TIL

I’ve been toying with a small Django project that can be given a list of podcast feeds, and then regularly checks those feeds and updates some interesting metrics. Initially, I wanted to see how many comparable podcasts to my own made use of various RSS namespace elements, and also to pull some aggregate statistics around release frequency, episode length, etc…

Thanks to this post from Adam Johnson, I’ve now updated my configuration to block OpenAI and Meta from crawling this website to feed their LLMs.

This week I wanted to play around with tkinter a bit. But this proved to be difficult on my M2 Mac. I use asdf to manage various runtime versions, so first I checked to see if it was already working with my existing Python installation using the built in test method.

I’m a big fan of using direnv to set project-specific env variables. And at one point I was using it to automatically activate my poetry virtualenv whenever I entered the directory per this function.

While looking at my Github news feed today, I spotted an app via one of Jeff Triplett’s stars. The app is Sloth by Sveinbjorn Thordarson, and it provides a GUI frontend for lsof that can quickly show you which processes are interacting with various files, directories, IP sockets, or Unix sockets.

This is one of those silly little things that I always feel like I’m the last to learn. Admittedly, when I’m working with hidden files, I’m usually on the command line or in a text editor that already shows them.

Python 3.10 introduced several improvements for type hints, including a much more concise Union operator. This means that instead of using: def square(number: Union[int, float]) -> Union[int, float]: return number ** 2 You can instead write this:

I was hacking on my quote service the other day, and notice that Read the Docs wasn’t building my module level documentation, which meant that anyone that wanted to look at said modules in more detail was getting a 404 error.