Scraping with Selenium
In college, I had a friend with a part-time research job. One time we were chatting and he told me he had to copy and paste data from a government website into a Word document. He was explaining to me that he had over 20 hours of work left at the current pace, and wasn’t sure how he would get it all done with his other responsibilities.
I asked him if he was interested in getting it done faster with software. He said yes, and I had some time, so I wrote a small Python program to scrape the data for him. It was pretty easy: The data was on a public website, the pagination involved passing a number into a query string, and there were obvious CSS selectors to use to target the right data. I wasn’t the fastest; I wanted to explain what I was doing as I went, and I think it took me almost 2 hours, but the result was amazing to my friend, because it saved him at least 18 hours of work. I used Beautiful Soup in Python to do all the scraping tasks.
Simple Search
I recently used the emoji search feature in an app. I typed “car” and expected to be greeted with 🚗 as a top result but found things like 🥕 (carrot) to be much higher ranking. This post explores how a search algorithm for searching a small list can be enhanced.
Making a Booklet
Recently I was compiling a booklet of devotions for a mission trip. My goal was to make a simple booklet using standard paper, printed double-sided, and folded down the middle. I looked online for options and kept finding web-based tools that looked like overkill. I wanted a simple text booklet - no splashy template, no color, no images.
I had heard of Pandoc and PDFJam before and decided to give them a try. The tools worked really well for my use case. I thought I’d share what worked for me as it took me a bit to figure out, not having any prior experience with these tools.
Beancount for Personal Finance
I love learning new things. Rabbit holes can be fun. This year I dug into double-entry accounting. And I didn’t just learn the theory; I decided to use double-entry accounting, with some open source plain text accounting software, for personal finances.
I’ll explain what I mean by these terms and what I have been up to in this post.
- Double-entry accounting: An accounting method where every transaction is recorded against at least two accounts.
- Plain text accounting: An accounting method where all your data is recorded in plain text, making the data portable and scriptable.
- Beancount: An open source accounting package, written in Python, which implements double-entry accounting in plain text.
Turning on Key Lights for Google Meet
I got two Elgato Key Light Airs for better lighting when I am on video calls. After setting them up, I wondered: How do I turn them on automatically for video calls?
I wanted to open a Google Meet link and have the lights turn on instantly, like my webcam.