Python on David Hamp-Gonsalves

The Music Player/Organizer For the Rest of Us

Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone has their own (strong) opinions about this but I think I’ve figured it out. First to organize your music Beets is amazing. Its light, easy to use and lets you tweek things exactly how you want them.

The limitation with Beets was that it was just an organizer and you still needed a full GUI application to conveniently find and play your music. This weekend I wrote the Play plugin which lets you harness the might of Beets queries and send those results to your choice of lightweight music player.

Building a Basic Android Bot

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I started playing a new game on my phone called Castle Crash. I don’t play often play video games but when I do, I play them obsesively until they are defeated. In this case you can’t beat the game since you are playing against the internet so I decided to tap out and let my computer take over.

MonkeyRunner

Android has a great tool for writing simple automated tests on a device called MonkeyRunner. It uses Jython to let you write Python scripts that simulate user interactions and events on your device. MonkeyRunner can be found in the tool directoy after you have installed the Android SDK.

DIY Photobooth

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I got married(it was amazing and surreal). When planning the wedding we really wanted to make the whole night reflect “us”. This meant an all vegan menu from hearty catering(amazing) and a lot of elbow grease as we built and crafted mostly everything ourselves. Our signs were life sized pictures, the cupcake stand was wooden slabs of a tree and I build a photobooth which is what I’m going to talk about in this post.

OpenCV/Python Color Tracking

Mon, 30 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Preamble

I needed some color based object tracking for a project I was hacking together last weekend. I choose to use the OpenCV Python bindings since I knew that I wouldn’t be doing anything fancy and I thought it would simplify the learning process. While the Python bindings are great I wasn’t able to find much documentation and what I thought would be an easy 10 minutes turned into a bit of an afternoon project. Admittedly I got side tracked with CamShifts, Histograms, Moments and the example code.