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 […]
My last post about my favourite ‘new’ (well, new to me) Python packages seemed to be very well received. I’ll post a ‘debrief’ post within the next few weeks, reflecting on the various comments that were made on Hacker News, Reddit and so on, but before that I want to post a slightly more personal […]
As I’ve been blogging a lot more about Python over the last year, I thought I’d list a few of my favourite ‘new’ Python modules from 2015. These aren’t necessarily modules that were newly released in 2015, but modules that were ‘new to me’ this year – and may be new to you too! tqdm […]
I wrote a post a few months ago about a couple of useful Jupyter (formerly known as IPython) notebook extensions, and commented that they were a bit of a pain to install. Well, I’ve found a great way to get around that problem – an extension called nbextensions that will help you manage your notebook […]
Slightly boringly, this very similar to my last post – but it’s also something useful that you may want to know, and that I’ll probably forget if I don’t write it down somewhere. Basically, scipy.ndimage.filters.convolve is about twice as fast as scipy.signal.convolve2d. I run convolutions a lot on satellite images, and Landsat images are around 8000 […]
This entry in my series covers manifestoclouds: my code for producing word clouds from political party manifestos. This is very simple, generic code that just ties together a few libraries – and is by no means restricted to just political party manifestos – but I keep it around because I find it useful occasionally. I use […]