449 items tagged “projects”
Posts about projects I have worked on.
2022
Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival traffic on Saturday 15th October 2022 (via) It’s the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival this weekend... and its impact on the traffic between our little town of El Granada and Half Moon Bay—8 minutes drive away—is notorious. So I built a git scraper that archives estimated driving times from the Google Maps Navigation API, and used git-history to turn that scraped data into a SQLite database and visualize it on a chart.
shot-scraper 1.0 (via) Only a minor release in terms of features, but I decided that I’m comfortable enough with the CLI design at this point that I’m ready to stamp a 1.0 on it and commit to not making backwards-incompatible changes (at least without shipping a 2.0 release, which I’d like to avoid if possible).
Weeknotes: Publishing data using Datasette Cloud
My initial preview releases of Datasette Cloud (the SaaS version of my Datasette open source project) have focused on private data collaboration.
[... 582 words]Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud preview invitations
This week I finally started sending out invitations for people to try out the preview of the new Datasette Cloud, my SaaS offering for Datasette.
[... 713 words]A tool to run caption extraction against online videos using Whisper and GitHub Issues/Actions
I released a new project this weekend, built during the Bellingcat Hackathon (I came second!) It’s called Action Transcription and it’s a tool for caturing captions and transcripts from online videos.
[... 1,362 words]Exploring 10m scraped Shutterstock videos used to train Meta’s Make-A-Video text-to-video model
Make-A-Video is a new “state-of-the-art AI system that generates videos from text” from Meta AI. It looks incredible—it really is DALL-E / Stable Diffusion for video. And it appears to have been trained on 10m video preview clips scraped from Shutterstock.
[... 923 words]Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, s3-credentials, shot-scraper, datasette-edit-templates and more
Despite distractions from AI I managed to make progress on a bunch of different projects this week, including new releases of s3-credentials and shot-scraper, a new datasette-edit-templates plugin and a small but neat improvement to Datasette Lite.
[... 1,562 words]Open every CSV file in a GitHub repository in Datasette Lite (via) I built an Observable notebook that accepts a GitHub repository as input, scans it for CSV files and generates a link to open all of those CSV files in Datasette Lite.
Building a searchable archive for the San Francisco Microscopical Society
The San Francisco Microscopical Society was founded in 1870 by a group of scientists dedicated to advancing the field of microscopy.
[... 1,845 words]Analyzing ScotRail audio announcements with Datasette—from prototype to production
Scottish train operator ScotRail released a two-hour long MP3 file containing all of the components of its automated station announcements. Messing around with them is proving to be a huge amount of fun.
[... 4,428 words]Plugin support for Datasette Lite
I’ve added a new feature to Datasette Lite, my distribution of Datasette that runs entirely in the browser using Python and SQLite compiled to WebAssembly. You can now install additional Datasette plugins by passing them in the URL.
[... 865 words]viewport-preview (via) I built a tiny tool which lets you preview a URL in a bunch of different common browser viewport widths, using iframes.
sqlite-comprehend: run AWS entity extraction against content in a SQLite database
I built a new tool this week: sqlite-comprehend, which passes text from a SQLite database through the AWS Comprehend entity extraction service and stores the returned entities.
[... 1,146 words]s3-ocr: Extract text from PDF files stored in an S3 bucket
I’ve released s3-ocr, a new tool that runs Amazon’s Textract OCR text extraction against PDF files in an S3 bucket, then writes the resulting text out to a SQLite database with full-text search configured so you can run searches against the extracted data.
[... 1,493 words]Joining CSV files in your browser using Datasette Lite
I added a new feature to Datasette Lite—my version of Datasette that runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly (previously): you can now use it to load one or more CSV files by URL, and then run SQL queries against them—including joins across data from multiple files.
[... 546 words]A tiny web app to create images from OpenStreetMap maps
Earlier today I found myself wanting to programmatically generate some images of maps.
[... 1,388 words]Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud ready to preview
I made an absolute ton of progress building Datasette Cloud on Fly this week, and also had a bunch of fun playing with GPT-3.
[... 370 words]Weeknotes: Building Datasette Cloud on Fly Machines, Furo for documentation
Hosting provider Fly released Fly Machines this week. I got an early preview and I’ve been working with it for a few days—it’s a fascinating new piece of technology. I’m using it to get my hosting service for Datasette ready for wider release.
[... 1,005 words]simonw/datasette-screenshots (via) I started a new GitHub repository to automate taking screenshots of Datasette for marketing purposes, using my shot-scraper browser automation tool.
Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, nogil Python, HYTRADBOI
My big project this week was Datasette Lite, a new way to run Datasette directly in a browser, powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide. I also continued my research into running SQL queries in parallel, described last week. Plus I spoke at HYTRADBOI.
[... 1,434 words]Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser
Datasette Lite is a new way to run Datasette: entirely in a browser, taking advantage of the incredible Pyodide project which provides Python compiled to WebAssembly plus a whole suite of useful extras.
[... 4,800 words]Automatically opening issues when tracked file content changes
I figured out a GitHub Actions pattern to keep track of a file published somewhere on the internet and automatically open a new repository issue any time the contents of that file changes.
[... 1,211 words]Building a Covid sewage Twitter bot (and other weeknotes)
I built a new Twitter bot today: @covidsewage. It tweets a daily screenshot of the latest Covid sewage monitoring data published by Santa Clara county.
[... 1,079 words]Pillar Point Stewards, pypi-to-sqlite, improvements to shot-scraper and appreciating datasette-dashboards
This week I helped Natalie launch the Pillar Point Stewards website and built a new tool for loading PyPI package data into SQLite, in order to help promote the excellent datasette-dashboards plugin by Romain Clement.
[... 1,985 words]Instantly create a GitHub repository to take screenshots of a web page
I just released shot-scraper-template, a GitHub repository template that helps you start taking automated screenshots of a web page by filling out a form.
[... 1,177 words]shot-scraper: automated screenshots for documentation, built on Playwright
shot-scraper is a new tool that I’ve built to help automate the process of keeping screenshots up-to-date in my documentation. It also doubles as a scraping tool—hence the name—which I picked as a complement to my git scraping and help scraping techniques.
[... 1,802 words]Google Drive to SQLite
I released a new tool this week: google-drive-to-sqlite. It’s a CLI utility for fetching metadata about files in your Google Drive and writing them to a local SQLite database.
[... 1,221 words]Help scraping: track changes to CLI tools by recording their --help using Git
I’ve been experimenting with a new variant of Git scraping this week which I’m calling Help scraping. The key idea is to track changes made to CLI tools over time by recording the output of their --help commands in a Git repository.
Datasette 0.60: The annotated release notes
I released Datasette 0.60 today. It’s a big release, incorporating 61 commits and 18 issues. Here are the annotated release notes.
[... 1,119 words]What’s new in sqlite-utils 3.20 and 3.21: --lines, --text, --convert
sqlite-utils is my combined CLI tool and Python library for manipulating SQLite databases. Consider this the annotated release notes for sqlite-utils 3.20 and 3.21, both released in the past week.
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