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I’ve been hearing about uv for awhile but I am happy with poetry for the most part. However, I’ll need to keep an eye on it and consider changing if it continues to mature.

One main reason would be the better build times it provides for development with Docker. This has been an on and off again nuisance in my development.

Production-ready Python Docker Containers with uv hynek.me

Starting with 0.3.0, Astral’s uv brought many great features, including support for cross-platform lock files uv.lock. Together with subsequent fixes, it has become Python’s finest workflow tool for my (non-scientific) use cases. Here’s how I build production-ready containers, as fast as possible.

I just discovered ZoomIt from Microsoft, a tool for making presentations from your screen. It provides some shortcuts to quickly zoom, draw and type on your screen which is helpful for demos or presentations via video calls.

I just found Google allows you to compare ISPs by using their own video quality metrics at google.com//get/videoqualityreport. Very cool tool for judging a service provider at least for providing a quality video streaming experience.

I saw this post The WiFi Only Works When Its Raining on Hackernews. I think I can say I’ve learned a thing or two working at a WISP for a few years because I knew what the problem was by the title alone.

Can you guess what it is?

With Pythons pdb usually q for quit is enough to close the debugger and stop the program. When that’s not working you can follow it with a quick ctrl+c to exit the program. But I got stuck in a loop with a poorly placed breakpoint and I didn’t want to close my terminal or use another terminal to kill it so I learned you can call os._exit() to force the Python program to quit skipping all finally blocks and __exit__ methods.

So for this situation import os; os._exit() force quits pdb and your program.

In Directus you can make relative datetimes from the provided $NOW timestamp such as $NOW(-7 days) or $NOW(+3 hours).

Read more in the Directus Docs.

I’m looking into a backup solution for my family’s photos/phones. I’m familiar with Syncthing so I installed it our NAS server. The goal is our phones will transparently send new files to the server and allow us to delete files to make space on the phones.

Surprisingly, this one-way data transfer is not recommended by Syncthing but it can be done by configuring the phone to send only mode, the server to receive only mode and finding the hidden advanced option on the server to ignore deletes.

The name is Syncthing so I suppose I am trying to use it wrong.

Read more details on their forums here.

EDIT: I am questioning this workflow and suspect it is more complicated than just a normal two-way sync plus periodically pruning and copying files to the directory I setup in the NAS for backups. I would like to learn more about setups that work for others.

You can use your system’s Python packages such as those built by your linux distrobution and installed like sudo apt install python3-pymssql inside of a virtual environment by adding the --system-site-packages flag when creating the virtual environment.

sudo apt install python3-pymssql
python3 -m venv --system-site-packages .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -c "import pymssql"

This saved me after spending far more time than I like trying to install pymssql on an old RaspberryPi which even the team at PiWheels.org don’t provide a wheel for.