bobiverse

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Book 2 of the bobiverse series – For We Are Many

Just finished listening to the first two books of the bobiverse.

Listening to a book is different to reading but the joy of reading or listening is the same.

I get my audible books through audible. I was going to cancel my subscription but I want to listen to the third book in the series.
So I will use my next credit to buy the third book and then cancel.
## NOPE ##
Was looking at the kindle edition of the third book and you can grab the audible edition with it for AUD $10.10 … which is cheaper then using your monthly credit of $16.
So I then went to cancel my audible subscription and one of the offers they gave me was half price ($8) for the next three months.

As much as I dislike amazon / audible because of their treatment of workers and their effect on small businesses I spend a LOT of money with them because their service and price is very hard to ignore.

After selling his software company, looking forward to a life of leisure, and signing up to have his head cryogenically preserved in case of death, Bob Johansson promptly gets himself killed crossing the street. Upon waking up 117 years later, he discovers that the afterlife is mind-blowing: his consciousness has been uploaded into a sentient space probe with self-replicating powers. In a flash, Bob starts cloning himself at an alarming rate. The addictively geeky fun that made We Are Legion (We Are Bob) Audible’s Best Sci-Fi Book of 2016 continues in For We Are Many and All These Worlds. As the trilogy and hilarity progresses, the Bobs must deal with rival Brazilian space probes, a fledgling space-faring species that sees all other life forms as food, the mysteries of artificial intelligence and deep space, and political squabbles on Earth. And, oh yeah, being worshipped as a sky god and keeping the peace with his girlfriends.

Book 1 of the bobiverse series – We are Legion (We are Bob)

Web Links

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Python

GitHub – willmcgugan/rich: Rich is a Python library for rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal.
Advanced football analytics: building and applying a pitch control model in python. – YouTube
GitHub – twintproject/twint: An advanced Twitter scraping & OSINT tool written in Python that doesn’t use Twitter’s API, allowing you to scrape a user’s followers, following, Tweets and more while evading most API limitations.

Interacting with files in Python
No Really, Python’s Pathlib is Great | Red’s Digressions
No really, pathlib is great – Trey Hunner
PyFilesystem is greater than or equal to Pathlib
PyFilesystem.org – PyFilesystem
Welcome to PyFilesystem2’s documentation! — PyFilesystem 2.4.11 documentation
PyFilesystem 2.1.0 adds concurrent uploads / downloads and support for globbing
Filesystem Magic with Python
PyFilesystem is greater than or equal to Pathlib
Filesystem Magic with Python

The Flask Mega-Tutorial Part I: Hello, World! – miguelgrinberg.com
Apple Watch faces and their features – Apple Support
Introduction to Python – Learn | Microsoft Docs
GitHub – microsoft/c9-python-getting-started: Sample code for Channel 9 Python for Beginners course
Bunch – BrettTerpstra.com
Don’t Get Lost in Translation: Using Google Translate in Alfred – Alfred Blog
EPA AirWatch | Environment Protection Authority Victoria
GNU Emacs – GNU Project
Input: Fonts for Code — Info
GitHub – aletisunil/Whatsapp_Spam: A python script to text the entire movie script one word at a time through whatsapp using selenium
GitHub – jstockwin/py-pdf-parser

R

Cycling

Article Directory – CyclingAbout.com

Below is a list of cycling resources I copied and pasted from somewhere … If I remembered where I would give credit.

AMA Schedule & Archive – The schedule of upcoming & archive of previous xbiking AMAs
Scheduled Discussion Prompt Submission – Submit topic ideas for scheduled discussions in r/xbiking here!
Scheduled Discussion Archive – An explanation & archive of the Scheduled Discussion posts made sporadically in the sub
General Chat Room – The general chat room for all the chillers in xbiking
IRL Riding Chat Room – This is a chat room designed to facilitate IRL meet-ups and rides among xbiking members. Let’s see how useful it is!
Stickers – Cop xbiking / Super Nice stickers here. PM u/RipVanBinkle to swap for your own stickers!
What is xbiking? – A thread addressing the sub’s most frequently asked question
Xbiking Strava – The Strava for all the interested chillers in xbiking
@xbiking – The xbiking Instagram account
Wikis
Toolshed – An editable xbiking resource for all things related to DIY bike mechanics, repair, modification, etc. Add to it!
Gear Recommendations – An editable resource for gear recommendations created by the xbiking community. Find gear and add your own suggestions!
LBS Recommendations – An editable resource for LBS recommendations created by the xbiking community. Find a solid LBS, and add your own recommendation!
Ride Recommendations – An editable resource for ride recommendations created by the xbiking community. Find cool rides and routes, and add your own recommendations!
Related Websites
650b Google Group – Google forum for discussion surrounding 650b and related topics
Bike Counterculture – The self-described “third-best bicycle website on the internet.” A collection of bike enthusiasts with interesting opinions about relevant xbiking topics
Bike Insights – A powerful tool for understanding and comparing bike design and fit, with an appreciation for the sorts of bikes you’ll find in this sub
Bikepacking.com – Bikepacking focused website with relevant adventure biking content
CyclingAbout – The expansive project of “Allee,” a perpetual bike tourer and bike-travel enthusiast
Gravel Cyclist – Gravel grinding news, updates, and reviews
Off the Beaten Path – The heavily opinionated and thoroughly enjoyable blog of biking personality Jan Heine (Bike Quarterly, Compass Tires)
The Paceline Forum – Expansive forum covering a wide range of biking topics, with increasingly prevalent xbiking related content
The Radavist – Rubber side up. Rad biking culture magazine with a focus on xbiking themes
Riding Gravel – Gravel grinding news, updates, and reviews
Super Nice Blog – My own blog-style website featuring related xbiking content, an AMA catalog, and other resources
Whatbars – Useful tool to review and compare handlebars
Related YouTube Channels
Bike Radar – General biking channel with increasingly plentiful and relevant adventure/gravel content
Global Cycling Network – Road bike focused channel with increasingly plentiful and relevant adventure/gravel content
Global Mountain Bike Network – Mountain bike focused channel beginning to dabble in adventure biking content
The Path Less Pedaled – The supple life. An active and informative channel conducted by adventure and gravel bike enthusiast Russ and his partner and sometimes-collaborator Laura
Related Print Reading
Bicycle Quarterly – A (not free) physical magazine edited by Jan Heine (also the founder of Compass Tires) that deals with several xbiking themes, with roots in randonneuring

