I came across Karabiner Elements a number of years ago when trying to find a way to get easy access to the # symbol on my MacBook Pro keyboard. I’m not sure why, but it seems that using a UK keyboard layout on a MBP means that to get # you have to press some […]
Last week I released version 1.9.0 of Py6S – my Python interface to the 6S radiative transfer model. It’s been the first non-bugfix release for quite a while (mainly because I’ve been busy with paid work), and so I just wanted to highlight a few aspects of the release. The full release notes are available […]
Just a quick post today, to tell you about a couple of simple zsh functions that I find handy as a Python programmer. First, pyimp – a very simple function that tries to import a module in Python and displays the output. If there is no output then the import succeeded, otherwise you’ll see the […]
During the Nepal earthquake response project I worked on, we were gradually getting access to historical mobile phone data for use in our analyses. I wanted to keep track of which days of data we had got access to, and which ones we were still waiting for. I wrote a simple script to print out […]
I really enjoy reading blogs. That seems to be a slightly outdated view, as many people have moved over to using Twitter exclusively, but I like being able to follow everything that a specific person writes, and seeing mostly long-form articles rather than off-the-cuff comments. Back in the day, when blogs were really popular, every […]
This is just a very brief reminder about something you might run into when you’re trying to get your code to work on multiple platforms – in this case, OS X, Linux and Windows. Basically: file names/paths are case-sensitive on Linux, but not on OS X or Windows. Therefore, you could have some Python code […]
This is a very brief post to explain how I managed to speed up the viewing (that is, listing of files/directories) in Samba shares accessed via OS X. So, a bit of background: I have a file server at home which has some shared folders on it, shared using the SMB protocol. This is the […]
After borrowing a CurrentCost electricity usage meter from my local library (if you’re in the area, then Eastleigh library will loan you one for free!), I decided to buy one, as I’d found it very useful in trying to reduce my electricity usage. The benefit of buying one as opposed to borrowing one was that […]
In a project recently I was struggling to find a way to parse strings that contain a date range, for example: 27th-29th June 2010 Tuesday 29 May -> Sat 2 June 2012 From 27th to 29th March 1999 None of the Python modules I investigated (including parsedatetime) seemed to be able to cope with the […]
The first piece of software in my series of essential OS X software is a very handy tool which reminds you when you haven’t attached a file in an email when you intended to. How does it do this? Well, it searches for key words in the email and reminds you if, for example, you […]