I’m an artist and a python developer, two things that rarely occupy the same worlds, let alone the same sentence. However, I have recently found a way to combine these two passions: Panoramas. My current smartphone takes excellent pictures. It does a great job at figuring out colors, lighting, and focus, even in low lighting. … [Read more…]
NZXT Kraken coolers are awesome for CPUs or GPUs. Their CAM software on the other hand is slow, bloated and possibly stealing your data. Thankfully, there are open source alternatives available. The option that I will walk you through using is a command line tool that doesn’t need to be constantly running in the background, … [Read more…]
Is it possible to build a personal media server that is hosted in the cloud, while making privacy, security, and accessibility paramount?I wanted to find out, and this post will dive into the options available to achieve such a possibly as well. (Spoiler: I did end up making my own software to do just this!) … [Read more…]
The trek from Python 2 to Python 3 has been drawn-out, arduous and fraught with perils. How close are our dear Knights developers to all reaching the long sought glory of Python 3? PIP Downloads Let’s first jump into what is being used the most currently. This data examines fifteen different libraries downloaded via PIP … [Read more…]
In Python, using plus signs to concatenate strings together is one of the first things you learn, i.e. print(“hello” + “world!”), and it should be one of the first things you stop using. Using plus signs to “add” strings together is inherently more error prone, messier and unprofessional. Instead you should be using .format() or … [Read more…]
Truffle is an amazing suite of tools created by Consensys to develop smart contracts for the Ethereum blockchain network. However, it can be a bit jarring to make the leap from local development to the real test network, ropsten. Required Setup For this walk through, I have installed: Node (LTS) Truffle I will be using … [Read more…]
Step Functions, State Machines, and Lambdas oh my! AWS has really been expanding what you can do without needing to actually stand up any servers. I’m going to walk through a very basic example of how to get going with your own Python code to create an ETL (Extract Transform Load) process using Amazon’s services. And … [Read more…]
It can be a real pain to upload huge files. Many services limit their upload sizes to a few megabytes, and you don’t want a single connection open forever either. The super simple way to get around that is simply send the file in lots of small parts, aka chunking. Finished code example can be … [Read more…]
Dealing with communications across programs, processes or even threads can be a real pain in the patella. Each situation usually calls for something slightly different and has to work with a limited set of options. On top of that, a lot of tutorials I see are people simply starting one program from inside the other (for … [Read more…]
Thread and Multiprocessing Pools are an underused feature of Python. In my opinion, they are the easiest way to dip your feet into concurrency, and yet still the method I use most often. They allow you to easily offload CPU or I/O bound tasks to a pre-instantiated group (pool) of threads or processes. One of … [Read more…]