known, or well understood, mappings into JSON it shouldn’t be hard to test Quamina against a wide range and scale of datasets. Sounds like a benchmarking challenge waiting to happen.

I’m glad Bray released Quamina and I’ll definitely be digging in trying to understand how it works. If I was a halfway decent Go programmmer, I would take a quick stab at wrapping some kind of RESTful API around it and seeing how close I could make it look like my memories of PubSub. So many ideas, so little time.

Although, if Quamina is fast enough, a cheap proof of concept could be done by wrapping something like Python’s FastAPI around subprocess invocation of the Go executable. Hmmmmm.


Joined Changelog++

Previously I mentioned The Changelog as one of my current favorite podcasts. Run by Jerod Santo and Adam Stacoviak, I use the term “podcast” loosely here, because they have a small empire of affiliated podcasts, an online community, and a couple of newsletters. There’s a wide variety of great, well produced content in differing formats. And they’ve been at it for over 10 years 😮!!

Anyway, I woke up one morning, was listening to an episode and heard the plug for Changelog++. Figured it was high time I supported these guys directly and pulled the trigger. Jerod promptly sent a nice email the same day asking, “What was the driving factor(s) for you signing up?” Here’s how I responded:

Nothing specific. Been a subscriber to The Changelog for 6 years, Practical AI since it started, and now dipping into GoTime. I’ve just been on a little kick directly supporting small individual content creators where possible. The folks who make podcasting enjoyable for me on a regular basis. Love what you guys are doing and especially the Changelog “house” interview style. Great production values without sounding overly corporate.

Need to give a few ++ episodes a listen before I can provide any concrete criticism, but so far, so good.


Doctorow’s Memex

I’ve occasionally dipped into Cory Doctorow’s publishing ouerve but never drank from his internet posting firehose. Apparently he left Boing Boing a bit ago and started his own link blogging site Pluralistic. As you would expect of Doctorow, it’s a flood of interesting content, leftish, activist, cryptopunk oriented, no surveillance capitalism to be seen.

Part of his 20 Years Blogging post is a detailed description of an linkblogger’s daily creative processs. In no way could I ever emulate that, but I was struck by a comment on his vast trove of previously published content:

My composition is greatly aided both 20 years’ worth of mnemonic slurry of semi-remembered posts and the ability to search memex.craphound.com (the site where I’ve mirrored all my Boing Boing posts) easily.

A huge, searchable database of decades of thoughts really simplifies the process of synthesis.

So for me throwing as much stuff as possible you’ve read, written, or listened to, into a your personal memex and sprinkling in a bit of search/AI technology seems like an interesting, if not winning, proposition. If nothing else, repeated elements like This Day in History can be semi-automated.

And I think I’ll give Pluralistic a try.


2022 Books Completed, Part 3

This is for both March and April of 2022, which is somewhat disappointing. For various reasons, I just hit a wall over those two months and didn’t make as much reading progress as I would have liked. I was pretty consistent with my daily read, but usually once I get going I’ll exceed the allotted time by a significant margin. Not so much these past two months.

Here come’s the break …

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Emacs and Emojis

So that’s all there was to it?

For the longest time, I had no memorable and easy way to enter and display Unicode text within my Emacs buffers. When jumping back into blogging this is somewhat problematic since the world sort of expects at a minimum the frivolous usage of a few emojis to demonstrate you’re keeping up with the cool kids 💥! After installing Nerd Fonts on my Macbook, I was more determined than ever to solve this conundrum.

Mickey Petersen of Mastering Emacs (buy his book), solved the display challenge. Install a package, do some customization, and voilà! Unicode characters, cut and paste from the Internet, display.

Petersen (buy his book, really) also had a nifty approach to entering emojis. Emacs has “input methods” which you can rig to expand text sequences into Unicode characters. You have to make a modal switch into the input method, but it’s better than nothing.

So then I started digging arouund to remind myself on how to insert characters with diacriticals. Of course Petersen (you did buy his book right?) had the answer, but within that answer was this nugget:

To insert a code point type C-x 8 RET and enter the Unicode name (type TAB twice to get a complete list).

Well, whaddya know 🤔


Link Parkin’: Speech to Text

Link parkin’, two services for converting speech to text:

The first via Talk Python, the second from Python Bytes


Prompt Action

Xonsh Terminal Screen Capture

Been having some fun reworking my terminal and shell setup based upon xonsh. I’m quite proud of myself for getting the 🐚 emoji into my prompt, which was decidedly trickier than I expected. Console is iTerm2. Glyphs and icons via Nerd Fonts. The system info was generated by neofetch


Personal Podscape Memex

The initial salvo on the podcast deep dive thesis was divorced from end users, strictly based upon the content of the podcast. Another aspect of interest to me is the incorporation of personalization.

I listen to a small percentage of the episodes from feeds I’m subscribed to. Each one I do listen to feels like there’s a ton of knowledge, of which I retain just fragments. Could an intelligent podcast app monitor my listening and automatically weave together products that could help my future self? At the very least a personalized search engine could be crafted. But is a memex for my personal podscape in reach?

Overcast has an OPML export feature, including a rich version with episode data. A prototyping foundation seems apparent. Jonathan LaCour cooked up a Python script to automate the download.


DuckDB and PyArrow

I previously link parked DuckDB as an embedded, high speed, OLAP engine. Gerard Bentley has some nice examples of using DuckDB, Arrow, and Python. Even though the combo isn’t definitively better than Pandas and Arrow, I like how seamless the integration between DuckDB and Arrow data appears. Simply referencing a Python variable from a DuckDB query is a neat trick. Wonder how that’s implemented under the covers.

Related DuckDB quacks Arrow: A zero-copy data integration between Apache Arrow and DuckDB

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