Tagged: Free and Open Source
Email is one of those protocols that still works. It reaches me where I am. It also has various clients and libraries that work reasonably well. And it can carry almost any kind of content (Of course, there are limitations attachment size and type, etc). I use it every day, including emailing to myself.
I wanted to write 100 posts in 2021, and I am nowhere close to that. I tried to look at the posts by year and see how I have performed over the years. Of course, I could have done that manually by looking at the year archive count or running a query on the database. But recently, I have started using Xidel, so why not use it? :)
So It’s in my nature to convert everything to a web-service. The biggest reason is that you can call a web service from anywhere, and it’s easy to share the processing power and logic with anyone who has access to a web browser or curl and nothing else.
As you would know, I scrape a lot of web pages as a Data Archivist at DataMeet. I usually use BS4 for this, and it’s beautiful, simple, and works. But often don’t want to write a python script to do that, and I need a simple tool to get data out of HTML.
I like to read a stanza of Vachana every day, and I generally visit Vachana Sanchaya to do that. They have a widget ಇಂದಿನ ವಚನ aka Today’s Vachana. Which picks a random(?) Vachana and shows it to you on their home page. But then its not fun to visit the site everyday. So I wrote a script so it appears on my Desktop.
I have been doing longer screencasts these days. Some of them are for private consumption, and some are public. I am yet to master it fully. But I have come a long way. These are the tools that have helped me.