Mr.Kapowski

I’ve been experimenting with using Python to generate text-based data for an experimental spin-off app from our team at work, and for my first “real world” use of Python, I’m pretty impressed with how efficient it is for doing this.

I’ve got a simple script iterating over a collection of strings to produce all possible combinations of those strings. The output of that script is being fed into a text file via Bash. So far it’s generating ~52GB of data in roughly 15 minutes, and it’s only part-way through the possible combinations. I’ve had to kill my test run because otherwise I’m going to run out of disk space on my laptop SSD! CPU usage was a moderate 26%, and RAM usage was tiny, at only ~2.8MB. Previous attempts at this using other languages tended to saturate one or both of these resources in fairly short order.

It’s fun to try out a new (to me) tool every now and then!

What size do you consider “critical mass” for an active community centred around a niche hobby/topic? Asking for a friend…

I’ve seen a lot about What3Words this week, but I haven’t seen much in the way of a look into their privacy practices and data collection. I’ve no doubt the concept is cool and useful, but I’m too wary of all location-based apps these days to buy in to the hype.

I had hoped to use my lunch break to prep and spray primer a few more test pieces for practicing painting white, but it’s a typical very cold, wet, Scottish summer’s day, so that’s not going to happen 😐🌧

While I was on the server to update the certbot configuration, I finally finished implementing the redirect to webp images I started adding last month. These should start coming through once browser caches of the original images expire. From a random sample the webp images are around 40% smaller than the source (compressed) jpeg files.