Part of this record is broken: Twitter is great when you’re watching it. Interesting links come in that many people would never post to their blog. But when you’re not watching it, well, it’s just a dumb frog. I decided to fix this for myself.
Back when smart people respected Twitter they had an open API that allowed services like IFTTT to read a feed source and pull in posts. This script is still better.
Pythonmonk is a beautiful and interactive training site for Python. It’s fully interactive and forces the user to solve real code problems. You type right into the code samples and run them in the browser. Right now there is only a primer so it’s not too useful for me, but I think this is a great start.
A bit of Python for mining Twitter for Haikus. I just think this is fun. I’m fascinated by the Python Natural Language Toolkit. This example just scratches the surface of NLTK.
The TableFu library looks like a very handy little bit of Python. I especially like that CSV or Python list data can be turned into HTML tables. Sure, the Ruby folks already had TableFu. This is still cool.
Brython feels like magic for someone that likes Python. Well, it’s really Python being converted to JS and then executed in the browser. The key is that the developer writes in Python inside a script tag instead of JS.
Check out the console page
This, my friends, is how you write a damn review.
Pythonista deserves this kind of excellent work. It’s an amazingly well designed and implemented app, just like Federico’s “review”.
I find myself using Checkvist more every day (Previous Post). I’m constantly surprised by how well it works. I’ve been happily using it for most of my outlining. Recently I started to use it as a sort of Inbox for everything that is not a task. This role was previously filled by Dropbox plain text files but I wanted to try something new to alleviate some problems associated with my large collection of notes.
I just stumbled across this Python library on Twitter. It provides methods for syncing bookmarks between Pinboard, Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, and Delicious. Fantastic work. I plan to use this very soon.
I’m kind of blown away by Pandas. It’s a Python library for manipulating data. For example, look how easy it is to work with plain text arrays of data. That just scratches the surface. How about combing with Matplotlib to read, manipulate and then plot data? Sure.
This looks like another lost weekend for me. Like any reasonably complex Python module, I’m having a tough time getting it installed on Mountain Lion.
Here’s a nice little tool I made in Pythonista for iOS (review). This script is using Brett Terpstra’s awesome heckyesmarkdown web service, which is extremely useful and underrated.
To use this script, I copy a URL to the iOS clipboard and jump into Pythonista. I trigger this script to get the web page in Markdown encoded text.
This URL: http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/09/nfc-is-a-crutch.html
is turned into plain text and put back on the clipboard.