The First French Polish

Starting a French polish can be daunting. I'll show you what ingredients and tools needed to complete a piece, what the process is like, and how long it will take. First, let's talk about the ingredients. Here's a list of all the things I got for the polish: pumice, I…

A digital tally list for hackerspaces

I'm a member of an open workshop in my hometown. Last week we started joking around about getting a drink vending machine. Still half joking, I started searching on eBay for used vending machines. While on my way to a pub, I pictured having a vending machine for the workshop:…

A tour of the Read the Docs Sphinx theme

Today I want to take you on a tour of the Read the Docs theme for Sphinx. We'll look into what goes into it and then look at what web technologies are being used to make this theme happen. In a different take from the theme's own documentation, our journey…

Integrating Sphinx doctests with Travis

If you want to run Sphinx doc tests in Travis you will need to jump through some hoops. Fortunately it isn't that complicated, I've created some sample code on Github/doctest-travis for you to follow along. Doc test are a way to ensure that your documentation is up to date.…

Creating a Custom Landing Page in Sphinx

Sample code lives here. When I refer to source code line numbers, you're supposed to look at the code in this repository. Sample output (courtesy of readthedocs.org) is at https://sphinx-landing-template.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. By convention the landing page for your Sphinx project is a simple table of…

Readings on Group Dynamics and Self Improvement

I've had three books next to my bed during the last week. Let's start with the worst one. Working out Loud"Working out Loud" is supposedly a method to make your work visible among a wider circle, with the intention of garnering career advancement and/or happiness. The primary tools…

OSM Tile Creation on AWS Spot

This article describes some efforts to automate OSM tile creation on AWS spot instances. I'm running a website for a regulars table in my city. As part of this regulars table we have a database of all pubs we visited, because we're in a different pub every Tuesday. Why not…

Printing to remarkable cloud from CUPS

A while back I wrote a tool to print directly from CUPS to the remarkable cloud. This is a little bit of description around that. I like the way I can skim the news in the morning and print directly to my remarkable and then read while riding the train…

AnkiDroid audio with Python and Google

I've been learning Czech recently. My Anki cards have my native tongue German on the front and Czech on the back. When listening to Czech audio I really took a long time to translate simple words or grapple with the conjugation of Czech verbs. The remedy to this situation appears…