Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

Does it take a while for the little verification check marks to show up next to your website on your profile? Can’t tell if I did something wrong here, since I added rel=”me” links to ganssle.io and blog.ganssle.io, but my profile doesn’t have the check marks.

I thought maybe my instance doesn’t do it, but I found @true_mxp’s profile and that seems to have one via the same process…

Time to do my #PyConUS2023 proposals.

I think I’m actually going to pitch a time zone talk again this year (I realized that this one: https://ganssle.io/talks/#working-with-timezones-pycon is from before zoneinfo got into the standard library…)

Anyone have a good example of setting up GitHub Actions for old, out-of-support versions of Python (e.g. 2.7, 3.6)?

If anyone else finds this kind of thing useful, I’d totally love it if someone else started using this project. Particularly if you are the kind of person who is going to make lots of improvements to the front-end and then send me PRs 😉

I keep coming up with interesting improvements for this project, but I only have so much time to work on stuff like this.

I started this application in December 2016, before I knew anything about databases, so I hacked together a pseudo-DB out of YAML files, because I wanted to be able to edit the files by hand if I screwed up. As this “database” grew, parsing huge YAML files became a bottleneck; I lived with this for years, but recently, I managed to switch over to using a SQLite database!

I lived with this for years, but recently, I managed to switch to a SQLite database!

This was surprisingly easy, because I already had a pseudo-ORM, and I just load the whole “database” into memory at startup, but I am still not using the features of a “real database”, since my “queries” are basically Python code iterating over dictionaries and such.

I really like the “segmented” feed, which breaks up books along chapter and/or file boundaries, recombining them to minimize total deviation from 60m files. I like to listen to audiobooks in ~60 minute chunks, and this automates the process of chunking them up for me.

The implementation was a rare example where dynamic programming was useful in the wild (and not just in job interviews): https://github.com/pganssle/audio-feeder/blob/1a07c8ffa7c7b548471f979382fedb653ce6ee5a/src/audio_feeder/segmenter.py#L45-L102

Thanks to @njs for suggesting the approach and basically implementing it flawlessly on the first try.

I’ve also created this probably convenient docker-compose repository for (somewhat) easily deploying audio-feeder: https://github.com/pganssle/audio_feeder_docker

Now featuring ✨🌟✨installation instructions✨🌟✨ (so fancy).

Yesterday I released version 0.6.0 of my audiobook RSS server, audio-feeder: https://github.com/pganssle/audio-feeder

It takes your directory of audiobooks and generates an RSS feed for each one, so that you can listen to them in your standard podcast listening flow.

I’m particularly happy with the new feature “rendered feeds”, which uses ffmpeg behind the scenes to generate alternate feeds where the audiobook is broken up along different lines.

#projects #python #ffmpeg

I was thinking about this because I was thinking about how I might optimize the resource consumption of a program where I’m ~the only user, and then I thought, “Hmmm.. If I spend that same time working on an open source project currently used by millions of people, with even a modest improvement I could probably save more energy than my homebrew project will consume in its entire lifetime.”

Fun stuff.