I have a Coding bookmarks folder which is stuffed full of loads of interesting articles that I’ve never shared with anyone because they don’t really fit into any of my posts. So, taking an idea from The Old New Thing, I’m going to run a few ‘Link Clearance’ posts. This is the Python-focused one (there will be […]
Summary: Microsoft now provides a single, small installer to get all that you need to compile Python 2.7 binary packages on Windows! This is just a brief post to share the news on something that I didn’t know about until yesterday – but that would have saved me a lot of trouble! You may have experienced […]
This isn’t normal content for my blog, but I thought a post here might reach people who would be interested in the job. Don’t worry, normal service will be resumed shortly – this isn’t going to turn into a job listing site! A research assistant is required to assist with the development of an algorithm […]
So, last time we worked out how communications were encrypted and managed to read the current status of the heating system (whether the boiler is on or not, the current temperature, and so on). That’s great – but it’d be even better if we could actually control the thermostat from Python: set the temperature, change […]
Like a lot of academics, I write many documents in LaTeX – including almost all of my academic papers, and my PhD thesis! So, anything that can make my life easier is of interest to me. I was recently discussing this with a colleague (a co-author on a paper actually), and realised that lots of […]
In the previous part we had established that the Worcester Wave thermostat app communicates with a remote server (run by Worcester Bosch) using the XMPP protocol, with TLS encryption. However, because of the encryption we haven’t yet managed to see the actual content of any of these messages! To decrypt the messages we need to do […]
When we bought a new boiler last year, we decided to install a ‘smart thermostat’. There are a wide range available these days, including the Google Nest, the Hive (from British Gas), and the Worcester Bosch ‘Wave’. As we had a Worcester Bosch boiler we got the Wave – and it wasn’t much more expensive […]
My PhD was done through a Doctoral Training Centre, and as part of this I had a taught year at the beginning of my PhD. During the summer of this year I had to do a ‘Summer Project’, which was basically a MSc thesis. My thesis was called "Can a single cloud spoil the view?": modelling […]
One of the most important things when developing software – particularly open-source software – is knowing when to stop working on something, relinquish responsibility and suggest that it should not be used any more. This is what I have recently done with AutoZotBib. For those who don’t remember AutoZotBib, it is a tool that I […]
Continuing my series of code that I’ve written in the past, and stuck up on Github, but never actually talked about…this post is about PyMicrotops: a Python library for processing data from the Microtops Sun Photometer. The Microtops (pictured above) measures light coming from the sun in a number of narrow wavebands, and then calculates […]