Tribe – On Homecoming and Belonging

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Just finished listening to Tribe by Sebastian Junger. I found the authors take on what is missing from modern society compelling. It is a very short book at 196 pages or less than three hours for the audio version. The amazon page for the book sums it up better than I can:

… a book about why men miss war, why Londoners missed the Blitz, and what we can all learn from American Indian captives who refused to go home.
Tribe is a look at post-traumatic stress disorder and the challenges veterans face returning to society. Using his background in anthropology, Sebastian Junger argues that the problem lies not with vets or with the trauma they’ve suffered, but with the society to which they are trying to return.
One of the most puzzling things about veterans who experience PTSD is that the majority never even saw combat—and yet they feel deeply alienated and out of place back home. The reason may lie in our natural inclination, as a species, to live in groups of thirty to fifty people who are entirely reliant on one another for safety, comfort and a sense of meaning: in short, the life of a soldier.
It is one of the ironies of the modern age that as affluence rises in a society, so do rates of suicide, depression and of course PTSD. In a wealthy society people don’t need to cooperate with one another, so they often lead much lonelier lives that lead to psychological distress. There is a way for modern society to reverse this trend, however, and studying how veterans react to coming home may provide a clue to how to do it.

From amazon page for book

Talking to Strangers

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Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know


A very entertaining book, but I feel it doesn’t really go anywhere other then to say what we already know.
– strangers lie, and we are not very good at detecting this.

It was like listening to a very long episode of Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast. Always entertaining, but in this case without a strong actionable conclusion.

Talking to Strangers
What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know


I am listening

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I have been reading a few books or I should say listening to audio books.

Thank You for My Service cover art
The autobiography of Mat Best by Mat Best, a very funny anti-PC book about his life so far. Inspiring, and more importantly funny. Well worth listening too. Just like his YouTube channel –> https://www.youtube.com/user/MBest11x
Funny 🙂 and inspiring because he created a YouTube empire and a coffee company, all the while having a lot of fun
The Terminal List cover art
The first in a trilogy of books about a navy seal written by a former navy seal.
There is an almost pornographic level of detail about the weapons used by the protagonist of the story. The plot is enjoyable. Well worth a listen, but I don’t think they match the Bourne series or Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan books & movies


Amazon.com: True Believer: A Novel (2) (Terminal List ...

The third book is Savage Son.



R 4.0

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R 4.0 is out Friday, April 24 (American time), so Saturday for me.
It seems I will have to install all my packages for R again. To find out what packages you have, run this R code:

ip <- as.data.frame(installed.packages()[,c(1,3:4)])
rownames(ip) <- NULL
ip <- ip[is.na(ip$Priority),1:2,drop=FALSE]
print(ip, row.names=FALSE)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38390548/how-to-uninstall-r-completely-from-os-x

To uninstall R:
1. Delete the R app in the applications folder and empty the trash.
2. sudo rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/R.framework

Now, install R 4.0

Change Log

Pages: 1 2

Real Python

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Just purchased a new book on Python to get me through the CO-VID-19 situation.

https://realpython.com/products/python-basics-book/

Python Basics Book

At USD $39 it is a reasonable price, but with the drop in the Australian dollar this comes to AUD $63 …. for a PDF 🙁


So why buy it?
– I don’t want to wait for the physical book which is months away.
– I am no longer twenty, the font in some books is too small making it hard to read.
But with a PDF I can read it on a 24″ monitor next to my main 29″ monitor so no problems with font size.
– The content is really good. The Real Python site has many excellent articles on python that have helped me. So this is my way of supporting their free content.

The book uses Python 3.8
I use Anaconda Python which is currently at version 3.7 So I have to install a 3.8 environment.
In Conda you can do this by:

$ conda create -n py38 python=3.8

Useful links for my purchase:

– https://realpython.com/lessons/python-basics-book-downloads/

– https://realpython.com/python-basics/resources/

– https://github.com/realpython/python-basics-exercises

Convert PDF pages to JPEGs using R

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I often get PDFs which have interesting images in them, but the problem is how to extract them?
This R Code will find every PDF in the current folder and covert each page to a 200 dpi JPEG

library(tidyverse)
library(pdftools)
library(fs)

# Uses the fs library to list all files ending in PDF in the current directory and store them in file_list

file_list <- dir_ls(glob = "*.pdf")

# The eqivualent of a FOR loop, it iterates through each element of file_list and converts each PDF page to a 200dpi jpg using the pdftools library
lapply(file_list, FUN = function(files) {
  pdf_convert(files, format = "jpeg",dpi = 200)
})

# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49941158/how-do-i-pull-in-multiple-pdfs-into-pdf-convert-using-r-and-pdftools-package