Some Introspection with Python

The discord bot I am working on has a number of features that can be configured separately and I wanted a way to display the configuration within discord. I ended up exploring some new-to-me areas of python to do this. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out and want to share it with you!

I have made a runnable example of the code from this article available, if you want to try it out.

sudo and pyinfra

Recently Ubuntu switched sudo implementations to a new version written in rust. If you need to swithc back for some reason, this article gave me enough information to do so, but there is a typo in it.

In my case this worked:

sudo su
ls /usr/bin/sudo*
#hmm, yes sudo it a symlink which after a few hops resolves to the new version
rm /usr/bin/sudo
ln -s /usr/bin/sudo.ws /usr/bin/sudo

In my case, pyinfra stopped working, as described here and this was the only workaround I could get working.

Upgrading Bash Shell on MacOS

I finally took the time to deal with the warnings about ’nosort’ that were appearing every time I started the terminal on my Mac.

It turns out that MacOS comes with bash 3.x and a number of open source tools assume you have at least bash 4.x and those tools will setup up completions with the complete command and the nosort option.

If you want to update to a recent bash version, you can do it via homebrew

Making a discord bot more production ready

3 years since I posted. I wonder if I (still) have any human readers. Many things have changed in 3 years and one of them is a renewed focus on software. I wrote software for decades before following a path that led me to machining for a while. More on that later perhaps.

Even after I stopped working in software, I continued to write software for my own pleasure, including writing a bot for a friend’s discord server. That bot has been running for about a year and I have been adding various features to it as time went on. The bot helps people to moderate their server and helps them to visualize the current traffic and act on it immediately.

Kobo

I’ve been using Kindle e-readers since sometime before 2010, but my latest one, a Kindle Oasis, just wasn’t doing it for me.

It was glitchy. When I went to wake it back up, I would very often find that the font size had changed or the page had changed. It needed charging every 4 days (and that was with wifi off). The backlight seemed to randomly adjust itself and I would often turn it on at night and would need to find some other light so I could turn on the backlight.

Using Awk to Bore Deep Holes

Introduction

I’ve been making stator housings for underwater thrusters, in 316 stainless steel. I use Fusion 360 to create tool paths, and am generally happy with it, but needed a bit of extra software this time.

You can see an some of the interiors after the first operation in the photo above. They are fairly deep and I wanted a fairly rigid (i.e. thick) boring bar after drilling it out to two inches wide.

Implicit Buttons Are Cool

I recently learned about hyperbole and its support for ‘implicit buttons’ and it helps me solve something in emacs. In my work as a machinist, I track a lot of things using org roam, including parts, which have part numbers that follow a specific syntax. They look something like: A123BC456D.

Often enough I want to create a separate org roam entry for a part, but I don’t necessarily want to go looking for places where the part number appears to create links to that entry. Hyperbole’s implicit buttons work well for this, letting me hit meta-enter on any part number (in org roam or not) and jumping to the correct entry if it exists or letting me create it if it does not already exist.