I can't vote for that, no can do

Halloween Candy Distribution Robot Chute

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...

Capturing text from any Mac Application into Emacs org-mode with Automator and org-protocol

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...

Using Google Colab for REST API exploration and testing

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...

Salvatore Denaro

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