Python

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 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.

I manage a handful of websites, like this one. Having built a few on other platforms, such as Drupal, I’m familiar with the dreaded error “The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.” On sites that I don’t check on frequently, it can be an embarrassment when people begin emailing you with questions about the site being down.

I wrote the following Python script to deal with the problem:

Indigo 6 is a popular home automation controller software package on the Mac. Extensibility is one of its main features and it allows users to add a range of features to suit their needs.

Using Python scripting, users can create plugins that provide extended functionality. These plugins can provide a custom configuration UI to the user. Since the documentation around a particular feature - dynamic lists was lacking, I’ve written up my approach here.

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. A bit of technical expertise is needed to get it operational but if you are up to it, clone the github repos above and go for it.

Speaking of Anki, here’s a Swiss Army knife of database utilities that provides searching, moving and renaming functions from the command line.

On GitHub.

You can do things like this to rename and collect tags:

$ anki_tool mv_tags '(dinosaur|mammal)' animal

Looks cool.