Installing files without using the installer. — If we have a managed computer, we may not be able to install a file directly using the installer since this requires access to Applications root folder. DMG For a DMG file, we can create a secondary “Applications” directory in our $HOME and drag this directly. PKG files However package files require us…

Finding out what additional packages are installed (and where they come from) when using conda. — Setup Installation of conda-tree We begin by installing the conda-tree package. This allows us to browse the dependancies of our environment. conda install -c conda-forge conda-tree #or (faster) mamba install conda-tree Testing out conda-tree To check that our installation works, we can see which packages in our current environment are not depended on by any others (these…

How to extract data from a JavaScript populated web page. — A very useful skill that keeps cropping up again and again (and again) is web-scraping. I have alluded to this in previous articles, but decided it is time it has its own. What is Selenium? Selenium is an open source tool allowing us to automate web browsers. We often use this with a…

How to query Generative Pre-trained Transformers programmatically. — In recent months (article written Nov 22), Generative Pre-trained Transformers have taken the world by storm. They seem to be the solution to many tasks, but also the epoch of many many headaches. In this quick and simple tutorial, I talk through how to use the OpenAI API in Python…

You have a lecture series hosted on Vimeo, but are travelling to an area of poor internet — so what do you do? Use your programming knowledge to download all the videos in advance of course! Be it a flight, or you just want the videos for reference, there are…

When it comes to dynamic maps, conventional methods can only take us so far — but is there a better way? Background Colour blindness. Alt-text. Tab Index. Contrast. Screen Readers — it is easy to get distracted when talking about accessibility. In the dictionary, accessibility is defined as: “ The quality…

Playing Audible on Garmin devices — Problem You set up for a nice long run, turn your training programme on, leave the house and then realise you cannot listen to that great audiobook without a phone. This article is for you if, like me, you purchased a Garmin to minimise the number of things you have to…

Three simple points on good coding practice —

Overcoming CORS by use of the GitHub API — Background Often we want to use a publically hosted file from GitHub in our web application. This could be anything from a small data or configuration file, to a couple of lines of code used for testing. …