by Dr. Radut

python

MuStack MicroVM: An Overcomplicated Solution to a Problem That Doesn't Exist

I have a habit of diving headfirst into projects that are fun but maybe not super useful. A project I worked on a few months ago  MuStack MicroVM (msmv) —a project that took far more effort than necessary to create something that, in all honesty, I’ll probably never use again. But hey, at least it works, right?

 

So, What Exactly is msmv?

At its core, MuStack MicroVM is a minimalistic Linux virtual machine build system. Think Docker, but without all the convenience and with way more manual labour involved. It's designed to create lightweight, secure, and isolated virtual machines for testing environments. Perfect if you're someone who enjoys the thrill of complexity, like building a ship in a bottle—but digitally. Plus, I'm a sucker for naming projects with an acronym.

Tags
python
linux

Browse the [modern] web in Internet Explorer 5 & 6

Here's something fun: Enable HTTPS browsing on IE5/Windows 98 with a Flask proxy that handles SSL and rewrites web content.

Windows 98 IE 6 Screenshot

For whatever reason, I have a Windows 98 virtual machine in UTM (which is fantastic on Apple Silicon) that I like to boot in to and take a trip down memory lane. It's fun, and painful at the same time. But, the modern web has moved on from Internet Explorer 6 (and Internet Explorer in general, but we're not celebrating that in this post). Lost in the dust, Internet Explorer of the Windows 98 days doesn't quite work anymore. IE6, released in 2001, came with support for SSL 2.0 and 3.0, and later updates added support for TLS 1.0. At the time, this was sufficient. The web was a different place, less sophisticated in both the technology it used and the threats it faced (generally speaking, of course).

Tags
python
windows

Failing HTTPS proxy with Ngrok on Railway.app

I've been a fan of free code to cloud deployment services (PaaS) like Railway.app and Fly.io to launch my fly-by-night ideas. They both offer generous free tiers that will allow you to run your code (Node, Python, etc) on their platform and host it for whatever use. The downside of all these different PaaS companies is that they call come with their own CLI that you must learn, with different syntax. Regardless, deploying from Git is easy enough and in fact simpler. Anyway.

 

I've been working on a new project that I think I'll turn into a SaaS eventually. A part of the project uses Google OAuth to login to the user dashboard. Setting up a new application in Google Cloud Platform is easy enough, make your keys, set your permission scopes and voila; instant Google SSO for your custom application. A part of this is specifying your redirect and callback URLs. 

 

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python

Search multiple grocery stores at once

tl;dr check out https://grocerygoose.ca

Code: https://github.com/snacsnoc/grocery-app

The price of groceries in Canada has absolutely skyrocketed over the past six months. Everytime I go to the grocery store, I am no longer shocked at the price increase. In fact, it's almost a bit of a game finding something that hasn't gone up.

A great example is Loblaw's No Name potato chips. On sale they were 97 cents, regularly priced at 99 cents. Great value for something so simple. I went to an Independant Grocer two weeks ago, expecting to be shocked but what I received was a heart attack instead. The price increased by 150%! The sale price now is $5.00 for 2 bags.

Tags
python
parallel
api

Python init system for Snacklinux

I've been thinking about this for a while. It's not really practical, but just for fun. Essentially rewriting the tools needed for a minimal Linux distro with just the kernel. I found this PyCon presentation(video on Youtube) about this very subject. Unfortunately there's no mention of it past 2006 but oh well. Another use for such a thing would like be similar to Docker but with the build process of SnackLinux. Being able to launch a customizable Python image with custom kernel is complete overkill but that's what makes programming fun I think.

Tags
python
snacklinux
init

Generating images for your podcast

I listen to Legends of the Old West podcast, it's a western-themed episodic podcast centered around outlaws.The narrator is great, the character actions are descriptive but I'm left wanting more.

With the surge of Stable Diffusion projects, I was inspired to make something AI generated art themed.

What I ended up with is transcribing the podcast audio into text, and then generating images based off of that. Take a look below for an example.


The bulk of the work is done by Vosk, an offline open source speech recognition toolkit. We convert the input MP3 to wav, send it through Vosk and receive a generated JSON output file.

Tags
python
ai

Tuya Smart Home Temperature Monitor + Python (tinytuya)

Why look go outside and check the temperature if you can automate it and use Python?

I purchased this inexpensive wifi-enabled temperature monitor from Aliexpress for approx $20 CAD. The goal was to log the temperature and humidty throughout the seasons and make a graph at the end of the year.

During the setup of the device, you have to use their cloud smart home app. You can only guess what they do with your data (hey, maybe they’ll see how cold it gets here in winter and feel bad for me). You’ll have to use the app to connect the developer account to your device.

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python

Merge big CSV files with Pandas and Python

I deal with large CSV at work, mostly database dumps. Google Sheets and Numbers/Excel just can't keep up with formula changes for 300k+ lines. What do we do? We use Python.

The use case here is replicating a the VLOOKUP function with a left join. We want to get the matching criteria from our referenced CSV file, but only the matching (otherwise that would be a full outer join).

Here's what our data looks like:

We want to look up the lat/long in our reference file and join on zip code. Here's what that data looks like:

Note the matching "zip" column names.

Here's the code:

Tags
python
pandas
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