For the last two years, I’ve been working through a 10,000 word Russian vocabulary ordered by frequency. I have a goal of finishing the list before the end of 2019. This requires not only stubborn persistence but an efficient process of collecting the information that goes onto my Anki flash cards.
My manual process has been to work from a Numbers spreadsheet. As I collect information about each word from several websites, I log it in this table.
Spurious sensor data can wreak havoc in an otherwise finely-tuned home automation system. I use temperature data from an Aeotech Multisensor 6 to monitor the environment in our greenhouse. Living in Canada, I cannot rely solely on passive systems to maintain the temperature, particularly at night. So, using the temperature and humidity measurements transmitted back to the controller over Z-wave, I control devices inside the greenhouse that heat and humidify the environment.
I’ve written previously about extracting and processing mp3 files from web pages. The use case that I described, obtaining Russian word pronunciations for Anki cards is basically the same although I’m now obtaining many of my words from Forvo. However, Forvo doesn’t seem to apply any audio dynamic range processing or normalization to the audio files. While many of the pronunciation mp3’s are excellent as-is, some need post-processing chiefly because the amplitude is too low.
Indigo currently shipping version 7 is a leading Mac home automation software package. One of it’s mostly widely-used features is its ability to execute user-provided Python scripts of AppleScripts. In my previous introduction to scripting Indigo with Python I showed how to use the Indigo plugin host to execute Python scripts. In this post, I’ll describe how I use a third-party charting package rrdtool to graph data from Indigo by taking advantage of Indigo’s ability to execute arbitrary Python scripts.
Among the many reasons I use iTerm2 in lieu of the macOS Terminal is its AppleScript support.
I recently had the need to automate some tasks on my Amazon Web Services EC2 server in a way that takes advantage of iTerm2 AppleScript functionality.
Use case I’ve found recently, that my screen sessions were disappearing. Although I haven’t completely excluded other causes, some have suggested that infrequently-reconnected sessions can be cleaned up.
I’ve used Indigo home automation software for a few years. It’s a integrated home automation software environment for the Mac and its a solid stable and well-supported platform.
Within Indigo, it’s possible to script triggers and actions either AppleScript or Python. It’s funny - AppleScript often looks like the easier route to take. It looks more like plain English than Python. But as they say, looks are deceiving. Two bits of bad news put the nail in AppleScript’s coffin for me - as least with Indigo.
As I’ve mentioned before I use Anki extensively to memorize and practice Russian vocabulary. With language learning in particular, adding spoken pronunciations to the cards makes an enormous difference. Since I use Open Russian extensively to provide information to built my Anki cards, it’s a natural source of audio data, too. To optimize my learning time, I built two small scripts to grab and rename the audio files from the Open Russian site.
Indigo is a well-known home automation controller software package for Mac OS X. I’ve written a plugin for Indigo 6 that allows you to create a virtual weather station from Environment Canada data. If you live in Canada, this will be a useful way of using weather data in your Indigo rules. For example, you could use wind and temperature data to adjust your irrigation schedule.
You can download the plugin from its git repo.
The spaced repetition software system Anki is the de facto standard for foreign language vocabulary learning. Its algorithm requires lots of performance data to schedule flashcards in the most efficient way. Anki displays these statistics in a group of thorough and informative statistical graphs and descriptive text.
However, they aren’t easily available for the end-user to export. Thus, the reason behind the companion projects AnkiStats and AnkiStatsServer.
The premise is that you can run your own more extensive experiments and statistical tests on the data once you have it in hand.
I have a number of AppleScript applications that need to run at odd times. These maintenance tasks often attempt to run while the computer is sleeping. Particularly those that rely on UI scripting do not function during this period.
This most flexible way of dealing with this is to manipulate the power management settings directly via the pmset(1) command.
The variety of options available using pmset is staggering and beyond the scope of this post.