Salvatore Denaro

New York City's Office of Technology Innovation provides a collection of useful APIs that let you access City data. For the past few weeks I have been playing with the APIs looking for useful application ideas and I've been using Google's colab product for that exploration. These APIs are free to access and you can sign up here . If you are new to Colab, Google provides an introduction notebook that covers the basics. If you've used jupyter  with Python you should be good to go. While Colab is frequently used for data science and AI, I think this is a great platform for building internal tools. For one specific type of user, users with lots of domain specific knowledge who may not know an API or tool, Colab is useful as a way of bundling instructions and code in a way that allows them to be productive.   Minimal code example for connecting to an end point This is a minimal test script. It connects to an API, uses a secure way of holding the API keys and allows the use...

I have been spending more time on LinkedIn the past couple of months and every time I want to facilitate an introduction between people I find myself thinking there should be a better way to do it. It's somewhat annoying that a platform for networking lacks a way to link people in.   Right now, LinkedIn lets you message a person and include in that message, a third person's contact. This would be ok as an introduction but it lacks what I think are two important features that should be part of LinkedIn's communication options-protection of the privacy and seeking the consent of the two people being introduced.  As an example, let's say I wanted to introduce a student I know named Adam to a business strategist who is looking for a part time worker. We'll call him Bob . I know Bob will find Adam to be the perfect fit-a motivated communications student at a local school who is looking for a part time summer gig. Starting from Bob's profile, I would pick the more op...

I am not a hardware guy and my Brooklyn apartment lacks true workshop space but we were able to put together a reasonably well done candy chute robot able to deliver candy directly into Trick-or-Treat's candy bags.  My wife wanted the robot to blink lights and wave an arm. I decided to use a servo motor driven by a Raspberry pi pico running MicroPython. The pico and MicroPython were chosen because I had them already from prior projects with my son.  Legos, chopsticks and leftover screws. Only the best. Cardboard, aluminum foil and Tupperware to protect the electronics. Those are the bags of candy and we managed to go through all of the candy by dark. This is what it looked like up on our balcony. How do you get the candy down to the trick-or-treaters? A dryer duct. Last time we used plastic sheeting and zip ties. The $25 to get a duct was worth it. We tested it with fun sized chocolate, smarties, double bubble gum, skittles and m&ms. The bagged candy, skittles and M...

There are plenty of blog posts explaining how to add Twitter Card integration to your Blogger posts but I haven't seen any that are written for the newer Blogger UI. The code that does the integration hasn't changed since this article in 2013 , but the steps to add it to your theme have.  If you haven't logged onto Blogger, do so. You should see this panel on your left. Pick "Theme" and you will see something that looks like this on the top portion of your screen. First things first, make a backup. Click on the little arrow If you are using the classic themes, it will look like this.  After clicking on the arrow, pick Backup. Download the file. It's the same for classic themes. Pick download. Save the file somewhere just in case you need to recover your theme. While editing your theme will not destroy any of your pages or posts, it can cause problems for the theme you are using if you make a mistake. If you've spent some time editing your blogroll and cust...

After decades of using vi and Vim I switched to  Spacemacs  which is an amazing vi keystroke emulation layer running on Emacs and configured with an amazing set of preconfigured layers for different tasks. I decided to give it a try after seeing Org-Mode in action and seeing it was a nice taking system with integrations with almost anything imaginable. A few weeks ago I found out about org-protocol and followed this post  by Jethro on using a bookmarket to capture from the Web to Emacs.  This page assumes a few things You use Emacs on a Mac You are using org and understand how to use capture and capture templates. You need to yank text from random apps into Emacs You don't need to be using Spacemacs and this should work with any install of Emacs that supports org, org-capture and org-protocol. Creating Automator Action Start Automator. It's this icon. I'm guessing many people have had this for years and have never used it.  Open it and pick Quick Action Grab the...